A Life of Appointments

A week in the life of a lady buying a house and starting fertility treatments who also has other shit going on is apparently a week full of appointments.

Monday -

9am - Movers came by to check out how much crap we have in our tiny apartment and then to tell us how much it'll cost to pack it all up and move it into our much less tiny soon-to-be (fingers crossed) house. Hey, apparently it's not that much more for them to pack everything. Um, done and done!

After they leave - Blood test to see if my thyroid medicine is doing the trick. (It is. Yay!)

12:35 - Therapy

2:30 - Walk-through of house with inspector (all went well).

Tuesday -

9am - Orthodontist (On track for a July removal of braces. Yay again!)

Then - Work

Wednesday -

Work

Then - 1pm First appointment of my first IUI Cycle! Soooooo....I got blood drawn. Then I got blood drawn again (back to the intravenous drug user look). Then I had an Ultrasound. I have 10 follicles in each ovary. Everything looks good to go. Got assigned my random drug and it is...DRUM ROLL PLEASE....not the one that I have to inject every day! Nope! I get pills! So, we don't know if it's clomid or letrozole, but we know it isn't the gonadotropin (injection). I waited for the call to make sure my E2 (Estradiol) levels were OK and when I got that a couple of hours later, I was cleared to go. So, I take two of these bad boys every evening:

Last night I was at dinner at friends' apartment for my first dose. The only thing I can say about them so far is that they float. THEY FLOAT! This means when I took a big gulp of water, they rose right to the top of the gulp and stuck to the roof of my mouth, making it very hard to swallow them! But other than that, it was fine. I have a journal where every day I keep track of what I took when and how I feel and if Ian and I hump and all kinds of fun stuff.

I asked Ian if it was weird that I was a little disappointed to not have to give myself an injection every day, even though the side effects of that medication seem a lot worse AND also hey I'd have to give myself an injection every day. He feels that, yes, it is weird. But he also finds this not surprising. I'm not sure if I should be insulted. Apparently, I am weird, and I like weird things, and I have a strange fascination with all things medical, so thus he understands why I am a little disappointed. So, there's that. At least I still get a once-per-cycle trigger shot to give myself! Anyhow.

That brings us to

Thursday -

Today I have a meetingful day at work and a straight from work appointment to get my hair cut. But blissfully house and medical appointment free (although plenty of house and medical record-keeping, task managing etc). And haircut = YAY! Think I'm heading toward this kind of cut:

And that's pretty much that. My back is a little sore, and I'm not sure if that's from the medication making my ovaries more pendulous (more on that later) or just cause sometimes my back is sore. I have no appointments tomorrow, but Monday morning I go back in. That'll be the morning after my last dose of pills and they'll test my blood (not sure which hormones they test - probably E2 again and maybe FSH) and do another ultrasound and look at how things look. If I have enough follicles that look egg-ful, but not TOO many (don't want to be an octomom K thanks) they'll either tell me then when I should do the trigger shot, or they'll schedule me to come back in a couple of days later and look again to decide. I feel like after this first cycle I'll have a better sense of what to expect at each of these appointments and what the timing of everything looks like.

But, what I do know is that at some point they'll say, if all continues to go well, "Give yourself the trigger shot on ___________ night and then we'll do the IUI a day and a half later" and that will be the exciting that.