Fun with BBT

When I get bored I like to play with my charts. Today I overlaid my BBT from this cycle with my previous two cycles (oooooo a Rainbow!) It looks like I need to sun myself on a rock! Is is possible for someone to even be that cold? (PS that last blue temp is fake. I wanted my cross hairs!)

I guess to some people this makes sense but all I can say is: Look at those pretty colors!!

I'm quite the longitudinal study.

Cool. I ovulated!

I admit I was horrible about documenting this cycle...

(My longitudinal study is falling apart at a rapid pace.)

...but....I think I ovulated yesterday on CD 16. This is weird because Mrs. EGGstraordinary EGG doesn't normally show her fantastic little face until CD 18.

But why?

I've had several friends recommend a supplement called FertilAid and this past month I thought "eh, what have I got to lose?" so I ordered some and took it. I guess it did something because my little chickadee was early. It feels like someone has been battering my Angry Uterus with a shovel for the last 36 hours and I choose to blame the supplement.

~Shakes a pitchfork at the FertilAid bottle~

This was the one cycle where I wanted AF to show up early. The faster the evil witch gets here, the sooner I can start my meds (which are now happily living on my dresser in the same place I threw them on Friday. I believe this is called Operation Ignore the Medications.) Since I O'd early, it will probably be a short cycle. Yay! There is always a silver lining to having my jacked up reproductive system. :) In less than two weeks I can start Operation Holy Batman Side Effects and see what the Femara does to me. The first few cycles of progesterone nearly took me out of this world so I am really looking forward to Femara + progesterone. (Note: Sarcasm)

I'll be obsessively taking my temps on Tuesday and Wednesday to see if my suspicion about ovulation is correct. It always is. I get these strange "feelings"--sort of like a llama has been set loose in my lower abdomen--and I know Mrs. EGGstraordinary EGG is about to show up.

A bright spot among all the gloom

Mike nudged me over to the pharmacy today to pick up my meds. I really didn't know how much all this was going to cost since *surprise surprise* my insurance does not cover anything related to infertility. Basically my insurance covers nothing, but that is for a different type of blog.

Anyway, Femara is used off label in fertility so guess what!?! It was covered! I only had to pay $10 for a 1 month supply. My progesterone was also only $10 for a 30 day supply.

I had planned to shell out a couple hundred bucks per month and so I was pleasantly surprised that it was only $15 (the progesterone will last me two cycles).

I may have moon walked out of the pharmacy. Only the eye witnesses know for sure.

My Femara dose is 5mg on CD 5 - CD 9. The RE says I should get a response from that within 5 days of the last dose, so somewhere between CD 10 and CD 14. I'm supposed to start the progesterone on CD17 but I will wait and start it 3 or 4 days after my temp spike to be on the safe side whatever day that may be.

For the first time in my life I'm ready for this cycle to be over so I can finally take these meds and see if they do anything!

~voo doos ovaries~

How do you know when you are over TTC?

When the RE calls in a million prescriptions to the pharmacy and two days later you still haven't bothered to pick them up.

People ask me all the time how I am coping with everything. Then I get the classic "Relax and it will happen." line.

Ha. Ha. Ha.

First off, no amount of relaxing fixes Crazy Sperm and no amount of relaxing will fix my Angry Uterus. Ok, it's not actually my uterus that is angry it's my Angry Hormones. Relaxing isn't going to fix my corpus luteum!! I have no idea why people think relaxing will ever help anything, but I digress.

My point is, to all you "just relax' advice givers, I am obviously relaxed about it since I can't even remember to pick up my prescriptions!! One would think that if I was anxious or nervous or obsessive about this whole thing I would have been standing at the pharmacy waiting for the call to come in.

I am not.

I am relaxed.

Life is good.

Embracing Life as a Crazy Cat Lady

Well.....

I don't even know where to start with this one. I expected the news we got yesterday but I don't think Mike did. I'm going to have to learn to love cats because it looks like Crazy Cat Lady is in my future.

The good news is that all my girlie parts are normal. No fibroids, polyps, strange shapes, tubes are clear, etc. I still make a crappy egg, but that is a fixable problem.

Mike's little swimmers, however, are worse than what we thought. His morphology remained the same at 1% but his other stats went down (like his count, etc.). What that basically means is that while he does make sperm, they are all funny looking and they can't do things that sperm normally do, like penetrate an egg.

I have no idea how we managed to conceive before between all of our issues.

The recommendation to us was Intracytoplasmic Sperm Injection aka ICSI. ICSI is a procedure used with IVF. Basically Mike's sperm suck so bad they don't think we have a chance to conceive naturally and they want to hand select his little swimmers and stick them directly into my eggs. There really is no other way around male factor infertility. There is nothing they can do to fix morphology.

