not expecting much

I finally figured out why the doctor (incorrectly) thought I had two follicles.  During my previous cycle, the NP was having a hard time finding my left ovary, and when she did, the follicle was hiding a bit.  She ended up measuring it twice, the first time at 18.1, and the second time she told the medical assistant to just put over 18 in my chart.  The assistant must have entered the measurements as two different follicles.  I’m pretty angry that a stupid little mistake like that is costing us so much money, although I shouldn’t be surprised after the charting debacle after my surgery.



I had a follicle check on Friday showing the exact same thing as my follicle check last cycle, two larger follies and one smaller one.  By Monday (yesterday) we had only one viable follicle, a little farther behind than last cycle at 17 and change.  I was so upset I cried.  I don’t know why we’re spending all this money to just get one follicle, it seems like such a waste.  It also seems likely this cycle won’t succeed.  Needless to say, we’re moving on to a different clinic, and most likely IVF with donor eggs or embryos.  It won’t be covered by insurance at all.  It will probably cost close to $20,000.  We’re already tens of thousands of dollars in debt for student loans, we just found out yesterday our car will probably need a new engine, and our credit card bills are getting higher and higher.  I feel like we’re drowning.



Yesterday was a bad appointment in another way too.  Because the clinic close to my house didn’t have any appointments, I had to go to the medical center that is much farther away.  The far-away center has a regular women’s clinic waiting room and a waiting room for women’s specialty healthcare (which includes infertility, as well as other things).   Unfortunately, they no longer staff the specialty waiting room, so us infertiles have to stand in line with all the pregnant women.  And, because how much you pay depends on what insurance plan you have and what the doctor ends up doing, you have to stand in line once to check in, and then again after your appointment in order to pay.  There’s nothing more frustrating than coming back to that room after receiving not-so-good news, having to wait in line in a room full of pregnant people, and paying $80 to hear bad news while the pregnant woman in front of you paid $5 for her appointment, and then go to the pharmacy to wait another 20-30 minutes to pay hundreds of dollars for fertility medication.



On top of all of this, I feel like my health is really suffering.  I weigh more now than I ever have in my entire life.  My BMI is 25.3, which is officially overweight.  This fact is causing me to get depressed and then I eat more to cope.  I’m too tired to exercise most of the time, and I was warned against it by my doctors who said that with how large my ovaries would get, I could risk ovarian torsion.  HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA.  MY one little follicle is hardly in danger of causing any problems, so  I could have been exercising all this time.  Luckily, this will be our last round of IUIs, and I doubt we’ll be using my eggs going forward, so I can go back to exercising.  Of course, that will be harder since I will most likely be quitting the gym to save money, but I can make it happen.



IUI on Thursday morning.  My husband is going with me so we can file a grievance regarding the incorrect charting that led to the doctor refusing to increase the dose of medication.  We don’t want to pay for a flawed cycle, especially when I voiced my concerns and the doctor was a complete jerk about it. 

horrible, no good, very bad... doctor appointment

So yeah, that was my period starting on Friday.  I called the clinic and got an appointment for a baseline ultrasound on Sunday (aka yesterday).  I had light bleeding and no cramps both Friday and Saturday, which was odd, but I’ll take it.  The cramps started Sunday and continued into today, and now I probably know why.



I have another fibroid.  2 surgeries, 14 fibroids, and thousands of dollars later (plus a number of aggravating phone calls trying to get the billing correct, along with a threat of being sent to collections), and here we area again with another fibroid, just under 2 cm.  It is located within the wall of my uterus, and not impinging on the lining, so no need to remove it, but I’m guessing that is what’s causing the horrible cramps I have every cycle. 



And that wasn’t even the worst thing that happened at my appointment!  My husband, D, was still away at summer camp (I learned after he got back that the camp was for children with congenital hand deformities, and apparently my husband never went to summer camp as a kid, because he had a fantastic time and returned home filthy with a braided bracelet that he had made himself and a cape that was pre-made but he was still really proud of) so I had to go to the appointment by myself.  I had heard from friends who went to the same clinic that the doctor that I was going to see this time was not well-liked.  I can see why.



