So My CD 3 labs came back and they are normal...YAY!! My estradiol is nice and low, which they said is good for stimulating my ovaries with medicine. I wonder how many little eggies I will produce. I hope just enough to give me babies! One will be quite enough, thank you. But....if I get 2 then I will be pleased as punch (as long as one is a girl :)) Now I just have to get through the dreaded HSG on Monday. After that, a follow-up appointment and then we wait for this cycle to wrap up so the show can begin! Yipee!!! Happy Halloween!!!

The Consultation

So the big day is here. I wake up thinking it's Christmas morning and Santa is coming at 1:00 and he is bringing babies!!! Well, at least the plan to get them. Just have to get through the morning. Ok, check. Now it's 11:30. Choke down a salad. Gulp, I am getting nervous. And nauseated. I race home to get Pete.
We enter The Kirkiln Clinic. Picture a huge, 6 story building with an atrium in the middle. There are clinics everywhere, with their waiting areas separated only by the chairs facing a slightly different direction, perhaps towards their respective reception desks. They are nice enough to put us infertiles down a hallway tucked in a corner. Even the chairs face away from the lost patients, looking for their doctors and late for their appointments. We sign in and sit down. There is a young couple there, as well as a hispanic couple. An attractive lady that looks 40-ish stands by the window making calls. A nurse walks up and asks our last name. She is looking for the man who "is having problems in my happy room". Pete then informs me this is also where the "jerk-off lab" is located. Poor guy.
We are called back. We sit in a room. We wait. A resident comes in, very nice, and asks questions about our history. I show her my Fertility Friend BBT charts. She is impressed with my organization. She leaves. We wait. I feel light headed and nauseated. Pete trys to read to me interesting tidbits out of some mundane magazine but I can't hear him. I try to read an article myself. I'm sure those words mean something, the way they are positioned next to each other but I can't decipher them or their meaning. I can only watch as the seconds tick by slowly, painfully.
30 minutes later, Dr. McLaren comes in. She's from Pennsylvania, so no southern graciousness here. She's very serious but she is nice. And empathetic. She talks to me first and investigates my long, irregular cycles. She is going to test me for PCOS. She wants to inject dye into my uterus and into my tubes to make sure they aren't blocked. Swell. She asks Pete if he has ever fathered a child. He hesitates half a second before saying "no" so I know he was contemplating making a joke but then thought better. She then drops the bomb. The reason why we are here. She gives us "our options", which are as follows:
1. IUI. I go on Clomid and they squirt the swimmers, squeaky clean from a bath, into my uterus and pray one of them finds an egg. I get to monitor myself with my temperatures and OPKs. It's cheap; only $300-500 bucks. With Pete's numbers, the 5-10% chance of knocking me up is slim.
2. IVF. Way more monitoring and a "minor" surgical procedure to suck out my eggs. 45% chance of working. And shots. Lots of shots. But much cheaper than we thought. They say they are the cheapest in the southeast. Only $7-9K, not including meds.
I am trying to ask questions, as is Pete. My questions aren't very organized and I am asking them as they occur to me. Dr. McLaren is nice and I can tell she really wants to knock me up.
We decide to think about it, although we think we will try IUI at least once, to say we tried it. If that fails, we will do IVF. We stand and I am weak. I have a headache. I slowly navigate my way out of the room. I see all the "success stories", aka the walls of baby pictures. I quickly scan them and check out the baby announcement competition. I have my work cut out for me.
I walk to the front and they announce, rather loudly, for me to call them when I get my period. There is blood work to be drawn 3 days after it comes. I get the IVF price sheet and drop off my co-pay. My cheap-ass insurance company is so nice to pay for this first visit.
We stagger out to the parking deck. Pete says he feels good about it and I do too, although I was too overwhelmed to know it at the time. We get in the car and head where, you ask? To the f-ing DMV. My tags are expired and I need to get them renewed. What a day, huh??
We survive the DMV and head to Whole Foods. It's becoming a ritual for us to come here when important fertility milestones occur.
This was surely one of them, and I needed a drink. Maybe two.

2nd swim meet

6 million/ml, 25% motility. Urologist said it's not impossible for us to conceive on our own but our chances will be greatly improved with assistance...well no shit!!! I really like the idea that it's not impossible. Maybe one day, after we already have our first child, we will be able to get PG on our own without trying. This experience has taught me that I will never be going back on birth control!!! The money I could have saved!!!

