Positive

Today we got the fantastic news that we are pregnant. Today was the pregnancy test, however I knew that I could also take a home pregnancy test and was planning on taking one before we left for my doctor appointment. So last night I went to bed around 10 pm, at 11 pm I woke up and went back to sleep, at midnight I woke up and went back to sleep, finally at 1 am I woke up and said to myself, "Well, I have to pee pretty bad, might as well take the test now." So I got up, took the test and finished up, by the time I was done washing my hands the test was showing a positive result. So I got back into bed and woke Kevin up and said, "We're pregnant!!" This woke him up out of a dead sleep and woke him up for the rest of the night. Maybe I should use this technique every morning to wake him up. Probably only works once, darn.

I went back to bed after texting family, I probably got back to sleep around 3 am. At 5:30 I woke up to get ready for my doctor's appointment and we left the house at 6:15, we got to the doctor's right on time for my 7 am appointment and after having my blood taken we were out of there by 7:05 am.

Poor Davy, we woke him up early and took him with us because he had a 9:45 doctor's appointment as well. He is a little under the weather with a cold and he got his last two shots until kindergarten. We got the call from my doctor's office at 1 pm today to let us know that we are indeed pregnant! Yay!!

Testing

Tomorrow is the day I have my pregnancy test. I am really excited and nervous. So much so I had dreams about it last night, I dreamt that I took a home pregnancy test and it came out positive. Hopefully it is a good dream and will come true tomorrow.

Davy was sick last night we will see how he is doing this morning. But there is a good chance he is staying home from church. Poor little guy. Today should be a bit crazy.

Poems and Cancer

Tonight I have been working on my computer, it pretty much crashed earlier today and we had to do a system reset to a past date when it worked. Then I scanned it and scanned it and tried to make sure to get rid of anything that might cause the problem again. While waiting I saw my old poetry journal that I made for myself when I was in college. It goes through the first few years of our marriage together, near the end it has one or two poems from our fourth and fifth year of marriage but mostly it holds poems from the first, second and third years of marriage. Wow, what a reminder. At first all the poems are mostly angsty little musings of a very young adult. I was 20 and still had memories of high school fresh in my mind and I was part of a writer's group where we pretty much spent a good amount of time reminiscing about how much public school sucked. The anger and love sick newlywed poetry leads very easily into the harsh cancer poetry. Those poems were such a sharp reminder. It has really been quite a long time since those days, but reading those poems brought it back so clearly. I am so glad that those days are behind me. I mean I wrote some fantastic poetry, but they were so rough on me. It has really been quite a while since I blogged like this. I really miss it, the whole voiding of the mind in the quiet times of the day. I really need to find times to do more of it. Especially now that I have "bed rest". I hate having nothing to do, I waste so much time. Anyway, it is getting late and both boys and both dogs are asleep so it is probably time for me to haul Kevin off the couch and into bed and haul myself there too.

Transfer

I know it has been a few days, I have been on bed rest but it is really no excuse. Pretty much good news all around. We had the five embryos and one of them stopped dividing, but the remaining four all made it to blastocyst, which means that they were in the best condition for surviving. We transferred two of them and froze the remaining two. How glad I am of our Flex Spending Account, it allowed us to afford the $850 cost of freezing the embryos. I am currently on that ten day wait to the pregnancy test. I still get the progesterone shots which Kevin gets to give me in my backside. We are very much hoping and praying for a positive pregnancy test next Monday.

Tomorrow is the day

Tomorrow we have the embryo transfer at 10:20 am, I talked to the embryologist today and two of the embryos are compacted and hopefully will be in blastocyst by tomorrow, which means they will be in prime condition to be transferred. The remaining three are still dividing and looking ok, I am hoping that they all make it to being frozen. That would give us three more chances at having kids from this IVF cycle. Right now I just hope it all works out ok.

Embryo update

Just got my call for today on the embryos, they are looking good and are dividing, they have set my embryo transfer date for Friday. This means that the embryos that they transfer will be day five embryos, which according to my doctor are more aggressive. Kevin and I are just hoping that everything goes well and that we are able to freeze some of the embryos as well as get pregnant from this transfer. Lots of prayers.

Embryos

Got my update just now, out of the 15 eggs they were able to fertilize 12, out of the 12 only 5 made it to embryo. We will see how many of that 5 actually survive. We will be transferring the two best looking ones and will be freezing any others that make it to the freezable status.

Egg Retrieval

Yesterday was the egg retrieval, for the retrieval they put you under and retrieve the eggs while you are under anesthesia. Out of the 18 follicles they were able to retrieve 15 eggs. I have basically been on bed rest since it was over yesterday and have been sleeping a lot. Today they will call me to give us the number of eggs that made it to embryo. Then on Tuesday they will tell me if I should come in on Wednesday or Friday for the embryo transfer. Chances are that I will be going in on Friday. I will be posting updates on where we are as each day passes.

