Cycle day 9

It's go time! Trigger is tonight and retrieval is on Friday the 13th. I had lots of follicles that were over 17mm, I think around 15 total, with a an additional 9 or so measuring at 15. I have to stay up until 12:30 tonight to get the trigger shot, and then I have to get up at 6 tomorrow to drive into the city to have blood drawn. Monday is the transfer day, since they always transfer 3 day embryos at my clinic. The amount of embryos they will transfer depends strictly on quality. They have written down 2, 3, 4, or 5 embryos...assuming that we have embryos to transfer. I'm trying not to do any assuming. Past failure doesn't mean we won't have success. And of course...past success doesn't mean that this cycle won't crash and burn. I just keep saying to myself think positive think positive think positive.

I found myself looking at my giant chart and wondering what they will do with it. Will they burn it? Can I take it home? After Monday, will I ever be here again? And if I have embryos enough to freeze....what then? Will I have the strength to dispose of them and move on? Or will they continue to torture me? I must have stood in the waiting room at the lab staring at the chart on the wall that spells out all the odds for a good 5 minutes or more. 103 IVF cycles for women 41-42 last year. 29.9% walked away with a live baby, and of that percentage, 34.4% had multiples. I looked at the statistics and thought that somewhere in those numbers, between women who got pregnant and women who took home a baby, there was me...and by the looks of it a couple of other women like me...who got knocked up but didn't stay that way. Which number will I be this time? Nobody knows. You spin the wheel and you take your chances.

Thank you to everyone who has stuck by me. Good luck to all the women who are spinning the wheel with me. Good luck to us all.

Cycle day 7

It's cycle day 7, or at least that's what I was told. I've got follicles popping out all over. The intern giving me my scan today said that my ovaries were "over achievers". That's nice to know :) I have a conservative count of about 12-14 follicles measurable follicles, with several smaller ones in the running. My estrogen was high enough to dial down the Gonal a couple of notches. Next check is on Wednesday. I'm betting on a Friday or Saturday retrieval.

I have been plugging along. We've bought paint, curtains, and hold backs. We've all gotten sick, and gotten better again. We've dyed Easter eggs, started seeds indoors, and spent countless hours enjoying the flowers and the sunshine. I've also spent many hours researching about IEPs and disability law, while reading with NB from the school book I purchased from Amazon and trying to bring him up to speed. But most of my time is just spent waiting. I'm waiting for the school to set a date for NB's PPT. I'm waiting for the painting of the trim to be done and for wallpaper to arrive. I'm waiting for warmer spring weather. And most of all, I'm waiting for retrieval and transfer, the 2ww, and the results.

I wish I had a back up plan for the worst case scenario. It would be great to be able to plan a tropical vacation or something of that sort. A class on something fun and totally unnecessary would be cool...like basket weaving or print making. Maybe even a new pet is a possibility. Out of all the animals my husband and I have adopted over the years only one cat remains. It would be nice to have something small and fluffy to love, to help fill the hole in my heart. I'm so afraid of facing the earthquake and the tsunami with only my children to keep me anchored. I'm so afraid of drowning under a wave of grief and the drudgery of the every day grind. I want my children to be safe from the after shock, and for my husband to be there with a life boat.

Socks! And other small and monumental things

Lindsay at Tiny Bits of Hope has sent me the most delicious socks through the sock exchange. (thanks to Cristy at Searching for our silver lining!). They are warm and cozy, perfect for the chilly damp of a New England spring. And they have polka dots...which I love. I wore them today (as you can see) because I couldn't wait, but I will be wearing them this Saturday when I have my next ultrasound, guaranteed.

Now I have to get some socks for my sock buddy. I'm working on it, I promise.

Yesterday I FINALLY got in for my baseline ultrasound and bloodwork. Everything looked great, and I was all on track to start stims. Then I waltzed out the door without having my blood drawn. ARG! I can't believe I did that. So I had to go to the local lab bright and early today instead. Hopefully I will be able to start stims today. Geez Louise it's taking me forever to get started this cycle. Can you tell that subconsciously I'm dragging my feet? Because I think I am. Because if this cycle doesn't start...then it can't come to a painful end. I have become just a tad bit fatalistic about the whole thing. The way I see it, there are countless ways that this cycle can end badly, and only one way for it to end well.

When I started this last round of ttc, I was naively ignorant of the consequences. I wanted another baby, we had health insurance....I figured I was 'playing with house money'. This baby would be a total bonus, the icing on an already rich and wonderful cake. I thought I had nothing to lose. What did I know? I lost a piece of my heart. I was overjoyed to have three more chances for a baby, and if I hadn't gotten pregnant and miscarried, I would still be excited this last cycle. But the miscarriage sucked all the hope and all of the excitement of trying right out of me. I am still trying to put the pieces of my heart back in place, and not doing the greatest job of it, I have to say.

Good thing my heart doesn't talk to my uterus and ovaries, and that being sad, scared, and heartbroken hasn't kept me from getting pregnant in the past. There are icebergs in the water, but I'm still moving ahead.

Sick and tired

Yet another lovely Friday in the chickenpen. This week our house has been taken over by the plague. It started on Wednesday night with my husband feeling poorly. Then early Thursday morning it spread to me, and last night poor NB fell ill. He's been such a brave, little trooper. AK has been wearing pull ups all day, poor thing, although she seems to be her chipper self. Only DA appears to be unaffected so far (knock on wood).

I was supposed to go to the clinic on Thursday, but for obvious reasons, it wasn't happening. The nurse told me to keep taking the Lupron and to call today if I couldn't make it. Well, I feel worse today than yesterday. According to the nurse everything is fine and I can keep taking the Lupron until Monday. I hope I can make it. I just feel so tired. I can't help but wonder if this is a sign that I should just give up. My heart already feels heavy. To be honest, I just don't have any hope that this cycle will work. I just want to dig a hole and crawl inside. I feel so shaky on my feet already, and I just know that the next wind is going to knock me down. I guess that all I can do is to keep putting one foot in front of the other and hope I'm wrong.

