The Waiting Starts: Hurry up and wait

It has been a long long long three months. 

Honestly, I thought I'd be moving into my second trimester around now. I thought I'd be feeling wonderfully nauseous and discovering the craziness of cravings and looking at maternity clothes and baby clothes without the guilt. 

But I'm not.

It's a fact. I'm not pregnant and it'll still be a while before I am. And that's ok. It slowly becomes ok as the days go on. But then something triggers it and the roller coaster starts. Luckily, I know, as with all roller coasters, it always calms down eventually. It gets better. 

During the hospital stays I stayed emotionally stable and in good enough spirits besides the few break downs. Then two weeks later, once I was back in the swing of work and normal life, everything hit me like a ton of bricks. I kept having flashbacks of moments from the hospital and home before and after. And then the memory of waking up after the retrieval. 

Please don't get me wrong, this is not the worst thing to ever happen to someone. I know So Many people who have gone through and are going through much worse things than what I have and am dealing with. I don't mean to exaggerate my own experience and I don't mean to minimize anyone else's. This is simply the most difficult thing I've dealt with personally and it's been traumatic in some ways, for me. And last, this is mostly for my own journaling anyway. 

But I was having these flashbacks of my experiences that I never had imagined I would experience. My little brain and heart had a heck of a time dealing with it. I've been extremely blessed through my life and although we had AMAZING people helping us and wonderful doctors and nurses taking care of us, the emotional scarring was a lot for my heart to handle.

It took a couple of weeks and and a few very honest conversations with my sisters-turned-counselors to help me come to terms with the experiences I've had and help me focus on the direction we were headed. Bryce held me through every tear-soaked-pillow night, fasted and prayed with me. What a wonderful man I have. I cannot wait for my children to have him as their father. 

Once I had dealt with the traumatized portion of my heart, I started going crazy with the waiting game. After the retrieval and subsequent hospital visits and then the bed rest, we had to wait while my body completely recovered. Once it did, though, my body decided to develop a big follicle that was producing estrogen, keeping me from starting a period. That's all we were waiting for in order to go back for our babies but it just wouldn't start. 

It had been 40 days since my last period and I was so ready to move on. So I looked up online how to induce a period naturally. I found a few suggestions:

I drank water like a camel.

I exercised. A lot. Especially my core and abdominal area.

I took tons of Vitamin C. (it starves your uterus of progesterone)

And I made and drank Parsley Tea....

Oh. My. DISGUSTING.

I can't even cook with parsley in my food anymore. Just the smell makes me sick. I made it through 9 ounces before I was gagging so bad I couldn't get any more down. 

After all of that, it still didn't work. (I had figured that I was praying for it to start so we could move on and I wanted to show the Lord I was serious about it and would do my part..... haha. I think He has quite the sense of humor.)

So it didn't work and we went in and got another ultrasound and more labs. 

At the end of that appointment, I confided in the doctor that because we had to cancel the transfer right after the retrieval and now we were just waiting and waiting, none of it felt real. It didn't seem real that we had 12 little embryos waiting for us. So I asked if there was any chance they had some kind of picture of my embryos so it could feel more real.

I LOVE our clinic. They sent me these by the end of that same day:

Oh, what a blessing these pictures have been for me!

 Above: babies 1-10

Above: babies 11 and 12

I got them in an email on my phone as I was leaving work that day. 

I cried the second I saw them. You know how women say they love their babies from that first ultrasound when they see the tiny little dot on the screen? 

Well, I am seeing, possibly, every one of my children in their very first day of development. You can laugh or think I'm silly all you want. It won't change the fact that I am completely in love with each one of these little ones. They each have the potential to become a tiny baby that will snuggle into my chest where I'll smell that tiny baby smell and feel their silky hair and tiny toes and fingers. They each have all the DNA to make them an individual, different than any other and completely and utterly my babies. Mine and my honey's. They're ours and I can't wait to take them back inside of me to help them grow safely in my tummy. I have tangible hope now. I have something I can see. And it's PROGRESS. I heart progress.

This was a turning point for me. My heart calmed so very much from that moment on. I had something to fight for. I still tear up every time I look at my little circles. I won't lie, Bryce thinks I'm silly and adorable that I think they're cute, but he understands and lets me be. He loves me.

