...moved on over to blogger/blogspot, because I am Google's bitch.

See you there, I hope! If you don't have a Google account, you can leave comments there with OpenID, any name, a name and a website, or completely anonymously.

Thanks to all of you who have come along on this wild ride.

Thank you for the chanting and the cheering and the commiserating! My numbers are just peachy keen, nothing that even hyper-anxious me can get worried about.

For the historical record:

FSH, 6.5. Below 10 is considered good. Under 6 would be superstar, but 6.5 is juuuuust fine with me.
Estradiol, 52. Below 80 is good.
LH, 5.9. Over three and yet lower than FSH is good.

Ratio of FSH:LH is 1.1. Over 2 predicts badness. 1.1 is ducky.

I know exactly what my doctor would say (I think I'll call him Dr. Stewart, because he totally reminds me of Jon Stewart). He'd say "What we know here is only that this blood test does not show any of the markers associated with diminished ovarian reserve." He would then quickly point out that we know nothing about the quality of my eggs, response to stimulation, etc. After my HSG he was careful to state that tubal patency does not mean anything except that dye moves freely through and then spills from the fallopian tubes.

Can you see why I like him? No? Well, I do. His downbeat approach makes me feel positively blithe and reckless in comparison. I don't particularly want a doctor who radiates positivity.  REs are in the business of selling an expensive, invasive procedure that doesn't work more often than it does.  A little bit of negativity feels like honesty to me.

I start pills tonight.

Well, my marathon 41 day cycle finally came to a close. This means that, like Portnoy, vee finally may perhaps to begin, yes?

Tomorrow I get my Day 3 bloodwork (for the innocent: a few hormone tests that are used to -- sometimes inaccurately -- estimate just how tough this project is going to be.) I am terrified. If my FSH is high then that's bad and an indication of diminished ovarian reserve, which has a grim prognosis. If my estradiol is high then it has artificially lowered my FSH, see previous sentence. Alternately, I may have an ovarian cyst. If my LH level is low then it could indicate diminished ovarian reserve; if it's high it may indicate polycystic ovarian syndrome (of which I already have some signs -- it's not too bad a thing to have, though).

Infectious disease testing is done from the same blood draw, including hepatitis and HIV. I am also terrified of these, which is completely irrational. I have been in a monogamous relationship for 10 years. My sole risk factor would be that 8 months of exposure to KD's semen. If I hadn't felt I could trust him not to endanger me I wouldn't have gone ahead with him as a donor. But. But. I'm terrified anyway.

After I get my blood tested tomorrow, I will take my first birth control pill. Like every single woman who has trod the long downregulation IVF path before me, gay and straight, I will have a good chuckle at this.

I should get the results by the end of the day, or the day after. I will heave a sigh of relief, or not.

My whole life I have been frightened of having fertility problems. This is not significant. I am a worrier, and my whole life I have been frightened of car crashes, cancer, choking, falling, being wrongly convicted of a crime, having all my teeth fall out, going blind, mass transportation accidents, and a thousand other things that have never happened and kinehorah never will.

So think good-number thoughts for me. Low FSH, low estradiol, LH the same as my (oh-so-low) FSH.

And then? Vee begin.

Good news: I finally ovulated!

Bad news: I ovulated 2000 miles from the tank of sperm. Thus I am rating my chances of pregnancy this cycle as "very low indeed".

Whatever. I keep telling myself that there's an 80-85% chance that the only effect of skipping this month's insem was to save us $1300. The odds are freaking depressing when you look at it that way.  It's one thing if you have a known donor (or husband, for that matter) and every spin of the wheel is free. It's an entirely different thing when it costs so very much for such a slim chance.

I am really looking forward to playing a game with better odds.

Did I mention that I'm in Las Vegas? Love this glittery town. I put a dollar in a slot machine and ended up with $2.50. See, Vegas loves me, too.

