A Pattern is Emerging

Ok, just go with me on this...

In January, after my CD21 progesterone check showed that the clomid had failed (yet again), I took prometrium to start a period. I had what appeared to be a period after 10 days of pills. A day or two after that period stopped, I started spotting - lightly at first, but it got heavier and heavier over 2 weeks, culminating in what appeared to be *another* period. After that, the spotting and bleeding stopped and life went back to normal. Then I started getting EWCM, lots of it. That lasted for 5 days or so and went away. Now, guess what: I'm spotting again. Very lightly for now, but its there.

So here's my theory:

Crazy as it sounds, I think I ovulated after taking those progesterone pills in January. I think I've heard of that happening to a girl on my forum. I can't explain the spotting , but it has happened before (I spotted during my first ovulation off BCPs last January). The spotting lasted about 12-14 days culminating in a very heavy flow for 3 or so days, like a period. So, if we count the first day of that heavy flow as CD1, the I started seeing EWCM on about CD18 through CD22ish with a HSO cervix from CD20-22. Over the weekend, that all went away and on Sunday (CD24?) I noticed the spotting was back.Even with all that evidence, I hesitate to make this assumption, but...it appears... I may have ovulated.... again.

...the fuck, man? A year without any kind of pattern, just two random ovulations and all of a sudden its like we're on a *schedule*?? Is it the clomid (which I haven't taken since late December)? It can't be the metformin because I've been on it for a year and only just started increasing my dose. Okay, nevermind how it happened - I will take what I can get.

I am a little concerned about the spotting since I have no clue why its happening. And since I wasn't temping or getting blood work, the only way I'll know for sure that I ovulated is if I get a period or a BFP in 2 weeks. But what to do about the spotting? I spotted lightly all through my first ovulatory cycle off BCPs last year. I didn't spot at all when I ovulated in October. I have plenty of progesterone pills, but should I take them without doctor's orders? I guess I could just call them and seek their advice... This is a situation I have never found myself in. And despite all my moaning and groaning and freaking out, I did manage to get some well timed sexy time in last week.

I'm going to follow The Corn fed Feminist's lead and not do anything different during this *assumed* 2ww. No sense making myself crazy when I don't even know anything for sure. So, do you think I should call Dr. B? Start taking progesterone? Just ride it out? Any input is welcome - thanks!

Feeling....Ranty?

Good news, everyone! J's ultrasound showed one healthy little embryo and a flickering heartbeat (still to early to hear it, I guess) - awesome! So excited for her. She's gone through enough heartache and deserves some happiness now.

I'm so glad her uterus is being a gracious hostess to that precious little package. My uterus, on the other hand, is earning a permanent membership on my shit list. The fertile signs continue... now a very high, very soft, and very open cervix, and a tiny bit of spotting. These are in addition to the EWCM which is, of course, continuing to mock me.

I'm sure you're wondering why I'm pissed rather than overjoyed that my body *appears* to want to spontaneously ovulate. I suppose it could be a good sign. Or maybe its just months of clomid *finally* kicking in. But the thing is, WE'RE ON A BREAK! (a la Ross and Rachel).

Last month, when I decided I couldn't take the disappointment anymore, I thought "Well, at least I know that I can rest and be sure *nothing* will happen. No period, no fertile symptoms, nothing. Because if clomid can't help, then my body is more broken than I thought". Every time I think I know something "for sure", I turn out to be wrong. I feel like a dog pulling on its leash and each time I lunge forward, the man walking me does a 180 and yanks me the other way. I'm sick of it! Can't I have anything the way I want it? EVER? I just wanted a fucking break from all the wondering and worrying and obsessing and LOOK AT WHAT I'M DOING!

::sigh:: I'm trying to roll with it. I'm *trying* to be all Doris Day "Que sera sera"... What I feel like is Lewis Black, *freaking* out over something stupid! I don't want to squander this possible opportunity to get pregnant, but I also don't want to fall flat on my face and make an ass of myself! I don't want to force M and I to have sex even if we don't feel like it - we did that for far too long! And there's something sick and twisted about the fact that any time I "give up", my body decides *that's* the time to work!

                                                                      ...I am not amused....

Mind Dump

Its another one of those days where I have a lot of thoughts bouncing around in my head, but no cohesive story to tell. You don't mind, right?

* Went out for Fat Tuesday last night and drank 4 beers in 4 hours with 2 glasses of water. Still managed to wake up with mild hangover symptoms! God, I feel *so* OLD!!

