CD 30

Today is cycle day 30 and there is no period in sight. My boobs don't hurt, I'm not bitchy or super emotional, nothing... no symptoms to make me hopeful that maybe I'll get a period anytime in the next week. Not that I've ever been a 28 day cycle kind of a girl, more like a 35 to 60-90 day cycle girl. It's just that I was hoping that my body would do things properly for once. It's almost like I'm pregnant, the way that I'm inspecting the toilet paper for any hint of a period. Fuck, when did I become so neurotic that I inspect toilet paper for shades of pink?

R seems to be doing better. Last week was rough. She was so miserable with cramps and stomach pains. I was beginning to worry about there possibly being some left over pregnancy parts in her (medically referred to as "retained products of conception" - nice term) or even infection. I made her call the doctor who of course wanted to see her. After some special time with the wand, it was determined that it was more likely her IBS acting up due to all the stress. I couldn't make it to that appointment but our RE was great. He sat in the room with R for half an hour, letting her cry and discussing stress with her.

This weekend R seems to be emerging from the dark, sad place where she's been for the past 2 weeks. I'm so proud of her, she's doing much better at this stage of things than I was. I used to argue this to the contrary, but I now do believe that it's much harder when it's going on in your body and that the loss is much worse for the person whose body is suffering the loss than for the other partner. I guess before I was just idealistic in thinking that it affected both people the same way. With that said, I hate seeing R go through this and would rather it have been me and never have her experience this firsthand.

We had quite the self indulgent weekend. Lots of great wine, a run to dairy queen for a dipped cone and a blizzard, lots of sugar cookies with icing (the really yummy ones from the grocery store bakery) and even wings from Hooters! We laughed so much this weekend - feeling like a blimp now was worth it to hear R laugh. Last night, we drank several glasses of wine, while playing connect 4, listening to bad 80's music (by bad I mean that I knew every word to every song) and eating sugar cookies. We then watched the L-word, which is so bad this season that it was also good for a laugh. (Really, has there ever been a more nonathletic group of women playing basketball? Hard to believe but it was actually worse than when they used to show Dana playing tennis.) Luckily, the laughing will continue today as we're now off to go try on bridesmaid dresses for my sister-in-law's wedding!

I guess we're entering the boring stage of the trying to conceive journey. The part where my readership drops off because not much is going on and probably because I'm not blogging regularly. I'm waiting for my period. R has me feeling myself up to see if my boobs are sore which may signal my impending period. She was excited about a pimple that I woke up with this weekend and also about some bitchiness exhibited on my part as evidence of PMS. It's still supposed to be a week away, so we'll continue to over analyze the latest set of symptoms (we seem to always be over analyzing some set of symptoms - Are the stims working? Did R ovulate early? Am I pregnant? Is R pregnant? Is R still pregnant? Do her boobs still hurt? Is she still nauseous?)

This past weekend, I had to work during the day but in the evening, we decided to live it up and try to distract ourselves. By "live it up", I don't mean some wild crazy night at the bar but rather a bottle of great wine. We actually have about a case and a half of wine that my parents bought for us when they were here visiting for Thanksgiving. My dad is a gourmet chef and a wine snob and bought R wine for Christmas. We had hoped not to drink it until September 2007. Instead 2 glasses of wine later and I was toast. I was also inappropriately frisky. 2 days after my wife has her D&C and I'm thinking about sex. WTF? I'm not sure what the appropriate time course is but 2 days is not it.

We then watched the movie Hotel Rwanda. Yup, that sure put things into prospective. Made our little trying to conceive difficulties seem minor. Although as I looked at all the African orphans, that also brought to mind the fact that because I'm gay I can't adopt from most African countries (and I also don't have Angelina Jolie or Madonna contacts). So in the mean time I will continue to wait on my period to show up.

And now with 2 empty uteri

R underwent her D&C yesterday. It went as well as could be expected and physically she is doing ok. I was able to be with her pretty much the entire time in the pre-op area because she would cry every time someone came by and asked her how she was. I was also able to go back to see her in the post-op area immediately (the perks of being a doctor since I was the only family member in the post-op area).

