Fumbling Towards Eggstacy

Monday's Miscellaneous Musings

My daughter makes me laugh. She loves covering her head with her shirt or her bib and walking around. She giggles like crazy doing that. Somehow she manages to not bump into anything doing it. I'm not so sure I'd be able to avoid walls myself!

She also likes climbing. I bought her a little table and chairs, and she uses the chair to get up on the table and she just hangs out on top of the table, dancing, watching the dogs.

She also started feeding the dogs. They are super gentle but even still we supervise this. Saturday she was feeding them french fries. One of our dogs, Pasha, accepts the food she offers, but the other one will not. So yesterday when Luca wouldn't take her Club cracker offering, Mia picked up a paper plate off the ground (it had dropped earlier) and put the cracker on the plate and put it in front of Luca. She is resourceful!

One more. She LOVES balloons. We had a birthday party here last week so I bought balloons. Mia was so motivated to get to them, she dragged her little chair over to them and stood on the chair, trying to reach them.

Now my fun fertility stuff. I had a bad reaction to Clomid -- visual disturbances. At night I saw vertical light lines and colored fireworks in my peripheral. Freaky. Doc said I should never take it again. From what I've read, 5% of people get this side effect, and for some of them it may be permanent. I'm still getting weak white vertical lines at night and it's been a few weeks now.

My IUI went fine but the HCG trigger shot hit me hard. Maybe it was body memory from being preggo but I was up all night after the shot puking!! And I could barely eat the next 3 days. I'm back to normal now. But I couldn't tolerate any vitamins or greens or anything. On the plus side I was taking in minimal toxins I guess.

My stats:
3 follies, 19, 20, 23 (day of trigger)
AMH came back at 1.7. It was 1.87 two years ago so pretty much the same.
They did the IUI only 18 hours after the trigger so we used our special back up method to hopefully cover all bases. There is so much variation on windows of things:
You can ovulate 24-48 hours after trigger with mean time 41.5 hrs
Washed sperm lasts 6-24 hours
Non-washed sperm lasts 2-5 days
Eggs last 12-24 hours
If only we could have monitoring to tell us exactly what's going on when.

I couldn't have acupuncture that day or the next due to scheduling so I asked the nurse if I should have a massage. She said yes. But I decided against it because that releases toxins and eggs are super sensitive to toxins.

That's about it. I feel nervous. Not sure exactly why. Maybe the thought of possibly being preggo again is making me nervous, since there are so many physical discomforts that go along with it, and my reaction to the HCG shot made the memory of all that come back. Maybe the thought of going through IVF again is making me nervous, it's not for the weak to take on, after all. And maybe a bit of "am I sure I can handle all this?" type of thinking is doing it. A busy job and two kids and a household to run is enough to make anyone a bit fried. I think I need meditation or something. But if I ever feel frazzled I just think of my daughter's beautiful laugh and it puts a calm and happiness over my entire body and I can handle anything with that feeling. =)

New Perspective

Yesterday I inquired about a Mind/Body health program that Conceptions offers, and the nurse told me it is only for people with primary IF and not secondary IF. I kindly said I understand, thank you. She did say they are trying to get a group together for secondary IFers.

My first instinct though was to scream "I DID experience primary IF. I STILL FEEL it. I know what it's like. It doesn't just go away once you have a baby. It lives with you forever, like a deep battle wound that leaves a lifetime scar."

We need a name for it, actually. Afterall, there's Gulf War Syndrome and Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome. Why not Post Intertility Stress Syndrome (or P.I.S.S.).

I pondered the rejection a bit and realized that my perspective this time is vastly different. If DD is an only child, that's OK. There are benefits to that situation. She'd get more of the family resources -- attention, more time, more stuff. There is a ground beneath my feet now. I have a base family to work from now.

This time around I'm going about my efforts more from an academic point of mind. Not that I wasn't a data hound before. But this time there's not the emotional neediness of desparately not wanting to be childless. Now the journey is more intriguing, almost expirimental, like...I wonder if I do [supplement ABC] if my egg quality will increase? If it does, awesome, if not, I'll try something else. Rather than dooms-day thinking, like...if it doesn't work this time it'll never work and I'll go to my grave alone, boo hoo. (Not to make light of these thoughts, I've been there and I respect anyone there and IF justifies the thoughts, but we all know this is the depth of despair and once you come out from it, you can find peace.) But I now have the luxury of not being tempted to ever go there again.

