That answers it!

Just had this convo with DH not five minutes ago.

Mr. Stick: Hey! My friend T just had a baby.
Stickles: WTF? I didn't even know he got married.
Mr. Stick: He didn't.
Stickles: Wow - isn't that like a huge scandal?
Mr. Stick: No, my mom says everyone in Greece has a baby first these days before getting married.
Stickles: Oh great, that's our problem. We got married first. No wonder nothing's coming. F*cking A!

(Imagine this as sarcastic and perky banter. I didn't have a meltdown like last week or anything. In fact, the number of pregnancy/birthing announcements has gotten downright comical.)

Friendly Fire

Thank you guys so, so very much for your supporting comments. I LOVE YOU ALL!!! I was in a really bad place last night - I couldn't even read through the first two comments because each one would just set me off in tears again.

I'm...okay. I'm in self-preservation mode right now, which is pretty much the same as self-nurturing mode except that instead of trying to refill a well, I'm just trying to keep the well from going dry. I'm hiding in a bookstore (favorite place of refuge since I was a kid), chilling until my acupuncture appointment. I think if I'm brave enough, I'll let the Poke Clinic know that I'm dealing with some emotional pain, and they'll probably open some more floodgates for me to release all this grief.

If anything, the fact that her news gutted me like that spells out pretty clearly just how depleted I am and that I did make the right decision in stepping back. Throwing "Clomidia" on top of the situation would just make things harder, and I'd be doing it for all the wrong reasons - panic, fear, ego, desperation...

I was trying to articulate to Mr. Stick (remember, supportive but clueless?) why I was so hurt last night, and it boils down to this. I had intuited a few months ago that M was pregnant, and the feeling was strong enough that I was fearful of calling her. (I'm really glad I had blogged my thoughts about it at the time because rereading it helped me articulate this.)

So I had prepared myself, summoned up my courage, called her and then asked her in the course of our conversation if she was. She said no, and then she asked me if I was. Which then segued into a really difficult but good talk where I finally came clean to her about IF.

I understand, of course, why she lied. (And I realize now that she did lie because in that first phone call, she wanted me to give her recommendations for a trip to Hawaii she was about to take, and I learned yesterday that they had originally planned this trip for late fall - until they found out that she was going to be due in November.)

But that lie created for me a false sense of security. I think that a lot of IF'ers protect ourselves in a subtle way when we are among "civilians" (I prefer that term to "fertiles") - I feel like I am on constant alert for a pregnancy bomb to drop. With M, my defenses were completely down. I was totally vulnerable. I didn't even have my usual flippant and witty persona on because I was in a state where I was feeling light, free, and trusting of myself.

So to beat the military analogy to death once and for all, I got taken down by friendly fire.

Mr. Stick had a really interesting take on it, which I think I will be able to accept when I'm in a stronger state of mind. He said that I had an intuition, a voice that was telling me to be careful around M because I thought she was pregnant, and I ignored it because she originally told me something I wanted to hear.

And then he told me that yesterday, I trusted myself and listened to that voice when it was telling me to take a break and give myself what I needed. So...in a way, the universe was reaffirming that my intuitions are correct, that I need to listen to myself and trust myself more. Because when it comes to my emotional health, I know more than my RE and even my closest friends.


(I need to give some props to Mr. Stick, btw, because despite my flippant comment about his cluelessness, he has been an absolute rock. One of the reasons I wanted to take a break was so that I could give the poor guy a reprieve from the fertility-drug-addled Crying McWeepy alien that has taken me over these past few months, and instead he gets an emotional meltdown straight out of the gate.)

Anyway...so...here I am, hunkered down and attempting to rally so that I can make the most of this gift of time I have. I'm still feel pretty emotionally torn up, but that little voice tells me I'm going to be totally okay, and I know that I should listen to her.

Down and up, and then down down down...

This was supposed to be a different post.

I was going to write about how emotionally and psychically drained I've been feeling lately. About how I've been dragging my feet over my planned Clomid/IUI cycle and wasn't feeling any joy or optimism about it.  About how after a really long talk with a close friend yesterday, I had come to realize that I was looking forward to taking a break from TTC more than I was looking forward to trying to get pregnant. And how that made me realize that maybe I shouldn't go through with this next treatment cycle. Because my heart wasn't into it, and deep down I didn't believe that it would work anyway.

