Bébé Maybe

 Currently chilling here half-asleep waiting for a phone call. It hasn't been a good day. The last time I tested was on Thursday. I tested again today hoping to see a darker line to reassure myself. That backfired. The line wasn't darker. It looked pretty much exactly the same... if anything, a tiny bit lighter. Theoretically it should be significantly darker 4 days later if I have more HCG in my body. It was dumb, but I did that test at 3am. I woke up and felt nervous and couldn't wait. Then when the result wasn't what I hoped for, I couldn't fall back asleep. I've already been super tired thanks to the extra hormones, and waking up at 3 did not help. Really not feeling myself. My mom drove me to the clinic today to get a blood test, which is of course much more precise. My levels were 87 on Thursday, and should be at least 350 today if everything is going well. I'm really struggling to hope right now. I cried the whole way to Illinois. Last week they calle...

Yesterday was a pretty historic occasion. I had my first positive pregnancy test. In my life. I took the test 8 days after our transfer. Some people start testing as early as 4 days afterwards, but the likelihood of getting a negative (even when you are pregnant) is pretty high if you test too early.  I've seen enough negative pregnancy tests in my lifetime, not really interested in seeing more. I also didn't want to wait all the way until my blood test, because waiting for that phone call hours after your appointment is horrible. I wanted to have an idea of what the results would be beforehand, but I also didn't want to torture myself by testing obsessively every day. I dreamed the night before that I had a positive test, and in my dream I was so happy that I carried my pee stick around all day and kept looking at it haha. I did NOT do that in real life, but I did keep it out on the bathroom counter and smiled every time I walked past it. After my dream I woke up feeling e...

It has been an eventful week. I've heard other people refer to this part of IVF as the "Hunger Games" because there are less and less of your precious little embryos every day. It's a terrible waiting game as you know more of them are dying off every day. As each one dies off it's one less chance to have a child. After the fertilization report on Friday (7 made it to that point), I was expecting to hear on Monday how many blastocysts we had. Blastocysts are the embryos that look healthy and are developed enough to either transfer or freeze. Apparently my clinic doesn't give you that info then. They just called to schedule my transfer, so at least I could assume that we had at least one good embryo. It really messed with me to not get that information. It was a hard day. I kept envisioning that we only had one, or that they would call to cancel the transfer because that one didn't make it either. Monday's key word: STRESSED. Besides stressi...

We've officially made it through the retrieval and I'm so happy! After 12 days of shots, I took the trigger shot at 10:45pm on Tuesday night. Don't mind me, just taking artsy pictures with my needle late at night. The timing is very precise. You ovulate 36 hours later, and that's when they schedule your retrieval for. On Wednesday I had a break from shots but I couldn't really do much because I was sore, bloated, and really tired. I had some nerves on Wednesday night, but we felt excited when we arrived at the clinic on Thursday morning. Only cool people take mask selfies. Waking up from anesthesia is such a weird feeling. I'm not nearly as funny as David is when he has drugs. I didn't say anything weird, but I did try to drink water with my mask on. We got the good news right away that they retrieved 10 eggs! This was the absolute best case scenario, so I was thrilled. 2 days beforehand the nurse counted 6 follicles that were alre...

IVF is confusing. It's pretty complicated and yet once you actually start the process, it goes by really so quickly. One of my main questions before starting IVF was how long it took and what the schedule was like.. this is how my 2 cycles ended up going. 7/9: I start my period, which means our cycle will be starting. 7/10: First appointment at the clinic for baseline ultrasound/blood work. First Follistim injection at night. 7/11-7/20 Stimulation medications every morning/night and appointments every few days (Follistim, Ganirelix, and low-dose HCG injections). 7/21 Trigger shot at night 7/23: Egg retrieval, 10 eggs retrieved 7/24 Start PIO shots (continued every day until negative blood test) 7/28 Transfer of 1 embryo (2 others are frozen) 8/6  Pregnancy blood test is positive, level is 87. 8/10 HCG level has gone down to 50, which means miscarriage. 9/14 Started my period, so our second cycle will be starting 9/15 First appointment, started Follistim injections. 9/16-9...

Today is Day 8 of "stims," which are the injections meant to stimulate my ovaries to make as many eggs as possible. It's actually gone by very fast! For the first few days, I started out with just 2 Follistim shots per day. I'm still doing that, with the addition of a Ganirelix shot in the morning (to prevent me from ovulating too soon), and a low-dose HCG shot at night. I have gone into the clinic last Saturday, Tuesday, Friday, and today. I'm getting very used to that drive to Illinois. Every time they do the same thing- a blood test to check my hormone levels and an ultrasound to count the follicles. I've been too afraid to ask specific questions about how it was going, but today I found out the exact counts. As of today there are 5 on the left side and 1 on the right that are big enough. They think another couple will possibly also grow to be big enough. Going into this I was hoping to get 8, so it looks like we might be on track for that. ...

We have officially started IVF! It feels so good to finally be DOING something. I had my first appointment on Saturday, 7/10. We had to leave our house at 6:45am to be there bright and early. They took blood, did an ultrasound, a Covid test, and gave me a little more training on how to do the shots. There were also a mountain of consent forms to finish signing and a just a tiny little payment of $11,100 to take care of. We have already paid $400 for a deposit, $3800 for the meds, and $550 for David's side of things. That adds up to a grand total of (drumroll please) $15,850. Not counting the other testing we've had done over the last year and a half. Thankfully, we were extremely financially blessed a few months ago. Right before Covid shut everything down, David had interviewed at a different company. He decided to accept the new job literally one day before his former company furloughed him with no pay (having NO idea that would happen). The new job included a si...