In November I had a 38-day cycle; looks like I'm going to rival that this month -- CD22, estrogen low, progesterone low (so I haven't ovulated), LH low. Nothing to see up there but a crop of scrubby little follicles.  Chances are excellent that I won't ovulate by Friday. This is relevant because Friday is the last chance to inseminate before we head off to Vegas for a long-awaited vacation.  Can't feel too sorry for myself about that, but it means that this cycle will automatically be a bust.

I wanted to do one more IUI before IVF. You know, a threatening sort of listen up, reproductive bits, this is your last chance to do this on your own before I start hitting you with the big hormone stick. Like the rest of me, my endocrine system is stubbornly deaf to threats. When I was little there were all sorts of jokes about how I could be never be bribed nor threatened to do anything on anyone's schedule but my own. It's not a quality that has served me well in life.

I have a pack of birth control pills to start on cycle day 1, whenever that may be. 21 days of birth control, some time period of ovarian stimulation. Trigger shot for final follicle maturation, egg retrieval (aka the huge honking needle through the vaginal wall. erp.) Then, kinahorah, embryo culture, embryo/blastocyst transfer, the blessedly short 10-day 2ww.  And then, and then. And then.

I don't know where to start telling this story, so I'll just tumble it out.

• No, I'm not pregnant. In my opinion, any TTC blog that puts up a post with the title "omg" is morally obligated to state pregnancy status in the very first bullet point.
  
  
• Sperm is our major out-of-pocket expense. Natural IUI cycles are running us around $1500/per, $1200 of which is sperm. There are radically cheaper options; I know of two "discount" sperm banks, Midwest and Northwest (what is it with the word "west"?) Using either of these banks would save a cool $800/mo. But Midwest doesn't offer ID-release donors, and Northwest only offers them in a very desultory, non-committal way. I want a real signed-on-the-dotted-line assurance that Kid would be able to ask for and get identifying information at age 18. I know there's nothing guaranteed from there, but at least I will have done the best I can to ease that situation. So that leaves me with the $1200 banks.
  
  
• One of our little dogs just puked all over the sheets and quilts and pillow, not to mention my girlfriend. This is not directly related to the story at hand, but I thought I'd share anyway.
  
  
• I am 34. I want more than one. I am really impatient. If I am going to use medical intervention, I want to proceed aggressively.
  
  
• Her Indoors and I both have a morbid fear of multiples. This fear prevents us from doing anything that will increase the risk of multiples at all. Not all of our reasons for this are selfish, although some of them are.
  
  
• That rules out medicated IUIs, Clomid or injectables. There are exactly two choices for trying to get pregnant that do not increase the risk of multiples: natural IUIs and IVF with single-embryo transfer.
  
  
• I don't think I have mentioned this much, perhaps out of embarrassment at my own intensely good fortune, but: I have amazing insurance with fertility coverage. It's more amazing than I had previously thought, and specifically includes lesbians (when I came to work for this place 5 years ago, it specifically *excluded* lesbians. Yay progress!). One cycle of IVF will cost around $2000, including sperm. Additional cycles (I'm allowed three) will run $500 each, since I'll have maxed out my deductible. Yes, this is amazing. Yes, I am very very grateful.
  
  
• Given the above facts -- even the dog puke factors in, in a complex way -- if I am not pregnant this cycle, next cycle we will embark upon IVF. Our doctor is open to doing three fresh cycles with single-embryo transfer each time. It's unusual, but he'll do it. We'll bank (knock wood, if we're lucky, etc) any extra embryos. If after three attempts I'm not pregnant, we'll pay for frozen transfers out of pocket.
  
  
• Stephen Colbert refers to cryopreserved embryos as "tiny frozen Americans". I think this is hilarious.

That's it. My mind is swimming. Our consultation with the doc was this morning, and I had anxious dreams about it all night. I knew exactly what I wanted -- three rounds fresh IVF with single-embryo transfer of a day-5 blastocyst, please! -- and didn't want to be rejected and have to shop around for a clinic. Our doctor is kind of manic-crazy (he got lost today in a metaphor about surf 'n' turf and peanut butter sandwiches; I think he even confused himself), but I like him, and he and the hospital he works out of are literally five minutes from our house. Considering how often I'll have to go to the office during an IVF cycle, location is not nothing.

