Day 10 of SHOTS!! (More complaining..)

Well, I've been on these damn shots for 10 days now, and they are just buckets of fun. When I was on the birth control pills, I had very mild side effects from the Lupron. Like being cranky and a little nauseous.  Now that the bc has stopped, I feel all the side effects like 10 times more. It makes me soooo tired and double cranky and nauseous and I've had this headache for like 10 days straight now. And yesterday I felt like I had a fever. But aside from that, its really not all that bad, lol. I have until friday of just taking the Lupron shots and then I have a doctors appt that morning. I have to get up at friggen 6 am for because apparently they ONLY do ultrasounds between and 7 and 8 am and its never at the office by my house.. always the further office. Since i stopped the bc, i've gotten my "period".  No one warned me that I wouldn't get an actual period,  so i was assuming that because i was on bc for 6 weeks, that i was gonna have this extreme opening of the gates river of pain huge flow, but instead, i just have cramps and not even enough to wear a pad, which I guess is nice, because I don't like pads.

I went to my teaching class on how to mix my shots and i took my mom as my note-taker, which is good because i think she wrote down what the nurse was saying verbatim. They literally sit there and show you how to mix your menopur, and then they give you this little fake piece of skin?? Kinda looks like a buttcheek and feels like one too. So once you finish learning that, you learn how to inject them into the fake butt on the table. It was all very scientific. It was also very overwhelming. Because I always seem to underestimate just how many shots/ how many times a day i'm getting them. But I do understand now why they gave me so many needles , and thats because you have to mix the meds with the bigger needles than swap out for a smaller ones. All very scientific once again. My husband is getting excited because the retrieval is about 2 weeks away, but I cant seem to get excited, I'm too nervous, besides that my energy is soooo drained from all this excitement. I've said this before and I'll say it again, If I didn't have my husband to go through this with I would go crazy. Even as I'm writing this he is sitting next to me joking around about all of this. My mom has also been a huge help. She is always ready and willing to do whatever I need her to do at the drop of a hat, like going to my appointment with me the other day.

There's not much else to say.  I have my u/s on friday and I get my new list of injections (what, when and how much to take) of the new medications.  In the mean time I am still praying... and napping...

Day 4 of SHOTS!

I've though long and hard about posting an update on how the shots are going because I hate to complain. I know how lucky I am to be able to even afford these shots and be able to afford the whole in-vitro process, so I don't want anyone to think I'm complaining whatsoever. I'm just telling it like it is. Days 1 and 2 were ok. I had terrible insomnia on nights 1 and 2 and every day since I have been absolutely exhausted and kinda foggy in the head. It's nice being home because I can do a little housework and nap and then do a little more housework and nap some more, but I've been trying to not nap so much because then I don't sleep at night. When I get through at least 4 straight hours of sleeping at night, we consider it a big success now. My husband is still trying to get the hang of giving the shot every morning and I give him a lot of credit for being a great nurse. He gives me my pills each night before bed, and my shot every morning now, and to top it all off he puts up with my bitching about how I'm feeling all day long. He should get an award.

They make me feel like crap all day. Like I'm getting over the flu but without the chest cough. Just a feeling of being run down and tired after doing something as easy as the laundry. And I've had a bad headache since I got my first shot and it hasn't gone away yet. I keep thinking sleeping will help, but my new weird sleeping patterns aren't really helping me out with it. I get my shot at around 6:45 every morning and then, since I can't really go back to sleep, I read my book for a while until the itchiness in my belly goes away. And then I get up and I'm immediately irritable and cranky. It makes me laugh sometimes when I wake up and realize I have a cranky face on and I don't even know why I'm mad.

So far, that's how I've been feeling. My husband has been feeding me chocolate every night (trying to counter the moodiness I think!) and just being an all around very comforting and patient person. I have another appointment this Thursday for a class to learn about how to give my fertility shots, or how to make them? or mix them together or something? I'm actually not exactly sure, but I do know that I have no idea how to use that refillable injectable pen they gave me, so maybe that's what I'll be learning how to use. I'll update then. Until then, I'm still praying. Talk to you all soon :)

SHOTS!!