He started by telling me that I still have a 14.6mm follicle left over from last time that hadn’t reabsorbed yet.  I also (I think) had only 5 total new follicles.  5.  That is not a good number.  He told me I could start a new injectable cycle if I wanted, since the leftover follicle was not too big to prevent it, but that it would hurt and he didn’t want me to come back and blame him.   I tried asking multiple times if the follicle would cause problems with a medicated cycle, but all he would say was that he didn’t want me to blame him for anything if I went home and googled it, and that it was up to me if we continued.  I was like, I have no idea what you’re talking about, how am I supposed to make a decision without more information?  But after a LOT of prodding, he said that it wouldn’t cause any problems, and I am now too scared to google it.



Then he told me that since I had three dominant follicles last time, they wouldn’t increase my dosage.  I was stunned, since based on everything I was told, I had one dominant follicle last time, plus one that was a bit farther behind and hadn’t caught up as of the last ultrasound.  WTH???  I guess the doctor (who was actually a nurse practitioner) and the nurse who was recording everything had some communications issues, or there was another follicle that no one told me about in any of my visits.  I tried explaining this to the doctor, who pretty much accused me of lying in order to increase my meds.  He told me it would be really bad if I ended up with 5 or 10 dominant follicles.  I wanted to slap him and shout “I only have 5 follicles total!  How could I possibly end up with that many large follicles???”  I was pretty much crying by this time.



He informed me that a lot of patients didn’t like him because they only want to hear positive things, and he believed in telling the truth.  I felt more like he believed in giving as little information as possible so that no one could blame him for a bad outcome.  I wanted to hear the truth!  But I wanted to hear ALL of it so I could make an informed decision.



He didn’t talk at all about my tiny number of follicles, the shortness of my cycle, nothing.  I was not happy, but what can you do?  I’m going to be 37 next month, I don’t have a ton of time left, and I certainly don’t have a lot of eggs left.  So  I am currently on the same dose I was on last time.  My prescription-strength painkillers have damped the cramps enough for me to behave normally at work.  I am barreling along towards what I feel will be another failure, a lot more money down the drain.  We have decided this will probably be our last IUI cycle, and IVF using my eggs is probably off the table at this point.  How many viable embryos can we really expect to get with so few antral follicles?



So now I’m not sure what to do next (assuming this cycle doesn’t work, which I am assuming).  I think we will probably move on to either donated eggs or donated embryos.  Donated embryos are the cheapest option I’ve found so far.  If I could find a program that uses donated eggs and D’s sperm and doesn’t cost too much more, that would be the ideal course of action, but I don’t really know where else to look now.  I guess we have a bit of time to think about it.

Failure

Looks like my period is starting.  Three days early.  I guess that's not too bad in terms of luteal phase (right?), but I'm horribly sad.

Feeling better today

I survived my first night without D.  It didn't go too badly.  The dogs mostly behaved, the cats mostly behaved, I got to eat my favorite food that my husband doesn't like, and I watched something like 5 episodes of How I Met Your Mother.

Speaking of mothers, it was my mother's 75th birthday yesterday.  I called several times, and finally got through last night, only to listen to a barrage of complaints about her friends.  She explained that she ate lunch by herself (or maybe it was dinner?) at her favorite restaurant because her friends are mean and all made other plans, and I actually felt a little bit bad for her.  But listening to her, it made me realize that if she and her friends cared as much about each other as they did about themselves, they would all be much happier.  Instead of giving anyone the benefit of the doubt, they automatically assume that everyone else's actions are meant to hurt them, and then they retaliate.  They spend insane amounts of time being angry and not talking to each other.  Every time I talk to my mom, she's not talking to at least one of her friends.  I hope I'm never like them.

Ah, well.  My sister and I are taking my mom (along with my sister's family, but not D since he won't be home yet) to a new restaurant near my mom's house that I'm excited to try.  Should be fun as long as my mom keeps the complaining to a minimum.