Our RE said that everything went very smoothly. He was able to recover a piece of tissue to send to pathology and for karyotyping. We hope that we'll be able to get an answer. I did ask the RE if the tissue resembled a fetus. When I had my m/c I passed a fetus in the sac. The fetus had 2 arm buds and 2 leg buds, you could make out where the eyes would develop, you could see the little nose and the open mouth. Granted I was 2 weeks ahead of R but my fear what that somehow the u/s had missed something. He assure me that there was just some tissue in the sac but that it in no way resembled a fetus.

Something that I find amusing about the entire experience is that R was apparently chatty during the procedure. They didn't use general anesthesia as first planned. Our RE had the anesthesiologist just use conscious sedation. He thought that this would lead to a much better recovery for her and I agreed. However, afterwards he casually mentioned that she "even talked during the procedure". My immediate response was to ask what she said. Apparently she just checked up on him and asked how things were going down there. I'm sure they all got a kick out that in the OR.

I still can't believe that it's over. We're not having our baby in September. Only a few more months to get pregnant or we'll completely miss out on having a baby in 2007 - another babyless year. I'm mostly numb right now. I can't cry anymore, I barely feel anything at all. Hopefully I'll have a period in the next 2 weeks and we'll start again. I don't regularly ovulate so hopefully I'll get a period when I'm supposed to and not 3 months from now. It's been a year since I had a natural cycle - in this past year I have either been pregnant, miscarrying, on birth control pills or on fertility drugs, so we'll see how this goes.

vanishing singleton - it's gone

I think the title says it all, it's over. This afternoon's ultrasound confirmed our worst fears, this pregnancy is over. We again saw the perfectly looking sac (if only the sac were the ultimate goal). But again, it there was no yolk sac and a barely there fetal pole without cardiac activity. R will undergo a D&C later this week.

We then met with our RE for over an hour. Our RE seemed to be as crushed as we were by the news. He is a great guy who we really respect. I do think he speaks to us more frankly as he sees me as a colleague. We discussed the next step and emerged with a plan. Currently, that plan is what is keeping me from completely falling apart.

R will have 2 months to let her body heal after the D&C and will then do a FET. For me, I will start up again with IUIs and injectables on my next cycle (hopefully in about 2 weeks). He also wants to be aggressive with my meds for my IUIs. The goal is to get me pregnant and I'm willing to consider selective reduction should it come to that. (With my previous pregnancy, I had 4 follicles and only got pregnant with a singleton, so I'm not too worried but it's a risk I'm ok taking).

I'm doing ok for the most part. I did break down and cry today when I updated my boss and told him that I would take off some time for R's D&C (I was assuming it was going to be bad news today). I also almost lost it yesterday in the grocery store when the deli girl, then the guy in the produce section, then the check out girl and the bag boy all asked how I was doing? I smiled and said hi but inside I was yelling out about our 3 false start to pregnancy/dead baby in the past 8 months.

BTW - today's ultrasound was in the same room that we had our first dead baby u/s. I'm never going in room 4 again.

Perfect beta with a barely there baby

Sorry I didn't update yesterday's blog with the beta number. I've been in somewhat of a numb state. The beta came back great at 39,646. According to betabase, that a doubling time of 88 hours which is very appropriate for 6-7 weeks. WTF? I'm just not sure what to do with that information. A perfect beta but a barely there fetal pole with no heartbeat. In my ever optimistic viewpoint, I still have a tiny glimmer of hope. Our next ultrasound will be Tuesday. I have my appointment on Tuesday to discuss why I haven't gotten pregnant with the past 2 IVFs and so now R will tag along, get an u/s and I'm sure we'll discuss what's going on with this embryo and if it truly is dead, we'll make arrangements to get it out (and hopefully to get chromosomes on it). We're waiting to hear from our IVF nurse about when they want R to get another beta.

In the meantime we're doing OK. As I mentioned above, I'm kind of numb. I'm just trying to figure out the best way to be there for R. Up until now, all of the really bad things that have happened to us (dead baby) were in my body, so R did most of the comforting. I now really want to be there for her. She's actually also doing OK as well. Each one of these devastating blows in our quest to become parents actually brings us closer together. I can't imaging how fucking close we'll be by the time we actually have a child.

another fucking dead baby

We had our repeat ultrasound this morning - we should have seen something as R is 6w6d. If a sac were the golden standard, the we would be doing well. She does have a perfect looking sac. However there's not much in the sac. The fetal pole was barely visible - the RE said "I think this is it". There was no heartbeat. Who knows if what we saw last time was even the heartbeat. We only saw it for a few seconds last time, maybe it was one of R's blood vessels. There was nothing this time. We had a beta drawn this morning, we should have the results in the next 2 hours.