*Gobs of EWCM continues into today. I have never had this much before, even when I was religiously dosing with robitussin. WTF, body? What did I ever do to you? Why do you enjoy stringing me along like those boys in college? I hate your face!

*J goes for her first ultrasound tomorrow morning!! It has been a difficult week for her. She's had two (non-consecutive) days of spotting and I don't blame her for freaking out. I know there are tons of reasons for spotting that are totally benign, but there's always the worry that its your worst fears come true. Luckily her latest blood work was *really* good. Pray for one healthy fetal sac!!

*I try to give up something for Lent each year as a matter of tradition and personal challenge. I've given up soda and fast food mostly and I think one year I tried to add more exercise into my habits. This year I'm not exactly giving anything up. I've decided to make a conscious effort to be nicer to M. He really is a sweetheart, just rather prone to only half-way completing chores and completely forgetting when I ask him to do something. I can go from zero to ten with him over things that really don't matter that much (although "ten", for me, resembles a small temper tantrum and much sulking, so its not very scary). I know that he has made an effort to be more helpful to me, so now I'm going to try and cut him some slack. We'll see how this goes.

*Really enjoying ICLW this month! Trying very hard to visit as many new blogs as I can.

ICLW Welcome

Hello!

Welcome to International Comment Leaving Week, or IComLeavWe, or ICLW.

I am Curly Sue and this is my second month of participation in ICLW. A little background for any visitors: I'm married to M. My sister is J. J and I both have PCOS. J is very recently pregnant, so sometimes I will be talking about that (in case that's a painful subject for you at the moment). M and I are on a TTC break until I get back from a trip at the end of March. Somehow, I still find plenty of IF and PCOS things to whine about on a daily basis. Lucky you ::wink::.

So, the latest drama with my ovaries is this: EWCM last night and this morning. I'd like to take a page out of the Saturday Night Live book and say, "Really?!?!!" Really, body, *really*? We're gonna do this? Now? That's really cute and spiteful of you, but I'm not falling for it. I know this game, remember? We played this game for four fucking months while I suffered through hotflashes trying to get your stupid ass to work right. I know how this goes - you gear up to O, showing off all these signs and symptoms, and after I've made a fool of myself temping, and having sex til I'm sick of it, you fail to follow through! You drop the ball! You cease to work! *You* are an Ex-Parrot! Ok, I feel a little better... I suppose it wouldn't hurt to go along with it and schedule some extra sexy time... But I am *not* temping or doing anything else! I'll know in a few weeks if it was something or nothing. Stupid body...

Sometimes I like to engage the viewer with some questions. Such as, Does it weird you out when people share everything including the state of their cervical mucus and when they will have sexy time? Do you think there is a way to blog about IF and *not* over-share? All my modesty has long since gone out the window, but I often wonder if others in the ALI community are uncomfortable with excess sharing.

ICLW Round Up

Better late than never, right?

I really enjoyed my first IComLeavWe. It required a certain time commitment, but not much more than I would spend on blogs in a normal day. I especially appreciated that it gave me the motivation to seek out more blogs. I found many of the initial blogs in my blogroll through Mel's Creme de la Creme list. So this was just another great tool to help me explore the ALI community online. I found new blogs to follow and read a lot of really awesome posts. Seriously, some people here have missed their calling as writers!

For my blog, I really appreciated the increased traffic. I like it when my posts can be treated more as a dialog than a monologue sometimes. Although I still monologue a good bit of the time. I felt it was important to update my blog daily for ICLW to make it easier for people to comment. That worked out fine since I had plenty to talk about. I know I won't keep that pace consistently; I certainly didn't this weekend. But events have a way of ebbing and flowing and I'll just roll with the tide. I haven't decided if I'm going to participate in February ICLW. That's another great thing about the project - I love that it is completed in 12 bite sized portions. A very workable commitment!

So thank you to all my visitors this past week. If you've decided to hang around and keep reading, excellent :-) If you think you'll stop by at the next ICLW, great! I just enjoy encouraging the conversation...

So, do any of you have any observations post-ICLW? Think you'll participate in the future? Did you pressure yourself to post more frequently?

I have a life?

Such a busy weekend ahead of me. I just went to the library and picked up the book that The Ladies in Waiting book club is reading next month. Very excited to start discussions about that. It will certainly be useful to keep my mind occupied and maybe for a while I can show that I do have other things that interest me besides obsessing over my infertility. For example: I now crochet. I also make jewelry, but my apartment is so small that pulling out all my jewelry crafting tools gets cumbersome and it clutters up our small living space easily. Crochet is far more portable.