I am so excited. I once quipped, because I am nothing if not quippy: "TTC is endlessly repeating the same process, hoping for a different result."

Fuck that. We're gonna mix it up a little.

All the prices at my sperm bank have gone way up, with no warning. An IUI vial that last week was $450 is now $530. Shipping that was once $120 is now $160. So the monthly cycle cost has now gone up $200. Dammit. Things just get harder. What the fucking fuck. Sure on one level I'm grateful that these banks even exist to give me an option I might not have had in another time, but I am also so angry that they charge so much for so little, that we can't do a thing about it other than suck it up and pay, pay, pay, that if we switch sperm banks we have to go through the harrowing and (don't forget) expensive process of buying profiles to pick another donor. Well hey, getting screwed a lot should get you pregnant, right? {insert weak laugh here}

On the upside, now I don't have to do all those things I promised I'd do if only I were pregnant this month.

Yesterday
Her: Invisible triplets?
Me: Damn, do they even make invisible strollers in that size?

Today
Her: Let me guess -- invisible quads.
Me: *out of snappy one-liners*


Well, back to the party.

I feel just great. On Friday night I was in our kitchen, looking at our spice shelf, and was just suffused by joy and gratitude. We are so lucky. Of all the people who have ever lived throughout human history, we are among the very luckiest. We live sweet easy lives, with warmth at the click of a button, extensive food choices, soft bed linens.

Most importantly, right at this shining moment, everybody I love is healthy and alive. I know this is not sustainable, but I am so grateful for it, right this second. Right now.

I even believe in the possibility that, if I keep shoving sperm up there, someday we might have a baby.

also, a big TTC greeting to Old Friend From Grad School, OFFGS. We had a wonderful evening last night. She and I attended a humanities doctoral program together at Swanky Ivy League University (SWIL-U) a million years ago. I washed out after the MA; she finished and is now a (tenured!!) professor.

Anyway, last night we figured out that of the eight people who started at SWIL-U in our year, ten years later, *two* of them now have their PhDs. Two out of eight. I liked all of them, and I'm sorry that more didn't make it through. But I don't think it's schadenfreude to say that figuring this out was kind of healing to my soul. See, I'd always taken my graceless departure from grad school as the golden opportunity that I blew, mostly though my own laziness and lack of direction. But when I started I had no idea that my chances of success were so slim to begin with. It was a golden opportunity for a very few people, but for the rest of us it was... something on the way to something else. And that's okay.

So. The future is roses, yes?

If I had the textbook 28-day cycle, it'd all be over by now. But I don't, and so there's 5 more days to go.

I started testing yesterday, CD9, which for me shows incredible restraint. I think my very first cycle I started testing CD**5**, which is just scientifically physically spiritually ecumenically grammatically wrong and and impossible. So working up to the just barely possible CD9 is progress for me.

BFNs today and yesterday, of course.

Yesterday
Me: If we're having a baby it's an invisible baby.
Her: I think invisible college costs less.

Today
Me: Invisible baby, again.
Her: Oh, crap -- invisible twins!

I think the thing I hate most about week two of the TWW is that testing is, per guidelines, done with first morning urine (known fondly as FMU). That means that staring at a negative HPT is the way I begin my day, and it is not exactly an uplifting experience.

Never mind. I have a friend I haven't seen in five years coming for dinner tonight, and I hung some velvet curtains and they are awesome, and all three of the dogs are flopped around snoring and snuffling and being absolutely adorable.

A brief history of the past week:

Monday (CD16): at about 2pm I got a reasonably convincing OPK reading, but then it went back to pale. CBFM read high, but not peak.

Tuesday (CD17): CBFM continues to read high-but-not-peak. OPKs a bit darker, but not what you'd call positive. I went in for a scan and bloodwork. The scan revealed: one egg, right side, not quite cooked -- a puny 17mmx14mm (mature eggs are usually above 18mm, although I have no idea if that measurement refers to the long or short dimension). Lining, however, is nice and thick.