R's heart is breaking and I don't know what to do. This fucking sucks. 3 dead babies in the past 8 months plus the embryos that don't even stick in me. I'm sure if we were some uneducated, meth addicted couple we would have a healthy baby. But instead we just have dead ones. If we add up our 3 pregnancies (one was very short lived as it was more of a chemical pregnancy but they kept me on the PIO through 4w4d to confirm it with multiple betas) we've achieved 20w6d of pregnancy this year.

good but not perfect

We had our ultrasound today because the clinic needed to submit their 2006 statistics and needed to get us in. I was actually a bit pissy that they asked us to come in a day early. I had already had part of my scheduled held for Thursday. I had to scramble to cancel some of my patients for today and rearrange my schedule because I would be dammed if R was going to have to go through the u/s alone.

So I finally get out of work today and we get to the RE's office only to be told that he's running about an hour late (he rarely runs late). Poor R was so anxious today and she had to wait another hour. I was so tempted to do the u/s myself as we sat in the room with the machine (the dildo cam machine).

When the RE finally came in and inserted the wand, we immediately saw the sac in the uterus. This was a big sigh of relief as I know that R had some concerns about an ectopic. The sac looked to be a good size (bigger than when I was pregnant and had an u/s at 6w3d). But it took a while to find anything in it. Finally the RE pointed to a smudge in one corner of the sac and declared it to be the fetal pole. My eyes then fixated on the smudge, searching frantically for the flicker. Where the hell is the flicker??? I think everyone in the room was holding their breath. Both of the IVF nurses/case managers asked us if they could be in the room - so it was a standing room only crowd and we couldn't see the freakin heartbeat. Finally, we saw it. It was brief - only a few seconds before he lost it. However it was enough time for one of our IVF nurses to yell out "I see it" as she pointed to the screen while at the same time I muttered "ooh, ooh ,ooh, there it is". Our RE agreed that we had all seen the heartbeat. One of the IVF nurses missed it because she wasn't looking at the screen so he tried to find it again for her. Our RE searched for a few minutes and once or twice we thought that maybe we saw it but weren't really sure again. Our RE said it was just the angle. That the fetal pole was kind of squished over to one side and that's why we couldn't see it.

He then debated on when to repeat the ultrasound. I managed to interject and we walked away with 2 more u/s. The next one will be on Saturday at 6w6d and then on Tuesday at 7w2d.

I'm still feeling quite confident that this pregnancy will be successful. R seems to be a bit more stressed but that's why we're a good team. We balance each other out.

Pregnancy is absolutely exhausting!

Yes, I suck. I have not blogged at all in 2007. I really haven't had much to blog about.

Pregnancy is absolutely exhausting! And I'm not the pregnant one. R naps several times per day and is ready for bed by dinner time. She's usually the one who does most things around the house since I work full time and she's a full time grad student. However, our RE told her to take it easy. So now when I get home from a full day at the office (it's cold and flu season, so our busiest time at work), I have a list of chores to do. Mostly heavy lifting and manual labor- things that R can't do. By the time I'm done with that and done doing the dishes from dinner (at least R is still cooking most nights), I'm ready for bed. There's just not time for anything else.

It seems the pregnancy is going well. R had another beta last week at 20dp5dt that was 7285. So basically her betas have continued to double every 40-48 hours. We are grateful that things seem to be going well. Our first u/s is on Thursday. We'll be 6w4d then and are expecting to see the heartbeat. I think we'll breath a big sigh of relief after that. Although, we've seen a heartbeat before and we know that it doesn't equal a baby. It'll just be another step in the right directions.

Personally, I'm doing pretty well. I'm very positive about this pregnancy. I really do think that it'll work. R seems to be a bit more cautiously optimistic. While I may change my mind at any time, I really think I'll wait until after this baby is born to try again. I want to do what is best for my family and not be selfish about wanting to be pregnant.