and now we are
Posted: June 26, 2013 Filed under: multi-week wait, the big IF, ttc, western medicine 3 CommentsDone with birth control. And done with the antibiotics for various orifices. Whew. None of those were fun. I know they are nothing, so far as “fun” is concerned as compared to the injections I am about to undertake, but all the same, I’m glad they are over.
So yesterday I went for a “practice transfer” and a baseline wanding and some blood work and a little meds tutorial. This was supposed to be a “full bladder” appointment, but I forgot that part in my scramble to be sure I had all the Sperm Related Paperwork* in order. So I spent the 10 minutes or so in the fancy waiting room drinking cup after 4 ounce cup of water while texting my friend Melissa and uberbutch. (F y’all’s I, this does not work – they knew I didn’t come in with a full bladder.) Despite the lack of retained urine, everything went swimmingly, as it does, and now there is a “map” of my vaginal canal, cervix and uterus for whichever RE ends up doing my transfer (please, baby Jesus, let it be Dr. Hot, please).
It’s interesting to me how every RE has a different way of doing things. E.G. in terms of cervical navigation, my dear old RE wanted me to remember the direction northeast and tell that to him anytime he had to put something up and into my cervix. The Richmond RE made a thoughtful face when I told him this and then allowed has to how that made some sense, but he never referred to any of the cardinal directions when threading my cervix. Dr. Hot, meanwhile, looked at me like I was a little crazy (but she laughs at my jokes and is, well, hot, so that’s ok) when I said to her that my cervix was of the NE variety when she did my SIS, but then she turned into a cartographer while doing my practice transfer.
I know your real interest is in the numbers, though, so I’ll give them to you. In a list, because I care:
- 10 antral follicles, 5 on each side
- 3mm-ish lining
- e2 at 20
So I have, as I said, quit the BC pills and now I wait for my highly overpriced meds to be shipped to my house and then I start injecting them into my belly on Saturday evening. These meds are all Science-y! I get to mix powders and salines and then use various sizes of needles and alcohol wipes and terms like “sub-q” and “IM”, if only to myself, and it’s like I am a scientist all in my own house! Whee!
Any damn way, injections Saturday, initial monitoring wanding on Tuesday and then everyday/every other day after that until things are settled where they should be and then retrieval and then transfer. Ok.
Of note, I signed off on assisted hatching if we do a three day transfer. Thoughts?
alone at last
Posted: June 26, 2013 Filed under: day in the life, food, home, montessori, work 2 CommentsAfter a fashion.
Both my current roommates/housemate/tenants (I never have figured out what to call them) are out. I have the house to myself! Whee! Generally, I enjoy renting rooms. It covers the mortgage, which teaching does not do; it provides company, mostly of the good variety; and it, well, I can’t think of what else it does. But I usually enjoy it. The part that is constantly a chafe is the kitchen. I think the next temporary person look for will have to have “hates to cook” in the ad. Sharing the kitchen with one person works well. Two is crowded. I’m over it.
Anyway.
Other things of note:
- it has been hot and humid as fuck, after the rainiest June I can remember, but I just figured out how to program the thermostats for the mini-splits and I a feel like the eco-police might yet pass by my door. There has been what I consider too much air conditioning happening, but it is just so damn hot and I am trying to keep tenants happy and paying rent.
- a restaurant across the street from me just sold/is closing. This is great for the owner, who I do like a good bit, but – wow – is that restaurant wrapped up in some good times from my life and its passing is more than a little sad to me. Silly to mourn the passing of a restaurant, I guess, but there it is. I’m sad.
- work, aka “camp” is more than half over for me! Whee! It is so worth the lack of money to not pull an entire summer of camp. I need the break, y’all. So as to come back “into the classroom” refreshed. I fully intend to be refreshed, because…
- cho-girl is in Maryland doing her Montessori training, which means I will be “assisted” (because who could call what she did mere assistance?) by somebody else. Hiring is happening. I’ve never done it before. New skillz! I may haz them! (N.B. the use of the word “may”.)
- wow, y’all, I sure do love my cats. Probably this goes without saying, but, wow. So true. It’s a little embarrassing. I can’t believe I just made a entire item about that.
- also in the world of “my work” I went to a workshop last weekend on RIE, which was great. I’ve been reading a lot about it this past year (mostly here), and I’m pretty sold on a lot of the ideas, which are pretty similar to Montessori. So that was great. Only now I really want to run a tiny baby class and be done with these giant, geriatric toddlers.
