No Trigger Yet!

Another appointment on Friday to monitor my little follicles who are growing ever so slowly.

Stimulating

Still going strong with the follistim. Tomorrow it will be 12 days that I've taken actual drugs. They just keep dragging it out, a few days at a time. Allegedly this is because it's my first time on the drugs and because I have PCOS so we don't want to excite those crazy ovaries.

It's so weird having to schedule everything though. I'm actually praying I don't have to trigger tomorrow because my husband will be out of town and there is nothing I can do about it. We had no idea how long this would take and obviously couldn't put our lives on hold to wait. I dread to think about how much money we've spent on this cycle only to have it all for naught.

While this is going on we're renting and moving to a house and I've got some crazy work stuff as well. I'm trying to remain calm about it. How am I doing? :-)

HSG

I survived! The moral of the story is my tubes are clear and my uterus looks normal, but oh boy.

So I got up super early and drove down to this other town. I was early, so I napped in my car for a bit before going in (but I missed the bottleneck of traffic that would have otherwise made me late). I saw someone from my home office there, another patient, and we chatted and it was nice. But the office didn't send over the order for my test, and the girl doing my paperwork couldn't reach the doctor on the phone. Of course, you can't, I said, he's over here doing procedures. Call the office! Apparently she could not and sent me running all over the hospital to get my own order, only to call me back when the doctor said he would do it verbally.

I was very, very scared of the going in part, but it turns out to be only slightly worse than your average pap smear. The doctor didn't think radiology would have a narrow speculum for me, but I was like, hey, if they don't we can find one, this is a HOSPITAL and I'm not doing it without one. Actually, I didn't have to be like that at all because radiology did have one. Pain, pain, pain, I was okay, then the x-ray was supposed to be the easy part. That dye made me feel like I was going to barf and then was super crampy. In fact, when I sat up afterwards the nurse asked me if I was always this pale. Sadly, the answer to that was yes.

I drove home and taught class and ran errands and everything was fine except I was getting more and more crampy and full. I took some more aleve last night and barely ate any dinner and went to bed early, and I am mostly better today, which makes me think I will be completely better tomorrow.

First *Self* Injection

I'm not sure I would want to give the muscle shot, but I gave myself the sub-q shot today as the husband was napping (and I almost caved and woke him up, and then thought, do I really want a sleepy husband in charge of needles? I did not.) It was so easy I wasn't sure if I was even doing it right. The top of the pen sort of twists down into the shot, it doesn't plunge like regular shots do.

Anyway, I am successfully a follistim junkie. I have to get up at like 4:30 am to drive into another town to have my HSG test done tomorrow morning. My husband was going to go with me, but some of our plans later in the week now require that he not take the morning off. So...I'm going it alone. Scared to death based on the bits and pieces I've read. This is a girl who cannot do a normal pap smear, I'm so narrow they have to use the smaller equipment on me. If I survive, I'll report back.

First Injection

Had my first shot tonight. Even though my husband and I went to official injection training, I still made him watch the DVD video again before we went through with it. It's...not as pleasant as swallowing a Clomid pill but not terrible. My right ovary now feels a little bloated, but I think it's all in my mind.

We are doing follistim for 6 days (cd3, 4, 5, 6, 7, and 8) and then I go in for testing on day 9. My nurse says they could ask me to do the trigger shot then, but that seems so early! Then I would trigger and ovulate sometime on day 9, 10, or 11. Then I follow up with progesterone capsules and wait it out.

I also have my test on Monday to see if my tubes are blocked. We had an infection (both the hubs and myself) so we're on antibiotics anyway.

That's all the news around here for the time being. More bulletins as events warrant.

The Next Step

My wish was granted in that my obgyn wanted nothing to do with me anymore since I spectacularly failed to ovulate this time. They wanted me to see a specialist that comes to their practice once a month, and the earliest appointment was Nov. 16th. That was okay, right?

Yeah, I kind of wanted to see someone sooner than two and a half months from then. (I talked to them last week.) I called the place directly and they could get me in Sept. 25th, and the place my insurance suggested could see me on Sept. 8th. I decided to make both appointments and see if I liked this other place first. The Sept. 8th place is an hour from where I live, but they have an office here for monitoring purposes. The Sept. 25th place is three hours from where I live, and the office they have here for monitoring is the one I'm at which has been giving me all kinds of trouble. Yeeeeaaaah, tough choice. I had pretty much decided if this new place wasn't like, the apocalypse of bad I was going to go with them.

So I filled out all my forms and made my husband sign everything and fill out his part, and I got up at 5:00 a.m. to drive over there so I could be back for my afternoon class. Due to a terrible traffic situation, I was half an hour late, (stuck on the highway, then I went to the wrong building, then I couldn't find parking at the RIGHT building), so I was practically having a panic attack. I *hate* to be late and I was sure they would say, "Oops, you missed your window, come back three weeks from now." But they had mercy on me! They were incredibly efficient and nice and helpful, and I just fell in love with the whole office (which now I realize is so much more important than falling in love with just your doctor).

I saw the doctor, and we discussed that with the Clomid not working, the next step is injectibles. (Ovulation induction by taking shots to grow the follicles, then a shot to release them unto my uterus.) This new place has a ton of monitoring in place for that, and they are going to check out my tubes and do a post-coital test, in addition to bloodwork AND ultrasounds every step of the way. My insurance covers the monitoring and the tests (with some co-pays and hospital fees thrown in there) but not the drugs. Not one little bit. I have to call to see if I can put the drugs down for my deductible or not. My husband takes regular medication and we're constantly getting refund checks for him since he hit his deductible long ago. Me? No problems except my ovaries don't work.

ANYWAY, they did a complete physical, then I had an extra session with a nurse counselor to re-explain the treatment and walk me through it (and hook me up with pharmacy brochures) and then ANOTHER extra session with a financial counsel who already knew how my specific insurance worked. I got a progesterone in oil shot to kick start my period. Then some blood work and a urine sample and I was good to go. Everything else I get to do here, where I live, except for the dye test for my tubes.

In some ways this is a huge step. I can already tell you my husband does NOT want to inject me with drugs (or go to his injection training this Friday ... or have twins (not that he's against multiples per se, but the higher risk did startle him a bit)), however we're taking this one step at a time. All I'm capable of doing right now is seeing if the big, heavy artillery drugs will help me ovulate. Then we will see where we go from there. My husband and I are taking this medical journey together, but we are doing so one step at a time.