My nephew is very excited that I have picked up this hobby because he has been wanting my sister to show him how to crochet for a few months. I'm not sure where he picked up on the idea, but I'm happy to share my hobby with him. I love that my sister is okay with her son being interested in "stereotypically girl things". He loves legos and star wars, and he's a boy scout - but when he was a baby he would coo like crazy in the Victoria's Secret store. We figured out his favorite color was pink, and we all had a good laugh about it. I think he's going to grow up to be a really well rounded person because no one is forcing him to live up to any particular image of what it is to be a "man". That makes me very proud :-)

And while I'm on the subject of well-roundedness, I might as well mention some other interests of mine that may come up. I *love* musical theater and if you ever saw me driving, I would be rocking out in my car to West Side Story, Avenue Q, Wicked, almost anything I can get my hands on. I just went to see one of my favorite musicals, RENT, at the university where I work. Our theater arts program is really good and the performance pretty well blew me away.

Look at that, a whole post about anything but my stupid, greedy ovaries. I feel like I'm growing! ;-)

So what kinds of hobbies and activities do you guys do to keep your brains busy?

Random Stuff

For once, I'm at a bit of a loss for what to say. Now that I've had my consult, there's not much going on. Just waiting to feel ready to get back on the horse. I've started crocheting and I'm really enjoying it. I'm hoping to crochet a baby blanket for my cousin. She's have a girl (tear) and is due at the end of March. It hurt a lot when I found out she was pregnant over the summer because I was on a forced TTC break while M was in California for three months. Felt like the longest three months of my life. I can't be too begrudging to my cousin, though. She ended up needing clomid in order to get pregnant and she has been very sweet asking about my TTC woes.

In other news I freaked the shit out of myself today by reading comments about the sonohysterogram procedure (or whatever its called). I'm convinced it is going to be the most painful experience of my life and I will get a life threatening infection in my uterus from it. That's what I get for reading things on the internet ::shakes head::. I've got a while to prepare myself and I can ask my parents if I can take vicodin for the pain. The useful, less hysterical, information I gleaned from personal reports about the procedure is: it can hurt more for women who have never given birth (check), and it can hurt worse for women who have a retroverted uterus (check, again). This does not help me feel better about it, but at least I am aware.

This entry is more word-vomit than usual. I've got a lot batting around my head and yet, not at the same time. Thank goodness my sister and I are going for a walk this evening. We always have a little therapy session while we exercise, LOL.

My Brain is Full

I'm too tired and my brain is too full to write out a full post about our consultation with Dr. B today. But I do want to say:

1.) Dr. B is awesome and I look forward to collaborating with him.

2.) The SA turned out to not really be an issue. All the numbers were great except morphology which was on the low end of normal (but still normal!).

3.) I am so so glad we are taking a break right now!

4.) I am *really* excited about starting treatments again in the spring.

I'll post more tomorrow, but for now my brain needs a good night's sleep to digest all the new information.

Mildly Sub-Fertile?

I don't know if its because I was raised by two nurses, or if its a control thing, or maybe an infertile thing, but it irritates the crap out of me when doctors' offices give you answers like "mildly sub-fertile" "not consistent with ovulation" and other equally ambiguous statements masquerading as useful information. Dude, just give me the NUMBERS. I'll use my google-fu and figure out the answers, thank you.

I didn't expect to hear anything about M's SA until we met with Dr. B tomorrow. Well, the results were also sent to Dr. P's office and they decided to give me a call. The results show, in Dr. P's opinion, we are working with "mildly sub-fertile" sperm. O-kaaaay... What am I supposed to do with this information? What was it? Motility? Morphology? Total quantity?? Liquification?? YOU HAVE TOLD ME NOTHING.

::deep breath:: Honestly, I'm handling the (lack of) information very well. I expected I might cry, or get grumpy or moody. But I have continued about my day in much the same way I expect I would have if the office had not called. And I haven't told anyone either, which is strange for me. I'm one of those people for whom something isn't real until I share it with another person. Although, I guess I am sharing it here with whoever (whomever?) is reading... Nah, you guys don't count ;-)

We have our big consult with Dr. B tomorrow and I can pry the specific numbers out of him, so I don't want to worry about it until then. This does give me about 24 hours to worry about how M will react to the news. I've suspected I would have fertility issues since my body tried to kill me in the 8th grade. Then my sister was diagnosed PCOS a year or two ahead of me, so I had time to get used to the idea that this might be my world. It came on gradually over time, coalescing into a diagnosis in 2006. I don't know what it would be like to have no idea something was wrong and then be slapped in the face with "mildly sub-fertile", whatever the fuck that means...

