The Eternal Guest Room

This morning’s sonogram yielded good news and bad news – things are progressing correctly, but too quickly. We might miss it.

I have 2 mature follicles on one side that are pretty much ready to go, but it’s too early in the cycle to actually do an IUI. I’ll take one more injection of the regular dose (75mg), then tomorrow evening I’ll have a half dose (37.5mg) and go back in for another sonogram on Thursday to see how things are.

By then it may be too late, but we won’t know until then.

So frustrating.

We were in and out of the RE’s office in 17 minutes this morning – I’m pretty sure that’s a record.

We hadn’t been in what feels like forever – 3 months. It was weirdly comforting to be back.

I wasn’t happy at all to learn that the sonogram lady was on vacation, which meant that the doctor himself did the sonogram. It’s bad enough without having the male doctor do it; I’ll spare you the details, but it’s invasive. Not one of those happy gel-on-the-tummy ultrasounds like pregnant women have. Nope.

It was quick, though. The shortest sonogram I’ve ever had, for sure. There were a few cysts, but just the small blood-filled kind that everyone has. Lovely, right?

I start injections tonight and have one every evening until I go in for a sonogram on Tuesday. At that point they look to see how things are progressing, and then we go from there. He said the IUI would most likely be earlier than the last ones, which were around day 12. That puts us right around next weekend sometime, as long as everything works like it’s supposed to. Fortunately I had the foresight to keep both of these weekends free – it’s like I’m catching on to this stuff.

We’ll keep you posted.

A few people pointed out to me that I hadn’t really made it clear when our next IUI would be – but it’s supposed to be this month.

I go in tomorrow for my Day 2 sonogram to make sure everything looks ok. They make sure there are no cysts, check the lining of my uterus to see if it’s the right thickness, and draw blood to check levels of something (horrible, I know; I should know all this by now).

If everything is ok, I think I’ll be starting shots tomorrow. Woo hoo! I get to put them in a cooler and drive them to Amarillo and have D give me shots at my parents’ apartment. Fun! Pick me!

Actually that doesn’t really bother me anymore. I’m just ready to get this going.

For our last IUI, I took clomid (a pill) on Days 5-9 and did FSH injections (shots) on Days 7, 9, and 11, going in for a sonogram between Day 3-5 and one more on Day 12.  This IUI is going to be different.

No clomid (good riddance - that stuff is pure freaking evil. I can’t even put into words my intense hatred of the stuff; it’s treated me badly in too many ways).  

Injections starting Day 2 and lasting for about a week. Every day at the same time (between 7:00-9:00pm). I’m a little hazy on the details since I was given them seconds after bad news several months ago, but I believe I go in for sonograms starting Day 5 and have them every other day for awhile. I’ll have more details tomorrow I’m sure.

I’m ready for tomorrow. I’m ready for this whole thing. Let’s do it!

I recently came across something that I wanted to share. Sometimes it’s hard to put everything very succinctly myself, so it’s nice to find things already put together that say what I feel. It does a good job of summarizing what we go through with this stuff.

And the pictures are pretty.

http://www.tearsandhope.com/emptyarms_video.html

Lately I keep having dreams that I’m pregnant.

They make me sad, because I wake up and realize it was just a dream.

But I cling to them – because in my dreams I’m happy, and content, and so excited that it has finally happened, that my dreams have come true.

I close my eyes and replay them. I try to hold on to the thoughts, the feelings.

I remember them so vividly. Not always the circumstances, but always the feelings.

They feel so real.

The waking life feels less real, sometimes.

I’ve had several people comment on my honesty and openness on this blog.

But I don’t feel that I’ve been all that honest, honestly.

There’s a lot I haven’t said. I haven’t really told anyone how I really feel in my darkest moments. Or anywhere close.

I haven’t told anyone how angry I’ve been. I haven’t admitted a lot of the thoughts I’ve had. There’s a lot I’ll only say to a therapist, or to Darek, or just to myself. If half of the people I know didn’t read this, I’d probably be a lot more honest. But I don’t even know who reads this stuff, so I self-censor quite a bit. I worry that people might treat me differently or think less of me, knowing about all these raw, yucky emotions I have.

I haven’t been totally honest about a lot of my feelings. I’m not sure if anyone wants to hear those anyway.

Lately I feel like we’ve given up hope completely. Yes, we’re planning on doing IUI(s), and yes that might work, but it might not. It’s been a long time with no major problems and it hasn’t happened; we know it may never happen. It’s a reality that we face that I don’t think most people really grasp. Darek used to say all the time “It will happen…” but he doesn’t say it anymore. We used to talk about how it would be to have a kid. We used to make tentative plans. We don’t really do that anymore.

