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!

He who never plays, never loses

This is one of my favorite weeks.  Not only is it Price Increase week, which means I’m making about $10,000 a day right now (don’t worry, that’s not even a fraction of what I need to pay the expenses of my event, much less pay to live…but it sounds impressive), BUT it’s also the start of HBO documentary series season.  Last night was a doc on Bobby Fischer.  I loved it because a) I love documentaries about competitions/sports; they always have me on the edge of my seat, and b) I love mental illness.  So as far as those two things, this documentary pulled out all the stops!  If I could be an armchair psychologist I would diagnose the late Mr. Fischer with a little Asperger’s, followed by paranoid schizophrenia.  He also exhibited the bizarre phenomenon known as “self-hating Jew”.  Apparently his relatives had to throw him out of dinner parties because he’d start railing about “the Jews”…and they were all Jewish.  Huh? 

Anyway, there was a moment in the documentary that made me grab a pen and write something down.  It’s when they were interviewing the young Anatoly Karpov (pic above) who won the World Chess Champion title by default because the current title holder, Fischer, didn’t show up.  They interviewed Karpov about his thoughts at the time, and he said that he thought Fischer was afraid of losing, and said, “he who never plays, never loses.”  Americans would say, “you’ve got to be in it to win it”.  Is this an American mentality vs. a Russian mentality?  It reminds me of that great moment in The Sopranos when Tony’s Russian lover says, “you Americans expect nothing bad to ever happen, and the rest of the world never expects anything good to happen.” 

This struck a real chord with me.  With all this TTC stuff, I realized I am making myself vulnerable to losing.  After all, if I never tried TTC, I would never have known if I could have a baby or not.  I would never have known that I wasn’t actually ovulating; I would have gone on blissfully believing that I could have had a baby, had I wanted one.  But since I’m actively trying, and using medications now, and have already had one failure, the stakes are so high.  I’m afraid to lose.  But I know not even trying is not an option.  So, here we are.  

Today I broke down and started my HPT Challenge, because I figured, why the heck not?  So I took a non-sensitive, “take after your missed period” test, the first of six I have on hand.  And guess what?  At 6 dpo (and 8 days past the hcg shot) the test was NEGATIVE.  I have to admit this came as kind of a shock to me.  I really didn’t think the shot would be out of my system this early (after all, for many it lingers on for two weeks!), and made me question a lot of things.  Perhaps if I used a more sensitive test it would have detected trace elements of it – but it really doesn’t matter; if my gauge is going to be these particular tests, since they are the ones I have on hand, then I know that there will be no false positives as long as I keep using these tests.  So the shot is officially out of my system.  Kind of bummed I didn’t get the thrill of a positive test just once even if it was fake, but oh well!

So what now?  Well, I don’t know.  I am very much playing this cycle by ear because if there’s one thing I’ve learned about TTC it’s that there’s no way to predict how you’ll react to something, so it’s best to be flexible.  So there’s no point in testing again for a good long while – probably not until next week.  Period is due about Tuesday, so I figure once I get back from Cleveland on Sunday I can test Monday and Tuesday, and if I really snap, go and take the blood test.  But there’s no point in doing anything this week, and I’m out of town Fri – Sun and it’s probably best not to test while traveling because I’ll want to break down and cry and I can’t do that surrounded by people.  Can I hold out until Monday, 12 dpo?  I don’t know!

Another blogger came up negative after IVF.  A big part of me thinks, how is this possible?  I mean, you extract the eggs, they fertilize, they get put back in your body.  How can this possibly not produce a pregnancy?  And I’m doing IUI which makes the sperm find the egg, fertilize it, and then the egg has to find its way to the uterus and implant – how could that possibly work, if IVF doesn’t?  And to women MY AGE with no known fertility problems.  I’ll be honest, it scares the crap out of me.  Makes me start thinking again….um, exactly how long is this going to take?  If it ever takes?  Will I one day wish I’d never played so I never lost?

Chicken make lousy house pet

Not much to report today, but thought I should check in.  Had some high anxiety this weekend, probably because I incorrectly thought leaving my schedule open would be good for me – but it just left me to sit and stew.  At a wedding shower yesterday the book club ladies and I were talking about all this TTC stuff and I was mentioning how surprised I was by my intense reaction to the failure of IUI #1, and a friend in her second trimester said something I’ve come to realize is true – that all of this TTC stuff comes from somewhere else.  It’s not logical, it’s not rational.  So to be completely gutted by the failure of a pregnancy attempt, even when logically you know the odds are not on your side and you can keep trying so it’s really no big deal, is actually pretty normal.  I often liken it to the way my chickens behave (yes, I have chickens).  I’ve watched as one chicken lays an egg in her little box, and the other chicken stands outside looking at the laying hen, and emits noises than can only be interpreted as “crying”.  I’ve googled this and other chicken owners have mentioned this phenomenon.  Even chickens are jealous when other chickens have babies and they don’t.  How far removed are we women from the basic impulses that drive these chickens?  Not that far, apparently!

