Feeling Too Good to be Pregnant? (Oh, and I Might Lose My Job.)

I’ve done 5 ART cycles before (4 IVFs, one FET), and I’ve gotten pregnant three of those tries. And I have ALWAYS felt like crap. Crappy when I was pregnant. Crappy when I wasn’t. I’ve never kept a symptom log or anything like that, so I’m not really sure what symptoms came with what results. But I do know that sometimes my bad symptoms stopped abruptly, and it seemed that that corresponded with the decline of the embryo.

Here’s the thing: I feel really good. Not completely pain-free, mind you, I still have some cramps and twinges. But I feel strong, clear-headed, and energetic.

This worries me.

Here is a list of what I have always thought were my pregnancy symptoms:

Insomnia
Tiredness
Headaches
Cramping
Backache
Tender breasts

In fact, the insomnia and tender breasts have been my most reliable symptoms. After my FET last year, which was my last pregnancy, I had insomnia and very sore breasts for days. Then I tested positive, but it was a very faint line. I knew it might not last, but hoped for the best. Then one night, before I even had my beta, I slept like a baby, and when I woke up my breasts didn’t hurt (they always hurt the worst when I’m getting up after lying down for a long time). And I knew that my embryo probably had died. And I was right.

Now? No such symptoms. Nada. I’m a bit fussy at night, but I think it’s more due to stress and worrying than anything else. And I’m having some mild occasional cramping, but nothing serious. Even my lower back pain seems to have disappeared. But most upsetting—my boobs feel fine, normal, not a hint of soreness. (And yes, I’m constantly feeling myself up to check.)

Does this mean I’m not pregnant? Does it mean it didn’t work? Or were all those symptoms just symptoms of my impending PMS? Were they never pregnancy symptoms in the first place? Does a healthy pregnancy feel different from an unhealthy one?

Or maybe this is all just because I’m so much healthier than I was a year ago. Or maybe, though this seems a stretch, this is all because I did a cycle with lupron? Does lupron change things that much?

I’m not going to lie—I’m going to be pretty devastated if this didn’t work.


On a wholly unrelated note (related only in the sense of can-you-believe-this-fucking-timing?), I might lose my job before October. Our office is conducting massive layoffs—as many as 20 attorneys out of 200. And while I have put a lot of years into this job, I work in a very exclusive division in which I’m the baby. So odds are that if my division has to lose one position, it’s going to be me.

This is a threat that’s been hanging over my head for more than 6 months. It’s so upsetting to me that I haven’t even wanted to mention it to you. In May, our union voted to give up our 4% pay increases and 2% bonuses for next year to prevent them from laying off 12 attorneys. Now, just a few short months later, the government is back for more.

This is a shitty fucking time to be looking for a job. The only people in the area hiring are the Feds, and it can take more than a year to get into one of those jobs even after you’ve been selected (which takes forever too).

And this isn’t such a great time for me, either. Can you imaging job hunting pregnant? Losing all your saved-up maternity leave? Or going into a job knowing you need to do more IVF—with the inconsistent schedule, hormones, and everything else involved. The bottom line is that I feel ill-equipped to change positions now. I’m used to being able to come in late if I have doctor’s appointments, work from home if I need to. And I’m used to being able to wear sneakers all day (bad back), which I can’t do if I’m in a job where I’m in court all day. And I don’t want a high-stress job, but that seems to be all I’m qualified for.

On top of all that, it’s a real blow because I fucking LOVE my job. I had planned to stay in this job for the next 30 years, no joke. You give up a lot to work for the government—money, prestige, support staff, office supplies. The tradeoff is supposed to be job security.

So this sucks, big time.

But you see what I mean, right? This news alone should have me all physically fucked up—I don’t react well to stress, and this is as scary as it gets. But I feel okay. Calm. Capable. Energetic.

I’ll know about the pregnancy on Saturday.

I’ll know about the job by the end of the month.

Welcome Home!

Welcome home, my four little friends. We do hope you enjoy your stay. Here in my womb it’s warm and dark, and just the right amount of squishy. There’s only one radio station, but it’s got all the chart-toppers loved by up-and-coming embryos all over the world, including heartbeat and bowel gurgles, livened up with the occasional enthusiastic (if often off-key) singing, screaming at various ball players, and a healthy smattering of “blue” language.

