1st Ultrasound

My first ultrasound will be on May 18th, I will be 7 weeks along at that point. Hopefully I will also be able to find out whether I am having twins or not. I am still on the progesterone shots and will probably be on them until I am about 10 weeks along, that is quite a bit of time still. The progesterone is making my backside numb in the areas where I have gotten the shot. The nurse said this is normal. It is a good bit weird but it also tends to work out well because in some areas Kevin doesn't even need to worry about hurting me because I can not feel the needle even go in anymore.

In other news I have been dealing with back pain like crazy, my neck and shoulders are super tense and have been sending jolts of pain down my arms. I have been feeling morning sickness for weeks now but have not yet gotten to the point of throwing up. I am kind of happy for that. It is kind of weird, I have basically told everyone about our pregnancy, except the people at work. I probably will not tell them until I hit the "safe" zone where miscarriage is pretty much not going to happen. And they wont really notice since I don't come in very often.

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.

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.

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. 

Failure

On the day that I gave birth to Davy I was asked when I thought I would try getting pregnant again. My response? "Give me a year to get over this." And sure enough by October I was contacting my OBGYN to see about getting things rolling, I knew that getting pregnant would take time. And sure enough it did. We really didn't get started until early January, Kevin moved his frozen vials of semen from one facility to another, I got things set up with my new fertility doctor, and everything was getting ready for my January cycle. When it hit everything got moving. I started taking shots, I started taking pills, I started going in on a weekly basis for blood tests. Everything moved along quickly. But the truth was, we could barely afford it all. Just the gas to drive to and from my appointments was something we had to carefully plan out. And the two drives to Chicago nearly killed us. But we made it, I even got a ride to the Pregnancy Test. That isn't counting the toll that the shots took on me, my rear end is currently black and blue from progesterone shots. But it was all worth it for the shot at getting pregnant, except, we didn't get pregnant.

Each try at IVF is $10,000 but with our insurance they pay for three attempts. Davy was our first attempt, and this was our second. We now have one last attempt left. And I am really scared that it won't work. If we can't afford gas to get to appointments, how in the world would we afford IVF without insurance? Answer is, we can't. After all our IVF attempts are over we have Artificial Insemination left, three more attempts of that left, and then we are done.

It is really difficult, I was planning this out, discussed it with Kevin. We were going to get pregnant again right away, because fact is I am not getting any younger. And this seems to be the year of babies, my sister is pregnant, my sister in law (brother's wife) is pregnant, my sister in law (Kevin's sister) is pregnant, heck even one of my cousins is pregnant. Everyone seems to be pregnant, except for me. And it really hurts, I know it will get easier over time, and I know, or at least hope that we will get pregnant again. But at this point I really don't know when. To sacrifice so much just to find out that your one in three chances failed.

Any of your who read this and have a child that you got easily through sex, don't you dare take that child for granted, because there are people out there who go through hell to get what you have. People who would love to have your child, no matter how difficult they are. And I am one of them.

Pregnancy test

Today was the day, the anticipated Pregnancy Test Day. I went in early this morning and they took my blood, and then told me that they would call me with the result around 1 pm to 1:30 pm. At 1:28 they called me with the news...we are not pregnant.

It has been a rough day, I don't know what else to say.

Embryo Transfer

Today was our Embryo Transfer, or in other words where they implanted the embryos into my uterus. The drive into Chicago was not too bad, except for some of the traffic. The worst part was when we got there. In my instructions for pre-transfer I am instructed to drink water/liquid when we were halfway there. I had Gatorade in a two liter Gatorade bottle, I ended up drinking most of the bottle. Meaning I really had to go when we got there. It took 30 minutes for them to bring me back, but thankfully once they did they let me empty my bladder a little. Yay!

Then the embryologist came in and talked to us about the embryos, one was in early blastocyst and the other two were compounding, which is pre-blastocyst. The optimum is when the embryo is in blastocyst, but the embryos were good for implanting as they were. They took the early blastocyst embryo and the farthest along compounding embryo and implanted those.

Some neat things:
1. Kevin got to stay in the room and watch the embryo transfer, last time he wasn't allowed in the room
2. They showed us the embryos on the TV in the room before the transfer
3. We got to watch the ultrasound and see the embryos placed in my uterus, we even got our first picture of the baby/babies if they end up taking, the gave us an ultrasound picture of the embryos in my uterus

Now is the waiting time, on February 23rd we will have the pregnancy test that will tell us if this worked or not. I really hope that it will.

Eggs -> Embryos

Yesterday we got a call from the Fertility Center where I had my eggs harvested, out of the 13 eggs they harvested only 7 were viable, and of the 7 that they fertilized only 3 made it to embryo status. It is difficult for us to know that we lost 10 eggs out of the whole process, but 3 embryos is better than none. They called me today to verify that they are going to implant the embryos on the 5th day. They could have done the implantation on the 3rd day if the embryos were not looking too great, but they must look good for them to be planning on implanting on the 5th day. Fifth day embryos are much more aggressive and have a greater chance of implanting and becoming a successful pregnancy, so they will not be implanting all three but will only implant two. There is a high chance that we will get twins out of this.

