Better Luck Next Time

A week ago, AF arrived, 4 days too late for me to catch the June cycle. That was the bad news, the the whole thing was delayed another month. The good news was that I was able to stop taking the lupron and the steriods, and I feel one hundred percent better. So for the past week I have been dealing with the logistics of delaying my trip to Colorado.
I have been visiting my mother in Florida for the past few weeks, and so another portion of my time since I went off Lupron has been spent trying to make up for my behavior while I was on lupron. Good times.

Today's agenda:
1. Visit cemetery in honor of Father's Days
2. Fly to Dallas (with puppy) to visit in-laws and my husband's grandmother.

Waiting for Aunt Flow, on steroids

10 shots of Lupron later, and 10 pills of dexamethasone, a steriod. I am not at my best.
I have a constant headache. I am short-tempered. I am uncomfortable. The pageantry of World Cup Soccer is making me cry.

(And speaking of World Cup Soccer, this display has triggered a long-buried memory of being in Italy in 1982 when Italy won. My mother and her friends took great pleasure in wrapping me in as many items of green, red, and white clothing as possible and parading me down the street. I was ten. Luckily, all of the Italians, even the shy ten-year-olds, were also wrapped in as many pieces of green, red, and white as humanly possible, so no one paid any attention to me.)

But I digress.
The sad thing is that the 10 days of Lupron and dexamethasone may be for naught because my body is refusing to cooperate. To fully explain the way in which my body is refusing to cooperate, I will now avail myself of one of the abbreviations common to fertility chat rooms: AF.
Apparently Aunt Flow is an American colloquialism for menstruation. On fertility chat sites, it is abbreviated as AF, which was absolutely baffling to me for the longest time.

I was supposed to start AF on Thursday, but I did not. During any other week of the year, this would not be a problem, but this month, the lab at CCRM is closing from June 27-July 3. On this protocol, I would start my controlled ovarian stimulation shots on Day 3 of my menstrual cycle and continue them for 10 days, then have egg retrieval 2 days after that. Then the eggs and the sperm would do their things, and have 4 or 5 days to grow to blastocysts so they can be tested for viability. If I had started AF as expected, my embryos would have just made it in time for this closure.

I am still waiting.

I spoke to my nurse yesterday, and her solution was to keep taking the lupron and the dexamethasone until AF arrives just in case the lupron itself actually causes my body to delay an entire week. If I am so lucky as to have a week delay in the arrival of AF, I will simply skip over the closure and take advantage of this month's cycle. In that case, I will be on Lupron a total of 25 days, because did I mention that I have to stay on it throughout the controlled ovarian stimulation as well?

The alternative is that AF arrives sometime before Thursday, and that I have to start the whole thing over again on Day 21 of the next month.

So, for now, I wait.

The Birds and the Bees

Check out this series of videos.

And So It Begins

Dear Reader,

Yesterday, I received the Big Box of Needles and Drugs.

Yes, this means that everything came out fine with all the tests and that I am starting my third IVF cycle tonight. I will do my best over the next few days to fill you in on the things that happened since the meeting with the genetic counselor.

Tonight, the first Lupron shot. Wish me luck. And more importantly, wish my loved ones luck.