Dr. P recommended IUI, that's about $1400 per cycle. I don't know how I feel about that. Thank God we are taking a break right now. It gives us time to digest all the new information and come up with an informed decision and plan. And money. It gives us a little more time to come up with all. the. MONEY. Fucking infertility.

On a related note, if you are the praying sort, please keep M in your prayers. He has been looking for a job since November and the *perfect* job just came open at the university I work for. If he got this job...God, I'm afraid to even dream about the amazing possibilities. We'd certainly be able to afford a few IUI cycles, that's for sure. So, yeah, prayers are welcome and appreciated. How's everyone's ICLW going? I'm loving it! ;-)

Flashback

I've been blogging for a long time - since my freshman year in college actually. But I only recently made the move to Blogger. I couldn't find a way to back-date entries here, so the past year of TTC and infertility posts are still hanging out over at LiveJournal. I wanted to post the entry where I came to the decision to take a TTC break. I feel like it was a turning point in my IF journey. Also because the KA referenced in the post has continued to be a challenge for me. I'm this close to blocking her on Facebook. And she would stay blocked for a couple years at least. Her excessive fertility grates on me that much. And then I feel the obligatory guilt, then I excuse myself because Hello! Infertility sucks! lather, rinse, repeat... So anyway, I have included that old post below. I think it was at that point I realized I may be in this for the long haul, and finding a community of women who are going through the same trials, anger, and heartache might be the only thing that gets me through to the end.

12/30/11 New Year, Same Old Wish...

I've been mildly depressed ever since finding out that KA is having a girl. It is so painful being infertile in a fertile world. I took my clomid as prescribed. I've been keeping up with my metformin everyday. All I have to show for it is the worst hot-flashes yet and very poor sleep. I'm tired of hoping. I'm tired of waiting. I'm tired of claiming I'm "TTC" when really there is no chance of me getting pregnant. In 12 months I ovulated twice. And both times I had given up, so the timing of sex was such that pregnancy was almost flat out hopeless. When I don't try, I ovulate. When I try, I find out there was no reason to try. I'm frustrated and so very tired. My sister only needed 50mg of clomid when she got pregnant with Alex. I'm already on 150mg and getting the feeling that even that isn't enough. How long, oh Lord, how long? How much heartache and time and money will the simple act of bringing another human being into this world take? An everyday miracle that seems as easy as breathing to most people, but like walking on the moon for the infertile.

I'm so tired of hating my body. I've hated it for one reason or another for most of my life. I hate suffering through the excess hair, acne, and weight AND STILL NOT OVULATING. I would happily endure non-stop hot flashes, sleepless nights, breaking out like a teenager - ANYTHING - if I would just ovulate consistently.

That's how down trodden I am. I'm not asking or even *hoping* for pregnancy anymore. I'd just like to ovulate. I'd like to have roughly 12 cycles a year. I would like all the money, time, effort, and discomfort to pay off JUST A LITTLE BIT.

I'm going to keep trying this cycle. I'm going to throw everything I can at it because then I know for sure it will fail spectacularly. And then I can take a break. I can go back on BCP and spironolactone and work on regaining my lost self-esteem.

Now, where to hide the bodies...

First, welcome to anyone who is here for IComLeavWe :-) Thanks for visiting!

What is it about bleeding profusely that sends some women (myself included) into a mild psychotic episode? I didn't just wake up on the wrong side of the bed, I woke up in the wrong bed - apparently Satan's bed. Poor, poor M... sometimes I wonder if he feels like he married Dr. Jekyll and Ms. Hyde.

Fortunately, I calmed down around noon and now I'm just a bit whiny whenever my uterus becomes particularly achy. I'm also craving greasy protein. I want a philly cheesesteak or one of those burgers with a fried egg on top! ::drool:: Normally that kind of food would make me feel nauseated just thinking of it. I can't get back on birth control soon enough. Suppress these crazy hormones!!

I was so busy this past week at work I didn't realize until today that my appointment with Dr. B is almost here! Hooray!! Discussion, answers, planning! The stuff on which I thrive. I warned M that I am going to cry during the consult. Its not if, its when. It doesn't matter what Dr. B says, I have an inability to hold it together when talking to doctors about my infertility. That's not to say I'm not thrilled to be talking to a specialist...I guess its just a part of my human frailty.

Let's review what we've learned today: 1.) I can be a psycho bitch when AF is in town, 2.) Someone needs to take my husband into protective custody when that happens, 3.) I regularly hold two discordant emotions in me at the same time. I'm just a treasure of a person, aren't I? ::facepalm::