IVF/IUI - If it makes a baby, I'll give it a try.

Maks is very excited about the game of Doctor.  

    I am floored by the amount of support my friends and family have given in response to my first entry.  I am truly touched and grateful to all of you.   In response to that, I am going to start oversharing a little.  After all, what's the point of this if I don't "empty the tank" as my dad used to say.  He was referring to running but I think the sentiment rings true with emotions and I think he would have agreed (being the cry baby that he was.)

       I really appreciate all of you who wrote and asked me questions.  I feel like IVF is my full time job these days and I have taken it upon myself to geek out on it as much as possible in order to understand it.  So, just in case anyone is reading who didn't write and ask me questions but is questioning, I want you to know that this is my obsession right now and I have no boundaries (obviously).  In fact, we attended a class last week on how to give injections and in the handouts there was a section about protecting yourself emotionally during the process and how you may not want to tell too many people.  I completely respect that but like I said before, I tend to work better with the support of others...or the questions.  Just in case you're wondering, Maks and I have been tested for all the normal things and our current diagnoses is Unexplained Infertility.  That means what you think it means.  Sex is supposed to make babies.  I have eggs that ovulate and he has sperm that swim but sex is not making a baby.  That's why they started with IUI.  It's the most controlled way to make sure we are getting everyone to the party in tip top shape at the same time.   When that didn't work, we graduated to IVF.  The brief rundown on IVF is that we are still using all of our own parts but the embryos are being created artificially in a lab instead of in the body.  All of the drugs basically stimulate my ovaries to turn every follicle I have into a mature egg so that they can take them out of me and attempt to fertilize them all.  We then take the strongest of the created embryos and put them back inside me and continue with more injections while we wait to see if it takes (same as the regular folks).   The hope for me is to get 17 eggs and from there, the doctor thinks he can create 10 embryos.  He would then implant 1 or 2 depending on how strong they are.    I do find it strange to undergo such a big process when we don't even know what is wrong.   It feels a bit like getting a pacemaker in response to shortness of breath.   It's how they learn, though.  It's a great way to get up close and personal with your parts and see why embryos aren't developing or why they aren't lasting.  Well, in truth, they don't really ask a lot of why.  They just keep trying to get you pregnant using ways that have worked on others.  It is strange because I am constantly asking why.   That's the most frustrating and heartbreaking part of all of this.  I don't know why.  I have been at this for a while and spent a lot of time spread eagle on a lot of tables in front of a lot of doctors and all we know is that there is no reason.   I have heard a lot of people tell me to just relax and stop thinking about it because it will happen when the time is right.  Well, the time is right.  Also, telling a person undergoing fertility tests and treatments to not think about it is a bit like telling a contestant on the Biggest Loser not to think about her diet.   I know why people say that, though.  It's hard to know what to say.  What can you say?   It's a weird thing to talk about and there is no justice in why some people make babies easily and some don't.  Teenagers and drug addicts get pregnant for free on accident in the back of cars.  I have a friend who got pregnant with an IUD inside of her.  I have heard stories of people who underwent multiple IVF treatments and once they quit, they got pregnant.   All of these stories are wonderful and I don't mind hearing them but I also don't know how to respond.  It's pretty hard not being able to do something that I am biologically supposed to be able to do and the thought that I am killing my future children by hoping and praying for them is even more stressfull.   Also, we spent a year and a half not thinking about it.  We went on romantic vacations and relaxed and enjoyed one another.  At this point we are on a path that requires us to put some thought into it.   That's all we can do.  

         As for how we are doing, we got some interesting news this week.  I have been doing injections for about a week.  My stomach is totally bloated and I am having a hard time fitting into my fat jeans.  I haven't really had an appetite, which I don't mind.  By boobs are gigantic, which Maks doesn't mind.  The irritability isn't as bad as it was on Clomid, which is probably due to the fact that I am not having constant mood swings and hot flashes.  I much prefer the physical side effects of these drugs to the emotional ones of Clomid.  If stress is a contributing factor to our infertility, Clomid definitely does not help keep that low.   Anyway, after 5 days of it, I went in for an ultrasound and the doctor only found 4 maturing follicles.  That means that while I have 17 available follicles, I only have 4 that are maturing.  So, this is a big bummer.  I was worried it meant that we would have to scrap this cycle and start over but instead, we are turing it into an IUI cycle.  Four eggs are better then 2 so our chances are basically doubled this time around.  While I am ready to get this IVF show on the road,  I am also really hopeful that this works.  I feel good about this cycle and much more relaxed then usual.   It doesn't feel like as much work as it has in the past to stay positive. I don't know if that is from finally throwing my hands up and telling everyone about it or if it really is just the relief of not being on Clomid.  That is a crazy making drug.   In case you're wondering why we wouldn't go ahead with 4 follicles, its because IVF is insanely expensive.  We want to make sure we get as many eggs on the initial treatment as possible so that if the embryo doesn't implant, we have other embryos in the freezer that we can try.

So, yeah!  That is where we are this week.  Lots of pokes.  Maks is a master injection giver, though.  I suppose that's going to come in handy if we take up a heroin addiction.   No in all seriousness, the needles are not that bad.  Just a quick poke, a little burn, and it's over.  Similar to the way some babies are made naturally. (wink!) And I will leave with this final piece of good news.  In the past week, I have encountered two products that improved my life greatly.    I don't know if it's from my history with infomercial products, or just life experience but I don't often find things that really work on the black and white annoyances in life.  Well, this week I found a detangling brush that changed my hair and a mattress topper that took away the back pain I was waking up with.  I am therefore left with an overwhelming feeling that sometimes things do work and they just need a little help.  I didn't have to shave my head or throw out the mattress.   Maybe all of my personal parts just need a little help too.  Fingers crossed.