On that note, and I have been trying to think of the proper way to say this so as to a) not make it all about me, and b) not make people feel bad – one of the things that got me going this weekend was the sudden spate of BFNs among all my favorite bloggers in the last week.  With everyone testing at the same time I thought for sure one or two would come up positive…but no.  BFNs all around.  Which made me immensely sad for the women involved (I feel like I know you all, of course, and hope you feel the same way about me!), and also made me less optimistic about my own chances this time.  One gal noted she’s now spent $30,000 on many failed IUIs and one IVF attempt and still nothing.  This scares the crap out of me, and makes me rail against the universe.  It’s so unfair!  All these ladies want is a chance to be a mom.  Is that too much to ask?  Can’t you freakin’ throw a bone to one of these ladies, please?  It’s so nuts. 

In the meantime, this week is my price increase week, which means non-stop work.  In fact, the next six weeks is going to be nothing but non-stop work for me (my event is mid-July) which is a blessing and a curse.  There are actually long stretches of time during which I completely forget I may be pregnant right now.  I am busy ordering blank T shirts to be imprinted, scheduling bands, and dealing with customer service issues.  I have two more band trips before my event, one coming up this weekend.  I went ahead and booked my own room at the hotel since I was meant to be sharing a room with three other people, and what with greasy progesterone supplements leeching out of me as I sleep and possibly taking pregnancy tests, plus my need for rest and quiet, I decided it was worth the expense to have some privacy.

How am I feeling?  Oh, fine.  This IUI had almost no cramping at all, which as you know is a good thing and a bad thing, because when you feel all normal it makes you think it’s not working, whereas when you feel all weird you think something is happening.  Perhaps the lack of cramping is because my uterus is now used to being poked on a regular basis.  I have been taking lots of naps, but I chalk this up to the progesterone, the elevated stress due to my event, and my insisting on nap time as a way to get through my day.  As you know even if I were pregnant now it’s WAY too early to have any symptoms – nothing will even implant until the end of the week, so technically I’m not pregnant now no matter what.

Still have no idea about a protocol for testing.  At the moment I’m leaning against doing a blood test because I just can’t stand this being in someone else’s hands – I can’t handle waiting for the phone call, I just can’t.  That was a miserable experience last time.  And since this time it’s in my best interests to delay my next cycle by continuing to take progesterone for a few days longer than usual, then there’s no rush to find out “for sure” like last time.  Now, will I be able to keep to this after Day 14po rolls around?  I don’t know.  Right now I’m calm as a cucumber but I know from experience that starts to evaporate at about 9 dpo.  I do plan on doing the hpt challenge – testing on Wednesday to see if the hcg shot is still in my system, just for fun.  If it is, then I know I need to keep testing every other day or so to see if it’s gone or not; if it isn’t, then I know any test after that is accurate.  Nobody seems to have an answer as to do the tests stay positive or do they go negative and then positive – I guess it depends.  I don’t know.  I won’t worry about it until the time comes.  For now, I’ve got shit to do!

Lies, Lies, Lies, Yeah!

Fortunately I have been under such a flood of work the last two days that I have not had much time to contemplate what may or may not be going on in my uterus.  My event is six weeks away, the price break is six days away, and all hell is breaking loose.  Honestly, as much as it stresses me out, I’m glad – I’m going to need all the distraction I can get the next two weeks – and beyond!

Had a VERY uncomfortable conversation with my co-bandleader today.  We have been booked for a New Year’s gig on the east coast which is very high profile and very important.  I would love to go – but I doubt I’m going to be able to make it if I’m 7-8 months’ pregnant.  So the guy in charge e-mailed me saying he wants to announce we’re playing right now, so this is my last chance to negotiate/back out (he of course has no idea what I’m going through, but I’ve been very wishy-washy with him for obvious reasons).  I figured the first thing I needed to do was make sure the gig could go on without me, so I called my co-bandleader to ask if he’d be willing to do it with another singer or no singer, “just in case”.  The rest of the conversation went like this:

“Yeah, I mean, we can play without you, but why?  Why wouldn’t you be able to make it?”

“Well, I probably will be able to make it, but just in case something comes up…”

“What, like holiday plans?  I mean, can’t you plan around that?”

“Yes, but you know, just in case something happens between now and then.”

“What could possibly happen between now and then?  Do you just not want to do this gig or something?  Is there something I should know about?”

“No, it’s not the gig, it’s just…stuff might happen…”

“Well, are you ok?”

“Yeah, I’m ok.”

