Tuesday, December 20, 2011

Expectations

I'm in trouble. After being forced to wait to move forward the past three months, slogging through extra days of additional medications to get my follies to grow, and laying on my tummy last night after my IUI procedure, a switch started to flip...that switch between "yeah, right" and "it's totally gonna work again". Tonight, laying on my tummy after our second successful IUI (10 million sperm post-wash!), the circuits lit up and I found myself imagining we might actually have a baby (or babies) to celebrate Halloween-Thanksgiving-Christmas-New Year's Eve with in 2012. I can even picture the little orange onsie and matching cap with pumpkin stem.

Crap.

The thing is, expectations are very dangerous. There's this horrible acronym in the IVF world that's bestowed upon women who have undergone embryo transfer: PUPO. It means Pregnant Until Proven Otherwise. I'd never heard of it until Paul and I had our Little Embryo That Could, the 5-day blastocyst, transferred to my uterus in February's IUI-turned-IVF cycle. Another IVF patient in one of my (many) private online chat boards for infertility congratulated me on being PUPO. I was fine up until I Googled and saw what it meant. What a bunch of crap! WHY WHY WHY would you intentionally set a woman up to believe she is pregnant unless/until it's proven she's not? That's the dumbest, cruelest damn thing I've ever heard. It pissed me off immediately, especially after every emotional up and down Paul and I went through to even get to embryo transfer stage. (I guarantee Dr. M. would never be so flip as to tell a woman she's pregnant until proven otherwise.)

I certainly don't consider myself to be PUPO now. Heck, I'm only 1 day post-IUI (1dpiui), and fertilization of the egg (if it happens) by a sperm cell (if one makes it) can take up to 3dpiui (which would be Thursday). After that, said fertilized mass must travel down the length of my (right side only, boys!) fallopian tube into my (spongy, ready-to-rock-and-roll) uterus, burrow in, and continue dividing and growing and living into a healthy embryo, one that starts producing human chorionic gonadotripin (hCG, the pregnancy hormone) that is picked up by my scheduled qualitative beta blood pregnancy test on January 2nd, 14dpiui.

And yet, the daydreaming/wondering/trying-really-hard-not-to-plan-and-jinx-myself-ing has begun.

One day at a time. Breathe. Don't dress your babies before they're even created.

Today, both IUIs are complete. Overnight I ovulated (as evidenced by the horrid right-side Mittelschmerz which woke me up at 4:00 a.m. and caused me to be unable to walk upright to the bathroom at 5:30 a.m.). Tomorrow night I start my progesterone in oil (PIO - in cottonseed oil, because the standard soybean oil makes me itch like mad), 0.5cc daily until either I get a negative beta or 11 weeks if it's positive (or beyond, depending on what Dr. M. wants to do differently this time).

Without being able to help it, and because I've done it so freaking many times in the past, I'll start analyzing every twinge of my ovaries and uterus, feel myself up several times a day checking boob soreness, all the while comparing to the real early pregnancy symptoms I had in May, yet knowing full well the PIO mimics both premenstrual and pregnancy symptoms simultaneously. Our pregnancy in May took us both completely by surprise. Now that we know it can (and did) happen, and that superovulation IUI was the trick, how can we help but wonder whether it's happened again?

We both must now seriously manage our expectations. I know from experience (many, many experiences) that those low expectations seem to work best for me, but I don't know how well that will work this time.

1 comment:

  1. Okay I finally found my way back to your blog! Glad that second invitation worked!

    You can't help, but let yourself feel excited for the possibilities and hope, we need hope so badly and we have to believe it is out there. It will SUCK if things don't work, but I know it will be hard whether you let yourself get excited or not. It's so hard to be truly excited for yourself when you know how much stands in between you and bringing home a living, healthy, screaming babe(s). I will be excited for you even when you can't be because I know that sometimes that's how this works! I have so much hope for you and Paul and this cycle.

    PS If you had to keep yourself calm, cool and relaxed to get pregnant after a loss, you wouldn't know ANY BLM who ever got pregnant again. Don't let people tell you that "just relax" crap. We can't relax and even with crazy stress it can and will happen.

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