Yet Another Reason to Eat Candy Corn

I was so pleased to see Erin's post about National Candy Corn Day just after I received a package full of fancy Halloween candy from my in-laws. I think this series of events sparked my epiphany about why my shots have been more painful this time around--I am too skinny.

I am not bragging about my current weight. The last time I started fertility treatments, I felt stronger and healthier. My posture was better. I was also several pounds healthier. I started losing those pounds during my three days in the hospital during my miscarriage, when the doctor kept me on a regimen of morphine and ice chips because of the possibility of emergency surgery. After I left the hospital, I did not exactly maintain an appetite while watching my father vomit from chemotherapy and waste away. And finally, for the last ten days of my father's life, my mother stayed in his room with him around the clock, relying on the kindness of strangers (and friends) to bring us a meal or two a day.

(Note that I do not recommend this as a weight loss strategy.)

I am not the healthy, strong, toned person I was before I started fertility treatments the last time around. And most importantly, I do not have the same amount of belly fat.

So when you give yourself the subcutaneous injections, what you are doing is pinching the skin and fat of your belly (avoiding a two inch radius from your belly button). Today, I finally realized that I just don't have as much to pinch, and that is making the process more painful. So I will now feel free to eat a little candy corn on Halloween, in the hope that by the time I am up to three shots a day I will have gained a little more belly fat without increasing my risk of gestational diabetes.

Long Long Lupron

And now a bit of the practical. I have started the Long Lupron IVF protocol.

For most people, this protocol begins with going on birth control pills, and I had already started to take them after a surgery I had to remove uterine fibroids in August. (The fancy name is a laparoscopic myomectomy.)

I have recently moved to a small town in Oregon, and there is only one fertility doctor in town. He uses the birth control pill and and an injectable called Lupron to get everyone in the current protocol on the same calendar. This allows him to organize his time so he can do all the egg retrievals and embryos transfers in the same week, which apparently leads to better results.

If you don't count the time on birth control, I am on day three of my protocol. If you want to know the nitty gritty of the process, here's my current nightly fertility regimen:

1. The birth control pill
2. A prenatal vitamin
3. A baby aspirin (the purpose of which is, I think, to increase blood flow to my ovaries.)
4. 10 units of Lupron in shot form (with a needle, not a glass.)

The idea is that this use of Lupron puts you into chemical menopause for two weeks before you start the other shots, the ones that stimulate the growth of the follicles that produce the eggs. Erin, are these the right verbs to use?



Chemical Menopause: "Egads," you exclaim. "The whole point of this is to beat menopause! To outsmart my infernal biological clock!" You might be agitated, and cranky, and you have not even started the Lupron yet. Well, I will share that so far, chemical menopause has not been as terrible as I feared. I don't know about you, but I mostly associate menopause with hot flashes. What I have had is more akin to the feeling you might get from a warm brandy. This is not a problem right now, as I am adjusting to a cooler, rainier climate here in Oregon and have not had alcohol since the day my father died. (One token glass of white wine with my mother at a restaurant, when she couldn't bear to head home to an empty house.) But the warm brandy flush might be alarming if you were not expecting it, or if you were giving yourself Lupron shots in Texas in August. The only other symptom I have so far, which has little to do with the weather, is a headache. Not a migraine, not a sinus headache, nothing too out of the ordinary. Just another hormonal headaches like all of the other hormonal headaches I have had in life. Irritating and persistent, but manageable. I have not had the crazy mood swings or nausea, or any of the highly unpleasant symptoms other women have reported on other blogs. But there is still time!

After all, it must be called the long Lupron protocol for some reason other than the charms of alliteration...