I've been expecting to hear these words since the first semen analysis so I am not totally devastated and heart broken. I was prepared for it. Mike seems totally devastated and heartbroken and I don't think he was really expecting this. He has an appointment with a urologist in another two weeks so we will see what that guy says.

The plan from here is to try Femara + progesterone and continue the process the old fashion way for 3 cycles. I'm not super hopeful but I'm not ready to pull the trigger on IVF yet. I have too many things going on this fall and through the holidays to be able to follow an IVF protocol so we will wait until spring.

I'll probably ask the RE for an additional 3 months after the first three to carry us through to January (I have to feel like I am doing something) and then hopefully we can start IVF/ICSI with my February cycle. I will give it one shot. That's it. After that we'll have to look into other options like donor sperm and IUI but I'm not thinking about that right now. That's a long way off.

D-Day! (or O-day?)

I have been obsessing about tomorrow longer than I want to admit. We get the results of my sweetie's *cough* "tests" and find out what the plan is. (And then I get the joy of waiting for the next cycle. Ugh. All this waiting. ~twiddles thumbs~) While I do hope Mike gets good news about his little swimmers, I know I'll never hear the end of his sperms jokes. I guess if I have to endure sperm banter in order to have a baby....so be it. ~sigh~

I have my list of questions ready for the doc. If he wasn't freaked out by my color coordinated medical chart review then he will be freaked out by my barrage of (practically alphabetized) things I need to know. The good news is I already embraced my slightly obsessive researcher nature when it comes to TTC so I have no problems being overly organized. 

I've been working on my list of questions for like three weeks. I'm slightly embarrassed to admit that. I have a few more stragglers that I want to add to it before tomorrow. 

Mike just came at me with a bottle of wine which is probably a hint for me to relax. (Relax? Relax!! How on earth can I relax!?! I'm only finding out the fate of my Angry Uterus tomorrow!)

Stay tuned. I will update as soon as I can. 

Less Than a Week!

I'm counting down until next Tuesday. Finally....FINALLY...we will have a plan.

I am really nervous and scared that whatever we try won't work and I'll be stuck curing my Angry Uterus for another year. Mike is the optimistic hopeful one. He talks about babies and his eyes kind of go all sparklie.

My Hubs Wants the Red Carpet Rolled Out

I'll be honest. I feel really confident that I understand what goes through a woman's mind when she contemplates having a baby. Not only because I am a woman contemplating (ok, obsessing) having a baby, but also because I spend a lot of time talking to some wonderful online friends who are also contemplating (read: also obsessing) having a baby. I get it.

What I don't necessarily get is what women facing infertility think about. In general, infertility is a dirty little secret that isn't openly discussed. No one wants to admit out loud that they are trying for a baby and can't have one. No one talks about their experiences with the constant tests, exams, and disappointments. I have one friend, ONE, who had been open with me about her journey to concieve. It took her 3 years and two miscarriages to get there. If it wasn't for my dear friend I would have gone crazy long ago. (For the record she won her battle with her ovaries and she is now expecting a little boy!) This particular friend is my hope and my inspiration, but other than that, it seems like the other members of the Infertile Couples Club want their membership to stay anonymous. I don't get that.

I have no idea if other women feel the way I do about their body. I don't know if the way I feel is normal or not. I often wonder how many women are out there just like me who are too scared to speak out and say something. Needless to say, my lack of access to an available group of infertile women leave me with only one outlet for discussion. Mike.

After so many months of TTC on the brain it's probably become, much to Mike's dismay, one of my most discussed topics. This whole time I've been thinking to myself: He doesn't get it. He already has a kid. Then I proceed to mentally bash my head against a brick wall.

Turns out I was wrong. He does get it. He does think about TTC. What he thinks about, however, is nothing that any woman would ever come up with!

Mike and I were sitting on the couch a few days ago. Like most guys, Mike is solution oriented. He wants to fix our problem. (Bless him for wanting to fix me!) He told me he had come up with a solution to our baby making issues. Short of coming at my lady parts with a wrench and a crow bar, I really had no idea what he intended to do. I was just so ecstatic that he finally wanted to discuss infertility!

Mike then proceeded to rattle off a list of things I could do to make my Angry Uterus less angry.

Mike's TTC Suggestions 

Suggested in just this order

1. Roll out a red carpet for the guys (meaning little swimmers)
2. Set up drink stations along the way to the egg
3. Hire a sperm masseuse 
4. Offer a variety of refreshments at designated "sperm stops" (he mentioned egg white CF & gatorade)
5. Have sperm rest stations with chocolates on the pillows
6. Hire body guards for his guys so the macrophages wouldn't eat them
7. Install maps
8. install a neon arrow pointing to the correct side
9. Build flower stands and gift shops at the entrance to my fallopian tubes so his guys could buy gifts to entice my egg
10. Play soft romantic music and provide low lighting in my fallopian tubes to encourage conception

Yep folks, that is my husband's solution to infertility. 