Check up

Today I went in for an ultrasound, I have 19 follicles so far, 8 on one side and 11 on the other. So far so good, I am hoping things continue to go well and that we have a good number of eggs that are harvested. But even more than that I am hoping that we get a good number of good embryos from this attempt.

I got a letter in the mail today from our insurance letting us know that this IVF attempt is our last one they will cover. I knew this already, but having it in print is kind of finalizing.

On a non IVF note, Kevin contacted our mortgage lender about the fact that our property taxes were lowered due to us going to the county assessor and disputing our taxes. This means our mortgage payment is lower and that we have over-payed, so they sent us a check for the amount that we over-payed and we used part of the money to help pay off the debt we had on our furnaces. So by the end of this month we will no longer be paying off our furnaces! One big debt down and a few more to go. We still are working on paying off the cost of having Davy, as well as the car and the house. Not much debt wise, but still I would rather be debt free. One day it will happen, hopefully.

Shots and Escapes

Tomorrow I begin the Ganirelix shots along with the Follistim shots I have been taking since Wednesday. It seems strange that next Sunday we will be going in for harvesting (as long as everything looks good). This is another one of those faith building experiences, I feel good about April every time I pray about it, so here we are trying this again. I just have to have the faith that it will work.

Today Davy figured out how to climb out of the barrier of couches that keeps him in the living room. It happened earlier today, the dogs were in the area between the living room and the kitchen chewing on bones, Davy saw them and wanted to get to them. So he got up on one of the couches and started to climb over the side, he lowered one leg down towards the ground and then brought the other leg over and dropped the rest of the way, which wasn't far. I saw him as he brought the first leg over. When he hit the floor he rolled and seemed to be just fine, which meant that he would try it again. And sure enough when I put him back in the living room again he did it again. Thus ends our great plan to keep him safe in the living room. Now we have to baby proof the rest of the house, because now that he knows he can get out there will be no stopping him. Sometimes that boy is too clever for his own good.

Pushing back my appointment

So the fertility clinic called me to see if they could reschedule my next ultrasound appointment. They want to push it back a few days. Which is fine except for the fact that I am still feeling nervous about the increase in Follistim meds. So I am going to be calling them tomorrow and see if I can talk to a nurse about my concerns. We shall see how it all goes.

They are floppy and have holes

Today we took Davy in to the doctor to see if he might have an ear infection, he has had a cold lately and has been playing with his ears a lot. Turns out he has no ear infection and just likes to play with his ears because they are floppy and have holes in them. Or so said the doctor. :) He does have Eczema though, which is not so fun for him, and means that we will need to get him moisturized regularly. The doctor said we should use creams, but we could also use Crisco if we didn't have creams as this is what they used in older times. That caused Kevin to ask if we could use lard as well and then he asked if we could just wrap the baby in bacon! Men are so funny sometimes!

April IVF

Haven't really updated since shortly after the whole failure. So here goes. We went back into the Fertility doctor in late March to discuss where we wanted to go from there. Before we did so though I really prayed about it. I didn't want us to try again when it wasn't the right time and waste our last attempt. After a lot of prayer I got a feeling that we should really try in April. It was kind of scary because if this next attempt fails then we are basically out of IVF options. It will be the last attempt that insurance will pay for and with our income we would not be able to afford it out of pocket.

When we met with the doctor he went over what probably happened the last time that caused it to fail, he said that it is not very often that it happens the way it did. Basically when we got 13 eggs we should have gotten more than 3 embryos out of it. And the embryos should have developed more than what they did. So this time he wants to see how many eggs we can get so he will be upping my dose of Follistim. The goal is to get as many eggs as possible and then to get as many of those eggs to embryo status so that we can freeze them for later use. We told him that we wanted to try again in April and he said that sounded good. 

I was expecting that I would get my period in late March and then get the period we would use in late April. But my March period waited and waited until it was two days before April. So when it showed up I called in and got the process started. My first appointment was today, I went in for blood work and an internal ultrasound. Every time I have had an ultrasound in the past at the doctor's he has been in surgery and has not been available to talk to me so I would get a call later with instructions on what to do. This time he was there. So he decided to up my Follistim dose to 300 units, which is really quite high. I have never been on that high of a dose before. I do remember being on a higher dose with my first attempt, but when I looked at my previous posts about my first IVF attempt I found that instead of a 100 unit dose it was 150 and then went down from there. I am really hoping I don't over stimulate, which could lead to my ovaries getting over stimulated and bad things happening, it could result in death even. Kind of scary. 

I start my injections on Wednesday and hopefully everything goes well. Here is my meds schedule: 4/2/12 Estradiol (estrogen) two pills daily (one in the morning and one at night) for today and tomorrow 4/3/12, Wednesday 4/4/12 start 300 units of Follistim, continue with the Follistim with 300 units injected everyday until Sunday 4/8/12 when I continue with 300 units of Follistim and also begin to take Ganirelix, which is premixed, and begin the Estradiol again, that continues until Tuesday of next week 4/10/12 when I go in for my next ultrasound.