Today’s agenda involves much self-study to decide if last night’s flare-up of the UTI from hell warrants antibiotics.  It seems GONE today, and seemed GONE yesterday, but if a few glasses of wine is going to cause it to flare, that has to be a fairly established infection, yes?  Can’t be good for nearby embryos, yes?  I’m going to call my clinic (yes, they work on Sundays!) to find out if they’d write me an antibiotics prescription on my say-so.  They probably won’t, and I’ll have to wait for an opening at a walk-in clinic all day long tomorrow.  Grrr.

(This is why, when one’s primary care physician retires in the midst of your IF treatments, you don’t blow off finding a new one on the grounds that “I spend too much time in doctors’ offices as it is…”

I am such a slug.  A slug with intermittent burning.  (I wonder if this is what slugs feel like when you drop them into a bucket of salt?  Poor slugs.))

The rest of the day will be taken up with making & delivering sweet rolls, watching Malcolm X (with Denzel Washington!) tonight, and bidding farewell to youngest step-daughter.  Also dropping lab-bills in the mail, writing thank-you notes, knitting, and spending too much time actively dreading going back to work tomorrow.

All in all (well, maybe except for the UTI) a reasonably good holiday weekend.  Not as good as I wanted it to be, not as good as I expected it to be (in, say, July.)  But reasonably good.

And for that I am thankful.

Food was great, family was great, we even managed to sneak in some SIL/MIL/Sprogblogger bonding by going shopping in the next teensy town over.  Nifty little antique stores and an amazing place called Pergola.  If you’re ever in Litchfield county, CT, look it up.  Wow.

There is, however, nothing new on the reproduction-front.  hCG stab wounds still hurt.  Lupron is still making me a crazy bitch.  Cyst is still making me bloated and blech-y feeling.  I guess what we’re hoping for now is that I get ANOTHER period in the next week.  I get to go in on Day 2 if I get any bleeding, otherwise, my doc doesn’t want to see me until the 9th.

This is sort of sucky since it’ll be my first week at the new branch.  ”Hi!  I’m Sprogblogger!  I’m your new librarian, except not so much for the next few weeks since I’ll be taking all kinds of late mornings and contiguous days off & hope you don’t mind. kbye!”

I’m going to buy a stationary bike. A “treat” for myself because I really need to move my butt.  (And thighs.  And calves.)  Running just hurts too much, and I’m too cheap (and strapped for time) to commit to classes at a gym.  Cycling is easy on my body and good for me.  I think it’s my best option, and we’ll just figure out where to keep the damned thing.  Anyone buy from a stationary bike company that they love?

Other than that, I’m just – WAITING!  Yeah, tell you something new, I know.  It’s what I do.  I wait.  And wait.  And wait.

December 9 cannot get here fast enough. Unless I’m very lucky — or, I suppose, very unlucky  –  we’ll be transferring on Christmas morning.  All I can say is, thank G-d my RE is Jewish…

Sure enough, I’m an ovulating machine.  Despite the Lupron.  Despite last week’s two-periods-for-the-price-of-one.  Plus I’ve got a cyst.  So it’s at least another two weeks before anything else happens.  Two more weeks on Lupron.  Two more weeks of angst and stress and unhappy.  I’m going to have to get another prescription because I won’t have enough because this shit is going on so fucking long.  I hate this.  I hate it all.

My life sucks, and how are you?

What I need to know – and can’t, because, obviously, there are no answers to questions such as these – is:

• What is this going to do to my donor’s chances of producing good, top quality eggs for me?  Being suppressed an additional 2 weeks can’t be good for her.
• This is going to put retrieval/transfer right at – if not exactly on – Christmas.  And getting an additional 3 days off right around Christmas?  Not so easy.
• Why can’t any-fucking-thing in my life be easy?  Just for a little while?

Seriously, about that last?  I’m wallowing in self-pity here, I know, but it’s a serious question straight from my soul.  Honestly, I just want to catch a break somewhere.  Somewhere, somehow, I would like something to go well for me.  I hate my job, I can’t have a baby, my writing life is stuck indefinitely in slow-motion due to the aforesaid stress & time-commitments for the job-I hate and the baby-I-can’t-seem-to-have.  This is not the life I want.  Fuck, I’d settle for just SOMETHING coming to me without huge amounts of grief and setbacks and unbearable awfulness attached.  Is that really so much to ask?  I just want something to go well, to be able to look back on it and say, “Hey, that wasn’t so bad!”

