Measures of Hope | 25 February 2011

+1. Check! Donor egg counseling stuff done. I really do love my sister...and my brother-in-law. How could anyone have a cooler, more mature, more easygoing sister than me? Clearly, she knocked the socks off the counselor. We had a great session all together as well. The 4 of us had already talked quite a bit about every possible scenario we could think of so we were pretty prepared. Of course, the one scenario we didn't think of back on the evening of December 30 was: what if I have a child with my own eggs first? Since that's at least now somewhat more likely (pending the CVS test and results), that was one new wrinkle, but not a big one. My sister actually ended up saying that she thought if we did end up having this baby that I'm growing right now it would be a good way for her to establish an 'aunt' relationship first so she could then have an equal relationship with any baby that I would have that came from her eggs. I thought that was kind of interesting. My sister's thinking is to treat any baby I have with her eggs as just another niece or nephew. She wants to be very even and fair (we are both in agreement that our parents were notoriously fair with us....to the point of silliness sometimes, really, but that's a story for another time, and, in the end, I'm deeply grateful to them for their fairness. I think it gave my sister and me an incredibly sound footing for a very good relationship.) I think any child might always have a kind of 'special' relationship with my sister, which I think would be nice. But, regardless, I'm sure any or all of my children will feel the same way about their aunt as I do -she's so cool!

+2. Post-counseling-session lunch at our favorite Vietnamese restaurant in our old 'hood. Yum!

+3. Two weeks until CVS test and, with it, the next ultrasound. Gathering all the paperwork/records they've asked me to bring (my blood type, my genetic testing results, Mr.Right's genetic testing results (still pending from the Counsyl test he sent in), both of our karyotype results and the pathology report from our Trisomy 18 baby). I do still need to call them and ask about when I should stop taking the Lovenox (assuming 24 or 48 hours in advance). I think I will make it until then.

All is good so far

Last ultrasound at my clinic today revealed a growing baby measuring 10 weeks (I'm technically 9w4d). Heartbeat 165. Arms waving around like crazy.

Now we wait. (When don't we wait? Ugh.) Two weeks and 1 day until the CVS test and then the days until we get the results (presumably preliminary results in 2-3 days and full results in 10-14 days).

I so, so, so want to be happy and excited about this pregnancy. But I just can't bring myself to it yet. Not until we get the CVS results. What should have been a happy afternoon after the ultrasound was just crappy. I came home and stress ate. It was rainy and I didn't go run. And just ended up sitting on the couch watching tivo'd Masterpiece shows. Finally, a minor meltdown when Mr.Right came home tonight. Ugh.

Last time I was pregnant we told my parents and Mr.Right's mom at 10 weeks. My parents (as well as my aunt and uncle) will be here Monday (on their way to fly to St. Thomas...nice). But we won't be telling them. We won't be telling anybody (well, my sister and BIL know since we had to tell them) until we get the full CVS results back. (I'm really tempted not to tell anybody until the baby is born, but I guess people will probably figure it out before then.)

In good news, I get to stop the Prometrium. Yay! Looking forward to foregoing the pantiliners (again.) Still taking the Folgard and Lovenox though. Lovenox until 14 weeks unless I can convince my OB (whom we're seeing on Tuesday morning) or the MFM with whom I'm having the CVS to let me stop it earlier.

Tomorrow is our meeting with the social worker (whom I've been seeing for nearly a year) and my sister and BIL. Then my sister just needs to get her infectious disease bloodwork done (and Fragile X testing) and she'll start birth control pills sometime mid-March. We've decided to freeze embryos (if, hopefully, we get any) out of a stimulation cycle with my sister that should take place sometime mid to late April.

It was kind of weird to be 'kicked out' of the fertility clinic today for my own pregnancy. But yet be talking to Dr.Dry about my sister's cycle in March/April. I won't necessarily be in the office again myself (my sister is going for monitoring at another office of my clinic and I may go with her sometimes) so I sort of said goodbye to a couple of people. Of course, I've done that before too. And ended up right back there again.

So, there's a kind of rambling update for both me and my sister. Hopefully I'll be able to get myself back on the hopeful train tomorrow and be a little bit more positive. I think getting this next step of the counseling session with Mr.Right, my sister and BIL will make me feel better.

Being omniscient so I could know that this baby growing inside me was free of any chromosome abnormalities would make me feel even better. But, instead, I wait.

Still holding my breath

I can't believe we're here again. Talking about 'moving on' to my OB. Although this time also talking about the appointment (scheduled for March 11) with the MFM doctors' office for the CVS test.