It feels so distant and unattainable. I measure our failures in other peoples’ successes; how can other peoples’ kids be turning 2 months or 2 years when we started trying long before them?

Lately I feel like this will be our reality forever.

It’s just so hard to imagine it any other way.

I think Father’s Day is this Sunday – although I’m not entirely sure about that.

Father’s Day doesn’t have anything near the effect that Mother’s Day has on me. Probably because there’s not as much hype, it doesn’t affect me quite as personally, and of course I’ll never be a father, so it’s not nearly as painful.

But I’ve realized something over the last year or so: there’s a “hierarchy” of what I find painful to be around. The first is definitely pregnant women, hands down. That just about kills me. The second is probably newborns, but the third isn’t moms with babies; it’s dads with babies.

For some reason it hurts much more to see a father with his baby or young child. I can’t really put my finger on exactly why. Possibly because I have a hard time picturing myself as a mom, but I can totally picture Darek being a dad. Plus, there’s something just terribly sweet about seeing a father interacting with his young child.

This is one of those things that I have a hard time putting into words, because I’m not entirely sure why I feel this way. I just know that when I see a dad playing with his kid in their yard, or see a new dad holding his new baby, I get tears in my eyes and a lump in my throat. It makes my heart hurt.

Avoidance is my middle name these days, but I live in the world.

Stupid world.

If this whole thing wasn’t so emotionally draining, I would laugh.

We first saw the RE in September, and we planned to do up to 3 IUIs before the end of 2009.

2010 is nearly halfway over, and we’ve been able to do ONE. (I don’t really count the one we did when I had the polyp.) That’s one realistically possible IUI in 9 months. Now that’s some sobering math.

Cysts, thin lining, and surgery all got their delays in. And then something went weird and put all of the potential IUI days on days when we are going to be out of town.

Our trip to Hawaii knocked one out. A trip to Seattle next month will knock out another one. And the current one is being cancelled because I’ll be out of town for my sister’s wedding.

What??

It’s almost funny – except that it’s not.

The decision to skip this month’s IUI for my sister’s wedding was not an easy one. Ultimately though, it was just too much, and that’s not the way I want to spend the week of my sister’s special day.

So we continue to wait.

This year will be over before we know it.

This has been going on for a long, long time. It’s just been awful. We know we can’t go through this forever – at some point, one way or another, it has to end.

We’ve made some decisions about how far we’re willing to go.

This will be our last year to try to have a child. We can’t take the heartbreak and monthly devastation for much longer. At some point we need to move forward – and we’ve decided it will be at the end of this year.

In the meantime we’re willing to try as many IUIs as our doctor thinks is worth trying. Our doctor doesn’t keep trying something that isn’t working, so there will be a definite limit on these – though I’m not sure exactly what that is yet.

 Our next IUI will be different than the previous 2, which were a combination of clomid (a pill) and FSH injections (shots). Our next IUI will be full injectibles – a week of shots, and no clomid. Any following IUIs will have a similar protocol.

Over the last few months, the terrifying letters I, V, and F have been creeping into our conversations. I’ve always said that I wouldn’t be open to IVF – it’s something like $12,000 with just a 50% success rate. I felt I couldn’t handle the disappointment if it failed.

But we’ve made a decision about that too: we’d be willing to try up to 2 rounds of IVF if it came to that. At this point, we feel that to come this far and not try everything we can would be a bigger disappointment and a potential lifetime of asking “What if?”

Of course, there’d be a lot of details to work out to do IVF – primarily funding – but if it ends up being an option, we’ll be open to it.

The decision for this to be our last year was made awhile ago; the fact that today is June 1 and the year is half over is a bit depressing, since we’ve only been able to try one IUI this year. But we needed a deadline, and we need to stick to it, for sanity reasons.

At the end of the year, if we aren’t expecting our own child, we’ll be moving on. I’m not sure exactly what that will entail, but we’ll be on a different path than we are now.

None of these decisions have been easy, and we still potentially have a lot of hard decisions ahead of us. But there is something about having a plan that is better than the uncertainty of not having any plan. Closure, perhaps. Being able to deal with things, instead of facing a complete lack of control.

So that’s the plan.

We’ve been away.

We just got back from a week in Hawaii and it was wonderful. I barely thought about IF or TTC or BBT or OPKs or IUIs or anything else along those lines.

It was nice to get away.

We’re back now and I plan to give an update on where we are with stuff very soon, but first I have about a million things I need to do.