1 day pregnant?

The eagle has landed.....or should I say the 18.7 million sperm (good number!!) have been placed directly in my uterus! 

I am potentially 1 day pregnant today!

The procedure went surprisingly smooth.  I had minimal pain compared to last time and although I did have cramping throughout the day it was manageable.
Only one issue......I have a small (and paranoid) bladder, if i am going to be in any situation where I am unable to use the bathroom I immediately have to pee. It's ridiculous really......on road trips i am unable to drink anything or we will be stopping every 10 miles. Anyway.....so I get in the room and immediately realize I should have used the bathroom. So I go out in the hallway and head for the bathroom and get ambushed by the nurse in the hallway who tells me I cannot use the bathroom.  WHAT! Apparently when your bladder is full you cervix's curves and kinks straighten out making it much easier to insert the catheter. Well let me tell you that laying down with your feet in stirrups with a speculum in you and a catheter in your cervix is uncomfortable enough without having to pee!!  And then your suppose to relax!?!?  Listen!.....if I relax too much I may very well pee on you so lets just do the damn thing already. Anyway turns out the full bladder is the reason the IUI didn't hurt as much so I was actually thankful for the nurses warning....in hindsight.

I'm officially losing my mind and it's only 1 day after the IUI, actually to be honest the crazy in me started yesterday.  On our way to dinner I saw a rainbow......I took this as a positive sign, it must mean that this is our month! So then last night we're watching Deadliest Catch (the crab fishing show in case you're not familiar) and they also saw a rainbow minutes before they pulled up the crab pot and they (lunging at hope, like myself) thought that this must be a good sign.......so then they show the crab pot slowly being pulled up and.........NO CRAB!! Damn f-ing lying rainbow!!  So this is when the crazy starts....maybe my rainbow was lying also!?!?!  Then I was thinking maybe since the procedure went so well that it is a good sign that we will have a good outcome....then I recall that a co-worker whom is currently pregnant as a result of IUI said her IUI was much more painful then the others when she became pregnant. .........see told you I was losing it! Soon I'll be walking around having conversations with my uterus.  If I thought it would help I would!!

Regardless of the outcome of this month I feel good about it. I know we gave it a great shot this month and that makes me happy.

Tomorrow!

So I took my ovulation test today and got a.........



Which means tomorrow is IUI day!!

I'm excited and nervous at the same time.......... It's going to be a anxious 2 weeks!

ABC's of infertility... and a update!

My husband was being nosey one day and looking over my shoulder while I was typing in a infertility discussion board and thought the use of all the acronyms was hilarious. So this list is dedicated to my hubby (who reads & stalks my blog). 

2WW: Two-week wait (until you can take a pregnancy test)
AF: Aunt Flo(w), your period (menses)
BBT: Basal Body Temperature
BD: Baby dance, sex
BFN: Big Fat Negative (test result)
BFP: Big Fat Positive (test result)
BMS: Baby-making sex
CB: Cycle Buddy (someone who shares the same menstrual cycle/ovulation dates)
CD: Cycle day
CF: Cervical fluid
CL: Corpus luteum
CM: Cervical mucus
CP: Cervical position
CY: Cycle
DI: Donor Insemination
DP: "Dancing" partner; spouse or significant other
DPO: Days past ovulation
DTD: Doing the dance, sex
EW: Egg white (re: consistency of cervical mucus)
FMU: First morning urine
hCG: Human Chorionic Gonadotropin (pregnancy hormone)
HPT: Home Pregnancy Test
IF: Infertility
IUI: Intra-uterine Insemination
IVF: In Vitro Fertilization
LH: luteinizing hormone
LMP: Last Menstrual Period
LP: Luteal phase
O: Ovulation
OPK: Ovulation predictor kit
PCOS (POS): Polycystic Ovarian Syndrome
PG: Pregnancy, pregnant
SA: Sperm/semen analysis
TTC: Trying to conceive

So there it is. Betcha didn't know there so many.  Some of these seem a little ridiculous to me....for intense:  DP- "Dancing" partner......I think I'll start referring to my husband as my "dancing" partner in everyday conversation, haha.

So a little update.....today is the 11th day of this month’s cycle and I just finished my 5 days of Clomid without almost any side effects (just one afternoon of complete irrational irritation followed by crying over nothing)  I learned some very helpful information today that I am excited to share.  So I have had a bit of anxiety over missing my ovulation last month, it's caused me to worry that the same thing would happen this month and my fears were only validated when I used my fertility monitor this morning and got a high reading (It should not have been high yet!!).  Last month my readings were high from the first day I started testing and never dropped, even after a ultrasound confirmed I had already ovulated. So I became panic stricken and started obsessing on how it was going to be another month of no IUI for me. :-(

So this is how these monitors are suppose to work,  in case you are unfamiliar........you start testing typically on day 10 (or so) and the monitor has 3 results it will give you, low, high, and peak (meaning 24-36 hours before ovulation).  The first day you test you would normally get a low reading, a high reading would appear approx 2-5 days prior to the peak day.  A normal ovulation test tests Luteinizing Hormone (LH) surge which occurs approximately 24-36 hours prior to ovulation, it does not detect when fertility is high because it has no way to measure that.  A fertility monitor not only detects the LH surge and pinpoints your 2 Peak Fertility days, but also identifies typically up to 5 additional fertile days when you may conceive (High Fertility days) by detecting the rise in estrogen which occurs immediately before this LH surge. 