I was going to write about how I summoned up the courage to call Dr. G. this morning and cancel my CD baseline ultrasound and admit to you all that I just needed to take a break, get off the treadmill, break the cycle of deja vu. About how light and free I felt after cancelling, that I actually felt more like myself than I had in months.

That I went to the gym for the first time in a really long time and took a salsa aerobics class because I had energy to spare. That I went out with my friend N, and without even knowing what I had done, she said to me over lunch, "What I love about you is that you have such an honor and respect for your body and its needs." And that I then took the $185 I was going to spend on my ultrasound and went and got a haircut, a brow wax, and a brazilian and had leftover money to book a massage with N for next week.

I was going to tell you that I felt like I had taken back my life back, just for a little while. That I did the right thing and listened to that voice inside that said, "I don't feel like doing this," and I gave my tired and anxious self a reprieve. That even though I was going to let go of hope for this cycle, I wasn't going to waste the time - I was going to love, nurture, and take care of myself.

I was at my computer about to write the post. I should've just written the damn post.

Instead, I saw the blinking on my answering machine and realized that my best friend M called. So I called her back.

She's thirteen weeks pregnant. THIRTEEN WEEKS. I had asked her point blank two months ago if she was pregnant, and she told me no.  Maybe she didn't know at the time, but I can't help but feel like she lied to me. My. Best. Friend. Lied. To. Me. About. Being. Pregnant.

That peace I had cultivated for myself? Gone. That little cloud of understanding and bliss that I was floating on? Burst. I feel like the universe has just slapped me in the face.

I don't know how I got through the conversation. How I managed through the "We really weren't thinking about trying for another few months. It happened so fast." or "I had really wanted a March baby." or "I have to buy new maternity clothes because all my old ones were for winter."

I fooled her. Oh, God how I fooled her. I was so nice, I was so sweet. I laughed, and I said all the right things. And I was so very understanding and congratulatory, and all I wanted to do was scream at her, "Why did you have to tell me this today of all days? Why didn't you tell me earlier? Why didn't you tell me later? Why did you have to pee all over my peace parade?"

I have always prided myself on being able to put my grief aside when someone else gets pregnant. This is no longer the case. For the first time in more than two years of TTC, I wept, and I sobbed, and I cursed when I got off the phone after learning that someone else was expecting. I never, ever, ever thought that I would react this way to my best friend of all people.

I feel totally lost. I don't know if I did the right thing anymore. Part of me says yes, and the other part of me says it's not too late to ask for Clomid and get back on the treadmill.

I feel utterly betrayed. Betrayed by the universe, betrayed by my friend, but most of all, betrayed by my own good intentions and love for myself.

Reboot

A little geek humor for today. (Thanks, XKCD.)

The deja vu of it all is getting to me. 

I have the whole treatment sequence down by heart now, and pretty much have the next month laid out:

• CD 1: battle disappointment with sarcasm and dark humor
• CD 3: baseline sonogram
• CD 3-5: take crazy pills
• CD 5+: battle "Clomidia" and onslaught of strange dreams
• CD 14: mid-cycle sonogram where there will be one mature follie and an ok-but-not-great lining of 6-point-something
• CD 16: +OPK
• CD 17: the IUI shuffle
• CD 18 - 26: actual professional productivity, as I'm not obsessed with TTC for exactly one week
• CD 26 - 29: become obsessed over sore boobs, strange crampy feelings, and watching to see when - oh, i mean - if my temps fall

We'll see if Clomid 4.0/IUI 3.0 actually results in Sticklet 1.0. If it doesn't, I'm looking to power down for a cycle or two before upgrading my protocol to Injectibles 1.0.

I'm feeling pretty blah right about now.

Nancy Drew & The Mystery of the Sore Boobs

My breasts hurt.

For most women, this would be cause for pulling out the pee sticks and going to town, but in crazy-upside-down Stickles world, it's just a reminder to stop obsessing and prepare for AF.

Let me back up here just a bit.