Some ladies might have been frustrated if their all their husband offered up as a solution. Not me. I know that for my hubs this was his way of saying that he does contemplate having babies, but he is at a loss on what to do to make one. I have to say, the gift shop idea sounds promising. 

A Visual of the Problem

I briefly mentioned that one of the problems Mike and I have with this whole baby making gig is the curse of a short luteal phase (LP). Today I am poking pins in my LP's voo doo doll. I keep trying to banish it to another dimension or curse it to become the Mars Rover's new BFF because I am so mad! I get mad every month we fail to make a little sticky bean because I know I'm the primary reason for our difficulties. My super sweet and doting hubby really wants a baby, and if he had picked a woman without difficult body parts, he would have one by now. It's depressing to stare that in the face month after month.

Our RE thinks the reason I personally have a short LP is because I make a crappy corpus luteum. The corpus luteum is the thing that sticks around on the ovary after ovulation to make the progesterone that in turn makes women into human incubators for implantation. 

You know what I have to say about that? 

Boo on you Ms. Corpus Luteum. Boo. On. You. All I want is to be a human incubator! Why is that so hard? 

At our initial consult, the specialist recommended Femara + progesterone. The Femara is supposed to make me make a better egg and therefore a better Ms. Corpus Luteum. We are still waiting on our follow up visit to see if that will be the plan. (10 more days! Waaaahoooooo!!!) The progesterone will be because even when I make a good enough egg to get pregnant, I still seem to have a progesterone problem and can't maintain the pregnancy. I couldn't have just one thing. Oh no. That would be too easy. 

While Mike and I continue to twiddle our thumbs for the next 10 days, I thought I'd provide a visual of what my problem looks like BBT style. For those not obsessed with making a baby, normal LP is 14 days. Anything less than 12 is kind of "iffy" and anything less than 10 is "holy batman you have a problem."

As you can clearly see, I am in the Holy Batman You Have a Problem range. ~sigh~

It takes 7 to 10 days for an egg to move down into the uterus to implant. For all I know, my fertilized eggs spend 7 days happily and lazily taking the scenic train from my fallopian tube to my uterus where it spends time checking in to the Uterus Hotel only to lay down and then here the EVACUATE sirens go off on day 8.

I am excited though because this cycle...MY LP WAS A WHOLE 9 DAYS!!! This is an improvement over it's usual 8 days. :) I'll take a small victory when I can.

I didn't take any progesterone supplements this month so my body had nothing to help extend the LP this time. Not that I think that really matters because it hasn't actually done anything in previous cycles. What I learned was that I am practically a reptile without it. (So if you see me sunning myself on a rock, pay me no attention.) Look at that ovulation day (henceforth called O day) temp: 96.4. Crazy! It looks like I slept in a deep freeze. 

Anywho, the main point of today's post is that I am back to CD1 of cycle 1,988,015,653. (At least, that's what it seems like.) 

Onto next month. 

You want me to check what?!?

After so many months of unsuccessful baby making, one has to get serious. A girl has got to pee on a lot of sticks, chart her BBT like she's in a cult, and...

(if you are squeamish, stop reading here)

Check your cervical mucus like your life depended on it!!



Yep, I said it. Cervical mucus. It's as gross as it sounds. As women we all know our body makes stuff but I never thought I'd be quite so obsessed with it. Mike and I read the book Taking Charge of Your Fertility and the author made a great point: cervical mucus is gross but cervical fluid is ok. So I'll talk about cervical fluid instead. :)

I honestly thought determining the consistency of CF would be easy. I am, after all, in the medical field. Ha. Was I ever mistaken! I can't tell you how many hours I spent googling and reading descriptions about all the different kinds. I knew I was desperate when I started googling pictures. I even took a photo once on my phone to show my husband and see what he thought.

He thought I was crazy.


Lucky for me my illustrious hubby, being the spectacular man that I married, stepped in and saved me from wasting my entire life looking at CF. My hubby took over the job. Yes ladies, my husband is now in charge of filling in that little blank on Fertility Friend. At first, it was extremely awkward for both of us. He was embarrassed, I was embarrassed. I'm pretty sure our dog was embarrassed.

Then, we realized baby making is a joint effort and CF and cervical position (oh yes, he checks that too along with how soft or hard that sucker is) are some of the few ways that the future daddy can really contribute during the data collecting phase of this whole project.

As crazy as it is, our nightly routine brought us closer together. It made us more of a team in this adventure and my husband, like most men, was given something he could tinker with and he could finally do something to help us.