Because right now?  It’s bad.  It’s all bad, and I’m scared out of my mind that it’s never going to get any better.

My life sucks, and how are you?

(Maybe if I say it with a really perky smile, no one will notice the words coming out of my mouth.  At least not unless they look in my eyes and see the Lupron-beast trying to get out and strangle them).

Fuck.

Decided I was being a big baby about the “I think I ovulated” nonsense.  I’m on massive drugs, and my system is completely out of whack – read last week’s “I’m bleeding!  Again!” entries for more info on same.  I have an appointment tomorrow to check on this anyway, and that’s soon enough for either good or bad news.  Not like they can make me not have ovulated, if I already did…  (Besides which, if I go in today, I’d be seeing Herr Bigshot, and I don’t think I could deal with that.  I might go all crazed-IF-patient on him and get kicked out of the clinic.  That’d suck)

In more cheerful, upbeat news, I slept through the night – for the first time in, oh, a week and a half.  Between the Lupron, visiting my in-laws (they have a lovely place, but oh! our bed there is miserable, and we’re in the “hot” room.  We’re totally opening a window this weekend!), and the UTI for these last couple of nights, I’ve been getting less than an optimal amount of sleep.  Even last night was less than 7 hours, but it was 7 contiguous hours, which makes a difference to my brain.  I feel less fuzzy than I have in days.

And tomorrow is the appointment wherein I should find out if this cycle is a go or not.  If we’re on, I’ll have a monitoring appointment next Friday, and we’ll be set for retrieval/transfer the week after that.  Excited.  Scared.  Bored.  Thrilled.  Round & round my emotions go.  Wish they’d stop, dontcha know?

Because I’ve got a bunch of stuff to get done.  Besides the knitting craziness, I’ve got a ton of things to accomplish and it’s only a month til Christmas – how did this happen?  And all kinds of parties to prepare for – Chocolate mice being my specialty, as well as peanut butter/hershey kiss cookies.  Why is it that no one in NYC has ever had these before?  For once I’m the worldly one.  That’s me – chock full of Christmas cookie sophistication.  Maybe this year I’ll break out the toll-house cookies and really floor them all…

From being totally excited about this process, I find that I’m moving straight into a state of ennui. I’m tired of trying (and failing) to have a baby. I’m tired of this being the focus of my life. I’m tired of the continual effort with the complete lack of reward. I’m bored. I’m ready to be done with this already, and I’m not, and it’s strange.

Due dates & anniversaries coming up, and it’s hard not to count down to them. Holidays coming up and it’s almost impossible not to imagine where I wanted to be at this time. This last pregnancy, I daydreamed nearly constantly of being nice and roundedly pregnant at both Thanksgiving and Christmas. I don’t know why those days played so prominently in my daydreams, because the boy’s daughters are likely to be less-than-ecstatic when I do catch pregnant and start to show, but I was still really looking forward to those days. Now? Not so much. Which is a shame.

And I’m kind of excited about fast-upcoming DE cycle, except it doesn’t seem real. I mean, we could be doing a transfer in 3 weeks or so, and it doesn’t feel real. Part of me is convinced that this will work – of course it will! Look at the numbers! Look at my history! And the rest of me knows it’ll be one more massive disappointment, so maybe it’s better to look at something shiny – Mockingbirds! Red leaves! Flower! – until it’s all over.

If I could, I’d wake up around the middle of January. Better yet, the middle of August, when I’d wake from my coma to give birth to a perfectly healthy baby, and wouldn’t have to have lived through another year like this.

Sigh. I need to get my head together….

OMG.

I know it’s just nasty Lupron weight.  I know my clothes aren’t fitting any differently – people have, in fact, been commenting on how good I look.  But still.  Stepping onto the scale and seeing that number was just way too much for me to take this morning.

