Infertility Awareness Week & the Panic Sets In...

This upcoming week, April 23-29, is National Infertility Awareness week. I’m pretty aware of infertility every single week, but I must say that I’m becoming more and more aware and more and more nervous/worried/excited as we get closer to my retrieval date.

This coming Wednesday, April 26 is my medication class for IVF retrieval. I should also be getting my medicine protocol calendar early next week. This means I will be getting all of my medicine soon! I won’t start taking the medication until Monday, May 8^th, but even that is just around the corner. 

This week I started going to acupuncture to try it out. Other women who have done IVF and been successful swear by it, so at this point I’m willing to try anything! I went for my first appointment on Tuesday and I will go back every week (sometimes twice a week) for relaxation and to balance the body. Closer to transferring the embryos the acupuncture can help thicken the lining of the uterus to help with implantation. 

All of this is making it so much more real. Up to now I’ve been living life like normal and nothing out of the ordinary. Now things are starting to change to prep for retrieval. I have my appointments all set for the next few weeks: 

May 3^rd at am for my Baseline ultrasound and labs

May 8^th I start medication

May 12^th at 7:30am I go in for my labs

May 15^th at 8am I go in for my CD 9 work up

May 18^th-21^st will be my retrieval

I’m so excited to get to that point, but I must say I have been super nervous and worried about it all lately. Quite a few ladies in the IVF group I am part of that went through retrieval last week did not have embryos that made it to day 6. After retrieval they monitor they fertilize the embryos and then watch them for 6 days to make sure that they grow. Some will arrest (stop growing) between fertilization and day 6. It is possible to retrieve plenty of embryos and not have any that make it to day 6, which in that case there would be nothing to transfer. I ache for the ladies who are going through this and I pray that we have embryos that make it to day 6. 

Because I my concern I went back and asked my doctor about another sperm selection technique and she recommended us signing up for it. It is called PICSI: Preselective Intracytoplasmic Sperm Injection is a technique that simulates the natural selection of mature sperm post Nanobead Sperm Selection for the process of ICSI.  In natural conception, the fertilization of an oocyte only occurs by a sperm that is capable of binding to hyaloronan present on the surface of the oocyte. This interaction can only be achieved by a mature sperm.  Hyaluronan is a compound found naturally in the reproductive tract, as well as, other areas of the body and specifically in connecting cells of an oocyte.The PICSI method includes the addition of small droplets of hyaluronan to a sample of sperm. The sperm that attaches to the hyaluronan is then selected for use in ICSI. This is an additional $200 but hopefully it helps pick sperm that can help the embryo fertilize and grow strong! 

I am also having mini panic attacks about starting the medication because it means I have to stop another medication. I haven’t told many people at all but I mentioned in my first post that a few years back when I was diagnosed with hypothyroidism I started losing my hair. Well the hair loss never did stop. I have been going to a dermatologist for the past few years. I have had biopsies of my scalp to find out what is going on and we found out it has to do with PCOS and my hormones attacking my hair. For that reason I have been using topical treatments to help fight the hormones and keep my hair. I will not be able to continue these treatments while I’m taking fertility medicine. I will stop the treatments as soon as I start the fertility medication. This means all of the hair that I maintained by using the treatments has the possibility of falling out. While you may think ‘it’s just hair’, it means a lot to me and it’s very upsetting to think about losing it all. And there is zero guarantee it would ever grow back since the hormones that attack it kill the entire root. I bought a wig a few years back when things were getting bad originally. I never had to use it, thankfully, because of the treatments, but at least I still have it if things get bad. 

 

I used to have severe panic attacks when I was originally losing my hair. I would cry my eyes out and ask Steven if he would still love me if I was bald. I couldn’t imagine him being attracted to me if I did not have any hair. I still feel like that some days when I think about it. He is very supportive about it all and I love him even more for that. I just wish I did not have this added stress to an already stressful situation. 

Keep your fingers crossed for me! I will have my fingers permanently crossed for the next few months!

Giving Thanks and Taking Control

So this past week I started to take control…birth control that is J It’s really funny to think that the first ‘official’ step in the IVF process is taking birth control. I was super excited to take the first dose since it made everything even more real.  You might be asking yourself why someone who is trying to have a baby is excited about birth control, well here is the answer. Birth control helps to prepare the ovaries for stimulation. The pills decrease the chances of creating cysts that could interfere with the cycle start. They also allow the doctor to control the timing of the cycle.

The clinic that I go to, MCRM (Missouri Center for Reproductive Medicine) has one week every month for IVF egg retrieval and one week for embryo transfer. So all of the ladies that are doing IVF that month need to be, roughly, on the same cycle to be ready that week. I will keep taking the pills until around the first week of May. After that I will start taking the medication to start stimulating my ovaries to produce, hopefully a lot of, eggs for retrieval! 

I do want to take a minute to say how grateful I am for the fertility clinic and their staff. I have been able to ask a million questions and they get back to me in less than an hour. I have been working closely with their financial person, Dena, and my IVF coordinator, Jen F., and they both have had well over 50 e-mails from me in the past few months. I was so impressed with the timeliness of their replies! I am excited to start my journey through IVF with them!

I also want to give a shout out to a Facebook group that some of the ladies who have done/are doing IVF at MCRM have started. It is a private group called MCRM IVF Support Sisters. These ladies have been absolutely amazing. It is a group of around 150 past, present, and future MCRM patients who share their advice, their success, their setbacks, and their support with everyone. I have learned so much about the process from these ladies! I have gotten to follow their journey through infertility and they are sharing in mine. Sometimes it is scary being a part of the group because when IVF doesn’t work for one I get worried that it might not work for me and my heart aches for that person. But then there are those that IVF does work for and I am reminded of the excitement and hope that I have and I get to rejoice with them!

I once again want to thank those who have contributed to our crowdfunding page! We’ve had a good show of family support in the past two weeks! We are almost half way to our goal J And for those of you in the St. Peters/St. Charles, MO area, if you're out and about today (or anytime in April) stop by the Barnes and Noble Cafe in St. Peters off MidRivers and order a drink! My husband is the cafe manager and they are doing a competition in the district to see who can go above plan in drinks by the highest margins for the month of April. The manager of the cafe that wins gets a large cash prize! His store is working their butts off to help us win this prize to go towards our Journey to Baby Kneeland! They have started calling the competition Baby Bonanza! Every drink made by the cafe counts!

PS- I cannot remember if I posted about Gizmo since he got his surgery. We had his surgery a few weeks ago and we got his biopsy back and it was not cancerous yet!! We are super thankful about that! He is working on growing back his hair from the surgery now.