Responding to my reader

I'm responding to my reader, the one kind soul who left me a comment. For all I know it's my only reader other than R. Thank you - Mama2BandT!

I guess I haven't been very clear on the details of this up coming IVF cycle. Partially that may be to retain some of my anonymity as R also has a blog and it's not an anonymous one. Our situation is a bit different than many, so for some of you avid readers, it won't be too difficult to connect the dots. When I started this blog, I was in a really dark place and wanted a safe space to go off on anyone or anything and not worry about the repercussions of my words. I'm now in a much better place and so I don't think my anonymity is that important anymore - other than to not have my patients or our real life friends identify me. I think it's mostly infertile women who read infertility blogs anyway, so I don't think they'd hold anything against me. (At least not anything that's written while on bcp's, lupron, estrogen, progesterone (PIO) or any other IF drugs).

So here's the story of me (for some reason told in the 3rd person).

Once upon a time in a land far away, there were 2 women who were in love. Although being gay, they were quite conventional in their ways and thus decided to get married before starting a family (or at least have a ceremony with a certificate suitable for framing since the local authorities forbid their kind of marriage). In the weeks leading up the wedding they did all the things that one would do while preparing to start a family... they picked out flowers for the ceremony, they sent out invitations, they had a bridal shower, they researched the sperm banks and picked out a sperm donor, they found a reproductive endocrinologist and made an appointment for the week after the wedding. These women had a master plan. R would get pregnant first since her biological clock was ticking a bit louder. 2-3 years later F would have the second child. Everything seemed picture perfect.

R tried and tried to get pregnant without any luck. She underwent scans and took all sorts of drugs and even had surgery but still, she could not get pregnant. Her only option was IVF but since F was only a resident, that wasn't really an option financially. Besides they had spent all their money on sperm and on paying the RE (who was not very nice and was very expensive). Insurance had not covered a dime because their definition of infertility is sex with a man for a year. And even though some would say that a year of pumping up the ovaries to produce 8 eggs at a time and triggering their release while squirting the sperm directly into the uterus might be a tad bit better than fucking your husband once a month, the insurance company did not see it this way.

F was then promoted to faculty and was able to switch insurances and go to a new RE. The new coverage did not cover IVF but did cover inseminations, so F started trying to get pregnant while R waited for a better job to come around with IVF benefits. Well the gods finally smiled down on this couple because after only 3 months of trying (with injectables b/c F's ovaries don't ever really produce any eggs on their own) F got pregnant. These were wonderful weeks for R and F that were only slightly dampened by F's weekly freak out that something was wrong. So each week F and R went to the RE's office for an ultrasound. The one at 6 weeks was perfect - with a strong heartbeat. Still strong at 7 weeks but bean wasn't growing very well. At 8 weeks the growth was catching up but despite the doctor saying everything looked ok, the heart rate looked slower to F and R. At 9 weeks F freaked out over mild spotting and this time her intuition was correct - bean had died. (The fun story of delivering the perfectly formed fetus while in the men's room of a restaurant will have to be told another time)

2 months later F got a new job and they were finally able to move onto IVF. They decided to put R's embryos into F since F really wanted to be pregnant (more so than R does). 3 perfect embryos were transferred into F. That was followed by 5 days of positive pregnancy tests only to find out that it was just a chemical pregnancy.

So one dead baby and one baby that stuck but didn't grow later, F is feeling a bit gun shy about the abilities of her uterus. Past performances have not gone very well. So this time F is making R participate past the point of egg retrieval. After all, at this point, all the glorious plans of planning out their family have long been lost. So F and R have decided to go for it. They will transfer embryos into both uteruses (is it uteri?) to increase the odds. At some point, you just have to go for it.