adieu, farewell, auf wiedersehen, goodbye

Third beta - 1769. No more blood tests needed, ultrasound in another 10 days or so.

Thank you all so much for your support. I started this blog because IF and IVF outraged and confused me. The whole process is demoralizing, destabilizing and ignored by the world at large. Little did I know my process would end after exactly 3.5 years of trying. Pregnancy on the other hand may be confusing but it is not an outrage, it is not ignored by the world.

I am not really interested in writing a pregnancy blog - there are many, many, many of them out there. If anything really bad or really good happens I may add a note, a sort of postcript to my narrative of IVF, but I don't think I'll be posting much more.

I spent a long time being a commenter and I want to continue - I am so touched and impressed by all of you out there. Amazingly strong and resilient women who are so giving and kind to complete strangers.

I will leave my IVF story up here for people to read. If someone comes along with my diagnosis they may find some solace in my happy end. I'll keep checking my email so feel free to ask me anything at all.

I'm tempted to keep doing book reviews and I'd love to start a blog about overachieving women professionals but at this point I'm afraid to write about my job.

I cannot thank all the commenters enough - even the anonymous ones - you were so, so helpful and kind to me.

With lots and lots of love and good wishes - Penelope

numbers

If numbers = plot , here you go.

hcg on Monday afternoon 920

they say that's good

I was away for several days - I have to say I still don't feel a thing although my husband claims my 32A chest now has cleavage - har!

the call...

I was so completely unable to work that I started a novel today while waiting for the call. It was the only thing that kept my mind off of things. A yoga mystery! Yee ha!

But who cares about that... you want the numbers...

beta 196

I can't believe it! I've never been pregnant in my life. They said they're still cautious but I'm excited. Next beta on Monday.

baby dreams

Okay - mothers and IVf. Do you fill her in? I swore I wasn't going to tell my mother until it was all over with but then she just happened to call the day after the transfer when I was feeling optimistic and so I gave her the gory details. I love my mother and she is an amazing woman in many ways but she's a nudge, and sometimes an oblivious one. (and no I didn't inherit this, I am a very sensitive, never give advice kind of person, ha!). It takes one to know one and I just can't help myself sometimes. So how can she?

She called last night to ask, do I feel pregnant? do I feel anything? Am I doing positive visualization (and thanks to mc's anji rec I can say yes, daily!) and am I relaxing? and "don't freak out if it doesn't work out because you have those frozen ones." Since I am pretty emotional I have a reputation as the family freaker-outer. "Ohhh, don't freak out but.." prefaces many comments from my family to me. And then I freak out or on the other hand you could say I EXPRESS myself while they say la-de-da, let's have a picnic, feelings, what feelings? In my nie on 38 years I have never seen my mother cry or even really scream. I do these two on all odd days of the month with extras for leap years.

Finally my mother asks, "are you having dreams about babies?" This is a new pregnancy symptom I hadn't really thought much about. And lo and behold I fell asleep and did have a baby dream. I had a dark-haired boy (unlikely w/my gene pool) who had a name I didn't like, something fussy like Adair. He was in some sort of NICU (I read way too many blogs and kind of think this is what always happens when babies are born.) However, the NICU was manned by the secretaries from my work (who are only nice to me when their superiors are which is not the case at this time) and they wouldn't let me in unless it was the right hours and they kept him in a filing cabinet and policed my visits so I could never be alone with him. As the dream went on he kind of became my cat but was still a baby, a pretty ugly tiny baby.

Sigmund? Jacques? You got anything for me on this one?

thanks mom now I had a baby dream.

I think part of why my mother is so weird about all of this is that she had quite a few miscarriages (before and after having me) and on some level I think she really, really wants to fix this IF problem for me but just doesn't know how.

I've got nothing

So I guess today is 10 days after the 3 day transfer and I haven't ever felt more normal. Normal breasts, no bloating, no weird food cravings, no fatigue other than moral, nothing. I feel PMS-y more than anything. Sad and crabby. Sad and crabby.

And yesterday I did a bad thing - reading everything on the internet and all those folks who had positives after IVF had symptoms and signs.

I'm not really up to POAS - I haven't got any and I don't know if I would believe it one way or another.

This 2ww really is the hardest part of IVF - if I do this again I'm planning a trip or something.

