cd 15: bring on the estrogen!

today was another check in with Dr. Mo, she asked if i was making any progress, and i thought "how the heck would i know??"  she checked my ovaries and my right one is proving to be a total dud, i remember the first ultrasound i had with the clomid round last fall with my FAVORITE u/s tech Marty {which i can't wait to start going to see her again}, anyhow Marty said that my right ovary was really "shy."  meaning that it's waaaay off in right field, so it really doesn't surprise me that i don't have any follicles growing on that one.  but on the left today Dr. Mo said i now have two follicles in the running, one that's 15cm and one that's 13cm!  hooray, that means there may actually be more than one target to hit when it comes time for the iui.

while my follicles are starting to look good, she did say my uterine lining was pretty whimpy.  she said she'd like to see it at 8cm, and right now it's at a measly 5cm... dang it.  when we tried the clomid round each ultra sound i had Marty commented on how beautiful or fluffy my lining was {almost like being told you look prett, haha}. so it's a little odd given that one of the major side effects of taking clomid is that it can thin your lining, and the up side to femara is that it usually doesn't... but o'well c'est la vie.

they had a solution, and i am now sporting two new vivelle-dot estrogen patches...  and i didn't really think before and i just slapped them on.... upside down, go me!

the nurse said you can either double them up on one side of your lower tummy, or one on each side... and now that i think about it, i probably should've just doubled them up on the left for the sake of helping my left follicles to grow, but i did one on each side.

Dr. Mo also said she's thinking our iui could be monday or tuesday, but would need to see what happens this weekend... huh?  as far as i knew my RE's office wasn't open on weekends, so i asked "sooo, when should i come back in for my next scan?"  she said saturday, so ok 9am saturday it is, and you better believe J is coming with me and taking me to brunch after =).   i guess they open up shop if patients need to be seen, which is comforting because i was starting to wonder what would happen if something needed to be done on a weekend, especially since fertility and cycles still march on over the weekends.

funny thing is, as soon as i drove away from the doc's office all of a sudden i got really flushed and felt little throbbing type feelings right under the areas where my patches were {kinda like i could feel my ovaries working}.  so i'm gonna assume that means the patches were already working... hormones + hot flashes here i come!  yeah, probably should've asked what the side effects are of the patches but i like to live life on the edge, i'm figuring out that sometimes in this process it's better not knowing what i "might" expect...

oh, and on a happy note: i got my hair did tonight, last month i had my friend/stylist add more lowlights to my hair, which i'm not really a big fan of too many lowlights since i feel like i start to look my hair is always dirty {it's a blonde thing}.  so tonight she added more of my platinum back in just in time for my big 3-0 that's quickly approaching on the 28th, ack!

 and it's also just in time for our glorious so cal weather to return again, hooray! will follow up after saturday's check in...

femara 5mg side effects?

for the sake of trying to remember the details of this first round of femara + iui i thought i'd just jot down some of the side effects, or health things that happened in the past week.

started the femara on monday 1.7.12:
but it wasn't until about thursday or friday i really felt like my ovaries had kicked into hyperdrive.... meaning that i was feeling some little pains coming from them, sort of like what ovulation can feel like, but times ten.  if you've experience what ovulation can feel like then you'll understand what i mean.  man this stuff really forces you to get to know your body really well!

finished femara on friday 1.11.12 {pretty sure i goofed up my doses}:
so on thursday i realized i was up one pill and thought i must've forgotten to take in the morning on wednesday due to J being up in nor cal for a hearing, which totally threw off my normal morning routine of getting up early to make his breakfast and start my day... shhh, don't tell him but i actually slept in that morning and man was it awesome!  needless to say, i thought i forgot to take my AM pill.  well on friday night i was down to 2 pills and decided to just double up and take both so i would be done with it that night {still don't really know why i did this??}  but right after i did i read the label and it said take 2 pills each evening, ah what the heck!? the pharmacist told me one in the AM + 1 in the PM!!  was i doing it wrong this whole time??  and dummy me i had an extra pill because i picked up my rx in the evening monday so i only took one pill monday, awe geeze...

saturday 1.12.12:
we skipped breakfast and had a late lunch, which i happily offered to make because i had seen a clean recipe on instagram for chocolate protein pancakes with a peanut butter/chocolate + bananas topping, and it looked DEVINE and J is always game when i try to make recipes that looks so delicious and yet are still supposed to be good for you...  well fast forward a few hours, the pancakes went down great, but man i was in pain, i thought i was going to throw them up.  they totally were not sitting well in my tummy and the photo i had posted of my recipe victory on insta kept getting likes and comments galore and it was all i could do to keep shutting the screen off so i wouldn't vomit every time the photo kept popping up... even now, five days later i still can't bear to look at them, i actually thought to post the picture of them here, but i had to delete the photo of them from my phone so i wouldn't see them again anytime i look at my photos... yeah, it's still making me sick when i see the photo, bleh!

anyhow later that day i started to get really bad chills and then my lower back started aching like crazy, and i thought, huh... that makes a little more sense i guess i'm just getting the flu.  so i proceeded to stay curled up on the couch the rest of the night half awake, half trying to be unconscious so as to not think about throwing up or how much i ached, or how i couldn't get my nose, hands or feet to warm up to save my life!  the nausea continued on sunday, however the aches and chills subsided quite a bit.  yet i still was pretty worthless most of that day too...

so monday and yesterday i still wasn't too sure of my stomach, and truthfully i kept getting these little burps, that had like a metallic/pepper/onion type taste to them that was just gross... and all i can attribute that to is the femara since i have heard that meds can cause a metallic taste... but today is the first day i kinda feel like im rounding the corner on it and may have graduated back to solid foods again, praise the Lord!