(That is something I'll never trade. This experience has given us a love for each other that I honestly don't believe would have developed by any other means. We've been greatly blessed by the Lord's hand in our lives. He truly has a greater plan for us than we ever had for ourselves and I'm grateful.)

We went in another week later and did another ultrasound and more labs.

After that, she prescribed a high dose of Progesterone. I took it for five days and then three days after stopping, TA-DA!!!!!

I've never been so happy to have cramps and feel like crap! :)  

(One day closer, right Steph??)

So, today was Day 3. I went in to make sure that the follicle had gone away, that my estrogen was low and that the lining of my uterus was thinned out. 

I have had more ultrasounds in the last 6 months than most women have their entire lives. I know what everything is on that screen the second it pops up. I could tell Dr. Noorhasan was avoiding looking at my ovary because she swiped past it quickly at the first and I saw that follicle there right away. She went strait to look at the lining without saying anything about the follicle. But I knew.

Turns out it's still there. It's on my left ovary and it's a stubborn bugger. It's now officially a cyst, not just a follicle. (pretty much, a follicle is just a fluid filled sac that contains an egg. It is supposed to mature, grow larger and at ovulation it releases the egg and the fluid seeps out and the follicle is gone. But when they fail to mature and/or mature but do not release the egg and become stagnant, they are then considered a Cyst.) I've had it for over two months now.

68 days.

Looking at it closely today revealed it wasn't just a Cyst either. It's a Hemorrhagic Ovarian Cyst. It's not just fluid-filled, it's solid and probably full of blood as well. But you can't tell exactly what it consists of or what it's going to do just with an ultrasound. You have to get an MRI to know. Sometimes Hemorrhagic cysts are cancerous but honestly, I'm not worried and neither is Dr. Noorhasan. It's only been there 68 days, tops. Cancer doesn't usually grow that quickly. So not really worried about that.

But we decided that even though it will probably resolve itself within a few months (not a fast process at all), it would be better to know for sure what's going on with it since we will likely and hopefully be moving into pregnancy in April---a pregnancy already bound to have complications. 

So I'll get that this coming week. My hope is that it will be just like she anticipates--just a dumb cyst that will take a while to resolve itself but won't have complications in terms of becoming or staying pregnant. 

In the meantime, she felt comfortable enough that she started my FET Cycle. (Frozen Embryo Transfer Cycle) It's a two month process and it's quite involved. Not as many injections as a fresh cycle (like I already did) but takes just as long. 

One of the possible factors with the cyst was that I was on a Low Dose of Birth Control while we waited for me to recover. But my body had gone through the wringer with the process and my hormones had spiked up so high, we think it kind of jump started my body into producing it's own hormones. My body doesn't normally do that, like a normal person would. But after everything, it started to but being on such a low dose, I was still able to produce that big follicle-turn cyst. 

So she put me on the new stronger birth control. I started that today. 

The FET Cycle:

They have to bottom my out. Lower all my hormones and thin out my uterin lining so we can start from square one. So I'll be on birth control for about two weeks on its own. Then I'll start an injection of Lupron every morning. Then after a week of injections, I'll stop taking the birth control. I'll continue with the injections and I'll have a period during this time. 

It should be the last period I have before becoming pregnant. Woohoo!!

They'll do labs and ultrasounds at this point to make sure everything is good to go. If it is, I'll do another week of injections (changing doses) and wear a medication patch on my tummy to provide extra precautionary benefits because of all my crap. :) I'll switch the patch every three days. Once I'm done with injections, I'll go in for another lab and ultrasound. 

At that point, I start taking estrogen tablets twice a day, increasing to three times a day. Then I start the GIANT injections in my booty every day. 

After a few days of that, they thaw my babies, watch them grow and develop. We will likely loose half of them in the course of the 2-3 days of developing. Then from the remaining, they take the strongest looking embryo to use for the transfer and re-freeze the remaining good embryos for future use.

Then we go in and using a catheter and a crazy tiny needle they place my little one inside of me. I'll stay on my back for a minimum of 24 hours but I'm going to stay there as long as possible just to be safe. I'll probably take about 3 days off work. 

I'll continue to get the GIANT injections in my booty and we'll go back for a blood test two weeks later and we'll see!