Stress

I have a lot of stress in my life.  And I know that most of it is my own doing.  I have a choice of how to respond to a set of circumstances...and I often (usually?) respond with stress.  I respond with action, but also with stress.  A perfectionist by nature, I want everything to be just so.  It is so hard to let go.

Today is CD53 (ouch!) and there are finally signs that AF will be here shortly.  I have been waiting for this upcoming CD1 for a long time, practically since the unfortunate discovery at my OB appointment on Valentine's Day.  

I want this cycle to work. I want to do everything I can to have my body be receptive to the embryo.  I need to be healthy mentally and physically, so I have committed to myself that for this cycle, I will go to bed at a reasonable time, I will eat well, I will exercise, and I will make every effort to minimize the stress that I let into my life.  

Wow...that is one tall order (it almost makes me stressed just to read it!)!

I am looking for tips.  My work situation is rough - simply put, I have a ton of it.  My natural response is to work more in order to mark items off the to do list and create a more relaxed situation, but that approach has been really bad for my sleep.  And I want to go on vacation, but I'm worried that this project I am leading would suffer (causing more stress). 

How do you keep stressful situations from getting to you?  This is something that I have never been good at.  Running has always been a savior, but I've been finding that I can't turn my mind off at night to fall asleep in a reasonable amount of time (which makes those early morning stress-reducing runs less appealing!).

Does IVF Cause Menopause?

Seriously...it seems as though the IVF sucked the last remaining eggs out of my ovaries and left my body with no need to have a period!  Today is CD48 and there is no sign of the end of this cycle.  Not fun!  With any luck, returning from my blogging hiatus will be the magical wave of the wand that my body has been waiting for in order to start a new cycle.

So yes, I'm alive.  The last several weeks have been relatively blah.  They have been filled with the usual trio: too much work, too much stress, and not enough sleep.  It's no wonder why my body is going on strike.  This certainly is not the recipe for getting pregnant.

Life has gone on in ways that once again make me take pause and realize that I have been on the TTC train for too long.  My younger daughter had a breakthrough, and as of Saturday, is out of diapers.  This is a big milestone.  When I think about the family that I am trying to build, it makes me sad that I am not in the typical rush to get the toddler potty trained before a new baby arrives.  Instead, I am here wondering whether I will have the opportunity to have a child in diapers again.  

Hopefully AF will arrive soon so that I can feel like I am working towards a direction, one way or another.

Hope and Fear

And then there were two.  Of the seven embryos that were biopsied, two are normal.  Once again, I feel like my decision to do PGD has been rewarded.  Four of the seven embryos looked really good, but only two of them were good.  I have been rewarded with two opportunities where I know I could get pregnant.  Will it work?

The info on the two good ones is this: one is graded 5AA and one is 5BB.  They are both the same gender, but I didn't ask which.

I am filled with hope.  And fear.  And relief.  And disappointment.  And anxiety.  And happiness.  And stress.  And more relief.  The emotional rollercoaster is back.  I guess you could say that I have reconnected.  I am all in.

Two. So there are two.  Two is good , and two is scary.  Two would be more scary if I weren't doing a single embryo transfer, because then I would have one chance.  Yes, all I need is one normal embryo to stick (and stay stuck).  But it's hard.  I feel a lot of pressure for this to work.  I know there are a few of you out there gearing up for your last chance, and I've been thinking about you a lot...the decisions for where to cycle, the gearing up for the final FET.  There is a lot at stake.

That was my commercial interruption.  I now go back to waiting.  It's likely to be a month or more.  Last time I ovulated around day 28, and this could be even longer since my body seemed to be more taxed by the cycle.  Thankfully many of you have exciting milestones coming up, and I am more than happy to cheer you on while I wait.

What's the hold up?

It's a well known theory (or is it a fact?) that the "good news" phone calls from our clinics come earlier in the afternoon than the "bad news" phone calls.  On beta day, it never bodes well for the phone call to come after 3 or 4PM. 

Sure, that's a gross generalization, and maybe not even true, but I'm beginning to feel some doubt about the test results on my embryo biopsies.  I received an email this morning from my contact at the lab.  It was just an invoice and a receipt to indicate that they had initiated the charge on my account, but it made me realize that they had probably completed their tests, so I emailed the woman back this evening to find out if the results had been sent to my clinic yet.

