Customer service!!!

Been kept captive at home the last three days just processing orders due to Price Increase Week.  You should see me now – greasy hair, dark circles under my eyes, the house is a mess of cereal bowls and papers.  But it’s over now; the quiet after the storm, as it were.

Yesterday had an inauspicious beginning, which was although it was supposed to be the last day of the early bird discount for my event, in fact the registration page (not under my control) set itself to the higher prices 24 hours before it was supposed to.  This is something I have always feared would happen, but hasn’t happened yet.  Hey, I guess there’s a first time for everything, right?  So I woke up to a torrent of angry e-mails from people accusing me of ripping them off (never thinking it might just be a MISTAKE), and had to spend about two hours apologizing and issuing refunds.  Luckily the guy who set up the page for me was able to fix it after about an hour.  But it was NOT a fun way to start my day!

Then it was slow as molasses all day and I started panicking about money (my favorite pastime).  Talked to two people about how terrible this year is going to be and how broke I am going to be…and then, magically, they started signing up again.  And let me tell you, when it rains it pours!  By midnight I had entirely met my goal – I made the $29,000 I needed to make to be even with last year, and had twenty more people than last year.  Whew!

I wish I could be over the moon with the great turn out, but something else happened yesterday that put a pall on everything – probably due to the stress, I developed a severe back ache, chills, and fever.  I didn’t realize I had a fever until the evening, when I started taking my temperature, which was 100.6 and 100.9, respectively.  My back was on fire and I finally took half a Tylenol, which helped a little.  Boy what I wouldn’t have given to take an Aleve!  I of course obsessively googled fever during implantation, dangers of fever in early pregnancy, damage of fever to implanting egg, etc etc, but just got a lot of different opinions.  In the end I know a raise in body temperature is not good for early pregnancy – for those body temperatures I had yesterday, I might as well have just sat in the hot tub all day and cooked myself.  I really don’t think my fever was high enough to do any real damage – it’s only 8 dpo so nothing has even implanted anyway – but I will always wonder if that stupid fever jeopardized everything.  It’s gone now but my temp is still a little elevated and I still feel like crap.  Oh, and I have a ton of things to do today, and have to get up at 3 AM to go to Cleveland tomorrow.  Good times.

So in an effort to assuage my fears today I did a little research.  One thing that’s been haunting me is a thread on the Choice Moms board about IUI vs. IVF, and several of the women on there who had repeated failed IUIs said they wished they’d stopped earlier and moved on, because it turned out they had problems that would have made an IUI never be successful, as in, one woman discovered during IVF that her eggs could only be fertilized by ICSI.  This really made me think.  For all the expense of IUI after IUI, it makes me wonder how worthwhile it is to keep going on this path, especially with my schedule the way it’s going to be for the next six months.  Basically, unless my cycles change by manipulation, I have ONE chance to try again for the entire rest of this year, in September.  And then in January when I can start trying again I’ll be six months shy of 40. 

I’ve done a bit of research into mini IVF.  It appears it’s the IVF process – the withdrawal of eggs, the fertilization of eggs, and placement of eggs – without the hardcore medications and hyperstimulation.  It seems like they just take the one egg you’d produce naturally and put that “in” you, all natural-like.  I called my RE and they said they do offer this, for about $4000.  A lot more manageable than IVF’s usual $15,000 price tag.  Not that I love the idea of spending $4000 on anything – but that would be what I’d spend on three more failed IUIs.  So part of me is really considering it; if it turns out I can’t manipulate my next few cycles, it’s worthwhile to think about maybe skipping end of June, July, and August, all months where I’m going to be extremely busy and stressed out beyond belief anyway, and trying mini IVF for September.  Not that IVF in any form is a magic bullet; the odds of success are still shockingly low (how can it possibly not work?  But it fails all the time), but I kind of feel like I just want to wrap this puppy up.  Is it better to bank my remaining funds on one better shot than multiple less likely to succeed shots, with my age creeping up and the possibility of having some other issue I don’t know about that would make any IUI I try unsuccessful (what if I have one of those egg types that can only be fertilized using ICSI?)?

It’s all scary and a crap shoot but at least there’s a plan – looking at the upcoming months and how impossible it’s even going to be to go in for a basic IUI, it really makes me wonder if banking on one shot for mini IVF in the fall isn’t a better plan.  Anyway, it’s worth thinking about.  In the meantime I’ll take some hpts next week and maybe I won’t have to do any of this!