Sore breasts used be a once-in-a-blue moon thing for me. I certainly never got them when I was taking the pill, and during those wasted years when I was off the pill and actually "trying-to-avoid" I'd have one or at most two cycles a year where I'd get tender breasts.

Naturally, during these rare occasions, I'd freak out a little that we had an "accident" (more so about the fact that I was probably drinking alcohol and caffeine during my cycle moreso than the reality of being pregnant), but those worries all came to moot.

So the really, really crazy thing is that since we started actively TTC, I get sore boobs during every cycle. Every cycle. This has wreaked severe havoc in my head. Those first few months of TTC, every time my girls started getting tender, I'd whip out the pee sticks only to see a BFN and a visit from AF within 48 hours.

I have asked my OB, my RE, and my acupuncturists about this, and no one can give me a satisfactory answer. The docs think I'm just more sensitive to the changes in my body (which, I don't think so, because those few times I got tenderness in the past *really* stood out - I have notes in my charts to back me up) while acupuncturists seem very pleased by this information because it means that my body is producing good progesterone.

So I am left to wonder if I am really creating my own version of a "hysterical pregnancy" towards the end of the 2ww or if this is an indication that something strange is going on in my body. Like maybe I could actually be conceiving, but something goes wrong at the end of the implantation stage, and no one seems to be catching it.

Oh, and just to throw another curveball...

I've also noticed that these three cycles of Clomid I've been on, I get the sore boobs later in my cycle. In a normal cycle, I start getting sore at 7 dpo and get AF about 4-5 days later. While on Clomid, I'm getting sore at about 10 dpo and getting AF about 2-3 days later. I really don't know what to make of this.

So this is all just to say that although I could obsess over the strange little things that have happened this cycle, like the acne breakout from hell a few days ago, or my need to take a nap yesterday afternoon, the fact that my boobs are sore in exactly the way they've always been sore these past oh...26 months...I'm not having a whole lot of optimism right now.

TTC and UTI: A PSA

I really should be cleaning some spreadsheets for a database import right now, but I'd much rather share with you some painfully-earned knowledge. It probably won't apply to most of you...or any of you, I hope...but if there's anyone out there TTC'ing under similar circumstances, I think it's important to pass this info along.

The Background

IF aside, I've always been a remarkably healthy person except for an anatomical proclivity for urinary tract infections. I started getting them as a virginal teenager, but they really started rearing their ugly head once I started having sex.  I'd average about 3-4 major UTI's a year - by major, I mean having to go get antibiotics - and a handful of minor ones that could be flushed out with water and cranberry juice.

I eventually figured out after a few years that simply peeing immediately after DTD and washing up "down there" prevented them for the most part. I managed to get the frequency down to about 1 or 2 minor ones a year, which I figured out I could self-treat with concentrated cranberry pills and/or D-Mannose, which is a type of sugar that binds to bacteria in the urinary tract.

And then I started TTC

I'd like to think we had an active sex life before, but TTC apparently ratcheted things up a bit because I got a big bad UTI within the first two months. I was stubborn at first, trying to self-treat without antibiotics, because I didn't want to take antibiotics (ah the naivete of those early days!) if I was already pregnant.

And once I sucked it up and actually went to a doctor, I fell into a bit of a Catch-22, as they'd put me on a milder antibiotic (Macrobid instead of say, Bactrim or Cipro) when I told them that I was TTC. I'd dutifully take the antibiotics for two weeks, the symptoms would go away, and then BAM! I'd be back in the next month with another raging UTI. 2008 basically became a throwback to those college years when I'd be bouncing in and out of the clinic for UTI antibiotics.

The shit...or I should say pee... really hit the fan in late 2008/early 2009 when I got "the UTI that wouldn't go away," even with antibiotics. It was a miserably painful time - my gyn was running bacterial cultures that were coming up negative, and scary terms like "interstitial cystitis" (IC) were being thrown around.

(I know this sounds terrible, but I think if I had to choose between IF and IC, I'd choose IF. IC just seems too agonizingly painful to deal with on a daily basis - I'm amazed at the women who bear with it and more so, the mothers who bear with it. I mean, I could barely deal with a few weeks of severe bladder pain as it was.)