*shudder*

So I’m drinking my coffee at least until MsDonorFantastica starts stimming.  And I’m cutting out the sugar.  It’ll be easier for me to ignore it if I don’t have any.  Not even my single Newman-O in the evenings.  And I’ll give up my wine in the evenings, (though all rules are off-line on Thanksgiving.)  But it probably won’t do a damned thing, since I certainly haven’t eaten crazily enough to gain one pound, let alone the three that my scale claims I’ve put on in the last 24 hours.

Ugh.

In cheerier news, I actually beat the headache into submission last night with extra-super-strength Tylenol.  Which made me happy.  Being able to actually see again?  Worth the bitter taste in my mouth from popping the T-pills all night.

And that’s all in my world of “How much longer do I need to be on the same drugs my father takes to deal with prostate cancer?”  Here’s a shout-out to my dad, who’s a hero for dealing with this shit-drug as cheerfully as he does.  Because really, when all is said and done, Lupron is the devil.  Yes, that’s right, non-Lupron-taking friends.  I’m injecting the devil into my belly each evening, and the devil apparently weighs three pounds, and lodges somewhere behind my occipital lobe with his full collection of knives & tridents tapping out his instructions to evil minions in Morse Code that gets relayed via my racing heart, and only much sugar (or extra-super-duper-strength-Tylenol  lulls him into complacency for a few hours, so it’s no wonder the rage is my constant companion these days, eh?

Ugh.  It’s been a week now.  One week to go (oh god, I hope) until things begin to get interesting.

It’s odd – I feel like I’m at a completely limbo-ish place right now.  Nothing has changed, nothing will change.  I am so beyond ready to be going forward, that even now that I am, it’s not going forward fast enough.  Which, of course means that I don’t want to move forward, I just want to be at my destination already.  And I’ve been at this for so long that it feels like I should be there already.  ”Whaddya mean we haven’t even pulled out of the driveway yet?”

But at the same time, I’m not consumed by my impatience.  I think I’ve been here too many times.  Impatience doesn’t help, and sometimes, this limbo-place is better than what comes next, so it’s rather as if my brain is just deciding to get comfy here for a while.  An odd sensation.

So I try not to eat crappy food.  I’m off the coffee (ack) and I’m being more diligent about getting enough exercise.  I haven’t yet forgotten a dose of Lupron.  I take my prenatal like a good little infertile woman.  I look for ways to minimize my stress.  I pat my dog.  And the time will pass.  My next check is next Wednesday – right before Thanksgiving.

Here’s hoping I have something to be thankful for this year.

You don’t know me, but I know a little about you.  I know your age, and the age of your siblings and parents, and how old your grandparents were when they died.  I know your medical history.  I know the sexual history you report to doctors.  I know how well you stimulate on stimming drugs, and I know that you gained ten pounds the last time you did this.  I know you want to be a dermatologist.  I know you like to talk.  My doctor says you’re pretty and nice and smart.  You have a cousin who’s infertile, and you were motivated to donate oocytes after watching her struggles to become a parent.  And, you admit, the money doesn’t hurt either, which means you’re honest, and that’s a point in your favor as far as I’m concerned.

People keep asking me, “Aren’t you sad to be using a donor’s eggs to make your child?”  ”Isn’t it hard to know you’ll not be contributing any of the working DNA to this project?”  ”Don’t you wish you could do this the old-fashioned (IVF) way?”

To answer all those questions, while – of course – I’d rather not have gone through this last year and a half of grief, fear, and misery, I feel grateful beyond words that I am going through this in 2009, and not in, say, 1979.  I already came to terms with the fact that my body wasn’t going to cooperate and that IVF was our only real option.  Turns out, my eggs passed their use-by date a while back while I was busy, you know, finding a man to be my child’s father.  But I’m so damned lucky.  Because this is 2009, not 1979.  Because of women like you, I have the chance to be a mother.  I know it probably gets old hearing about what a generous thing you are doing for your recipients, but let me say it right out front:

You are giving me an enormous gift – one for which I will always be grateful, whether or not I end up with a baby at the end of it.