“Well, I can tell you don’t want to talk about this right now, so…”

Ugh!  It was excruciating, and I’m still full of uncomfortable feelings about this.  Why not just tell him?  I have to be honest, I’m on the brink.  But it still gets back to my original intent in not telling certain people – this person alone will be most negatively affected by my having a child, from now on.  The possibility alone will stress him out, and why stress someone out when none of this may ever happen, or certainly not soon enough to jeopardize this particular gig (after all, if this month doesn’t work but next does, I may still be able to make it – anything after that and I’ll be fine).  And I just plain don’t want people knowing.  I want to tell everyone when I have actually achieved a pregnancy, when it’s far enough along that I don’t have to couch the news with a “only if this one makes it”, when it can be a joyful thing and not a stressed-out “this might not work now, or ever, or even if I do get pregnant I may miscarry over and over again, who knows…” I mean, that’s not fun!!!  I don’t even want to think that, much less say it out loud to someone else.

I keep reminding myself that this guy has a lot on his plate and I’m sure the last thing he’s thinking about right now is, “What’s wrong with her?  Is she sick, is she ok?”  I’m sure he’s forgotten this conversation already.  But it’s bugging me a lot.  I wish I could just tell everyone and have everyone pulling for me.  But I don’t know what awaits me on this “journey” and I don’t know how I’m going to feel…about anything.  And apart from the few friends who know and broadcasting every detail here anonymously, I really, REALLY don’t want people to know about this until it’s for sure a done deal.  Until I can say, “this is one doodle that can’t be un-did, home skillet.”

Two

So, guess what?  I had IUI #2 today at 4 PM.

Went in at 2:30 for the “just in case” ultrasound and they said, “it’s happening right now!!!”  Not that they can actually see an egg rupturing, as you know, but they can tell by fluids & appearance of follicles, especially when they have the previous day to compare to.  So they told me to come back in an hour and a half and we went for it!

I filled that in between time by going to Target and buying a new doormat (dog got diarrhea all over the old one yesterday), water filter (the one I bought a few weeks ago keeps popping off the faucet and spraying water all over the kitchen), some Tylenol (be damned if I’m going to have harsh menstrual-like cramps for three days like I did last time), some Luna Bars and hair gel.  Was tempted to stop by the baby section and buy myself a little good luck charm – a cute onesie or something – but just couldn’t bring myself to do it.  I’ll admit it.  I’m afraid to be hopeful.

I am trying very, very hard to be in the moment, honor this moment, and be happy.  And I am.  Oh, I am very grateful that for once everything went my way and I was able to try today, rather than the horror of being told, “you didn’t respond to the Femara, you’re going to have to look into other options,” or, “oops!  We missed it, sit out thirty days and try again later.”  Any number of things like this could have happened, but they didn’t.  And unlike April we saw not only a giant follicle but evidence that it had ruptured.  So, short of a non-viable egg, there is absolutely no way this time could fail.

But hope is hard.  Because all of this stuff is such a crap shoot, and I really want to avoid the pit of despair I fell into last time after it didn’t work.  The good news is the clinic confirmed for me that yes, I can continue with the Femara a few more cycles (whoopee!) and not have to move on to injectables; they also said I can use the extra progesterone to delay the next cycle if need be (although it may not actually delay the next cycle, it’s worth a shot so the whole summer doesn’t get flushed down the toilet).  So at least there’s a plan in place in case of failure, and it’s a plan I like and not a scary one.

How is this time different?  Well, for one thing not knowing we’d go today kind of changed the expectations, because I wasn’t prepared for it; originally it was supposed to be tomorrow AM.  BTW, we did the trigger shot last night (thanks again for your help, you know who you are!) and it was SO not a big deal that I felt silly for all the fears I’d had – I barely even felt it, and so far have had no side effects at all.  After yesterday’s ultrasound I had all kinds of cramps/twinges which made me worry I was ovulating right then; apparently it was actually starting without the shot.  I don’t believe I had those kind of feelings when I was younger and not on birth control, which makes me wonder, maybe I NEVER ovulated before, not in my entire life.  Interesting, huh?

So I don’t feel the weight of last time, which is ironic, considering the fact that last time was guaranteed to fail (although I didn’t know it then) and this time has an excellent shot of actually working.  Maybe it just gets down to having already done it once.  I guess everyone remembers the first time they had sex, but who remembers the second time?

For now I’m going to try to let myself be hopeful and happy.  No reason not to be.

One ritual-type thing I tend to do is have soundtracks for things.  So the soundtrack for the first IUI was Foster the People’s “Pumped Up Kicks”.  This time it was Wreckless Eric’s “Whole Wide World.”  It’s a song about a quest for “someone”, which seemed appropriate.  Some of the lyrics I thought were apropo:

I should be lying on that sun-soaked beach with her
Caressing her warm brown skin
And then in a year or maybe not quite
We'll be sharing the same next of kin

I'd go the whole wide world
I'd go the whole wide world
Just to find her
I'd go the whole wide world
I'd go the whole wide world
Find out where they hide her