Now that D is gone, I'm realizing how much I depend on him for certain things.  For instance, he's my alarm clock.  Realizing I was going to have to get up on my own this morning, I tried setting an alarm on my phone.  When I went to turn it on, instead of having a check box next to each day, the days were all listed in green.  when I touched a day, it turned white.  I assumed that meant it turned the alarm on for that day.  HAHAHAHA.  Apparently, the default was for the alarm to be on every day, so by changing it, I was turning it off.  Oopsies. I woke up 10 minutes before the alarm was supposed to go off, and decided to just stay in bed until it was time to get up.  15 minutes later, I realized my alarm wasn't going to go off at all and that was when I discovered my mistake.  Thank goodness I didn't accidentally sleep in, and now my alarm is hopefully set for tomorrow morning.  Whew.

Today is 10 days past my IUI.  Only a few more days to go before I will hopefully know something!  My boobs are super sore today.  It was actually hard to sleep on my stomach last night (one of my favorite sleeping positions) due to the soreness.  I hope this is a good sign.  No spotting so far either.  It's CD 21, although I guess it doesn't matter too much when you're controlling your own ovulation.

My anxiety is catching up with me

I let my husband's cat out yesterday morning, after which he told me that he wanted to keep the cat inside during the day.  He usually lets the cat out whenever the cat (whose name is Boss, which is a TERRIBLE name for a cat because it gives him serious delusions of grandeur) wants to go out, so I was surprised that he was upset.  Nevertheless, the cat was out of the bag (or the house, hahahahaha, I amuse myself so much), and we had to get to work and that was that.

Our neighbors have two cats that spend a lot of time outside, and my husband has observed Boss sitting on the corner with one or both of these cats, and possibly other neighborhood cats, in the mornings.  I've started calling it the Corner Cat Conclave, or the Corner Cat Coffee Klatch.  Boss is usually quite disagreeable with other cats, but he seems to be mellowing out in his old age, and their little get-togethers seem to be pretty tame.

Generally, after being outside for a while, Boss is desperate to get back in and have a little snack, so we were surprised to get home yesterday afternoon and Boss was nowhere to be found.  We checked our front courtyard multiple times, looked under the cars of all of our neighbors (not suspicious behavior AT ALL!), and walked down to the Corner Cat Conclave location periodically, calling his name, which made me feel ridiculous.  I also call him Bossy-Poo, which he loves and sound much more manly.  At this point, D was starting to freak out about where Boss could possibly be, since we haven't lived in our new town that long.  I imagined finding his broken body lying in the road somewhere.

After dinner, we went to run errands, and drove around the neighborhood a bit more, and when we got back, we walked around the corner to look a bit farther afield.  The neighbor's orange cat was lounging on their front porch.  Their Siamese cat was around the corner on someone else's front lawn.  I spotted the back end of another cat squeezed in between an RV and a hedge (I'm assuming his/her front end was in the hedge, but it was hard to tell), but no sign of Boss.  It has been so hot lately that a lot of neighbors have been leaving their garage doors open a bit to get air circulation through, and some of them even leave their garage doors completely open.  It seemed likely he had gone into another house.

Side note: My old neighborhood may have seemed nicer, what with all the nosy neighbors patrolling and enforcing arcane rules, and we lived in a court for heaven's sakes, but the garage door was left open one night right after my last surgery (and I totally blame Boss for it, due to his habit of waiting until the last second then darting under the closing garage door and causing it to reopen after D or I have gone into the house) and my extremely expensive road bike was stolen.  And it's not like it was out in the open - at that point, our exterior lights were out, so even seeing that the door was open was difficult, and the nice bike had a TON of stuff piled in front of it, so getting it out would have required some serious rearranging.  WHILE WE WERE HOME!  And sleeping just on the other side of the wall.

OK, so anyway, we walked around like idiots calling for Boss, noticed that at least one neighbor had a pet food bowl out on their front porch, figured Boss wasn't coming home because he'd been feasting at someone else's expense, and decided to head home and wait him out.  Of course, as soon as we turned around, we heard a sound and there he was, running down the sidewalk after us.  D picked him up and carried him home and decided he needs another collar with tags this time.  I wonder how long he'll wear this one before he takes it off and leaves it somewhere.