Anyhow, the ultrasound today was great. The baby's been measuring right on target the last two ultrasounds and again for the third today. We saw head, body, arms, legs (ok, they're little buds, but the arms were moving!), spine, umbilical cord. The yolk sac is getting smaller as it apparently should. Heartbeat was 170. As Dr.Dry said, just about as good a looking pregnancy as you can get.

And yet......that doesn't tell us about any genetic abnormalities. And for that, we have weeks to go yet. The March 11 date is the CVS test itself. The preliminary results we may have in 2-3 days after that. The more detailed results a few weeks thereafter.

But, I've got appointments to keep me busy between now and then. Well, at least two. We're going back for another ultrasound next Thursday. Not strictly needed, of course, but Dr.Dry was almost encouraging it. I think he kind of wants to send us off as best he can (they can't see me past 10 weeks at my clinic.) We both know that my OB's office doesn't have a decent ultrasound machine so I won't get any love there when I go for my first appointment (which we're trying to get scheduled between next week and the March 11 CVS test.) Thankfully, the head doc in my OB practice (who is a patient herself of my husband's practice) who did my D&C after the Trisomy 18 has told my husband that she would see us herself (instead of us having to sit through the nonsense of seeing the nurse practitioner in my OB's office for the initial OB visit.....which would be just a useless repeat of last June's visit.) So, we're still working on getting that scheduled. We've also get records to collect for the OB and MFM offices. They want all of our genetic testing, karyotyping, Trisomy 18 pathology, etc. records.

So, here we are. It's good news, definitely. I just don't yet feel like I can really let go of my breath yet. I'd tell myself that a genetically abnormal fetus is unlikely to have hung on this long or to be growing so well and looking so good at this point, but I know from prior experience that that is just not true. On the other hand, I just can't bring myself to quite believe that we'd fall on the bad side of the statistics yet again.

So, unfortunately, I'm going to be holding my breath for the next month or so. Sigh. (But it's a fairly happy sigh.)

Measures of Hope | 15 February 2011

+1. Only two days left until ultrasound. I think I'll make it.

+2. Mr.Right and I seem to be on the same page. We usually are, but in bed last night he described how he's feeling about where we are and I pretty much could have said it myself. We'll be terribly disappointed if we go in tomorrow and there's no heartbeat. And if we make it beyond that, we'll be equally terribly disappointed if the results of the CVS test (which will probably be earliest March 9) mean that we have to terminate this pregnancy. But it just feels like it won't be devastating. Because we have a plan. We are moving forward with my sister as a donor. And if that doesn't work, we're moving on to anonymous donor eggs. At the same time, we both feel this crazy sense of hope. Like, it was such a random fluke that I got pregnant the cycle after a pretty spectacular fail at IVF#4. And, even if I have a 1 in 20 chance of having a genetic abnormality in a fetus, isn't it time we get one of the the other 19 chances? But, we're both trying not to get ahead of ourselves. We have a long way to go yet until the CVS test results. And even then, I think we both agreed we know too much now to think that it will be a done deal even after that. Ok, this started out as a positive statement and has gone a little south. But the fact that we're pretty much in the same place I think is a good thing. Maybe I've gotten a little bit more optimistic and he's gotten a little bit more realistic. We've met in the middle and that doesn't seem like a bad place to be.

+3. Lunch with a good friend today. He quit his job at the end of the year and is taking several months to figure out what's next. It was good to catch up with him and share my newly-free-to-while-away-the-day-without-going-into-the-office' tips with him.

+4. Am going to get paid for the second part of the Qatar consulting project I worked on last year! Yay! And there's some promise of more work upcoming for them.

The staircase

I was randomly watching the news on tv last night and a commercial flashed by (I can't even remember what it was for) that had this quote from Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.:

"Faith is taking the first step, even when you don't see the whole staircase."

I don't think of myself as having had a lot of faith throughout the last few years, but this just kind of quietly hit me as such a good description of what this whole experience with infertility has been about. And I guess it convinced me that I have indeed had some amount of faith along the way.

Way back when, we took the first step. In retrospect, this was pretty naively done, thinking we knew what the staircase would like like if we could see: do IVF, get pregnant, have a baby. Done. Maybe the more amazing thing is that we kept taking the next step and the next step after that.

Who would have known that the staircase would have had so many twists and turns? Who would have known that one branch of it led to a locked door - well, really several locked doors (my non-responder status, our Trisomy 18 and subsequent D&C)? Who would have known that there was a crazy gap in the staircase that we had to leap over to get to donor eggs and who would have known that my sister would be standing there? And then who would have known that following the staircase lately would have surreally landed us right back at the bottom - with an 'old fashioned' pregnancy with my own, unmedicated eggs and some random sex. And I still don't think we know what this staircase really looks like. We can't see all of it even now.

