It's not the despair, it's the hope!

I love John Cleese.  I love how all the characters he plays are snotty, uptight, and ready to snap at a moment’s notice.  In one of his little known movies, Clockwise, he is attempting to get to a conference and has one mishap after another, hilarity ensuing.  At one point he’s so sick of everything that could possibly go wrong going wrong on this road trip that he yells out, “it’s not the despair that gets you, it’s the hope!!!”  And that’s exactly how I’ve felt for the last twenty four hours.

So up until yesterday I thought I was normal, healthy, and ready to become a mom in two weeks.  Sure, I have low post-ovulation temperatures, but this was a fairly common hormonal deficiency that could easily be solved by just taking progesterone supplements, and bam! - healthy baby.  Then the clinic called with my blood test results.

Yes, I have low progesterone.  It’s a 3.3 and they want to see a 10.  But this isn’t what concerned them.  They say I have hypothyroidism.  I’m at 4.9 (just slightly above normal range, which is 4.5) but they want you under 3 in order to get pregnant.  They said they want me to get on a medication called “synthroid” right away and then they will monitor me in six weeks (!) and see if it’s made any difference (!).  I right away made an appointment with a random Kaiser doctor (my first attempt at using my new insurance) in Glendale in the hopes that they’d just hand over the prescription and be done with it.  I thought I’d like to avoid another hideous blood draw if I could, so I drove up to the clinic to pick up my lab report. 

When I got there, the lady who did my ultrasound, X, was there, as was the original (Doctor?  Nurse practitioner? Specialist? Who knows) who I had consulted with and who knew more of my history, who I’ll call Z.  I picked up the paperwork and Z assured me the level really wasn’t that high, just fairly typical for women my age.  Which was reassuring.  But then somehow we got to talking about ovulation and Z asked X (ultrasound lady) what my lining was, which was 5mm (remember, when I said to X is this a problem she said no, it would be dissipating already), and then Z blurts out, “oh, then you’re definitely not ovulating.”  WHAAA?  I said but what about all the signs?  The positive OPKs?  The fluid changes?  The temperature dip and spike every month right on schedule?  The three bars on the fertility monitor?  She said yes, but you also have the low post-ovulation temps which means you’re not ovulating.  I was absolutely crushed.  I said to X (ultrasound lady), “but I thought you said you saw I had ovulated, that the left ovary was bigger than the right, that there was a follicle…”  She said she did see a follicle, but Z said no, I didn’t ovulate.  I told her my next period is due Sunday and she said I probably won’t get a period.  What?

I went home in a torrent of tears and frustration.  I’m telling you, every time I walk into that place, they give me a totally different story.  They contradict each other; they completely change their opinion of my history based on some random piece of information that contradicts every other piece of information.  They say the only thing that indicates ovulation for sure is the temperatures, and yet they don’t accept temperatures at all when it comes to timing IUIs – say it’s the “rhythm method” and it doesn’t work, so they ask you to use OPKs, which as we know have been reading bright and clear for me for months, always followed by that temperature dip, always followed by a temperature spike.  And yet they say I’m not ovulating.

Then I got a comment from someone on one of the Choice Moms discussion boards that made me start to think.  This person was furious that my clinic closed on that Sunday when I (thought I was) ovulating; she said I need to dump them and go somewhere that’s more accommodating.  I personally thought it was ridiculous that they would let me throw a whole cycle down the toilet because they didn’t feel like staying open another half hour; that and the constant changing of information has been driving me completely batty. 

So today I saw my generic Kaiser GP, who turned out to be lovely.  Although she’s not an ob/gyn nor a fertility specialist, she was very skeptical about the information I’d gotten from this clinic and encouraged me to at least see their ob/gyn for a second opinion.  She said that yes, if you have all the signs, and yes, your periods are normal, PAPS are normal, and I’m not THAT old, that she has a hard time believing I’m just not ovulating.  She also had never heard of this business of wanting a really low TSH number to get pregnant, and as expected wanted to do more thyroid tests to get a better picture of what’s actually going on.  She says that 4.9 is a number and she doesn’t medicate numbers, she medicates people.  So she asked me to come back for a full blood workup when I haven’t eaten (of course I had breakfast an hour before) and they will run more thyroid #s plus everything else I have no clue about – iron, cholesterol, etc, and then we’ll take it from there.  I set up an appointment for Tuesday with their ob/gyn; she said to bring all my charts, all my info, and just talk to them and see what they think.

So now I am hopeful again even though I know they could all say the same thing – my blood tests could come back hypothyroid and I’ll have to go on this synthetic hormone for six weeks and then see if it even makes any difference; the ob/gyn may take one look at my charts and say, “yeah, you’re not ovulating.”  They may tell me I have a litany of problems and trying to get pregnant will be a real uphill battle that may not even be worth doing (especially when I have $0 put aside for something like this).  But they may just put me on progesterone and tell me I’m fine and I can try when I’m ready (boy would I love to still try in April and May!).  But I will attempt to look at this as an exploratory time – I’m just going to take baby steps (no pun intended), get all checked out, talk to some people, get that 2^nd opinion, and see what comes of all of it.  Honestly, I’ve swung from despair to hope so many times in the last few months that I really don’t know which is worse.