Subfertility is an endless cycle of hope and heartbreak. Right now, I'm on the upswing of hope. This month my bloody cysts shrank down and stopped producing estrogen, and I got the green light to start the fertility drugs (technical term: gonadotropin therapy). This included jabbing a needle into my belly every day, and then going in to get an ultrasound every other day or so, to see how my eggs were growing, and to take a blood sample to measure my estriodiol levels (E2, as the cool kids call it). I've heard some women respond to the first round of the treatment in as little as 5 days, but no, I took 13 days. By the end, I was so bloated and uncomfortable I couldn't even bend over ,and even sitting was difficult. I began to see the benefit of having an IUI - sex just didn't sound appealing. Towards the end, the ultrasound technician would really have to jam the wand against my ovaries, causing all kinds of discomfort. If I haven't told you before, this isn't the nice kind of ultrasound where they rub jelly on your belly and move the sensor around. This is a trans-vaginal ultrasound, where they stick a giant sex-toy looking thing up your hoo-ha and look at your insides.
But, after 13 days, they declared me gravid, and told me to take the trigger shot. The trigger shot is basically HCG (the pregnancy hormone) - it's supposed to kick the little eggs of of the ovaries. I took the shot on Wednesday night, and we got busy Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday night (yeah, we were pretty tired of it by Friday night). Then, Saturday morning I started on progesterone suppositories, to keep any embryos that might be forming from falling out. And now....I wait. I wait and wait and wait. I'm supposed to test this Friday or Saturday. Actually, what the nurse said was, "stop taking the progesterone on Saturday, and if you don't get your period, come in for a blood test". Because I'm paranoid about my chronically low progesterone levels, I'd rather not do that, so I'll take a home test on Friday. And probably Saturday and Sunday. The only thing that is keeping me from testing every day is that the trigger shot has the same hormone as the one the pregnancy test looks for, and that shot can take up to 2 weeks to leave the body. So, testing early might give me a false positive, which I'm just not up for.
The annoying thing about the progesterone suppositories is that they mimic pregnancy symptoms - cramps, bloating, exhaustion, sore breasts, and nausea. So, we'll see. Three days until I can test. I hope my fingers don't develop gangrene from being crossed for this long.
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