MicroblogMondays: Transfer Is Approaching

The next transfer is slowly creeping up on us.

I have been on Lu.pron and estrogen patches for a few weeks now.  The one and only lining check is going to be today at 11:30am.

How have I been feeling?  Mostly at peace.  I pray for peace and strength, and total trust in the Lord daily.  I did have one moment of panic about one week ago but it went away quickly.  I found myself in a different state this time.  Lighter, perhaps?  The old me would have been very on top of things.  However, this time, I have been quite forgetful.  I often get startled by the Goog.le calendar reminder for the Lu.rpon shot at 9:15pm. At times, I truly forget that an injection has been scheduled daily.  Maybe I feel that there are better things to do than to get overly stressed about the injection?  As long as the phone reminder does its job, I have nothing to worry about.  I was supposed to leave a voicemail with my clinic after I started my estrogen patch.  I did start the patch, but totally forgot about calling the clinic until my nurse hunted me down with a phone call.  This is very unlike me, but it tells you how much I am not thinking about the transfer.  After taking a break since our failed cycle, I finally contacted my acupuncturist for a few sessions leading up to the transfer.  When she saw me last week, I shared my feelings with her about this cycle.  She observed my face and my body language and said I did look lighter.  It’s so interesting to know that she could actually see it on my face.

Another interesting thing is, today’s lining check does not stress me out.  The last time I was stressed out because I had a date set and I really wanted to do it right before Thanksgiving.  With my mind set on a date, the appropriate thickness of the lining was very important on my lining check date.  This time we don’t even have a set transfer date.  Transfer will be any day between February 1 and February 5.  So the thickness of the lining today is not as important.  I feel that I am just going with the flow.  Whatever the nurses and doctors say, I’ll follow.

Don’t get me wrong. Even with this newfound “lightness”, I am still hopeful.  I am still thinking and planning ahead for a pregnancy.  I do think about a couple of months down the line what I will be doing with my new pregnancy.  Recently, Bob and I started talking about planning a trip for our 5th year wedding anniversary.  We were originally going to go to Hawaii for our honeymoon.  Because I just didn’t have enough energy to plan another thing right before our wedding, we abandoned that plan and went somewhere locally (and still had a blast).  We always talk about going to Hawaii but still haven’t gone.  We have already saved up the money for it.  We have even labeled our savings account for that trip “Babymoon”.  So we are going to go.  I haven’t booked anything yet pending Bob’s vacation approval from his work. But during all the research and planning, it did cross my mind that anything could happen at that point.  We could be 14 weeks pregnant.  We could have failed the cycle and be still looking for a donor.  Or we could have found a donor and our planned trip would be right in the middle of our cycle.  But you know what?  I can’t let all the what-ifs stop us from living life.  And I choose to believe that by the time our trip rolls around, I will be bringing our baby along.  It will be a trip for our family of three.  Isn’t that a wonderful thought?  I will even sacrifice the enjoyment of consuming various kinds of fish that Hawaii has to offer for the sake of my child.

And how’s Bob doing?  He is doing much better.  He was angry at God for a while but he seems to be in a better place.  He can pray again and we pray together.  He is also hopeful about this coming cycle but not as “light” as I am.  He is still skeptical about it and sometimes feels that we should save every single penny up for more treatment, such as the money we have already set aside for our babymoon trip.  I just let him go a little crazy for a while before he comes to me and tells me that we should go on our trip.  😉

So yeah, I guess transfer will be here before we know it.  I am really ready for it.  Hopefully I can keep my “lightness” through out these next few weeks.

Counting Down to Lining Check

My lining check is coming up soon.  This coming Thursday in the afternoon we’ll know if the lining is thick enough and trilaminar for us to thaw the eggs on Friday to fertilize them.

How have I been feeling?  Amazingly well.  Still calm.  Not anxious.  Carrying on my life like usual and taking it one day at a time.  My daily prayer has been to be anxiety free and calm and to depend on God fully.  I pray that God continues to carry me through.

I may feel differently come tomorrow or Thursday.  But I will just focus on the present and am very thankful that I am not more nervous than I am.

I have been on my Lup.ron shots daily.  That tiny little vial seems to be lasting forever.  I hope it does the very important job of making my ovaries quiet.

Today I still have my two estrogen patches on my tummy.  Tomorrow morning I will replace them with four new patches.  Has anyone ever had trouble finding the right place for these patches?  For my first patch, I just put it somewhere below my belly button.  What I found out was that its placement was right where my jeans’ waistband was.  I found myself constantly checking to make sure that the patch was still there.  The instructions also say to avoid putting the new patch on the same area as before.  The second time around, I placed the new patch lower, which made it easier to avoid rubbing.  But it became a little bit tricker to place two patches and to avoid the previous areas as well as to make sure that they are between the panty and my pants’ waistband.  I can only imagine how fun it will be to constantly have to find room for four patches.