- the gas line from the pipe in the floor to my stove got replaced. Fun times! There was the faintest smell of gas and I dithered over it for a moment and then called the emergency gas leak number in the phone book (starrhillgirl, still using phone books in 2013) and the nice man from the city, who’s been here before for a gas leak, came right over and did all his little test things and swore up and down the space behind my stove was no grosser than he’d seen before and found a tiny leak in the flex pipe. Which I then convinced a friend to come fix in exchange for a night of babysitting. Done and done. But wow, it was gross behind the stove. There was cat pee. Ugh. And yuck. But now there is not. Whew.
Looming on the horizon! A trip to the west coast! To see chosen family, not family of origin (who are great, don’t get me wrong) and to ride a train from San Fransisco to Seattle! I’m so excited!
and doubt not, the earth that has grown old in sorrow/ shall grow young again in the light of that morrow
Posted: June 14, 2013 Filed under: stupidly introspective, the big IF, ttc, western medicine 5 CommentsCheck out this handy list I made, back in the day:
https://starrhillgirl.wordpress.com/2010/07/17/stats/
Whoa. I’d sort of forgotten a lot of that.
And whoa, am I ever doing a different protocol this time. Dr. Hot thinks that since I did a lupron cycle last time, why not “mix it up” as a co-worker of mine used to say, and go for antangonist this time? I certainly can’t think of a reason.
So I’ve picked up the meds that I can get at my favorite pharmacy/soda fountain, which not only has delicious sandwiches and limeade, but also the friendliest ever clerk at the pharmacy counter who refers to me as “lady” in that way hip young people do, which makes me feel hip *and* young, ahem. Those meds are :
- birth control (oh, days of yore when I’d read other blogs and be confused by people taking birth control to get pregnant… such youthful ignorance!)
- cipro
- some vaginal “cream” version of antibiotics (haven’t started those yet, but for the record, I am not a fan of such things, just F everyone’s I)
- valium (for the eventual transfer, although not as many as I used to get from the dear Richmond RE, however the new cheater RE wants me to take three at once? Fun! But none to horde… boo.)
I started the birth control (did you know it comes with these little stickers so you can change the day of the week?! It’s like controlling time! So fun!) and the cipro yesterday and my stomach seems to already be a little unhappy. It is handy to have a friend who is a nurse to text at such times. She suggested probiotics. My pre-school-strengthened immune system has afforded me years of no antibiotics so I was all “whaaa?” when I struggled to eat more than a few pieces of roasted kale.
The plan, as it stands now is a mock-transfer and baseline u/s and bloodwork on the 25th, start injections on the 29th and then see what happens from there, the general hope being, aside from a live baby, home from the hospital as they say, retrieval sometime the week of the 7th and transfer 3 or 5 days after that. There are a mess of commas up in here. Probably, I don’t need them all.
For the record, the final outlying test – kerotyping (still no idea if that is the correct form or use of that term) – came back normal, so no PGD, which I wasn’t really up for anyway, so yay. I also said no to ICSI, which this lab likes to do with all sperm bank sperm, because it seems, they got burned once and are traumatized. But my “gifted” sperm (that’s for you, LB) seemed to have no trouble fertilizing a mess of eggs sans ICSI and my personal eggs seemed to have no trouble being fertilized by other sperm bank sperm, so I’m not going to worry myself over that one.
There are plenty of other things to worry about! But, oddly, I find myself rather, um, un-worried. Weird, huh? I just pretty much feel ok – cheerful, even. Not desperate. Sanguine, almost? This isn’t one of those “I’m so blissed out and and relaxed, I’m sure to get knocked up right away!” things, mostly because I’d never use the term “blissed out”. It’s really just this thing I’ve noticed that’s, honestly, a relief. This will work or not work and that’s how it is. My freaking out or “relaxing” won’t make anything more real, so I just feel… ok. Good, mostly. It’s like they’ve added the bonus valium that didn’t come with my prescription to my water. Valium certainly is a fun drug.
So. Onward Christian soldiers! Keep your hands and arms inside the ride! Forward ho, lovers of truth and good*!