Shots!! Shots!! Shots!! Shots!!Shots!! Shots!! You know like that song.... This is what my husband has been singing to me every night for the past week. Not the whole song mind you, just that one part because I've been walking around saying the word shots at random times like it's the plague. So that's his response to lighten the mood lol :)

Well the big day has finally arrived. My mom came over on Tuesday to keep me company while we waited for the arrival of my big box of SHOTS!! The pharmacy told me it would come between 7am and 9pm so I basically had to sit around and wait all day for it. Lucky for us it came at around 2pm so we weren't imprisoned inside the house all day! I guess I was expecting something different. Not that I wasn't expecting little vials of drugs and some little needles to go with it, I just wasn't expecting SOOO many needles to come in the box. There must be over 100 needles in that box. The tiny insulin needles for the lupron shots that I started taking today, the injectable needles for the fertility drugs and some other much bigger needles for some other drugs that I have to take and then I think even more insulin needles in another bag, and then a smaller bag of littler needles and then some other refill injectables... Seriously, I may not be the best here at math but the ratio of little vials of drugs to needles is WAY off... Let me clarify one thing though, I'm not taking insulin. They're called insulin needles because they are the tiny needles that diabetics use to inject insulin. I am using insulin needles to inject myself with Lupron.

I got my first shot of lupron this morning given to me by my wonderful husband. I haven't slept in about 5 days because I had been having nightmares about doing the shots wrong. Either we inject too much, or too little, or the wrong drug and then we have to go back on birth control and wait another month and everything gets pushed back again. I know, ridiculous, but really not so ridiculous because this is a very exciting yet very stressful process to be going through and my subconscious is just messing with me every night after I fall asleep.

So before we went to bed last night we went on YouTube and found a video of a woman giving herself a shot of lupron and giving a tutorial while she was doing it (isn't the Internet great?). We went to bed thinking, ok so it looks pretty easy, I mean she gave it to herself, she didn't even need someone else to give it to her. So this morning when it was time, we got up and my husband got the needle ready and I layed down on the couch and he gave me the shot. It was unpleasant, as I had assumed it would be because, hey, it's a shot, but it wasn't the end of the world and I am more than prepared to do it again tomorrow morning and my husband was so good with everything, he made the whole experience a lot more pleasant than if I had to inject myself. He really was a rock star, he didn't even bat an eyelash at the whole thing and he really doesn't like needles at all! After that, I went back to bed for a little while before getting up to go to work and my tummy was itchy at the injection site for about 15 minutes. This is an immediate side effect apparently but it wasn't so bad and I fell back to sleep soon after.

So far that's all the excitement of the past week or so, and I am ready to catch up on all my sleep tomorrow after my next shot. I'll update soon with more side effects in about a week or so. Talk to you all soon!

First appointment with the IVF coordinator

Well, we had our first appointment on Monday with the IVF coordinator. We made ourselves sick worrying about it because we have never gone to that doctors office and had a good appointment or gotten good news so we were wondering just WHAT was in store for us. Every time it's "well you have a huge ovarian cyst, or you have a blood clotting disorder that makes it harder to get pregnant, no the clomid didn't work again, no the IUI didn't work.. I see some fluid in your uterus and I don't like it" Seriously, not ONCE have we had a good appointment, but this time, the stars aligned and for once all was right with my uterus. Thank you Jesus for that.

So, the very first step in the IVF process is going on birth control so I don't ovulate this month. It's so nice to not have to pee on ovulation sticks for once, but it's a little strange going on birth control. He says he has to time when I get my period so he can time everything else. So I've been on birth control for 2 weeks and my ultrasound looks great... the cyst is completely gone, the fluid is long gone, nothing negatively new in the old baby making basket (They also did an infectious disease (STD) test before the whole thing started and we were both completely fine. Let me tell you-- no matter what anyone says, even if you're 100% sure you don't have any STD's, it's still a huge relief when they call you and say you're perfectly healthy lol).

Here comes the best part... So we're on this mega high from having our first GREAT ultrasound and the IVF coordinator comes in with our next step in the process. Now we were both under the impression that the shots began November 4th, AND that they were injectables like my eppi pen. We couldn't have been more wrong (this is another great example why you should never believe what you read on the internet). So the IVF coordinator comes in with this syringe and this little tiny glass bottle or fluid and she starts showing my husband how to fill it up and where he will be injecting me. And I think time stopped for a whole 45 seconds and then the blood left my head so fast I thought we were both gonna pass out. She made it looks so simple. "Oh it's so easy, the Lupron should come in the mail by next Tuesday and you will need to start the injections on Thursday morning. It's so easy!" the nurse kept on saying how easy it was and even she could do it but I mean come on, you're a nurse of COURSE you can! This doesn't come second nature to us non-nurses here. Especially my husband, who expressed great concern months ago when we began entertaining the idea of in-vitro.

It is something we're gonna have to get used to though. Once the Lupron shots end, we start shots of the fertility drug. If all goes well and babies magically appear in my uterus at the end of all this, I will need to go on Heparin shots for my first whole trimester, so basically shots start next Thursday and (fingers crossed) end sometime in February!

Still praying, but mostly saying thank you to God this month. Our biggest fear was that SOMETHING was gonna happen and they were gonna tell us we had to postpone it another month but nothing like that came up. Kinda sorta starting to get excited now. Just kinda, though.