Jenn Unplugged

I feel like the only thing I'm posting about is pregnancy stuff lately! School is starting in a week and I'm feeling a little swamped with course preparation, so I'm not terribly creative otherwise. It's definitely exciting to be going back to school, though. It's always been one of my favorite times of the year!

( Good news here. )

Bad news first: I got a call this morning from Austin IVF to let me know that none of our embryos were able to be frozen. Six of them just stopped growing on day 3, and the three that actually grew into blastocysts were too weak and would not have survived the freezing process. So of course, that makes me wonder how the two that were transferred are doing. What are the odds that two out of the original eleven would survive? I suppose they're in their "natural" environment, which makes a big difference, but still... It was a good dose of reality, which I needed.

I'm managing to hold all of this at arm's length, which I think is a good thing. It seems very abstract right now, so much that if it does work, I think it'll take it a while to sink in. I know that the odds are 50/50 at best, and I kind of expect it not to work. I don't ever again want to be as devastated as I was last year when the last IUI didn't work. So unlike I did with every IUI, I'm not really thinking about this much. I'm not lingering over baby stuff, or thinking of names. And I'm trying to keep in mind that we may have to do this all again, maybe more than once. That would be okay. It wasn't nearly as hard as I thought it would be. I could do it again.

Now some good news: I have been trying to figure out who can give me my shots when Doug is out of town (as he will be for most of the next month), and for a while I thought I would have to go to a clinic that's about 15 miles away. But I found one about 4 miles away this afternoon that said they would do it, which is awesome. They're even open 7 days and until 10:00 at night, yay! It will cost $12 a shot, but it's worth it.

I realized last night that if I am pregnant, I'll continue to have this nightly shot in the ass for possibly another month. That makes seven solid weeks of at least one shot a day. :-P Normal people just get to be all happy when they get pregnant, don't they? </bitter>

It turns out that 15 of the 17 eggs were mature, and ICSI was performed on all of those. 11 of them fertilized, so we currently have 11 embryos, dividing in petri dishes down at the clinic! We'll get an update tomorrow, I think.

Tomorrow I start hatching meds (about 7 pills a day for five days), and I also start my progesterone shots tomorrow evening. The embryo transfer will be Tuesday or Thursday, and I have no idea when we'll find out which day it will be. It could be as late as Tuesday morning!

( Quick update. )

In other news, Doug's parents are here visiting us this weekend, and we've had a lot of fun. We cooked breakfast and dinner every day, and went out for lunch. So yes, we ate waaay too much! We drove around the lake Saturday, which was just gorgeous. We've had a lot of rain this spring, so the lake is full again and the hills around it are green and lush. It was amazing! We had lunch at one of our favorite lake restaurants, where we got to watch people come in and out on their boats. One of these weekends, Doug and I are going to rent a boat and spend a day out on the lake. When it gets cooler, maybe.

We had a great weekend at home together, the first weekend we've spent together at home in a long time. It might even have been late March or early April since we had a weekend just to hang out at home and do nothing all day.

Of course, the weekend before that was amazing -- we went to New York to go on a theatre binge and to go to the Tonys! We had a great time and saw Curtains (which our old friend John Bolton was in, and starred David Hyde Pierce), Company (for the third time, as it's Doug's favorite), and the night after the Tonys we saw Spring Awakening for the second time. Seeing a show the night after it won eight Tonys (including Best Musical) was incredible fun. The cast was so excited and the crowd cheered in stretches of three minutes throughout the show, effectively stopping it. It was amazing!

Monday afternoon I finally recorded my session with Seth Rudetsky of the Broadway's Best channel on Sirius, which was a lot of fun! (That was my birthday present from Doug last year -- I talked about it down at the bottom of this post.) We were told that it would air on Wednesday afternoon and we were ready to record it, but it didn't air that day. We think it may have actually aired on Tuesday, when we were flying. :-( We'll see if we can get them to re-air it. If not, I have the raw audio that I can post, which is also kind of fun.

It was a great weekend, and the last traveling I'll be doing for at least a month, depending on how the IVF goes. ( IVF update here. )

Yesterday I had a sonogram to make everything was set to go for starting the IVF cycle, and it really hadn't occurred to me that there would be a problem. But of course, there was -- I have a cyst on my right ovary, which means I can't start on the drugs just yet. They want me to come back in a week for another sono, but the fact is that it usually takes several weeks for cysts to go away.

( And of course, we don't have several weeks. )

Surgery is tomorrow morning, bright and early. Oddly enough, I'm not the slightest bit anxious. I think that's because I've been through this before and know it's not a big deal.

I'm actually much more anxious about the fact that my grandfather will be at the doctor for an evaluation of his heart condition at the same time. After this, they'll decide how to proceed. Open heart surgery seems to be on the horizon, which is a heck of a lot scarier than a wee hysteroscopy.

*worries*