I also read in the comments on a blog yesterday about dogs with seizure disorders who actually have brain tumors, and now I'm freaked out about Lola.  She's been rubbing her face with her paws lately, and at first I was worried about foxtails, but now I'm worried about a tumor.  She does seem to have allergies or asthma, so it could be something like that too, or it could be nothing.  But after going four months without a seizure, she suddenly had three in the month of June, and it worried me.  A lot.

My husband thinks it's the stress of the TWW that's getting to me, and he's probably right.  What if I'm not pregnant and we have to start all over?  What do we do next?  What if I am pregnant?  How can we possibly take care of a baby???  What if something bad happens to it?  Lucky him, he's leaving today for the next five days, basically until the end of the TWW, and he'll be working the whole time, so at least he'll have a distraction.  I'll be home all by myself, with only my ever-increasing anxious thoughts to keep me company.

Halfway through the TWW (super long post! Huzzah!)

I don't know how people do this over and over.  The wait is killing me.

My husband leaves tomorrow morning to work at a camp for disabled kids for 5 days.  He's super excited to be doing something different for a few days, I'm kind of excited to have some time to myself. 

Last night, I went out with some friends.  It was really hard.  They're not people I know super well, but I like them a lot, since they're all close to my age and live in the same area as I do, plus most of them are super nice and really funny and I always have a good time when I hang out with them.  But, last night.  Ugh.

So I'll back up a bit.  When I was in high school, I had neighbors who lived down the street with one boy a year older than my sister and I, and another a year younger.  Since we didn't have a high school in our small town yet (they finally built one that opened the year after I graduated), we had to drive to the closest city for school.  There was a bus that came out there, but it had a LOT of area to cover so it took forever, and we were all in band, which started an hour earlier, which meant we couldn't take the bus anyway.  Because there were so many people who drove in from all over the area, this meant a few things: none of our parents wanted to get up that early to drive us that far, and there were so many people driving in that there wasn't enough parking for all the students.  So there was sort of an informal system of carpooling, and older kids usually drove their younger neighbors, with the younger neighbors taking over driving duties once they became old enough.  So we carpooled to school every day, and the older boy taught me how to drive a stick, and we were all like a family.  You know, like most people in band (you do know that right?  I can't be the only band nerd around)

ANYWAY!  The older of the neighbor's kids was a really good friend of mine, and we've kept in touch over the years, despite all of us moving all over the place for college, grad school, jobs, etc.  Well, a few years ago (probably more than a few actually), the older kid finally moved back to the area (with his fiance!) and settled down and we started hanging out and I became good friends with his fiance (now wife).  They started a family pretty quickly, she got super involved in the community and made a ton of friends with other mothers, and she ended up starting a book club and inviting me to join, even though I didn't have kids and everyone else did.

So I'm still in the book club and I'm still the only childless one, but seriously, everyone in the book club is so awesome I just love hanging out with them.  My sister and I have both invited a few friends to join over the years, and it has expanded to include some amazing women.

But last year, my friend and his wife moved away for a post-doctoral position on the east coast.  They actually left early in the morning after my wedding, so at least they made it to that, and then they were gone.  We've continued the book club without her, although she still joins in on our online discussions and we've Skyped with her a few times at meetings. 

And now she's visiting again!  Yay!  And she organized a dinner out last night!  Yay!  But some of the conversations really got to me, especially the two women who were complaining about how they got pregnant with their second children despite only having sex once during the prior month.  And there was SO MUCH COMPLAINING about children.  I think most of them are stay-at-home moms or have part-time jobs or seasonal jobs (like teaching), so they spend more time at home with the kids than most of the people I know in the rest of my life (who I know through work, so obviously, they don't stay at home with their kids).  It was hard to sit there and listen to that. 

