Well that certainly was fun!

Saturday morning was as interesting as it could possibly be. Our alarm went off at 5:30 am. Last year on the day of my wedding I said- "sweetheart, next year on our first anniversary I want to wake up at the crack of dawn and go do something awkward and painful." I'm so glad my loving husband remembered and made my day as special as possible. All my dreams came true...

Seriously though, I really am kidding. Aside from the IUI we had an amazing anniversary. We got to the doctors office around 6:45 am --- thanks to my impeccable driving skills (i.e. 85 mph on the parkway the whole 23 miles without getting pulled over) and arrived just in time for my husband to give his sample to the lady at the front desk (VERY awkward for all parties involved.) Then we waited. A whole hour and a half. It wouldn't have been so bad if not for the music in the waiting room that was just a touch louder than waiting room music should me, combined with the waiting room TV that was playing some dvd that I see every time I go in for an appointment. None of the interviews coincide with each other (dinosaurs and then Ricky Gervais) and they play it loud enough to be heard over the already loud waiting room music. So strange.

Well after the thrilling 90 minutes of my husband and I trying to entertain each other enough to stay awake, they called me in for the big show. Really, I think it was a show. There was a doctor I had never met before performing the procedure and a nurse and my husband and me in all my glory on the table with a paper napkin attempting to keep myself covered from the waist down. They always seem to make those things like 1 inch too small to so everyone sees my butt the second they walk in the room and if I try to do anything like make the napkin cover me, well it's a napkin so it rips and then nothing gets covered and then I have half a napkin where a whole one would at least pretend to cover maybe half a butt cheek.

So the doctor comes in and is all ready to go and I assume the position and he takes the thing and sticks it in my nooner as hard as he possibly can to open me up, I think. It hurt. Really bad. My husband then felt bad and held my hand. And then before he injects me with the sperm he's like "you have a tilted uterus" all serious like the world is ending and I freak out. Thanks unknown fertility doctor. You really know how to put my mind at ease when I'm the most vulnerable. So then he pushes down on my belly to straighten out my uterus before injecting me. This makes me hurt double. I'm getting squished and stretched in all different ways and right at the end the doctor goes: "does that hurt?" No doc. But just for good measure, I'm gonna punch you in the face and then after, I'll ask how pleasant the experience was for you. His bedside manor kinda sucked but the end result was that there was sperm where the sperm should be. He said it was in the fallopian tubes and that's good cause apparently my tilted uterus was making them hard to get there. And I know I ovulated cause I was clomid crazy and my pee stick was positive. Then he shook my hand and said something along the lines of "go have sex the next 3 nights now. And good work." or something. I don' really remember. I was a bit too traumatized from the past 5 minutes. --don't get me wrong, I knew what I was in for and I'd do it again a hundred times to make a baby but I just thought you all might want to know about my experience.

After that we drove on into the sunrise for some rest stop food before driving the hundred miles to our anniversary extravaganza!! I hope you enjoyed reading this post as much as I had writing it. We're still saying our Saint Gerard prayers every night. We have this paper that my aunt sent me with 2 prayers to him that we take turns reading every night. We still have faith. Thanks for listening everyone. Talk you all soon :)

The big day is finally here!

What a crazy crazy week it has been! I took the clomid last week starting on Tuesday and taking it through Saturday and it kinda made me a tad miserable and I think my husband can attest to that. The first couple days I was moody and the last few days I was just plain sad. And my ovaries hurt really badly on the 4th day. The moodiness lasted up until this past Wednesday. I didn't want to talk to anyone except my husband when I was feeling like yelling at someone. My mommy was texting me and I kept apologizing because I just really wanted to be alone. It was making me depressed and I was starting to feel like I was doing this all for nothing. We've been trying for so long and getting no where.

My three tentative IUI appointments were for Wednesday, Thursday and today which is Friday. Basically, on the day you ovulate, you come in the day after and they perform the IUI. For the past year I've been taking ovulation tests and they've been doing this fade thing. There's never really been a big LH surge like everyone talks about. The line just sort of fades and gets darker over a few days until the control line is the same as the other line and then my husband and I sit around trying to decipher the lines, because we honestly never have any idea what is going on when I pee on all these things. They don't actually spell it out for you-- they just put pictures on the papers on the inside of the box and give directions on how to pee on the sticks and then you have to take your best guess on what exactly is going on... anyway, the day after what looks like a surge (or just a darker fade than the day before) it starts to fade out again until the line goes away a few days later. VERY confusing.

Well this month there was no fade. No nothing. Just a bunch of clomid miserableness and a lot of crying and emotional ridiculousness. I even called the doctors office on Wednesday morning at 7am and proceeded to yell at them (and then they yelled back at me and told me to stop yelling lol). They told me to calm down and not worry because Wednesday was the first day that I could potentially be ovulation and I still had a whole week of days that I could ovulate. The nurse kept saying "it's too early to be worrying right now" (Right. HA! Story of my life...) So for the past few days I've been taking the ovulation tests and seeing NOTHING. Not even a hint of a faded line. Well I woke up this morning and had a good feeling that today was going to be my day. Sure enough 45 minutes ago I took a test at work and there was a very dark positive line. Well I called the doctor and he said to come in tomorrow morning to have the procedure done. Tomorrow!!! I had a feeling it was going to happen this way. Tomorrow is my first wedding anniversary and my husband and I have reservations at a hotel in Cape May tonight and tomorrow night but I guess we'll be arriving late. I don't mind and know my husband doesn't mind. We were nervous thinking the ovulation was going to happen after we got there and we'd have to leave early but I'd rather arrive late than have to cut the vacation short.