In the afternoon I get a phone call that the bloodwork results have come back and I'm definitely surging with LH 44.7 (above 14 is considered a surge), estrogen 400ish, I don't remember exactly. That night, strong positive on OPK. Whoopee!

Wednesday (CD18): CBFM registeres an egg. Another win for the CBFM. 9:30am, ultrasound reveals fat lovely follicle! 21xsomething. A busy night, indeed. The timing is pretty perfect. Despite this, the insem is ouchy -- he threads the catheter in with no trouble, but apparently my uterus is anteverted and the catheter is a bit too soft and floppy for him to easily get all the way to the fundus. My beloved strokes my hand and face and tries to distract me by asking questions about dinner. I DO NOT CARE ABOUT DINNER. But I love her. A few minutes and lots of toe curling later, it is done.

I was pretty uncomfortable that evening, not crampy exactly but just feeling irritated, as if I had a cystitis attack coming on.

Thursday (CD19): As of 8 am, cervix is still high and mucus is still mucus-y. I decide that this means that although I've likely ovulated, it wasn't that long ago. Ultrasound at 9:30am says the follicle has collapsed. This bird has flown. On the chance that it happened within the past 12 hours, we do another insem. This one is still uncomfortable, but not as bad as yesterday.

They gave me a lab slip for a quantitative beta-HCG 12 days post insem. I don't know, I don't think I'll use it. I just don't want to be let down two days before my period by the office assistant on the other end of the phone. I prefer the gentle letdown and privacy of staring at a blank peestick under full-spectrum light. I think. If I get anything resembling a positive, if I'm late, then I'll use the lab slip.

When we left, the RE's office was having its gift exchange. Everyone was in high good humor and chorused GOOD LUCK as we went out the door. Very sweet.

That brings us, dear reader, to the present day. I am feeling serene. I love the first week of the 2ww. The second week is death by a thousand papercuts, but the first week is lovely. It's past all the stress of worrying about the optimal insemination time. The stress of testing and examining myself for Signs has not yet begun. It is a gentle time, full of hope. I've got a few days off and I'm home with my dogs and my girl. There will be lots of eating and coziness. Here's wishing everyone a sweet turn of the year.

Last night's dream: I was at a hospital getting a transvaginal ultrasound to check my lining, follicles etc. Except instead of what we expected, there was a fetus in there. It looked just like the gazillians of first-ultrasounds I've seen posted.

So I was really really happy and excited and thought "gee, I've thought so much about what this would be like, and now it's finally really for real happening."

{end happy dream}

And then I started coughing up big white flatworms, and realized that I had some sort of parasite, and was terrified that it would hurt the baby. So I started running around the hospital trying to find a doctor to help me, but it was the middle of the night and there weren't any doctors, just a few nurses who were totally not interested in my problem.

Night before last I dreamed that I suddenly realized that I was pregnant (yay!) and about to give birth (yay!) but that something was terribly wrong because I was nearly nine months along and not showing at all (boo).

In conclusion, I would like my subconscious to give it a fucking rest with the pregnancy dreams, okay? How about a nice naked-in-public dream? Or being unprepared for an exam? Or falling? Or something?

In other news, yesterday I bought two more vials of essence d'Echolls. When I placed the order I asked a couple of questions: since last month, has anyone reported a pregnancy with this donor? A: no. Have a lot of people used this donor? A: no.

So for whatever reason, Mr. Echolls isn't very popular. I'm okay with that, although a bit surprised -- I mean, doesn't everyone pick their donor based on the dual criteria of SAT scores + looking rather like an actor from their fandom?

Last night I dreamed that I had a baby. It was very small, the size of my thumb, and I had it at home. Because it was so tiny I was supposed to nurse it every hour or so. I nursed it once and then put it in a drawer and forgot about it all day and it died of hunger. I was terribly ashamed and upset that I had been careless enough to let it die. In the dream I thought "dracunculus had hers in the hospital and they reminded her to feed it. I should have done that. Why didn't I do that? What kind of an arrogant idiot was I, trying to do this on my own?"