A call from "the" clinic

The RE clinic, that is. You know, the clinic where the big girls go to play. They returned my call and explained what to expect for the first appointment. It sounds exactly what I was hoping for. Pete goes in for his second swimteam analysis on Friday and then next Wednesday is the appointment. The nurse explained that they would look at his results, take a complete history from me, draw my blood and maybe do an ultrasound of my ovaries. Once I tell them how lazy they are, I imagine they'll want to take a look. They will also tell us what they think our best course of action is. I wonder how much waiting there will be between this appointment and actual fertility procedures. I am hoping his numbers are high enough for IUI, I wouldn't want to jump straight to IVF unless they really think that's the best bet. And if they do, we will manage :)

Hope is a person's greatest treasure

That's what my fortune cookie from last night said. I thought it was pretty profound as I got a smiley face on my OPK on Saturday. I know not to hope too much for a pregnancy this month given the odds, but I felt comforted when I read it (I held it in my hand the whole way home!).

But why shouldn't I hope? Without hope, what is there? What's really left? I mean isn't that why we are going through this? That at the end of the road we get what we are hoping for? If it really only takes one stubborn swimmer, then maybe it can still work. Maybe Pete was just having a bad day in the "jerk-off lab". I hope that's possible. I hope that this is our month. I hope we will be the miracle story about the couple who conceived with such odds against us. Why shouldn't I?

Maybe my little fortune is trying to tell me that I can be hopeful about this cycle. Maybe it's telling me to not give up, that it can and will happen. Maybe I'll pee on a stick the morning of my RE appt. Maybe it will be positive. I will be 11 DPO, afterall. Maybe I could call them and announce that I won't be needing their services after all because I'm pregnant. Afterall, I can only hope........

Well that didn't last!

I'm back to peeing on OPKs and temping. But I'm ok with it all; I 'm really much better. I plan to stop once I get a positive OPK. I want to be normal again! Right now I am looking forward to a nice football weekend with the hubbs and good friends!

My oh my again!

Am I feeling good today, or what??! I decided to take a break from TTC. IDK how long it will last but I know that I didn't take my temp this morning and I don't plan to pee on an OPK this afternoon and it feels great! Pete and I had a long conversation last night (well, I did. He's a man of few words.) and we decided that taking a break will be good for me. It may only be for today (i'm such an information junkie that I doubt it will last more than 1 day) but it feels nice to not be in control of controlling things that I couldn't control anyways, no matter how hard I tried. Ideally, I would like for us to have casual sex, every 2-3 days, and then occasionally take my temperature to see if I have ovulated. I figure that our first RE appt is 2 weeks from today so I really would like to have a small break before all the serious TTC stuff happens. It's like a mini vacay!

My oh my

I think that I have somehow managed to deal with all this stress pretty well....until now. I can't find any other explanation for why I am so exhausted and why my body is all of a sudden not agreeing with me. I suppose I could be coming down with a virus but it would usually hit me with it's full blown viral load by now. My hands even feel heavy as I type this. I took a "mental health day" yesterday. I faked a GI bug to stay home and watch tv in my pjs. I didn't even tell my husband the real reason my stomach was so upset. It was upset, but not from a GI bug, it was purely stress catching up to me. I was too embarrased to tell him.
My family said to me about a month ago that they thought I was putting too much pressure on myself to get pregnant. I never saw it that way; I just thought I was being proactive and covering my bases. Maybe they are right?
I feel like such a weakling succumbing to this!! I feel like I should be stronger and not let life hold me down under its thumb. I feel guilty.

This is now the 2nd time I have edited this. I came home early from work and on my way home I realized how right I am about stressing too much. Examples:
1. Try not to get upset about this in front of Pete. Don't want him to feel guilty or responsible for his swimmers.
2. I got up at 4:30 to pee but never really went back to sleep. Why didn't I take my temp when I got up the first time? How accurate is my 6:30 temp? The room was really cold/hot when I woke up. Does that matter?
3. I can't have anything to drink for 4 hours so I can pee on my OPK when I get home. What time exactly did I last go to the bathroom? I really have to go now but I can't for another 1.5 hours. Do you really think I have to wait the whole 4 hours? Yes, bc if you don't then this will be for nothing.
4. Why haven't I gotten a positive OPK? Did I not exercise enough? Have I been eating too many carbs?
5. I'm really tired and I need to go to sleep but we need to "do the deed" tonight b/c Pete has to work tomorrow (works 24 hour shifts). Should I prop my hips up on a pillow? How long do I need to lie here? Have I been lying down long enough?

Something clearly has to give. IDK what it's going to be yet, but it's either going to be the OPKs or the thermometer. It just might be both.