So what does everyone do when they have a medical concern......GOOGLE IT!  I should know better than this.....being a medical assistant and all.  I'm not going to lie though, the truth is that I have found out more about the birds and the bees in baby making through Google than through a doctor’s office so I am going to stay loyal to Dr. Google.  Well guess what I found out?!?! ...........................this is what the Clearblue website said:
"If you’re taking Clomid (clomiphene citrate), we advise you to consult your doctor for advice before using the Clearblue® Easy Fertility Monitor. Clomiphene citrate can raise estrogen levels and this may result in High Fertility being declared early in the cycle and more High Fertility days being displayed, and in some cases the Monitor may not show Peak Fertility even when ovulation occurs."

AH HA! So is there a reason my RE didn't bother to let me know this information?? I mean as the best reproductive clinic in the state shouldn't they have known this information?  Whatever, it just goes to show you really must be your own health advocate!  So the crappy news is that I am the owner of a $200 fertility monitor that is useless to me.....the good news is that I can use the regular ovulation kits from the drug store and since they don't measure estrogen the Clomid won't affect them!  Yea!! So I anticipate having my IUI sometime midweek next week. 

The blog sabbatical ends

I'm back from my blog sabbatical (aka my temper tantrum), I'm sure I was very missed. 

If you must know the truth my hiatus was due to my attention whore vagina.....yes that's right my vagina is a attention whore, along with my uterus, ovaries and the rest of the clan.

Please brace yourself for my pity party rant...........and the vagina talk because there will be a lot of it.....

So where did we last leave off?......I believe I was happily harvesting 3 beautiful little eggs and waiting ever so patiently for my lovely ovulation day.......well that is where the problem started......ovulation day never came and my little virus I had mentioned previously turned into a full blown sinus infection with a side of bronchitis. YUCK!  So I died on the couch for a few days, waited for my peak day to let me know ovulation was on the way (and if I haven't mentioned before...I use a $200 ovulation monitor to check for ovulation!), and started a second round of different antibiotics to bring me back to life. So on Tuesday when I was finally able to return back to work I called my RE's office to find out when my eggs should be descending.....they advised I get another ultrasound ($175) to see what is going on and then they could give me a HCG trigger injection ($65) to induce ovulation and I opted to wait it out a few more days and just hope my fertility monitor ($200 as you recall) would show me a peak day.  Wednesday I finally cave in and schedule a ultrasound for the next day they said if all looked good I could get a trigger injection that day and we would do the IUI the following morning. 

Fine. Whatever. At this point I just wanted to get on with it. 

There's something about joining the infertility world that makes undressing from the waist down and carrying on a conversation with people while having a intimidating ultrasound wand in your lady parts a part of normal everyday life, so much so that at times I have to remind myself that not everyone is comfortable hearing about whats going on with me from the uterus down outside the RE's office. Guess that's what this blog is for....lucky you.

So anyway there I am paper gown, intimidating wand, a RE I hadn't met before that was covering for my RE, and a monitor displaying my insides, .................and there, very clearly on my ovary where a nice round follicle use to be, was a exit hole. Imagine a banner that's held up prior to a football game and then the players come tearing through it and leaves nothing but a jagged edge hole in the middle of the banner.....that is what my ovary looked like....3 jagged little holes where 3 mature eggs had already made their decent.
I was crushed. Heartbroken. Pissed!!
It didn't seem fair, and it still doesn't to be honest.  We've waited and waited and tried and tried to get pregnant and we know that the first IUI probably isn't going to be "the one", in fact the odds that it will be are so small per single IUI that I refuse to even type it out....lets just say we were told we have a 50% chance of IUI being successful with 6 IUI treatments, break that down per IUI and it's too small to repeat so you'll have to do the math.  Point being I just wanted to start making our way toward that 50%, I wanted to have the first one attempted so we could be closer to the possibility of a success.  So I cried, a lot.

So that was it, I had missed my peak day and since I really didn't know when it was I couldn't even predict when I would start my next cycle......I would just have to wait it out, something I am getting a little tired of doing.

So remember the second round of antibiotics? Left me with a horrid yeast infection! Any women who has a yeast infection knows they are miserable! I had only had 2 other one previously, both a result of antibiotics (next time I'll just die on the couch) well this one was the Queen B of all yeast infections and made me want to amputate my body from the waist down. 

This is when I started to realize I was losing my own identity to my vagina, she just couldn't stand for it to not be all about her (of course it's a her, and no I haven't named her because she doesn't deserve a name!)

So as the horror of the yeast infection faded the anxiety of when to expect my cycle started.  Then the spotting.....you want to make a women trying to get pregnant crazy?? Mess with her cycle! So of course the questions started.....is it implantation spotting? Could I be pregnant? Is it my period playing tricks with my mind? I'll save you the suspense....after peeing on anything resembling a pregnancy test and 2 days of every so lightly spotting, my lovely period is here to stay and I am NOT with child once again.

So after all that some good news is in order right? 
The good news is that my husband is wonderful and surprised me with a getaway this weekend. Men don't always do or say the right things, my husband is regularly a prime example of that. It's the times that he does things like, send me a cute invitation over email inviting me to a weekend away with the link to the hotel reservations that I remember how much I love him and how he has the amazing ability to make everything better at times.  Wow that is a little sappy and annoying isn't it?  .......So true though. He's one of the biggest reasons why I want to get pregnant so much in the first place, I don't want him deprived of being the amazing dad I know he will be.