Sex, Drugs and Alcohol Swabs

I keep trying to figure out where to start talking about this.  It's such an overwhelming process for me that when I really try to boil it down to the beginning, I can't get my thoughts straight.  That's why I am starting with this picture.  We can call this the new beginning.  This is a picture of what my body will be ingesting over the next three weeks.  This is baby making in the 21st century.



 For the past couple of years, Maks and I have been trying for a baby.  The day after we got engaged we decided to pull the goalie and see what happens.  We figured we were too old to wait.   Well, not old and I certainly wasn't too old at the age of 32, but you get the picture.   Alas, I would not be sitting at my kitchen table faced with this elaborate start your own drug lab kit (as Maks calls it) if any of our prior attempts had been successful.   Last summer we started attending the fertility clinic at UCSF in order to try and figure out what we might be doing wrong.  It turns out that my preacher was not exactly correct.  Sitting next to a boy, holding hands, kissing with tongue...none of those things will get you pregnant.  My eighth grade science teacher was also not correct.  Unprotected sex (no matter how much or what position) will not always get you pregnant either.  In fact, contrary to what I had always been taught, getting pregnant is quite a process, especially for us.  Don't get me wrong, I know the old fashioned way works for some and that's great.  It's just not our way, I guess.

        We started with Clomid and IUI.  We did that 4 times.  Basically, the run down on that is that you take Clomid for a week and have hot flashes and nausea for a month.   Half way through the cycle you do a shot of Ovidril to make yourself ovulate and 36 hours later in the most romantic of laboratory settings, your husband goes into a room on the 8th floor and makes his deposit and you go into a room on the 7th floor and have his freshly washed floater and sinker eliminated sperm deposited into you by a very nice lab tech.  Our clinic doesn't have music in the room which is a shame.  I feel like it might make the sperm march with motivation.   Sadly, this just didn't work.  I had a small polyp removed just in case that was blocking the path but no dice.  I would describe the entire process as genuinely irritating and uncomfortable.  I felt like I never knew when I would have a hot flash.  I would get it and then 2 minutes after be freezing.  I gained some weight.  I cried a lot for stupid reasons.   Reasons like mayonnaise on my burger or tripping on the dog leash are just a few.   I yelled at my poor husband for even stupider reasons because I was genuinely more irritated then I had ever been in my life.   Like I said, it was an uncomfortable couple of months.  Perhaps the hardest thing about it is that you're supposed to try to stay stress free and the entire process of being irrationally irritated by the smallest of things and trying not to explode is quite stressful.  However, exploding has its stressful repercussions as well.   The benefits of Clomid are that it's supposed to help you create more mature follicles.  Instead of creating one mature follicle a month, I made 2-3 each month.  Each time we did the insemination, we put roughly 75-85 million sperm next 2-3 mature eggs right inside my uterus.  You would think I would be a mom to triplets at this point.    But,  after all that, no baby.

          That's the hardest part.  No baby.  I have never in my life wanted something as badly as I want a kid.  I wouldn't say that I have always wanted to be  mother but I would say that I always expected to be one.  I have never envisioned my life without children.  As an only child, my goal has always been to have more then one.  And once I found a partner to share my life with, the desire to make our family bigger grew exponentially.  For the past few years we have expanded our holidays to include my in-laws who are now just family.  I am so excited to share them with our children.  I can't wait for him or her to learn Russian and even do little baby vodka shots (sub voda for vodka) or take a ballet class.  I envision myself at baseball games and soccer games passing out Gatorade and even yelling at my children for dragging smelly stinky stuff into the house.  I see my mom teaching them to dance and sing no matter where you are.  I know that I am romanticizing it.  I have been told that it is difficult.  I was even recently told how much I don't understand because I don't have children and how unprepared I am for the reality of it by someone I considered close to me.  That hurt a lot.  All I can do is imagine it at this point.  I don't even have the option of being afraid.  I am constantly being told to just relax and think positively so the best I can do is imagine the positive.  I can't face the reality of parenthood at this point because my reality is a tabletop full of needles and vials.

          That's why I am starting with that picture.  After receiving the drug package and going through it, a friend facetimed me to show me her daughter who just started crawling.  It was the most perfect timing.   This table of drugs is going to get me to that.  It's going to bring me smiles bigger then I have ever experienced.  It's going to be hard and I will write about it a lot.  I have scoured the internet for blogs like this about how people are dealing with IVF and sadly, I can't find enough.  I want to know everything.  I want to know about side effects, good times, hard times, and most of all successes and failures.  I'm now a part of that circle so this is my voice and my take on it.   It's not perfect.  It is probably not even grammatically correct.  I don't fancy myself a writer.  I have thought about writing about this for months but shied away from it because I wanted it to sound so much more eloquent.  It wasn't until I found myself reading the same blog post of another IVF participant over and over that I realized my words don't have to be perfect.  They just have to be mine because this is my journey and God knows it's not perfect.   It feels good to share it.  I won't have a lot of the moments that some pregnant women have.  I won't have a big surprise pregnancy announcement.  IVF will either work or not work and I will have to spend the 12 weeks after it hoping for the best and I don't want to do that alone.  Technology has not only improved my chances of having a baby, it's given me the tools to talk about it with everyone I know on Facebook.   I would love to hear from anyone who might have dealt with this, as well.   I also love hearing from my friends who made babies the old fashioned way.   And as undecided as I am about religion, I am asking any of you who do pray to put me on your list.  If you meditate, put me on that list.  I have started praying too.  I don't know who I am talking to.  It might be my little babies soul.  I think it's worth the effort, though.   In the end, this will all be worth the effort.  Thank you.