Prayers to St. Gerard and God have been louder than normal this week. Lets hope they're answered... Thanks for listening everyone! Talk to you all soon :)

3 days in...

This is some crazy stuff. I took it Tuesday morning at 6:45am and felt fine fine fine until about 12:45 pm. All my side effects seemed to hit me all at once, and now that I'm on day 3 they're getting a bit stronger. When everything hit me around lunch time I was a little of everything-- a little nauseous, a little lightheaded, my head hurt a tiny bit, I was a little moody for a little while and every once in a while I would get a hot flash and go into the kitchen and stick my head in the freezer to cool off.

Day 2 was a bit worse because I was very sad. When the doctor says moody he doesn't just mean angry, I was very sad and crying and then happy and a little short tempered. Still nauseous and lightheaded and my head was still hurting from the day before, but all in all it's been manageable. The only thing that's a little annoying is the night sweats. Hot flashes are a side effect of clomid and I seem to only get them when I'm sleeping now. 2 nights in a row I've woken up in the middle of the night so I'm going to assume this is how it will be from now on while I'm on it.

Today is day 3 and when I took it this morning I didn't automatically become nauseous like before and I thought things were getting better but right when I got to work I became very lightheaded. And now I'm moody. I just got off the phone with my husband after being upset and then apologizing and then being upset.. it's a vicious cycle now. God bless him for taking all of this in stride and still being right there with me and offering me hug after hug after hug, even though I've been yelling at him and complaining for 2 and a half days now. the nausea and headaches have gotten a bit worse day by day. There's not really anything I can do about it because I really really don't want to take Tylenol or Advil or anything that could stop the clomid from doing it's job--I just want to be as safe as possible. For now, I'm trying to keep my mouth shut and my head down at work so I don't get myself in trouble. I need a nap.

Talk to you all soon.

And the month of Clomid craziness begins...

I know it's been a while since I've blogged and everyone else seems to update their blogs weekly, but sometimes I think about writing and all that comes out are complaints about not getting pregnant and all these other girls who are. A friend of mine just e-mailed me 2 days ago about just finding out she was 12 weeks pregnant and her ex-boyfriend won't return her calls or talk to her at all. This is what makes me feel like a bad friend. I don't even want to talk to her. My husband and I have prepared ourselves for pregnancy and babies. When we do get pregnant we are going to be great parents and we are going to give those babies a wonderful life. Why do I constantly see people around me getting pregnant by mistake? It's not fair. This girl is a nice girl and was looking for me to help her and talk to her and i can't do it. I'm so angry about what my husband and I have to go through. I can't congratulate her. Or tell her it's gonna be ok cause it's not. Maybe that makes me a bad person for feeling that way or not being able to be there for her, but there's nothing I can do about feeling this way. Sorry.

Back to business...

I had a doctors appointment yesterday for another internal ultrasound. Every time I see the doctor it happens to be right after I ovulate, or right around ovulation time so when he was doing these ultrasounds he was seeing fluid in my uterus (Which could be attributed to ovulation). I went yesterday, 4 days into my cycle and he was still seeing fluid, but he said the amount was much less and it could possibly be the end of my period that he was seeing. Nonetheless the amount of fluid was less and he seemed happy about that. Today is day 5 of my cycle and I took my first clomid pill this morning. I take them for the next 5 days and then next week I have 3 tentative appointments for the IUI on Wednesday, Thursday and Friday of next week (20th, 21st and 22nd) and I'll be using OPK's probably every day until then so I don't miss it. I feel fine right now... The doctor said I would be feeling very hormonal from Clomid. In fact, instead of telling me, he made a point to tell my husband that I would be hormonal and moody hahaha. I bet he can't wait for that...

I'm excited to take the Clomid but at the same time I'm so terrified it's not gonna work. It's been a very long time that we've been trying to conceive, with many very painful periods including this last one this month that left me almost incapacitated for the first half of my day at work. At the moment I feel fine. The only thing I noticed was a little nausea but apparently the biggest side effect is moodiness which I will be trying very hard to control. My husband and I were joking yesterday because a normal girls moodiness during pms, is me on a normal day so there's a good chance I could come out of this process a complete psycho, but if in the end I'm pregnant it will all be worth it.

There other big side effect of clomid is multiple births. There's a 10% chance of twins and a 1% chance of triplets. It would be absolutely wonderful to have more than one, but I would be more than happy with just one baby.

Our fingers are crossed this month again, and our prayers to God and St. Gerard will be more vocal than ever. Thanks for listening everyone. Talk to you all soon :-)