*stolen, shamelessly, like the title of this post, and then adulterated.
ok, here’s the situation
Posted: June 14, 2013 Filed under: family, friends, help, stupidly introspective, the big IF, western medicine 4 CommentsMy parents went away for a week’s vacation.
Ok, not really.
Anyway, here’s what’s going on. Thanks to a number generous friends, I am doing IVF. Holy fucking shit, y’all. People are *giving* me money. And? People are *giving* me sperm. Some of these people I know and some I don’t and Jesus H. Christ on a cracker, people are giving me the things that I don’t have and cannot get myself so that I can have a baby. The world, my world, I guess, is right at some very basic level.
Let’s use ye olde internet to find some words to express just how grateful I am:
thankful – appreciative – beholden (from direct from my initial search)
beholden, gratified, indebted, obliged, pleased, thankful (from thesaurus.com)
Those are all correct (because I found them on the internet), but also don’t really hit the nail on its proverbial head.
The second definition from Miriam-Webster is
giving pleasure or contentment to the mind or senses <I’m glad for the grateful warmth of the fire on such a cold day>
And the synonyms for that one are, well, better? Something.
agreeable, blessed (also blest), congenial, darling, delectable, delicious, delightful, delightsome, dreamy, dulcet, enjoyable, felicitous, good, grateful, gratifying, heavenly, jolly, luscious, nice, palatable, pleasing, pleasurable, pleasing, satisfying, savory (also savoury), sweet, tasty, welcome
All of which is to say, yes.
And thank you.
Thank you.
and another thing.
Posted: June 10, 2013 Filed under: friends, home 4 CommentsOh, yes. The bathroom! You want to see the finished product!
First pictures and then the story of my heated floor. (Heated floor?!)
Huh. These are not very good pictures. They do not do justice to the wonder that is my new bathroom. It has improved my day to day life in a million tiny ways and I am grateful. Grateful to my grandpa who shined shoes and cleaned spittoons as a little boy and then managed to give all his grandchildren money for college (although mine went for a house which has payed off in spades, you’ll remember) and to my mama for being so generous as to pass some money on to me – in part because I think she was (justifiably) horrified by the bathroom’s previous state.
As we are here together discussing generosity, let me mention in passing that I have a heated floor in this new bathroom. What?! I KNOW!
See, my friend – who lives across the mountain with his lovely wife, who is also my dear friend, and their lovely daughter – often stays with me when things call him to this side of the mountain. He has a key and I am happy to have him: he’s great company and he will randomly and skillfully fix little things for me. So he was here during the bathroom renovations (Really, who wasn’t here? The thing took 4 months to ((almost)) finish.) because of a play he was directing and we were talking bathroom re-do shop because he’d recently redone a bathroom at their house. He waxed poetic about the heated floor and I shot him down with some mutterings about not wanting to spend that much and he protested that it wasn’t really that much and then we moved on to talking about other things, as you do.
So the next day, I got a message from my friend wanting the number of my handy neighbor who was doing all the bathroom work so he could “ask him some questions about tile”. Well, this was mystifying to me, because my friend has done tile work, but whatever. I called back and left the number on his voice mail.
And then apparently, the next day, there was a hilarious (to me when I found out) chain of phone calls that even included my neighbor’s girlfriend (also my neighbor) walking up the road to the diner to pass on a message about what my friend was calling about. None of the neighbors have cell phones.
Turns out my friend was determined that I have a heated floor and so his plan was that he could show up with all the parts, instal it and then the tile guy would come and do his tile thing over it and then my friend would come back and do the electrical hook up. When my neighbor’s girlfriend heard this over the phone, she was determined to make it happen so she ran (well, probably walked) up the street to the diner where my neighbor was having his usual beer to tell him what was going on and to threaten that if he didn’t make this all come together she would never let him forget it. So he did, because my neighbor’s girlfriend (who is also my neighbor) is the sort of person you want on your team.
Once they’ve worked this all out (sort of – there was some last minute scheduling, because that’s how we do in Starrhill), I was informed and was left, well, speechless. So everybody did their various parts of the plan and the floor is nice and warm and I can’t get my friend to tell me how much to reimburse him for the parts. His wife, dear friend that she is, provided no help either, replying “what floor?” or something like that when I asked her to dig up the receipt for me.
ANY way. Damn if it isn’t like heaven to get up and have my feet be warm first thing in the morning. Damn if it isn’t pretty much heaven itself to have people be so nice.