So all the shit you’re injecting into your body, the rage-y moods you’re enduring, the weight you’re probably gaining, please know how grateful I am to you.  Please know it’s appreciated.  Please know that in my book, you’re a heroine.  You’re the heroine of this story, and I’m the damsel hoping to be rescued from the dragon of IF that’s eaten my life.

Thank you.

Puny words to express everything I’m feeling, but they’re sincere.

With deepest gratitude,
Sprogblogger

I bought the meds, averting a potential screw up by the pharmacy.  My nurse called me at about 3pm to let me know that MsDonorFantastica’s ultrasound came back fine, and that she’d be going to pick up her meds at the pharmacy to start Lupron tonight (dear, if there were any way you could be reading this, know that you have my complete sympathy & appreciation for what you’re about to go through.  You’re earning that donor fee…)  Only thing was, as I mentioned to the nurse, the pharmacy hadn’t yet called me to authorize payment.

“Are you sure?” asked the nurse.

“Um, yeah.  I’m pretty sure I’d remember making a $2500 payment today if it had happened.”

So I called them, and first they couldn’t find it since it was – obviously – not my name on the prescription.  And they couldn’t give me the name, and I couldn’t give them the first name my doctor let slip, since, you know, anonymity & all.  So we walked around and around the question til we figured out which set of meds was for which person.  (And I sincerely hope they got it right.)  I did pay for it.  And she will pick it up, start injecting herself, and everyone will do their respective jobs and make baby-bits for me to incubate into a little person.

At least that’s the plan.

In Loopy-ron news, I slept for a total of 3 hours last night, after kicking off all the sheets, and pushing away both dog and husband.  I lost a wad of hair in the shower, and I can feel a headache just beginning at my temples.  I was getting angry in my dreams, and woke up cranky.  My period’s already slowed to almost nothing.

Yup.  It’s working.

Sigh.

Nothing of the sort.  It was easy. Of course it was. It was Lupron.  Easy in, but you pay for it later.  So why the trauma?  Then I realized, it’s been almost 9 months since I’ve been on non-PIO injectables.  At the very beginning of that short-lived “Damn, we shouldn’t have put you on Lupron since you managed to get yourself pregnant” pregnancy that would have been, well, a full term baby right around now.  That was a long time ago.  No wonder I was a bit freaked out.

As always, the Lupron bottle looks like jokesters at the factory emptied half the vial before shipping it.  I actually googled “Lupron half full” and came up with enough bloggers making the same comment that I was reassured.  Also came up with many blog entries comparing their pessimism/optimism levels.  I still don’t see how this bitty half-full vial will last for a month or so, but hey – I’m just the recipient, here.  Nothing to see, nothing to worry about.  Or so they say.

Personally, I’m starting to freak out.  Four to five weeks from yesterday – assuming all goes well.  What if all doesn’t go well? What if-

Deep breath.  See?  Another freak out.

So to distract myself from the freak-outs that are increasingly taking over my life (and, oooh, I just can’t wait for Lupron brain to make the freak-outs all rage-y, as well!) I’m going to try to take my mind off the fact that none of this is going to be about me for quite a while by striving toward some goals that have been eluding me during this down-time.

• Lose 20 pounds.  Ok, I’m kidding.  But losing some weight will help me feel in charge.  Since “eating more healthily” hasn’t done much except making me feel perkier, I think I have to come right out and say it (and act like it).  As of today, I am on a diet.  A caloric-reduction diet.  Because I am a cow.
• I will not buy another bag of coffee – not even decaf.  I will let the bag I have run out in another couple of days.  I will switch to some herbal, innocuous tea and I will not mourn.  Much.  At least not in public.
• I will stop drinking wine at night, which should also help with the diet resolution.  I lurves me my white wine, and it’s nice to me right back, in that I never get headachy or drunken no matter how much I sip at during the evening, but really?  Not so good for me.  Not now.

And of course, I will stab myself in my soon-to-be-shrinking gut every night.   And take my vitamin.  And I will try to stay as stress-free as possible.  And I will pester my nurse for updates on Ms. DonorFantastica until they just give in and call me automatically.

And then I will wait.  And I will hope.  And wait.  And hope.  And wait.  And hope.