She replied that they were sent on Monday.  MONDAY.  It is Thursday night.  I don't think I need to count out the number of days, but that was three days ago!  Deep breath.  Technically my results are not urgent and technically I don't need an immediate call.  But it's been THREE DAYS!  Deep breath.  My doctor is off on Tuesdays, and I know that she's been reducing her time in the clinic.  I think she's been focusing more on research, so I suppose it's possible that perhaps she's traveling or has been out of the office for some other reason.  I don't know whether to expect a call from her or from a nurse, but I know that she needs to review test results prior to them being released to a patient.  So maybe they were faxed over and are sitting on her desk.  It's possible, right?  Realistically, it's probably better that I'm finding this out after three days rather than after one, because it's less likely that the silence is due to the "bad result pity".

Needless to say, I'm enduring a wee bit of anxiety over here.  I'm in meetings all morning tomorrow, but I will call for an update as soon as I have a few minutes.  Fingers crossed that I'm causing myself some unnecessary excitement.  It would be a shame if there weren't any normal ones in the bunch.

Moving along

Ten days past retrieval and AF arrived last Thursday.  Wow, that was fast.  Hopefully this cycle won't be much longer than six weeks....

The best part of CD1 was being able to go out for a run.  The first few weren't pretty and didn't feel good, but my morning runs are such a big part of my life that even when they feel like crap (like the first two did after 15 days of not running, being sick, not eating due to sickness and/or humungous ovaries), they put a smile on my face.  It's been almost a week and my insides feel like they are back where they belong.  Yay.

Anaheim was great.  The weather was HOT down there (I saw 99 a few times on my phone) this weekend, and I was glad to be able to go on Splash Mountain.  Small victories.

My focus now is getting back into shape over the next several weeks and reconnecting again with this process.  Once again I feel so disconnected...and it's killing me.  I don't like wondering whether I'm doing the right thing, questioning whether this path was the right one for us.  While it's nice to not feel the daily ache of TTC, I still wish I felt more engaged, and believed that this could be right around the corner.  Maybe it will happen once I get the results from the lab.  Hopefully I'll be hearing something in the next few days.  I think normal turnaround times are a week to ten days. Sigh.

And now we wait

I got the cryo report yesterday.  7 embryos made it to blast (6 on day 5, one on day 6) and were biopsied, frozen, and the samples were shipped to the lab yesterday.  My contact from the lab emailed today.  She had the instructions wrong...they thought I was going to do another fresh cycle and wanted to test the samples from both batches at once.  We got it straightened out and they will run the tests at their leisure.

So now we wait for the results.
And we wait for AF...
So that I can wait for another (probably 6 week) cycle while my body heals.
And then, if I have at least one normal embryo, only then do I finally get to the point that I have been waiting for ever since I miscarried three months ago...the chance to be pregnant again.

In the meantime, I am in a very comfortable place.  The initial disappointment of this long drawn out process has been more than made up for by something that puts me completely at ease: a plan.  Even before my WTF appointment with my RE, I knew that we would likely not do a fresh transfer.  Having this plan has allowed me to plan.  And that makes me happy.

I do not need to be available for any appointments at the clinic until mid-June at the earliest, so this is the perfect opportunity for us to take advantage of the freedom.  We are heading down to southern California this weekend to visit the happiest place on earth for a few days.  And then we're trying to schedule a diving trip the second week of June.  I hope that works out, but I'm not sure if it will happen....  It's nice to have a lot to look forward to and to plan for things that I wouldn't be able to do if I were pregnant. 

I'm sure the time will fly and before I know it, I will be in the two week wait...then time will stop.

My boobs hurt. Could I be pregnant?

Sorry, that's a little "freeze-all" humor.  I know it's not very funny, but oh well.  I think I've spent too much time searching on the forums over the years looking for answers to my various questions and finding off-the-wall threads.  Today is 5 days past retrieval and my breasts are sore.  I wonder what it could be from?  My progesterone levels should be low (yay for no PIO or Endometrin!) and I am most definitely not pregnant!  Maybe my body is just trying to make some sense of what happened to it this week.

My RE called this morning to confirm the plan.  Nine embryos were able to be biopsied and six of those were advancing well.  I agreed to biopsy all nine.  I continue to be hopeful that we'll find at least one normal one in the bunch.