Either way I am currently on a bunch of meds, and getting daily shots in the bum from Kevin. Yay fun! It is all for a good cause though, so it is worth it.

The Harvest

Today they harvested my eggs, this time they were able to harvest 13 of them. Last time when we got pregnant with Davy they were only able to harvest 5 eggs and only two made it to embryo status. Hopefully this time we get a lot more embryos so we can put them away for our next try. Tomorrow the clinic will call me and let me know how many eggs made it to embryo status. Next Wednesday is my implantation date, so we will drive back in for them to implant two embryos.

The clinic is in Chicago, which was quite a drive. We had to wake up at 4 am to make it to our 7 am appointment. Thankfully Kevin drove us into Chicago, and then he had to drive us out as I am on instructions not to drive the rest of today. I am also on a 5 lb lifting limit. Which means I can't pick up anything over 5 lbs, so no picking up the baby and I can only hold him if he crawls into my lap, which thankfully he does quite often. Love our little boy. I hurt today and feel quite under the weather so I can't really do a lot of walking without it hurting. I think that is what upsets Davy the most, Mommy can't get up and walk around a lot with him like I usually do.

Nana and Grandpa watched him yesterday and today because I had to drive into work and today we drove into Chicago. Nana sent me lots of cute pictures of Davy having fun at her house. I guess he spent a lot of time watching videos on her iPhone. I am on a new set of meds, and Kevin has to inject the progesterone in oil into my backside again. I will post more about my meds and the update on the embryos tomorrow. I think I am going to take another nap.

Walking and Schedules

Lately Davy's favorite thing to do is walk around the living room with someone holding his hand. He can walk between us but he doesn't seem to feel comfortable with his new walking skills to go walking on his own. According to his doctor he should be able to walk now, he has great muscle tone and good balance but he is just chicken and will walk once he gets up his courage. In the meantime Mommy and Daddy have become his walking companions. He does not do so good when it comes to walking with Mommy or Daddy outside the living room area, because he wants to see all the things he doesn't usually get to play with. Davy has also started to climb, which is giving us all sorts of fits as he likes to climb up on the couches but has not realized that falling off the couch could seriously hurt him. There is a part of me that feels like I should let him fall once to let him learn that he needs to be careful on the couch. It is difficult letting my baby learn tough lessons.

On the fertility side of things I have begun to give myself shots. I started on Monday January 30th. Here is my schedule: Monday January 30th to Thursday February 2nd (today!) inject 200 Units of Follistim subcutaneously, Friday February 3rd inject 200 Units of Follistim, 2 pills of Estrodiol and one syringe of Ganirelix, continue all three until Monday February 6th when I have a doctor appointment and will be given a new schedule by the nurse.

Speaking of doctor appointments I am full of them for the next few weeks. I have the appointment on the 6th, as well as an appointment with my General Practitioner on the 7th, and another with the fertility clinic on the 8th. On the 9th I will be driving in to work for a meeting and then on the 10th we will be driving to Chicago for harvest of the eggs. We will be returning to Chicago on the 15th for implantation. Just thinking about next week makes me feel tired. Davy will be spending the 9th and 10th with Nana and Grandpa while I am at work and in Chicago. I am sure they will have more fun than I will.

I exercised last night and the night before. Turned on a tv show and exercised for the duration of it. I need to do more of that.

Artificial Insemination or IVF?

Today we met with the doctor to discuss where we go from here. She initially started talking about artificial insemination and using six vials to do so. We have 12 vials so this would use half of them on three attempts. Kevin got concerned at this point and so we talked about other options. We discussed IVF (In Vetro Fertilization) and what our options were with that. We went round and round with it and then settled on a decision. We are going to start me on Clomid which will increase my fertility, we will do one attempt at Artificial Insemination and then if that does not work we will start me on the process for IVF in May. I guess the clinic does IVF in groups of women and so they do it during different months so the earliest she could get me into was March, but she didn’t feel comfortable in rushing it so instead we are going to try for May.

This effectively gives us a plan A and a plan B. If I get pregnant from the Artificial Insemination then we will not do the IVF in May, if I don’t get pregnant then we will. I am thinking that if we do get pregnant through AI then maybe after we have the baby I will go through the process of harvesting the eggs next year just so that we have them saved for future children attempts. That way we have the eggs from when I am still young and fertile.

Hopefully by next year I not be working and the harvesting process will not be as much of an interference in my life as it is now. We shall see.

If plan A works then we could be pregnant late February to early March, if plan B works then we could be pregnant late May early June. Hopefully the sooner the better, but we will see how it goes.