Day Three (or Five?)
I told myself I would start a blog when I started my next cycle. I’m three or five days in, depending on how you count these things, so I missed my deadline (as I did with this whole getting pregnant thing).
I started Lupron on Monday (to hold back ovulation) and Menopur and Follistim on Wednesday (to get the ovaries going). The real action starts with the Menopur and Follistim; these drugs stimulate the ovaries to make way more than the usual one egg a month the body normally produces. Now my body is going through a kind of tug of war with itself. At least that’s how I see it. How can part of my body be making eggs and another part say “la, la, la, I’m in menopause and will not release them.” I’m no scientist, but I try to piece together what the doctors and nurses tell me. I vacillate between wanting to know everything and wanting to know nothing. Some days its best to sink into ignorance. Some days its impossible not to feel like a science experiment.
This is our third round of IVF. When we started our first one in Novemeber (which we entered into with blinders on), we said “let’s try it once, we’ll only do it once.” By the third day, we said “we will never do this again.” And we crossed our fingers and prayed that luck would be with us and that we wouldn’t ever have to go through the injections and mood swings and early morning doctors visits and proddings and pokings and procedures. We didn’t like this new thing in our lives that at times felt like a third person who had moved into our already too small apartment. But we weren’t lucky with the kind of luck we wanted that first time, and were even less lucky the second. So here we are at three, and we’ve said again, this is our last time, but four is my number. It has to be. You can’t do something like this knowing it is your only chance. That would be more devastating than the loss of something we’ve never had.