“I live in heaven. My home is a sphere that turns around the sun. It is called Earth.”
(Maria Montessori, getting it right again.)
meanwhile, upstairs..
Posted: June 4, 2013 Filed under: home 2 CommentsThe subtitle for this post should be “In Which I Am Very, Very Lucky”. I mean, I’m lucky I have indoor plumbing. That I own my house and can change things at will. That my grandfather worked as hard as he did and passed on inheritance to my mama, who is equally generous. Lucky. I won’t ignore that.
But! On to the pictures! Ok, not just yet because I don’t have a Before picture. It was that bad. So bad that if you were to come visit, I’d not let you go use the bathroom upstairs. So bad that when I was having little things done to spruce the place up for the appraisal for 2010’s refi, my contractor friend who did the sprucing (For free! See? Lucky.) looked at the bathroom and shrugged and said I should just hope the appraiser didn’t really look in there. So imagine: two layers of vinyl flooring squares, some of the top layer slipping so that you could see thin strips of the bottom layer; a weird and huge and poorly tiled counter that took up the entire length of a five foot long wall with a light brown sink in the middle; toilet that had a bad habit of running 3 flushes out of 5, which a recent but now gone roommate never seemed to notice so who knows how much water was lost when I wasn’t home; a shower surround that defies description. Also imagine just enough mildew that fear of black mold strikes you in your heart. Because it struck in mine.
Ok! Now how about some pics?
The first thing he did – he being my neighbor who is great and defies description like the old shower surround, but in a good way – was rip out the stupid old counter-sink combo(plus replace the drywall as needed). In part because it gave him more room to work, I think, but also because he’d seen a sink with a big rectangular marble surround at the Habitat Store and he thought he could do something interesting with it, which as you can see he did. Clearly, the second thing he did was cut that sink down to size and stick it in the corner. Better already!
A panoramic shot, for perspective.
Look at that tiny corner shelf above the sink! There are two more just like it above it. Look at the little seat sized just for me! Also marble, ahem. One of the many great things about neighbor builder guy is that he has a huge stash of stuff and he would pull things out for me, all willy-nilly, if he thought they’d be nice. Also in this picture, you can see the bottom of a little cut out in the wall that he didn’t want to do because they are “a pain in the ass” but I said I really wanted one and then he did it and was all proud. The wood around it is gorgeous.
Check it out! The tiny shelves are held up by old keys! Keys!
Here it is after I primed it. Twice. Because that seemed like it would allow for just one coat of the real paint?
Nope, it took two. This is the bit of wall above the shower that I took a picture of to send to Uberbutch, so she’d know how close I was to able to meet for coffee. Now, it looks like the priming/painting happened with in days, even minutes of each other. But they didn’t. This whole deal, all told, took months.
But here it is, mostly done, with more cute little shelves in the corner. Convenient place for a glass when indulging in shower-time drinks. The biggest, I think deal is the new shower surround. Plain and clean and not plastic! Bonus, no mold when the old yucky surround was ripped out!
Ok. I have to run down to Esmont for Lisa’s birthday. This post is huge. I’ll write another with finished pictures and the story of my heated (?!) floor. Continued theme: wow, I am lucky and wow, people are nice.
one down
Posted: June 2, 2013 Filed under: miscarriage sucks, stupidly introspective, the big IF, ttc Leave a commentOne decision that is.
As some folks here and lots in other places noted, I’m clearly not ready to give up on this pregnancy/baby lark.
I had some New Age Time with my chiro (rolling my eyes at myself), after which I realized my fear about trying again stems from how terrible I felt for, really, two years after my last failed IVF. Hence, in hindsight, my friend’s order to examine how I’d feel if I tried and failed again. Which is, obviously, within the realm of possibility.
Here is the deal. Things were bad there, for a while, y’all. Not like thoughts of suicide, but generally just not good. But then, last summer I started to feel better and now, as evidence by several things (my energy level for cooking and gardening most prominent among them), I feel, well, like my normal self. No longer broken! Fixed! It’s nice.
Even if I fail miserably at this, even if that failure makes me miserable, it looks pretty clear that I’d be able to, given time, come out the other side and feel ok. It might take a while. It might be really hard. I might alienate *all* my friends this time. (That’s a joke.) But I’ve done it before – with complicating factors – and so I trust I could do it again.
Done and done. That part at least.
caved 