It really is amazing sometimes, when you think about all we've collectively been through, that we all just keep going. And that's not to denigrate those who decide to get off the staircase when they've had enough. I totally understand that.

Anyhoo, not to get all Jack Handy Deep Thoughts on you on this fine Friday evening, but I thought I'd just share this awesome quote. I hope everybody has a fantastic weekend!

Measures of Hope | 10 February 2011

+1. I love Mr.Right. Well, of course I do. But, I especially love that he's so willing to 'take on' different aspects of our pregnancy (tangent: I remember very distinctly Mr.Right and I have a discussion about how we'd never be one of those couples who says, "we're pregnant" instead of "she's pregnant" or from me, "I"m pregnant" but we talk all the time now about "when we got pregnant" and "our pregnancy" and so on. It truly is something we've been going through together....which is the point of this point, I guess.). He suggested it might make most sense for him to call the MFM doctor who's been recommended to us by Dr.Dry to do the CVS testing. Since Mr.Right is the one with the fairly inflexible schedule (or at least one where patients have to be bumped in order to make it open enough for him to go to an appointment with me), it just makes more sense for him to be calling to schedule the appointment at a time that works best on his schedule. He also volunteered to call my OB. We decided we wanted her opinion on who to go to for the CVS as well. And since he's a referring doc (and she's a patient of his partner's) he'd be more likely to get her on the phone. We decided we should probably let her know that I'm pregnant again before we go for the CVS (even though she won't be doing the referring) since if I need a D&C based on the results of the CVS test, it will probably be my OB who has to do it. I know. That's not very 'hopeful' planning, but it's our reality.

+2. Just the fact that we're even talking about scheduling the CVS says there's a whole heck of a lot of hope in me that we'll even make it that far. A double-edged sword, for sure, but why not be hopeful? We know our problem is my crappy eggs, not carrying a pregnancy for at least 12 or 13 weeks. About the CVS....not so hopeful (but maybe that will change.)

+3. RESOLVE support group the other night was nice and buoyed the hope in me, but weird because, of course, I was the only one pregnant there, and, particularly pregnant with my own egg. They didn't kick me out though, which was nice :-) since we are continuing to pursue donor eggs in parallel. Lots of others struggling to get to the donor egg phase. I'm so incredibly, incredibly lucky to have my sister.

+4. Getting the psych test for my sister and the counseling meetings for all of us back on the schedule - for next Friday and the following Friday respectively.

+5. My hardcore commenters. Thanks for sticking with me. I feel like I've been neglecting my blog a bit. The 'measures of hope' posts aren't daily anymore and I really should be writing some other posts than just lists, but thanks anyhow for checking in on me.

Measures of Hope | 8 February 2011

+1. Lunch with Mr.Right today at a swanky restaurant near his office. It felt like we were meeting for a secret assignation! A little bit of story here: we had scheduled to do the counseling session with my sister and BIL today at noon, but we ended up canceling late last week because my sister was having a crazy week with sick kids and upcoming work presentations and couldn't get the personality test done last Friday afternoon. Mr.Right had already asked the staff to bump his patients today during the time we were supposed to be in the appointment and when we cancelled he decided he didn't want to have to explain that his appointment was cancelled, etc., etc. So, we met for lunch at a favorite restaurant - so very posh and quiet. Very sexy!

+2. RESOLVE support group tonight. I'll have to explain my situation, but I hope they'll let me stay in the group since we're still doing the donor egg thing in parallel. I guess I could have worse reasons for getting kicked out of a support group. :-)

+3. A little vertigo. I mean, really, really slight. Is that a pregnancy symptom? Or do I just have some weird inner ear thing going on. Whatever. I know I said I wasn't going to hunt for symptoms. Our little bean is either still alive in there or not. No signs yet of not. That's a positive thing.

Measures of Hope | 4 February 2011

+1. No real symptoms. That could be a negative, worrying thing, but I'm choosing to think about it positively. I didn't really have many symptoms the last time I was pregnant for 13 weeks. Yes, a little nipple tenderness that comes and goes. But nausea? nope. My measures for hope on this? My sister never had a whiff of morning sickness with either of her pregnancies and neither did my mother with me or my sister. It runs in the family, right?

+2. 13 days = number of days left til next ultrasound (ok, I promise I won't post the countdown every day! :-) )

+3. 3 miles = length of the pup's first run! Jessie did great today. She didn't stop to sniff things nearly as much as when I walk her. I think she totally got the idea of a 'run.' She did slow me down a little, which is a good thing, given that I've pledged to Mr.Right to ease back a little on the running.