So come on in, pick a corner, unpack your DNA baggage, and settle in for a nice, long visit.

Your room may seem spacious now, but if you all decide to stick around it could get a bit cramped. So while we do appreciate your patronage and wish you all the best, we would appreciate it if at least two of you decide to try your luck in the great outdoors. Go camping, maybe see some sights. Washington, DC is lovely this time of year.

Feel free to decide amongst yourselves who’s going to stay and who’s going to go. (But if you find one of you is more stubborn and cranky than the others, be sure to encourage that one to check out early.)

Oh, and our lawyers tell us we have to advise you of the following:

If you all decide to stay, we may have to ask one or more of you to leave. Politely, of course, but we will insist.

- the Management

* * * * * * * *

So we decided to roll the dice. My RE gave us 15% odds of twins, and about 3-5% odds of trips or more. (By the way, I LOVE a doc who will actually give odds when asked.) She says that they can hook us up with the best reduction specialists around, in the unlikely event that it’s necessary, and that there’s only a 1% chance that reduction would cause miscarriage of the rest of the pregnancy.

She calls it aggressive. I call it desperate. But really, what’s the difference? The truth is, I’m happy with our decision. And I’m not sure I would be happy if we hadn’t gone all in.

Oh God, How Do I Make this Decision?

Five eggs. Four embryos. And my RE wants to put them all back.

And I’m completely freaked out by this.

We put four back last summer, but they were fertilized with J’s sub-par sperm, not with commercial super-sperm. And we ended up with a not-surprising negative beta.

My RE says that she doesn’t think the risk of multiples (beyond twins) is very high. Which, by the way, makes me kind of sad, because it means that maybe we’re not changing things SO much by going to donor sperm—maybe my chances of getting pregnant, even with a donor, aren’t as high as I thought.

I am so unbelievably torn. On the one hand, this cycle was pure hell (still is). And it was Cycle #5. I don’t know how much more of this shit I can take before I crack, or my body gives out completely. I REALLY REALLY REALLY NEED THIS TO WORK. Obviously, putting back four embryos greatly increases the chance of it working.

On top of all that, even assuming all four are capable of becoming bona fide fetuses, how much of that chance do I lose by freezing a couple of them? I know that a fresh cycle is a lot more likely to succeed than an FET. So what if we just transfer two, it doesn’t work, and then the FET on the other two doesn’t work because they didn’t do well with the freeze/thaw process?

And I would like twins. Yes, yes, I’m sure that if I actually have twins a year or two from now I’ll be wondering how it was possible that I ever wanted twins. I know they’d be so hard to care for as babies. But I want more than one child, and twins are my only shot at that. We put back four, there’s a higher likelihood of twins.

BUT, on the other hand:

Triplets? Quads? Reduction? Two and a half years ago, when we did our first IVF, when J and I decided to put back three embryos, we agreed that we would somehow try to survive triplets. Now I just think that’s out-of-the-question insanity. No way am I up to carrying trips, and no way am I up to caring for three babies at once.

So if we got incredibly “lucky,” we’d be looking at reduction. I haven’t Googled this process (too scary), but it sounds REALLY dangerous to the remaining fetuses. I imagine the odds of losing the whole pregnancy, or inducing pregnancy complications, are really high. What a fucking nightmare.

The other option is to put back three and freeze the one. But this sucks, too. Does this mean, if this cycle doesn’t work, that I’d have to go through a whole FET for just one embryo? (So suggests my shared risk contract.) Or could I do another fresh cycle and combine whatever frozen leftovers I have for a later FET? No idea.

This decision sucks. Maybe worse than any decision I’ve had to make. If I don’t put all four back, I’m going to spend the next two weeks freaking out that I’ve made the wrong decision. And if I do put them all back, I’m going to spend the next two weeks freaking out that I’ve made the wrong decision, and then another several weeks (assuming positive beta) wondering how many are brewing in there.

I’m almost hoping that one of them died last night. Which is just so, so wrong.

Less is More?