Just another Friday

This week sucked. It still sucks. Tuesday morning I found a tick imbedded in my daughter's neck. My husband had to bring her to urgent care to have it removed. They told us to be on the lookout for symptoms of tick born illness, and today she is mildly feverish, weepy, and all together out of sorts.

Tuesday night I had my sleep study to look forward to. Because I went to the walk in clinic weeks ago for experiencing bouts of shortness of breath, and my dodo husband mentioned that I snored OCCASIONALLY, the doctor decided I had anxiety due to a sleep disorder. WTH? So I had to pack my bag and sleep in a strange place for a night. It shouldn't have been a big deal...but it was. First off, the only small overnight bag I have is the one I purchased as my hospital bag when I was pregnant with the twins. I have only used it for overnight trips since their birth twice, and one of those was another trip to the hospital to have my daughter. Packing the bag with my sleepwear, robe and slippers, my Kindle, and my toiletries slowly filled me with sadness. Walking into the building with my pillow under my arm was so strangely like going into the hospital the day my daughter was born it was like deja vu. All the straps and monitors were very similar to baby monitors and stuff, all I needed was an IV and blood pressure cuff to make the ensemble complete. It sank me into a funk the whole next day.

Yesterday at parent teacher conferences NB's teacher and special education coordinator informed my husband and myself that they would be holding NB back in first grade because he wasn't attending in class and was spending most of his day whining for the last two weeks. This is in spite of the fact that he is on or above grade level academically. I have a communication notebook that goes back and forth to school every day. Do you think they would have mentioned this trend? Or mention that they wanted to review the possibility of holding him back in there even once? No...of course not. So now my husband and I have to go all angry mama bear on their asses and try to figure out if it is what is really best for my son.

On top of this, my poor husband has an infected tooth, and I have a wicked, splitting, Lupron headache. At least I'm not thinking about how many weeks I would have been...much.

Yeah! Baby hats! *UPDATED*

Kristen at Buck up Buttercup has had her twins! I'm so happy and excited for her :)

I finished her baby hats, but I don't have her address yet. I took a couple of pictures, but my computer is being cranky and I'm having trouble uploading them.

So.....Whose next? I promise that this time I'll be a little more punctual. Baby hats are free to all followers. I make them in newborn size, but if you are in need of a larger size I can do that.

*UPDATE*

Hubby fixed the worm that attacked my computer, so now I have pictures! That is Baby Doll X modeling the hats. 

Drain on the main brain...a parent complains.

        * WARNING* If you can't handle hearing a parent complain, THIS IS NOT FOR YOU* (you totally rock if you hear Eddie Vedder in your head when you read THIS IS NOT FOR YOU!) I have about four or five different posts in the queue that I would like to write. But writing a thought provoking post requires actual THOUGHT...and I've got nothing. Well, not exactly nothing. I've had lots of thoughts on various issues, I thought about responses to the questions I was tagged with, but they flew out of my head somewhere. I've had lots of thoughts on PAIL vrs the ALI community, and when I've had a minute to read other people's blogs and comment I've done so. I had a blog post for PAIL about breastfeeding just about written in my head, but I think I've missed the deadline now. I'm not sure...but my thoughts are gone anyway. 

The truth is that I have a small window in the evening when I normally write. It was from around 6 or so until 7:30 ish most weekdays.  My husband has been coming home from work, bathing the kids and making them dinner. I usually do homework with the boys and clean the bathtub before quietly retreating the relatively peaceful quiet of our bedroom. But for some unknown reason, this time has started to shrink and decay. Yesterday my DH didn't make it home from work until almost 7. When I finally got upstairs, my brain was too fried and I ended up knitting instead for about 15 minutes. Not only has the amount of time shrunk, but the quality of the time as well. More often than not, my husband has had at least one kid 'slip under the radar' and end up in our bed keeping me company.Don't get me wrong, more often than not it is a nice time to connect with the boys, but sometimes I just need my space. It happened tonight, but when NB started to pester me about what I was writing I kindly brought him downstairs and put on Thomas. I'm going to have to find some other time, or some other place, to blog if I'm ever going to write anything interesting again.

The truth is, I feel burnt out. The boredom of the daily routine is grinding me down. The weariness of being repeatedly sad is grinding me down. These past couple of weeks I have been having a hard time hearing my inner voice. This is the part about parenting that really sucks. Being a parent doesn't suck, and the kids never do. It's all the brain/time/soul sucking stuff around it that does. It is the same brain/time/soul sucking stuff that kills you when you're not a parent...but you can't put it off because it's not for you. When we didn't have kids, I didn't cook, because my husband likes to. I didn't have to step into a grocery store. If my husband didn't feel like shopping or cooking, we just went out to eat. I would eat peanut butter and sandwiches every day if there was nothing in the house. Now I'm always cooking and grocery shopping...and I can't put into words how much I hate it. But...the kids need to eat well. My boys also can't aim worth a damn. Seriously. I have to clean both toilets almost every single day. That's ok...I write a lot of blog posts in my head while cleaning toilets. It's just that by the time I get to sit down and actually write.? Well....you've all seen the result. To make a crappy post short, my brain needs a vacation. It isn't that I can't make the time, it's just that I don't have the mental space.

On the ttc front, for anyone that's still following along: I had to go back to the lab on Monday because I hadn't ovulated on Friday. I was told Monday afternoon that I had ovulated too recently to start the Lupron yet, but I have been scheduled to start it on Saturday. Just the first hiccup in this cycle, and probably not the last.