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.