Unfortunately, the fog that is clouding my brain this week is blocking my ability to write—both in my blog and in my job. My fingers feel clumsy and words slosh around in my brain willy-nilly. Which of course makes me stressed out about not getting good work done while deadlines loom. In short, I’m a mess.

Here’s the skinny: this cycle is all about making high-quality eggs. Which is why my RE put me on the lupron. So I’m making fewer eggs. And I am trying really hard to be positive about this, but it’s scary having a twice-as-hard cycle for half-as-many eggs. It looks like I’m going to end up with between 5 and 7 eggs. Back in my heyday (and I so like the idea of an IVF heyday) I used to produce 11-13 eggs.

Then again (I keep telling myself), none of those 13 eggs turned into a baby, did it? I actually really like and trust my RE, so we’re probably on the right track. But no one can look at a sono and say “Hey, those are some great-quality eggs you’re growing in there!” And when what you hear is “only two on the left ovary,” and “they’re growing, but slowly,” it’s hard to feel like you’re doing a really good job.

My ovaries hurt. My lower back hurts. All I want to do is sleep, but I’m getting even less sleep due to the repeated early-morning trips to the RE for bloodwork and sonos.

Sometimes I think that this definitely is going to work. We’ve come so close so many times, even with J’s lackluster sperm. How could this NOT work with supercharge, high-test, commercial sperm? Right?

But I know that the odds are still 50-50 at best. And when I think of what the next three weeks may bring, all I can feel is tired.

How to Blog Through Mood Swings

I meant to be better about blogging this cycle. Really I did. I find just knowing that other women are reading my blog satisfying, and I get a lot of comfort and wisdom from the comments you all leave on my blog, as well as from reading your blogs.

But it’s hard to settle on a post when you’re mood is swinging around like mad. I come up with an idea for a blog, then an hour later I’m in a totally different place, and can’t imagine following through on my original idea. Here are some of my half-baked post ideas from the past few days:

• How crappy I feel. (And there are so many variations on this theme: bloating sucks because it makes me feel fat and ugly; if I’m so damn tired all the time why can’t I sleep at night; name that abdominal pain; headaches make me feel worthless; hot flashes in mid-summer in DC are redundant, yet still awful; and the list goes on . . . .)
  
• How much I just want to crawl under my desk and cry.
  
• How I wish my husband would realize how hard this is on me (stressful, full-time job + doctors appointments + hormones + physical strain + insomnia) and offer to do EVERYTHING he can to help me without me having to ask.
  
• How I get these strange bursts of energy (from the Lupron, I think) that make me kind of manic—talking really fast, laughing loud, and (when I can harness it) working really efficiently—and how that’s kind of fun.
  
• How sometimes I feel so drugged that it feels like I’m pulling my facial muscles through mud just to smile at someone, and it takes a concentrated effort to talk without slurring my words.
  
• How sometimes I find myself so full of hope this cycle I catch myself assuming I’m going to be pregnant in a few weeks and won’t have to do this again.
  
• How hard I find it to believe that this might work.
  
• How frustrating it is to have to plan out August assuming there might be a miscarriage that will pull me out of work for a week or more.
  
• How each IVF cycle gets harder, rather than easier, because even though you know better what you’re doing each time, the pressure is also higher each time, and how sometimes the pressure seems so intense I just want to scream.
  
• How sometimes I think that at some point my body is just going to give up and stop producing eggs no matter what drugs I take, and I have to approach each cycle as if it were my last.
  
• How work is a blessing, because it allows me to focus on something other than getting pregnant, something that I have some measure of control over.
  
• How angry I am that our office is announcing more RIFs, because I just can’t cope with that kind of fear on top of everything else I’m dealing with.
  
  And, my favorite:
  
• How much I hate belly pics of pregnant women, because I don’t need a glaring reminder that my normal condition is way fatter than that cute little four-months’-pregnant girl who’s just starting to poke over the top of her low-rise jeans.
  
  

But I’m not going to write about any of those. Instead, I’ll just give some updates:

1. Another sample of our donor became available, and we bought that one too. Which I think is making both of us feel a little better. Nice to know that if we have to go again we don’t have to pick another donor.
   