Moral: if you have a baby, you should feed it, although you probably don't have to feed it every hour, unless it is the size of your thumb.

"Brick walls are there for a reason: they let us prove how badly we want things. The brick walls are there to stop the people that don't want it badly enough."
-- Randy Pausch

It's a good quote, but I don't know how much I believe it. I believe that Randy Pausch really, really wants to live. I believe that I (and countless others) really, really want a baby.

I just can't get behind any notion that there is intentionality, that any force is granting babies (or life) to those who do the right thing and denying same to those who are insufficiently enthused. We've all seen ample evidence to the contrary.

Of course, I've only seen this as a standalone quote and not in context, so it's entirely possible that I'm misunderstanding Professor Pausch's point there.  He doesn't seem to be leaning on religious faith anywhere else, so probably it's not required to interpret that quote. In that case, the brick walls are there to let us prove to ourselves how badly we want things.

If we end up with a baby, it will certainly be a wonderful thing     to be so very aware of how badly we wanted this and what we were willing to do. But what happens when you prove how badly you want something (and how badly is "very badly indeed) and you don't get it?  The brick wall stops the people who don't want it badly enough, but it stops a lot of other people, too.

Cramps, spotting and a stolidly negative HPT tell me that this isn't the month.  D'oh.

I'll call the cryobank on Monday and have them reserve two more vials of Mr. Echolls.

It's too bad because I really had myself convinced this month -- and also I know that my chances will never be better than they were this month. The timing was perfect and the first insemination is associated with greater chances of success (I know perfectly well that this is not because of any magical properties of the first insem, but because the fertilest women will catch immediately. I guess I just hoped I was one of them.) But there's no use crying about that now. And even the dewy fertile young lesbos whose BFPs start turning pink as soon as they download a donor catalog, even some of those took a few cycles.

So: one down, five more to go before a change of plan.

Also, we received a certified letter telling us that we have been fined $50 by the city for keeping a bathtub in our backyard (we are executing the world's slowest bathroom remodel).

Oops.

Of course I have been faithfully peeing on sticks twice a every day since 8DPO.  So far I have not even been able to muster a good evap. And believe you me, I have examined every stick sans glasses one inch away from a 10,000 lumen full-spectrum light box. I've even had my girlfriend "The Human Spectrophotometer" examine a few. No dice.

Never mind. It'll all be over by Sunday one way or another; my luteal period has never gone longer than 14.5 days.

It's called "Pregnant, or Not."

It started like this.

Setting: car, enroute to mall. It is CD18 and we have just come from the second IUI.

DP: You know, someday we may look back on this day as the day everything changed for the rest of our lives.
Me: Or not.

We look at each other. The game is born.

Me: Is that tender look you just bestowed upon me because I am carrying your child?
DP: Or not.

DP: I'm not sure that you should be doing that in your delicate condition.
Me: Or not.

DP: And right now the morula is being wafted gently down the fallopian tubes... waft, cilia, waft!
Me: Or not.

Me: Darling, I think I just felt the burgeoning of new life inside my womb.
DP: Or not.

You get the idea. This game is endlessly amusing to us. Will last weekend be the weekend that Changed Everything? Or will it just be that weekend when we went to Michael's and Bed, Bath & Beyond?

I must say that I don't feel particularly burgeon-y, although it is still early to expect burgeoning.

( cut for ramblings about money. )

As of 9am, the follicle had collapsed -- that bird had flown. Whoowhee! This is excellent, because it means that we know that I ovulated within the 24-hr period between Saturday and Sunday mornings.  Assuming a conservative 24-hr sperm life and a conservative 12-hr egg life, it means that at least one of the batches of sperm must have met the egg, and there's a decent chance that both batches did/will.

