Quick Fix vs. Prolonged Drawn-Out Nightmare

So, this is the week of The Ultrasound.  The ultrasound that determines if the Femara will be the quick fix I hope it will be, or if this is now going to turn into a prolonged, very expensive and drawn-out nightmare.  I’m at yet another point of my life when I’m sitting here thinking, wow, in just a few days I’ll know my fate.  It’s crazy.

Friday I go in for the Day 10 ultrasound, and I’m cautiously optimistic that everything will be fine and I’ll be able to do the IUI sometime the middle of next week.  As mentioned before the odds of my being unresponsive or having some weird reaction are pretty slim – I figure it’s about 90% that I’ll be able to proceed as planned.  But there is of course that chance that something will go wrong and I’ll be benched again.  Don’t really know how I’m going to handle that news, to be honest.

Because either this is going to work or it isn’t.  Either the Femara will be my Magic Pill that gets me a baby or it’ll be the first in a series of treatments that failed.  Again, I look at some of my fellow bloggers’ timelines and all that they’ve been through and am completely amazed – all the failed treatments, all the canceled cycles, all the disappointment.  I don’t know if I’d be able to keep going year after year like that.  I wanted to quit after one BFN!

I’ve been trying to formulate some kind of plan so I feel more in control.  I figure, ok, if I don’t respond to the drug, there’s no point in continuing to take it (apparently there isn’t a dosage issue like with Clomid – either it works or it doesn’t) – so that means expensive injectables.  Which I’d do…but I can’t do any time soon, since I’ll need more monitoring and so much can go wrong and make me end up in the hospital.  The smart thing to do would be to just shut down all operations until September, the first cycle where I won’t be traveling right in the middle of everything.  So that’s the plan if the Femara fails me.  Injectables, and not until September.  I don’t like this plan at all.

Then there’s the Femara works but the IUI doesn’t issue.  Part of me – the naïve part – thinks, how could this POSSIBLY not work?  I mean, if you produce follicles, if you have the trigger shot to guarantee ovulation at a certain time…how could it not work?  But plenty of people have done this protocol and it hasn’t worked.  So then what?  I guess if I respond to the drug then maybe I can keep taking it a couple more cycles.  One idea I had was, since I’ll be on progesterone anyway and progesterone supposedly delays your period, I thought I would continue taking it (I have five suppositories left over from last time) past a BFN to make my cycle start four days later which would then shift the timing enough that I could still try end of June & end of July.  As my cycle stands right now I’d have to miss the next two months (possibly three).  Maybe I can manipulate them?  I’ll ask the clinic what they think. 

So, that’s the plan.  I am standing on the threshold of this being just a simple fix and moving on to motherhood, or this whole process getting bumped into the expensive/difficult/scary side effects arena, which horrifies me, but hey, you do what you have to do.  Not one of us SMC’s thought we’d end up taking months, years, to have a baby once we decided to try, nor thought we’d have to spend thousands or chemically alter our bodies to make it happen.  None of this was part of the plan!  But now that I’m in it I’m just dealing with it, step by step.