2. Despite my paranoia, I am producing eggs. Unfortunately, Lefty is running behind again. Stupid lazy ovary. Step up and be a man, dammit!
   
3. The Harvest is looking to be mid-week next week. My money’s on Thursday, though Wednesday’s running a strong second.

I’ll let y’all know what I find out in my monitoring tomorrow.

That Bitch Lupron

Guess what? Lupron causes insomnia. And headaches.

Fucking bitch.

"Our Guy"

We found our donor!

Last week I was sick as hell. This is the second time in two months that J has brought home a cold, been sick for 2-3 days, then cheerfully moved on with his life while I am sucked into a two-week-long tailspin that (at least last time) ended in a round of antibiotics. I swear, next time that man gets the sniffles he’s sleeping in the car.

And all this while we were mid-donor-search. I had ordered “personal profiles” on five more guys, and had flagged a couple of them for J to look at and order medical records. I told him earlier in the week that I really needed him to go through the medicals—he’s in a lull right now and I just don’t have the time. But I was still pretty sure that I was going to have to go through them at some point. After all, it took some time for me to get him to even look at the donor lists.

So I’m sitting on the couch, drinking my “gypsy cold care” tea and watching the Bachelorette (how can Jilly not see that Wes is such a slimeball?), when J walks in and pauses my program.

“I’m done,” he announces.

“Done?” I repeat, wondering what the hell he’s talking about. I take a stab in the dark, “You mean you found our guy?”

“Found him,” he confirms smugly. “Come on, take a look. I bought his baby picture.”

And on my computer screen is this blonde, bland-ish, adorable, blue-eyed toddler staring out at me. “Wow,” I said. “Is this one of the new guys I flagged for you?”

“Yup. The doctor. His medicals are clean. And check out is profile.” And then he starts running down the highlights: kick-ass SATs, MCATs, grades. Practicing physician. All-star athletics for both high school and college.

“And look at his facial features.” J was practically bouncing on his toes. “The only one that doesn’t match me is that he doesn’t have freckles.” (I still get a little misty-eyed at this—it wasn’t until we were deep into profiles that I realized J really wanted to find someone with features similar to his.)

“Is this the guy with two kids?” I ask.

“Uh-huh,” J responded smugly. “He’s perfect.”

Then we looked to see if he was available. No ICI (which is what our RE recommended), but under IUI it said “call.” Earlier in the week J had called the cryobank to see what that meant, and had been told they list “call” (rather than ordering online) when there were fewer than 20 samples left of that donor.

We looked at each other for a moment, then both started talking at the same time:

“I’m going to e-mail [our RE] and see if IUI is okay,” I said.

“I’m going to call the cryobank,” he said.

So I sent my e-mail and then paced around impatiently while he talked to the cryobank.

“Mmm-hmm. Uh-huh. Okay. Can you do that for us?,” he said, looking across the hall at me as I sat on the bed watching him. Finally, after what seemed like a really long time, he put down the phone.

“Our guy’s pretty popular,” he said, “there was only one sample left.”

Pause.

“And they’re holding it for us.”

Yesterday J bought the sample. It’s ours. This little piece of our perfect guy is ours.

I’m so happy about how this turned out. Every time I think about it I smile. I thought this was going to be hard. I thought we would get our short list and agonize over what we found. I had envisioned a pro/con list, or a chart where we compared medicals with personality or facial features with physical abilities. I thought I would have to put hours into reviewing medical files.

And I thought that I would have to push J to make the decision.

I really wanted this to be J’s choice—I wanted him to feel like he still was providing the sperm (albeit from a vendor), that it was his contribution to our child. I should have known he’d be up to the task once he put his mind to it. He’s always been a good shopper—he just goes in and gets it done, just like that. (Which is why we don’t shop together. I drive him crazy looking at everything 10 times and he makes me feel rushed so I make bad decisions.)

And the fact that we got the last sample just makes it all that much sweeter. After all, if everyone else wants a piece of this guy we must be onto something, right?

So now I’m thinking the cryobank needs to add a new column to the search feature: the ability to sort donors by “most popular.” After all, if it works for Amazon and Zappos and Art.com, why not for sperm donors?