It feels kind of funny not feeling or knowing what is going on inside my uterus.  I naturally want to help the lining in any way I can.  But I just don’t know if it needs help or not.  One thing I was planning on doing was to do castor oil pack thinking that it would help with the blood flow.  I was waiting to start it after my bleeding was totally gone.  One lady on a FB DE group told me to be careful about it as she used it only to get rid of ovarian cysts.  Another lady told me that she used it for days before her transfer.  I wasn’t really sure who to listen to.  Luckily, my Mayan massage person who is currently on maternity leave returned my email just in time.  She said that castor oil is quite moving and is not the best of growing a lining.  She told me to avoid it.  Good thing I wrote her as I was about to start the pack that same night.  She told me that self care (a massage that I can do myself on my stomach area) is good for lining growth and can be done up to transfer.  I tried it once, but abandoned the idea because the oil that I applied to my stomach and the movement of the massage actually created air bubbles in my estrogen patches.  It was hard to avoid touching the patches as where they were was the exact same area I needed to massage.  It would be a bummer for these patches that cost $10 each to fall off my stomach.  Instead of doing self care massages, I have been applying a hot water heat pad on my belly area for 20 minutes a night.  After I am done, I pass it onto Bob who also places it on his stomach as he says “To keep my uterus warm”.  Instead of sympathetic pregnancy, this is sympathetic lining growth. Haha.

What other things have I been doing to help my blood flowing and to help myself keep warm in order to grow my lining?  I finally contacted an acupuncturist to get a few sessions in.  My original acupuncturist moved across the bay, so I can no longer go to her.  My Mayan massage therapist, who is also an acupuncturist, is about to give birth to her second baby.  I was in need of an acupuncturist.  At first I just wanted one for pre and post transfer.  A friend of mine gave me a name of an acupuncturist who did the pre and post transfer sessions onsite for one of her friends who got pregnant with donor eggs after a day-three transfer of two embryos.  The pricing is reasonable for an onsite session at the clinic.   I texted the acupuncturist who promptly returned my texts.  She is available for my intended transfer day.  When I thought more about it, I knew that I wanted some acupuncture support for the lining growth as well.  I like that she has a practice 15 minutes away from work and from home.  It’s basically half way between my work and my house.  She is available after work unlike some other acupuncturist who has no availability for a couple of weeks.  I went to my first session last Friday.  My impression was that she is not as knowledgeable as my other acupuncturist, but she is good enough.  She didn’t seem to immediately grasp the idea of donor eggs or frozen donor eggs, but she does see patients with fertility issues.  She also told me that castor oil pack should be okay, although later I learned that it wasn’t.  She took her time in feeling my pulse and applying the needles.  She also did moxa on my belly area.  All in all, it was a pretty good session.  The interesting thing was that the stomach area where she had applied needles and moxa bruised up and felt hard the next two days.  I wasn’t alarmed.  I was more puzzled why it happened.  The acupuncturist sent me an email to check in on me so I told her about it.  I had another session today.  She explained to me that it was probably a blood vessel that was nicked by the needles.  She said that it was definitely not because of the moxa.

One thing that she recommended, which I used to do, is to drink bone broth. I still had three pieces of marrow bones in the freezer from a while ago that I had been too lazy to deal with.  Bone broth is good for my body type and helps with keeping me warm.  I made a whole pot and so far had finished half of it.  I love bone marrow and consider it a treat.

It has been colder here recently.  (I know Maddie would laugh at me for saying that it’s cold here.)  I have been doing a good job keeping myself warm.  Bob keeps the heat on.  I have been wearing socks and wearing layers.  Since I don’t want to exert myself too much during these two weeks, I haven’t been going to fitness bootcamp.  In order to keep my blood flowing, I have been taking a walk for 20 to 25 minutes after eating lunch.  I choose to go up hill and sweat a little.  I find it a much better way to spend lunch than listening to pregnant ladies and new moms talk about breast feeding, labor, and other things that I cannot chime in yet.

Oh!  Bob and I finally signed the consent form for this upcoming cycle.  The 31-page consent goes over everything from frozen eggs to ICSI to the favorable number of embryos to transfer.  It also talks about the risks of pregnancies from IVF and the potential complications of pregnancies with multiples.  And then there is this whole section about freezing the embryos and what to do with the embryos if there is death, separation, or other things going on in our marriage.  Some heavy duty stuff.  Bob won’t be there with me at the lining check so we had to notarize his signatures.  Originally I thought about going to our church administrative assistant who is a notary public, but I didn’t want her to know what we are doing.  Thanks to my friend Jane who reminded me that getting signatures notarized is inexpensive at UPS.  That was exactly what we did over the weekend.

So this is it for all the things that I am doing to get ready for the lining check.  My nurse just emailed me today to let me know that Dr. No Nonsense, my RE, won’t be there to personally do the transfer on November 25.  Another RE, who happens to be one of my friends’ RE, is going to do it.  It’s a bummer but I am not overly sad.  I believe that I will be in good hands.

Two more days before the lining check!  Think thick, fluffy, and cushy!