This time may turn me into a supplement junkie. And I'm learning about products that not only may help my egg quality and fertility, but may also help with heart health, more energy, better skin, youthfulness. It could very well be a bunch of crap written on a little green bottle of pills, but who knows, maybe this whole IF journey will in the end benefit me not only by better appreciating my child but also by better taking care of my body.

Here's a list of what I'm taking and some interesting info on them.

• Greens First & Go Greens - (similar products) The former came from my last acupuncturist, and the latter from GNC. They're little packets of green pouder that you mix with water and that give you the nutritional, whole food equivalent of 6-10 servings of green veggies.
• Vemma - again something from the acupuncturist and is sold in a kind of marketing-scammy way where you sign up to get 2 bottles every month. It's a liquid vitamin with mangosteen and green tea and aloe and a "full spectrum of vitamins & plant-sourced minerals." I'm going to cancel though because some of the vitamins and minerals are synthetic. Here's a great article on natural vs. synthetic vitamin sources.
• CoQ-10 (600 mg) - This "plays a key role in producing energy in the mitochondria, the part of a cell responsible for the production of energy." There's a study out there hidden behind password-only sites but copied here (scroll down on page) that showed improved egg quality & increased eggs for fertilization in mice.
• Vitamin D (1000 iu) - Shown to help with implantation rate here.
• Resveratrol (250 mg)- An anti-inflamatory phytoalexin produced naturally by plants and is advised by SIRM docs. I've read conflicting things on this, mostly that it's shown to be beneficial for plants but not necessarily mammals.
• Pycnogenol (50 mg) - Antidioxidant from pine bark, loaded with active bioflavonoids which are found in fresh fruits and vegetables.

Oh - and I caught a cold which sucks because there is research to show that it hampers with fertility and it's bad enough dealing with the side effects of Clomid given my <5% chance of pregnancy, let alone dealing with the effects for a lesser chance. Oh well at least I'm not doing IVF now.

Round Two (or is it Round Five?)

My beautiful daughter -- my dream come true -- is now one year old and walking. She loves swimming class, strawberries, yogurt, dogs, books, peekaboo (this somehow hasn't gotten old yet), sitting on dad's shoulders, going down slides (and trying to go back up), and the Upsidedown Show (a family fave). I am truly in heaven to have such a joyous child in my life. (and my husband likes her too).

 

If it weren't for my struggle in having her I'm not sure I would soak up each moment with her to the same extent. I do doubt that I could ever love another child as much as I love her. But even with that doubt I am certain I could love another child and make room in my life if blessed to that extent.

So now I'm ready to give it another go. Here's a run down of my efforts:

• I verified that I have insurance money left for another IVF. I do, thank goodness.
• I met with Dr. Swanson at Conceptions two weeks ago and he ordered blood tests and an U/S.
• FSH  is 9.0 which is good. Two years ago it was 10.4 (lower is better - doc wants to see <10).  Although you're only as good as your highest #.
• E2 (estradiol) is 28, it just needs to be < 80.
• LH was 5, just needs to be <= FSH.
• Resting follicle count was 13 and probably even more that the tech couldn't see (the nurse said they are happy to see 10).  
• I get my AMH # in another week and get my Day 10 FSH checked next week.
• I've been doing acupuncture, taking herbs, taking heavy duty liquid vitamins.
• I'm doing clomid starting today just so I don't "waste a month" of eggs while I'm still in my 30s. Dr. S gave it less than a 5% chance of working and I'm fully aware it probably won't work but hey what the heck.
• I'm considering taking bee pollen & royal jelly to improve egg quality but am scared of anaphlactic shock!! Also I haven't started taking CoQ-10 or L-Arginine or L-Carnitine but they're all sitting right here on my desk staring me in the face.

I asked about taking growth hormone with just a clomid/IUI cycle and doc says he won't prescribe because there are no studies to back it up. Because of my age myeggs may have hard shells which means they won't fertilize unless [a] growth hormone is used to make them better quality (which I think means softer shells too) or [b] ICSI is done where the embryologist actually punctures the shell of the egg and injects a single sperm. This helps because even the heartiest sperm may not be able to puncture the shell left to its own devices.

My biggest challenge is that Dr. S wants me to stop breastfeeding. I never thought I'd go this long (13 months) but here I am. DD shows no signs of wanting to stop and the more I read about BF the more I'm fine with going longer. However with IVF drugs it's not recommended, and BF may lower the chance of getting pregnant, IVF or otherwise. But DD is down to just twice a day and doc checked my Prolactin. If it is low it may not interfere too much. But he still says stop.

No idea if anyone reads this anymore but I need somewhere to capture all this data so it might as well be here!!