one line

And not even a faint second line.

But I’ve been feeling nauseous and hopeful.

I don’t quite want to believe this just yet.

I have no idea to what extent the one drug I’ve been taking (some progesterone variant) could make me feel nauseous. Or to what extent I could imagine random waves of nausea.

I was just so hopeful this would have worked, and now I don’t quite know what to think, or do.

Heat

Took SB to the local science museum on the weekend. It’s awesome, we have a yearly pass and go quite often.

They have an infrared camera. Supposedly the regions where you have some extra padding show up in blue. Instead, my midsection was green-yellow. Through layers of clothes.

This might just be coincidence. But I hope it’s not.

transferred

Thanks all for your support :)

It was a rather anticlimactic experience – got to the office, waited a few min, called into room, phone call from doctor to embryologist about how embryo #2 is doing (wait and see) – but #1 was fine, so she came over with it, quick ultrasound, small talk*, inserted, and then I was free to go. No smoking, no liquor, otherwise “live as usual”. I’m not sure how much time has distorted my memory from previous transfers, but right now it all seemed very low-key.

So I went to eat cake (because why not) and visit my cousin and her 3 kids, and then to the airport and back home. I did pass a pacifier on the way home, just like I did so many years ago, and I’ve decided to take it as a good sign (even if this is the most child-friendly city I’ve ever lived in, and there are quite a few lost pacifiers around).

And now we wait, and I try not to over-interpret every “symptom”. With about as much success as one would expect ;)

* I think they do small talk to distract us, but I’m always so afraid of distracting them from their important work that it stresses me out rather than relaxes me…

competition for the ‘worst blogger award continues’

An update in bullets, because if anything will happen it’s that.

• I’m still married. And while I wouldn’t say things are great, exactly, they certainly are better than last year. (Ok, that bar wasn’t too high.)
• The big change was… not therapy, not tedious discussions on who-does-what… but sunlight. We had a long & dark winter (even for Scandinavian standards, I think) which clearly didn’t help. And then it became April, and the sun came out again, and *poof* everything was better. Now it’s getting gray & dark again and I’m worried. But at least more prepared.
• Somewhat surprisingly, I finally managed to ship our embryos to Europe. Not to this country, because apparently there’s a law saying they can be at most 5 years old. Which of course nobody bothered to tell me until we had gotten just over that threshold. But my – usually over-regulated – home country seems fine.
• So I went there to actually meet the doctor now hosting my precious potential babies. Expecting timelines as at my previous clinic, which is, weeks of prep. To my great surprise, he said, “well, then you can come back on Monday, and we can transfer one”. Um, what?! I had to take a moment and think (and try, unsuccessfully, to get my husband on the phone). Ultimately we decided to roll with it. So, dear little embryo who’s currently hopefully thawing and growing to morula, and blast tomorrow, here I come. Heart wide open.

cancelled

My transfer was cancelled. Last Friday, the doctor monitoring my cycle (at the clinic where our embryos are) suggested I stop all drugs and start over. Given that there usually is a 12h flight between me and my embryos, and I’m not just going to fly over again in 1-2 months, this wasn’t a great option. I talked them into one last-ditch effort, increasing vaginal Estrace to 2x/day and hoping for the best. On Tuesday at yet another ultrasound, the lining was 7.2mm, so we thought we’re good to go. Unfortunately the doctor decided against a transfer, because there was no trilaminar pattern (despite having said on Friday that, at 7mm, she’d transfer even witout stripes).
As you can imagine, I’m frustrated and sad. Sure, I understand that the embryos are very precious, and that we only have a limited number of them. But I am not sure how much evidence there is that the lack of stripes is really critical. And it is very unlikely that we’ll come here for 6 single-embyro-transfers, or attempts to do so. Thus, while they would have looked as transferring now as “wasteful”, realistically, in a few years we may decide (for various reasons) that our clock for having more babies is done, and any embryos we have left will be discarded. So… I’m not convinced that the net outcome will be an different, and now we didn’t even get a shot at pregnancy. And on some level, I wonder how much their concern about their SART statistics plays into this…
I do realize that this is, at least in the world of IVF, a luxurious problem. In the past we have been rather lucky, and most elements of the process went smoothly. My transfer success rate has been stellar. Nevertheless I can’t help and be sad at this loss of opportunity.
There were many things that didn’t work out particularly well in this cycle. The communication between the two clinics was essentially non-existent – the local clinic only ever wanted to talk to me, not my embryo-storing clinic. And, although I have some biomedical knowledge, that led to more delays and annoyances than I care to repeat. So I’ll need to look for a new local clinic, and have a chat with them about how this communication will go, before starting another attempt.
There are some other complicated things going on, unrelated to fertility but still stressful, and to some extent related to our family’s future. I haven’t really blogged about them, but I might in the coming days. Though first of all, I very much look forward to holding SB again tomorrow evening, after an entire week without her. We talked on Skype yesterday, and she was so happy to see me, it was wonderful. Balm on my heart and soul.

complicated

Clearly I haven’t become a better blogger. Sigh.
So at that first ultrasound, the lining was thin as expected, but there was a cyst on one side. And for the first time it became apparent how annoying it is to coordinate between clinics in vastly different time zones – it wasn’t until 36h later that we actually had a plan (continue Lupron, start patches and hope for the best). Then, at the lining check 2 weeks later, I was only at 6mm, and no striped pattern in sight (the cyst was gone though!). After another back-and-forth across timezones, it was decided that I should add estrace vaginally. Of course by then it was in the middle of the night, so I had to wait until the next day to actually ask my local clinic for a prescription and pick it up. Today we’re at 6.7mm… so that’s an improvement, but still not quite where it should be. All this worked way better with SB’s transfer – but then, I wouldn’t trade places for anything. I find it so much easier to handle this less-than-stellar performance, knowing that I have a baby to cuddle when I come home.
The main point of contention is that I am still nursing SB. Essentially, only at night, but who knows whether that has any detrimental effects. (I haven’t even told the clinics. They’ll just tell me to stop, and I see their point, but also, lots of women get pregnant while nursing toddlers.) But now H has enough, he wants to do everything we can to make this transfer work. I struggle with taking something from my one living baby that she clearly loves, but… I also understand him. Perhaps it is time. And as I’m leaving for the west coast on Monday, it literally is only a question of 2-3 more or fewer days of nursing in any case.
Wish us luck.