OK, got that off my chest.  I'm now 8 days into the TWW, with 6 days to go.  I'm also on CD 19.5 (I started at night, I'm never sure how to count it when that happens).  My last few cycles have been around 22 days, with quite a bit of cramping and spotting in the 5 days or so before the cycle starts.  I know I took drugs this time that ensured a good uterine lining and actual ovulation, so things could be different, but the fact that I have no signs of an impending period are really encouraging.  My boobs have also been quite sore, especially at night.  I'm trying not to be too hopeful, but I so want this to be the month.  If this isn't the month...  Well, I'm planning some camping trips for August, and I should at least be able to go on the first one without injections causing problems.

We finally got our bill for surgery

I had surgery in January, and as you might recall, the doctor accidentally coded it as a laparoscopy instead of an operative hysteroscopy.  He told me himself at my follow-up that he had coded it wrong and that he would try to fix it, but he obviously wasn't successful since I got a bill for $3000 for a laparoscopy a few months later.  After several frustrating phone calls, including one in which the person to whom I was talking insisted that if I had surgery it must have been a laparoscopy, I finally got the revised bill yesterday, and it's only $500.  Thank goodness!!!

You may have noticed that I added a page documenting the costs of our infertility so far.  I can't believe we've spent so much to do so little.  Time to add the most recent bill...

One step forward, two steps back (warning: LOOOOONG post)

My mother is a difficult person.  I know I've said that before.  She turns 75 next week, and I'm sure she's expecting a huge party, but I just don't have it in me.  She called my sister last night (we'll call her S for clarity, and my mother will be M), and started out by telling S how awful all of M's children are (myself included), then informed S that M needed surgery for cataracts and that S would have to spend a day carting M around for it.  Obviously, my sister was less than thrilled (who starts a plea for help by telling the person you're asking how horrible they are?).  I told my sister that I would take a day off of work to go with her, but I'm not taking care of my mother by myself.  I'm in no condition to deal with my mother's crap right now.

Speaking of which, I obviously haven't told my mother about my infertility.  At all.  She doesn't know that I've had multiple surgeries for fibroids, that we've been trying to have a family for 20 months (21 months?), that we're having lots of problems.  She was, however, concerned that if I don't have children, she might lose the competition with her friends over who had the most grandchildren.  Luckily, my sister's pregnancy has relieved the pressure on me over that.  Considering her less than enthusiastic response when my husband and I told her that we were getting married, and her recently telling me that she liked me better when I was single, I doubt she'll be too excited for us if we do manage to get pregnant.  I would love to have a supportive mother who could support me through this, but I unfortunately did not win the mother lottery.

I was recently thinking about the costs of infertility, probably brought about by friends complaining about the costs of children.  I wonder if they would complain so much if they had to actually pay to get pregnant.  So far, my husband and I have paid just under $4,000 and we owe another $1,000-$3,000 for my last surgery, once the bill is finished being processed.  This includes lots of diagnostics, doctor's appointment, two fibroid surgeries, and one injectible IUI cycle, but no ovulation testing kits, pregnancy tests, vitamins, and the like.  In the grand scheme of things, it's not actually that much money, but who knows how much more we'll have to spend?

So as I embark on my TWW, I know that it will be a while before any symptoms will show.  But last night, man did I have sore boobs. I guess it could be from the trigger shot, right?  It's also insanely hot here, yesterday on the drive home our car said it was 111 outside, and at 9:30 last night it was around 84.  I was sweltering.  Today is supposed to be the last day over 100, I think.  I really hope.

I completely forgot that my husband is leaving next Wednesday for a children's camp at which he will be a counselor (I guess?) for children's hospital patients.  It's not that far away, but they're in need of male chaperones who can stay for the whole camp, and he gets paid for it, so he's doing it.  He'll be gone through Sunday, and chances are if this IUI didn't work, I will be getting my period sometime while he's gone.  I don't look forward to dealing with that by myself.

And on top of everything else, our dog had another seizure last night, the third one in the month of June.  We need to figure out a better plan to take care of her, as what we're doing right now is obviously not working, and it's really hard on us as well.  Hopefully we can get it figured out soon.

And the wait continues!