It also confirms what I had suspected, which is that I tend to ovulate within 24 hours of the urinary LH peak. About half of women usually go within 24 hours and a half within 48. So I'm likely within that half, which means insems on the day of the surge and the following day, not at the following day and day after.
I'm not sure if today is 1DPO (I ovulated yesterday) or 0DPO (I ovulated this morning before 9am). But I'm gonna call it 1DPO because it makes the wait one day shorter that way. Tricksy, huh?

Let the TWW begin!    

The radio silence is because I thought I should talk to KD before posting this, and I am avoidant and didn't talk to KD until the last possible minute.

What's been going on

- My unhelpfully long cycle got helpfully short! Despite the fact that last cycle I ovulated on day-freakin-22, this cycle I appear to be going on a very civilized day 18, in plenty of time for me to board the plane to Parentland.

- Have decided to do a few cycles with off-the-shelf sperm. The difficulty of this decision was both about the regret of having to give up the dream of KD's being our donor, and terror of the price involved. All the thinking I've done in the past year has solidified in my mind that I want to us to use an open-identity donor.  That comes with a price tag of roughly $1000/month.  I am not a gambling woman.  The idea of putting $1000/mo on a chance made me nauseous.

Eventually, though, I got over it. Money's just money, right? I won't endanger our house or our wellbeing for this.  We probably won't be able to quite  keep up with the expense, so we'll end up accumulating some debt. Then we will pay it off.  I'm still paying off the house and my college education, and I regret neither of those. The flaw in that argument, of course, is that it's quite possibly to spend $20,000 on fertility treatments and end up with nothing. But such logic is not appreciated around here, okay?

Then came the choosing of the donor. This was incredibly difficult, although I was ably assisted by BFF. Was I not assisted by the love of my life, you might ask? No, I was not, and I am grateful. Bless her blithe trusting heart, for she said "you pick it out, highwayttc. I'll love no matter what comes out of you, and I honestly don't care what height his grandparents were." This gave me maximum freedom to indulge my own idiosyncratic preferences.

I was decided, pretty much. I had a guy, I liked him, he seemed fine if a little... blank. Then I called up the sperm bank and talked to the sperm-picking-counselor. She read the notes in his file -- "The celebrity he looks most like is... Jason Dohring? Who's that?"

Dear reader, I sporfled my chocolate milk, because I know very well who Jason Dohring is. I am a big Veronica Mars fangirl, and I have always adored Logan. Somehow the world shifted at that point. I was all this is so cool, I'm totally getting Logan Echolls' sperm. And suddenly what had seemed a slightly desperate, scary reality became a madcap romp. (please do not point out to me that there could be a big range in looking like Jason Dohring, and that Jason Dohring is furthermore not Logan Echolls. That logic isn't appreciated around here, either). 

I ordered two. From there on, all has gone as smooth as silk. Overnight shipping got it here by Friday, CD16 -- early, considering I usually go between day 18-20.  I made a hot date with the dildocam for Saturday, just for monitoring, considering that it would only be CD17.

Despite this, I got a OPK positive reading on Friday night, and an egg on my Clearblue Fertility Monitor. That meant that Saturday's appointment would be not a monitoring appointment, but an insem.

I just can't shake my feeling of wonder at how well everything has gone. It's just all been... easy. Endometrial lining, check ("lush", I will modestly admit).  Follicle, ripe. Os, open; mucus, mucuosal. The IUI catheter slid in no problem; I barely felt a thing, perhaps a distant cramping, but more a very faint feeling of tightness or oddness in that area.

The price has been high, financially, but I am reveling in the certainty. I know we didn't miss the egg. I know that the sperm is good (our doc let my darling see it under the 'scope.) The insems are happening over the weekend, so I don't have to worry about missing work. Since it is the weekend, the doc was in jeans rather than the white coat, and this palpably reduced my white-coat-phobia. I felt relaxed. I felt optimistic. My girlfriend was wearing this tight black velvet jacket and her hair knotted back and she looked hot. I was wearing my favorite David Bowie t-shirt.

It may not work, but for the first time I am utterly convinced that we have a fighting chance, at least.

I am going in for Insem #2 tomorrow morning at 9 am.

Also? I am totally having Logan Echolls' baby.