Measures of Hope | 3 February 2011

+1. 119 = heartbeat of our little bean this morning (normal at 6-7 weeks is 90-110)

+2. 6w4d = size of little bean today (at 6w3d)

+3. 2 weeks = time until next ultrasound. Ok, this isn't really an entirely positive thing. It seems like a long time, but it's better than nothing (which is probably what I would be getting if I had just called the OB instead of gone back to our fertility clinic for this pregnancy.)

+4. Seems like we got a really good recommendation on a doctor to do the CVS test today. I've already read up on their website. And we trust Dr.Dry's opinion about his fellow docs. He hasn't steered us wrong yet.

We have a heartbeat.....deja vu all over again

Ok, you know it's getting bad when you start repeating post titles. In this case, two: My first "We have a heartbeat" was last June at the exact same date in my previous pregnancy: 6w3d. And, well, "deja vu all over again" I've used at least once, but doesn't this all just feel like that movie "Groundhog Day"? The repeat pregnancies, the repeat losses, ugh.

Enough of that depressing infertility stuff, though. The point is: we saw the sac, fetal pole and heartbeat this morning. Measuring 6w4d (yes, little bean is already a 1 day overachiever!)

It's so funny how different my clinic's office is during post-monitoring hours (9:30 onward). Dr.Dry actually stood and talked with us in the exam room for quite a while. And then the nurse that saw us afterward just wanted to chat and chat and chat about pregnancy symptoms and instructions. I was kind of like, "been here, done this, got the t-shirt" and wanted to get out of there. But, she just kept chatting away. I almost felt like I owed it to her to let her have this happy moment. I suppose I do owe it to her since she's the one that I was pretty nasty too on the phone when she called to tell me we had only 1 mature/fertilized egg in the last IVF round.

Before Dr.Dry left the exam room, we talked about the genetic testing Mr.Right is going to have for our sister/donor eggs scenario. We wanted to avoid having my sister do just one more test, so we're going to have Mr.Right be tested first. Obviously, if anything comes back positive, then we'll have my sister tested just to make sure.

We also talked about the timing of doing the parallel stim cycle/retrieval of my sister's eggs. We decided to push it off by one month from what we had planned. That would mean with this next cycle (in 7-10 days) she would *not* start bc pills, but would delay til the next month. That puts stim cycle in mid to late April. Partly this is just to push this off until we've got the CVS testing done (if we make it that far.)

We also talked about the CVS test. Dr.Dry is going to have us go to a doctor he really believes is the best in the area for the CVS. We'll go for an appointment at 9.5 weeks and then have the CVS test done at 10.5 or 11 weeks. We'll have the FISH results back in a few days, but the full results don't come back for 2 weeks. So, that puts us well into the middle of March. I guess we want to know the CVS results before my sister starts her stim cycle. Although, at this point, unless I have a D&C tomorrow, I don't think I'd be able to do a fresh transfer for at least 3 months. We don't want to drag this on too long for my sister. She's getting older (she'll be 37 in July) and June and onward for her is bad, since she does a lot of field work in the summers for her job.

Anyhow, we were told to come back in 10 days. That would have been Valentine's Day (well, the Sunday before), but Dr.Dry isn't in until Thursday of that week so we'll go back in 2 weeks. We just felt like we wanted him to do the next scan. But it seems like an awfully long time. A two week wait, ugh.

So, this is all good news, right? So, how come I came home today after the appointment and stress ate? (2 large pieces of sausage and mushroom pizza - I mean, what is the point of the organic milk I bought yesterday if I'm going to stuff my face with disgustingly-bad-for-me pizza?????) I don't know, I had it in my mind that I was going to need to be comforted with food today and even though the appointment gave us the best news possible, I was still in that mindset.

Oh well, there's always tomorrow. But two weeks? I guess I'll just have to try not to think about it for the next two weeks.

Measures of Hope | 2 February 2011

+1. Ultrasound at 9:30 a.m. tomorrow morning. Mr.Right has moved patients to be there. There's a fair amount of hope somewhere inside of me that we'll see a heartbeat tomorrow. Of course, we're nowhere near in the clear (not until the CVS test in another 4 weeks if we make it that far.)

+2. Psychological test (MMPI) scheduled for my sister on Friday afternoon and sessions for my sister and BIL as well as for my sister, BIL, Mr.Right and me with the counselor scheduled for next Tuesday. Only things left after that are infectious disease bloodwork for my sister, bloodwork for Fragile X test for Mr.Right and Counsyl test (saliva sample) for all the other genetic stuff for Mr.Right. We're continuing to move this donor egg thing forward.

+3. 3 mile walk with the puppy (who is now 52.5 lbs!) this afternoon in the beautiful sunshine. Lots of snow still on the ground but the roads are practically dry. So nice to be outside and not freezing!