Holy Cramps Batman!

Yesterday I was concerned about not having enough of a flow to go in for my baseline ultrasound. When I told the nurse I was only spotting, she said I might need to cancel my appointment since they couldn't count it as day 1 unless I was really bleeding (and miserable). I shouldn't have wasted a second fretting about it.

Today I was popping Advil like tic-tacs. I usually only need two to control cramps for about 8 hours, but these seemed to break through after only 2 hours. As long as I was consistent they weren't too bad, so I took another two before I went to bed at 2:30am and figured they'd be enough. BIG HUGE MISTAKE.

At 6:45am I woke up to absolutely horrible, body twisting cramps. I haven't had cramps like this since High School and back then they used to keep me home, in bed, in a ball. It took another bunch of Advil over 3-4 hours and a heating pad on high to get them down to a manageable level, and I may have told E mid cramp that I would not be having his babies naturally after all. He laughed at me and said Duh so we'll see how that goes when (not if!) we get there.  I'm pretty sure I have the progesterone to thank for these wonderful cramps, I'm definitely not looking forward to it this month.

Once the afternoon rolled around, it was time for my appointment! I went nice and early but ended up losing my advantage to the 30 minutes it took to find parking -_- There was street cleaning today so half the parking was unavailable and I had to park 4 blocks away. No fun when you have to run back and feed the meter.

Since today was just a baseline ultrasound, my appointment was with Nurse C instead of Dr. K. I had been looking forward to chatting with Dr. K, since she had forgotten our previous meeting, and I had practically cried over having to go through the whole thought process again. Luckily, she ended up leaving detailed instructions for my cycle that matched our previous plan so all was well. We saw at least 6 little antral follicles and I would love to see those turn into 6 mature eggs. The new plan is:

CD 2 - CD 11 - Birth Control Pills
CD 12 - CD 14 -  No Meds
CD 15 - CD 18 - 8 vials Menopur, divided into 2 doses daily, E2 Ultrasound
CD 19 - CD ? - More Menopur
CD ? - Trigger
CD ? - IUI or Egg Harvesting, probably IUI

We're hoping that suppression with birth control first will help my eggs develop at a similar rate. Usually, your body selects 1 egg as the dominant follicle each month, but we'd like to get many more than that. The birth control should stop that one egg from getting a head start so hopefully the smaller ones we saw last cycle will be able to catch up and mature too.  Then we're going all out with the max dose of Menopur to see if we can wake these lazy ovaries up. 

Bad News and (Not So) Easy Choices

This morning, or more accurately this afternoon, E and I went in for our infertility consultation. Even though I tried to be optimistic, it was disheartening to have our challenges laid out so plainly. The RE went over all our test results and all our options, which are extremely limited. Because E has such severe male factor infertility, we can only go with IVF. Because I have so few eggs, we can only go with IVF. So basically, even if we were only dealing with one form of infertility, we'd still need to do IVF to get pregnant.

Right now E is a bit of a wild card. We're not sure whether his sperm are non motile because they're dead, or because they're just lazy fuckers. Our doctor ran another SA on E and we should have those results tomorrow, but considering the poor quality of his boys overall, the doctor is suggesting that we split the eggs.

Lets say we retrieve 13 eggs, and 10 are mature enough to use. Our RE is suggesting that we use E's sperm for 5 of the eggs and donor sperm for the other 5. That way, if none of E's swimmers are able to produce viable embryos, we still have those 5 other hopefully good quality embryos to implant. If we didn't do this and none of E's swimmers were able to produce embryos, the cycle would be cancelled and we would be out all the money we had spent.

I am not in much better shape than E. I had my AFC and while my uterus looked just fine, my ovaries only had 7 antral follicles between them. That's a pretty awful number for a 26 year old, the RE was hoping to see more like 20, making my high FSH a fluke. Unfortunately, that wasn't the case, my awful numbers are accurate and I really am running out of eggs. Yay :(

Now we get to wait for a phone call tomorrow. If E's results are improved, we can proceed with IVF. If they're still awful, we need to seriously consider whether we're okay with using donor sperm.  E was really against it when we discussed it before, but it might be the only way we can achieve a viable pregnancy. It's a lot to deal with and we're going to have to do some real thinking.