are we there yet? {cd 12 doc visit}

ain't that the truth?... well, yesterday i saw Dr. Mo for my cd 12 check in and like i had a feeling we aren't there yet, but that's as i suspected.  so i rushed to make it down to my early, early appointment {no, i'm totally not a morning person, which i know will have to change when i'm a mommy}.  but after rushing to get down there early i did have a few minutes to sit in the ultrasound room and enjoy the view from Dr. Mo's office.

pretty sweet huh?  Dr. Mo is located right next to Fashion Island in Newport Beach, and yesterday morning was a beyond beautiful morning {something i am likely to miss being that i prefer not to make it a regular occurrence to be up and out of the house before 9 normally}. =)  the past week we've had really chilly days here in so cal and yesterday we'd had some santa ana winds that had blown away the smog and revealed this beautiful view of the ocean all the way to Catalina Island...  thank you God for the pretty gift you blessed me with while i was waiting for my check in.  i was reminded of Lam 3:22-24 "His mercies are new every morning, great is your faithfulness."  and this picturesque view was a reminder that He is indeed faithful and with every new morning i need to be reminded of that... and if i had to start my day off that early and not get the best news, at least i was able to sit an enjoy this calm before the doctor came in to discuss the next plan of action.

any who, back to the visit itself... she checked me and said my uterine lining was indeed getting thicker {yay}, and that i had a bunch of little follicles but only one that looked to be the promising one, however it was only about 11cm, and they prefer it to be closer to 18-20cm before they can give me the HCG trigger. so we're in a holding pattern until thursday.  i'll go back and get checked again to see if any other follicles have started maturing and how the dominant one is growing.

it's kinda surreal that we are finally actively pursuing fertility help, it feels like it's been a long time coming and we {really i} have had so many thoughts and concerns swirling in my head about moving forward with fertility treatments... one of which being that if we start really using fertility meds we run the risk of possible multiples out of the treatment.  and truth be told, while i had mentally and emotionally come to terms with the "idea" of having multiples it really was freaking me out a little bit!  twins are a total possibility given that J's family has a history of twins, but the thought of more than two, yeah i was letting my imagination get the best of me when i thought about that possibility....  but, after my first check in and hearing i really only had one follicle in the running my heart sank a little.  i was kind of hoping to have more than one follicle since that would up our chances of conceiving, but it would also up our chances of conceiving multiples too.  so its a little bittersweet to think that there's only one so far in the running.  but, i do know a guy, and He is in the business of creating miracles, so i can rest assured that if that one little follicle is meant to be our future child He will see to it that it all works out according to His plan and not mine.

a new year, a new cycle...

{just FYI i drafted this over a week ago and am now finally getting around to posting it}

happy new year to anyone who may have happened to stumble upon my blog, i'm convinced due to my blog analytics that anyone reading this is viewing my blog completely by accident due to the "keyword" searches being done to end up here, but whatever... as of Christmas there hadn't been any sign of late ovulation so i went ahead and started a progesterone challenge to start a new cycle knowing that i should end up with a new cycle right around the start of the year.  after about a little over a week my cycle started, which was a relief i think to both my husband and i... i personally think you start to get a little hormonally outta whack when you go too long without a period, and i think he would agree with me that i was getting quite snippy without actually PMS'ing...  we discussed that when we got back from traveling to see family for Christmas and being up in Arrowhead for new years we would move forward with our first IUI cycle this month.

so i will warn you that due to a random series of events leading up to yesterday i'm a little down emotionally, but i'm determined to blog whenever i visit the doc for posterity's sake.  anyhow, yesterday was CD 5 {cycle day}, and the protocol is to go in on days 3, 4, or 5 to have an u/s {ultrasound} to check your uterine lining + follicles, and yep they're both still there.... it was interesting because my u/s lasted no longer than 2 minutes, and they had me back up at the front desk.  since i have no fertility benefits/coverage they did let me know now that they're actively trying to help us conceive, they wouldn't be billing insurance.  cash it is... and that 2 minutes of my time was a solid $105, which could be worse, however when i told my attorney husband he said "man i picked the wrong profession." and on the topic of money, we've decided since we have a nest egg saved {we had originally intended that money to be for purchasing a home, we've since decided we will use some of it to go towards IUI rounds}.  now if the IUIs aren't successful we may have to revaluate things when we get there to decide what our priorities are at that point.  but for now we've decided since we have the money saved we'll just use our Starwood card to pay for all of it and pay it off as we go with the funds we have saved, in hopes that we might be able to use those points to go on a babymoon {well that's more my wishful thinking perhaps}.  also, i did ask Dr. Mo what she thought about Femara vs. Clomid, and she said it's for women who haven't really responded to clomid... and then said we can do Femara, and seeing how my OB only did one cycle of clomid at 50mg {the lowest dose}, we could've tried a hight dose, however i was leaning more toward wanting to try Femara and stay away from Clomid if possible.

so here they are... my 10 little femara pills which i'll be taking twice a day for the next 5 days till i get to CD9.  Dr. Mo started me at 5mg {the mid range dose}, so we'll see how that plays out.

also, she wanted to make sure i was on a prenatal + DHA, so they gave me an assortment of prenatal samples that fit the bill {let's be honest at $100+ a visit i would sure hope there are freebies coming along with my expensive visits}!

so i'll be on this regimen till friday {1.11} and then i'll head back for my CD12 scan to see where my follicles + uterine lining are at.  and not to sound like a debbie downer, but knowing me chances are good that i won't be ready for the trigger injection yet.  just knowing that it took some time to see results when i was taking clomid last september i'm thinking it might be the same with the femara, but we'll see.  and just in case i forget what the tentative plan of attack is they gave me a cycle guide for the next month of my life, which you'll see in the photo above....

so i'll check back next week after my CD 12 doctor's visit