Eventually, I wound up in a urologist's office, and she determined that my urinary tract wasn't infected - it was badly inflamed from all the recurrent infections of the previous year. Ironically, she put me back on Macrobid, because it has an anti-inflammatory effect - and I had to take it for six weeks. She also put me on a daily regimen of taking cranberry or D-Mannose supplements and gave me a long-standing prescription to take Macrobid each time after sex to ward off another infection.

Thankfully, it worked. Within a week, the pain that I thought would take up permanent residence in my nether regions was gone, and it didn't come back after six weeks of antibiotic therapy. I happily took my supplements, and refocused my energies on getting pregnant.

But then I did some research a few months later.

It turns out that just about everything that I was doing was unfriendly to TTC:

• D-Mannose doesn't just bind to bacteria, it also binds to sperm. Sperm have mannose receptors, and D-Mannose is apparently effective enough at this that there is a patent out to use it as a contraceptive.
• Cranberry supplements create an acidic vaginal environment that is partially hostile to sperm. This too, is apparently effective enough to be used as a gender swaying technique for those maddeningly fertile women who use it to kill off the "weaker" y-chromosome sperm.
• Macrobid shows a slight risk for miscarriage. Now don't get me wrong - this is one of the safest antibiotics one can take, and there are probably millions of pregnant women who have taken it without adverse effects. That said, though, there have been a few women who claimed that taking it resulted in miscarriage. There isn't a lot of strong scientific evidence that demonstrates this, but when you're as paranoid as I am, it's best avoided.

And of course, my tried and true technique of peeing and washing up right after sex is a little harder to do when there's a ton of advice about lying down with your legs in the air for a half hour after DTD. Sigh.

This makes me wonder if I've just wasted a bunch of cycles while I was on antibiotics or sperm-killing supplements. I don't blame my urologist - she's not an RE, after all, and I'm eternally grateful to her for putting an end to those weeks of pain. I think this information is pretty obscure, as well, since one of my acupuncturists at the Poke Clinic even recommended D-Mannose to me when I mentioned my penchant for UTIs. Which is why I thought it prudent to publish my experience on the Internets.

So what now?

Well, I gave up on the daily D-Mannose and cranberry supplements a few months ago. And I'm only taking Macrobid after "fun sex" in the early part of my cycle as opposed to baby-making sex  mid-cycle. Poor Mr. Stick knows better than to try to jump me late in my cycle when I'm worried about taking Macrobid during the 2ww, as well as not wanting to "shake things up too much down there" (irrational, I know, but welcome to my IF mind).

I'd also like to think that the acupuncture is overall having a balancing effect on my body. It did eradicate my allergies, so I don't think it's unreasonable to think that it might be resetting my body's chemistry to something that is both sperm-friendly and UTI-bacteria-unfriendly.

I've been lucky so far, in that I haven't had any UTIs - major or minor - since that horrible one more than a year ago. So I'm just hoping that it continues to hold out until I get the biggest lucky streak of all with a BFP.

IUI Update

Hey ladies,

Sorry for dropping off the earth there. I get kind of blog-saturated during ICLW (love it though!), so I needed to take a breather and not spend every day focusing on infertility.

So I realized I never posted about IUI #2, which I'm sure you're all dying to know about. I got my much expected +OPK pretty quickly after whining about not ovulating, and we booked the IUI for the next morning.

After our IUI-shuffle hijinks of last month, Mr. Stick insisted that I sleep in while he went to the lab at the crack of dawn to "collect and turn in his specimen." Not only that, but he was sweet enough to wake me up in time for the IUI appointment and drive me into town again a few hours later, so he could keep me company during the procedure. What a husband!

Mr. Stick is nothing if not consistent - his swimmer numbers were almost exactly the same as last month across the board - motility, morphology, density, and count. I even asked Dr. G if he wasn't just reading the numbers from last month. We got about 40-million of those babies in there, so I really hope my egg rises to the occasion because we really tried to make it easy for that eggie!

So now I'm in the 2ww, the first half of which is always the most relaxing part of my cycle. There's nothing I need to be doing, watching, or waiting for. Ironically, though Mother's day is going to fall right at 12dpo, which is usually the point at which my temps take a nosedive. So next Sunday could potentially suck...or potentially not suck in a big big way.