It's hard to tell what's hormonal and what's reality since I'm still completely demoralized about my job and I just don't know how to forget all that and focus on the positive since I feel no hope on any front.

AND it seems I was wrong about unfertilized embryos because according to a commenter an egg that does parthogenesis is an embryo - but not one that would ever become anything worth transferring - just ask Millie.

Democrats are stupid too...

Now as an infertile I may be too hep on the vocabulary of reproduction but I think I would remember a fair amount of it from biology class. The sperm, the egg, the embryo, etc.

So did any of you hear Bill Clinton on NPR yesterday? He was talking about the whole embryo donation/stem cell research thing and said he has nothing against research on "unfertilized embryos."

WTF??!!??

I guess it's just as well that Bill preferred BJs because he doesn't seem to have a clue about human reproduction.

If you haven't already done so, go read Julie's (alittlepregnant.com) excellent and articulate rant on the whole snowbabies thing.

On a completely different note I had a crazy psychological breakthrough while doing Supta Bada Konasana and listening to the Anji IVF cd yesterday. Because of my particular family history, I am very, very, very anxious about rejection and I realized that part of my IVF freakout is the concern that the children-to-be won't want me. Call me daft. Call me nuts, but identifying the weird old source of my fears made me feel much better, and I do realize how ridiculous this is. Leave it to IF to make sure you relive all of your old traumas - even when the rational mind knows better. So now I'm as bad as the religous right, I'm even attributing personal choice to those cell clusters!

hard times

Well it's getting harder and harder to think I might be pregnant. I feel nothing, nothing and I've got another week of waiting. My job situation seems hopeless at this point and I'm not sleeping well thinking I've wasted an awful lot of time on a profession that allows for truly crazy mean behavior. Unfortunately bad news triggers my anxiety/depression that all my positive efforts are for nought.

Additional stress is brought on by the concern that if I'm stressed out then this will be bad for any embryo action - so I lie in bed thinking "be calm" "be calm" "this is never going to work" "be calm" " the world is full of mean and nasty people and they have the power" "be calm..." and then it's 2 am, 3 am and I'm giving myself a headache.

I need a better therapist - mine basically said I'm strong and loving and I'll make it through all the crap. My mother could tell me that. My therapist said my job situation sounds like the Bush administration, mean-spirited people living in alternate realities. And that's not very helpful now is it?

My usually coping method for this sort of gloom and doom is to do crazy yoga poses where if I don't concentrate I'll crack my head open but that probably wouldn't be wise during this 2 week wait. Or I'd go mountain biking but that also seems too excessive.

A friend of mine is having serious surgery for cancer but she feels absolutely fine. She doesn't feel sick at all but the tests have shown there's something amiss. How can our bodies not tell us what is going on?

blood juice

The very nice technician at the clinic recommended drinking a lot 1/2 hour before a blood draw so I got a bottle of that Brambleberry iced tea, that has a very rich purply blood color, and downed it before my blood test. Don't get excited. It was just an estrogen test and it was fine.

Two nice things though - when I got my blood just at some anonymous lab the technician said I deserved to have children so I could pass on my pretty hair. This was kind of a shocker for me since I have yet to dare think about what my children might actually look like - wow. But she seemed entirely confident that they would look like me and that would be a good thing. Do I dare visualize such things? After 3.5 years of hoping, I'm pretty cautious these days and working more on being resigned than optimistic. It's so scary.

Also at the blood draw lab were two new-born twins, I guess one doesn't need to say two. Anyhow they were there to get their blood drawn (eek) and they were each only about as long as my forearm. Teensy tiny little babes.

Pretty nifty stuff. This could all be very exciting if I had slightly more optimism. One more week to go until the next blood juice drinking and drawing session - the scary one!

In the NY Times this morning there is a very strange article about Christians "saving" embryos. The group calls themselves the Snowflakes and they're out to get your frozen embryos and save them by transferring them to good Christian women/families. I was a little sensitive to the NY Times misusing the word "implant" because frankly that's the part that seems to be uncontrollable and up to God, the universe, or karma. Here's hoping Cecily will give us a good rant on this one! I'm just so discouraged by the constant, constant battling over women's rights to reproduce - it's my damn body, it's my damn family, and they're MY choices.