Salt and Pickles

I really need to work on my updating skills. They’re poorly.
I’ll just do a sum up of the last week and a half

Retrieval

We had our retrieval appt at 9:30 in the morning on Monday the 22nd (so last monday).
When I showed up, they put me in a comfy reclining chair with a big warming pad under me and over me and then a nice flannel blanket on top of that. I was super cozy and wrapped up.. it was easy to forget I was wearing paper slippers, a paper hat and a gown open in the back.
they took me to the room for retrieval (meanwhile Hans went to give them some sperm) and Mitch (my doc) got me all situated. The anesthesiolgist spoke to me for a bit and told me to breathe in on the mask.. and out I went. Nap time.

When I woke up I was in a curtained area and the nurse (who i love) was standing there smiling at me and gently rubbing my arm … I said “you’re so nurturing” in a small voice, and I fell back asleep again. Apparently I’m my nicest when waking up from general anasthesia. They said the same after a surgery I had years ago.. I woke up and smiled at everyone.. asked for a bucket .. threw up.. said thank you and beamed at them and fell back asleep.

Mitch came to tell me that they had retrieved 13 eggs and things looked good. This was exciting news.
I lay there for about another hour , munching on crackers and drinking water. Hans did some studying or just talked to me a little. I recovered fast and they let me head back out. Hans took me home and I napped for the rest of the day.

Fertilization Rate
They called me the next day to say that of the 13 eggs: 5 were immature, 8 were injected with sperm (we are doing ICSI which means they nject the sperm directly into the egg rather than just putting sperm into the dish with the egg and letting them do their own work) and 6 fertilized.

Starting the Progesterone in Oil shots
We started PIO shots on the wednesday after retrieval. I’d been DREADING this for weeks. The needle is long and bigger than the little ones i had been using in my belly which I didn’t feel at ALL.
I was terrified and had been building this experience up for way too long. Partly because I knew I had to do them nightly for at least 2 weeks. If i got pregnant, we had to do them for like 9 weeks. (basically the entire first trimester)

So I prepared the syringe for hans. I went upstairs and lay down naked on the bed.. face down. I clutched a pillow and concentrated on NOT clenching, since a clenched muscle would probably hurt if a needle were in it.
Hans said “So do you want me to count to three or just do it?”
I said “Just do it” (muffled in the pillows)
….
pause…
“don’t be cruel! just do it!”

“um, honey.. I am already injecting the medication”

so, i guess there really wasn’t anything to worry about! hah!
yay for my big ass!

Transfer
My transfer was on Thursday at around 1pm. I had acupuncture just prior and then took my Valium and drank the 32 oz of water I was supposed to drink.
At the transfer they said that all 6 of the embryos were “gorgeous” and in fact were so gorgeous, they were leery of putting in the 2 they had planned on transfering.
after some hmming and hawwing, i agreed to only transfer 1. We’re just not feeling up to twins right now. We’d love it if it happened, but there’s some ambivalence there.
I went back to acupuncture for another hour of napping with needles. (I always sleep through acupuncture)
then I went home for the rest of the day

Now i’m back in that familiar two week wait.
I was excited during the whole IVF process. I loved the whole thing.. the control, the little glass vials and syringes, the feeling like I was DOING something to help this along.
Now that I’m in the same old familiar 2ww that i’ve experienced month after month, it’s hard not to feel down in the dumps and depressed.

I’m still taking estrogen pills and the PIO shots.. the blood test is next thursday (ow the waiting pain!)

I’ve been taking it pretty easy and not socializing much, which may lead to more moping than I’d like. I think i’ll try to do more for the next week and a half to take my mind of this whole thing.

i also promise that your life will be full of stuff like this:

http://www.babylovesdisco.com/bldusa/winners.html#videolink

oh boy do I hope you dance at least a little like your papa. that kid max seems to be channeling him.

I want to start adding pictures to posts, but I’m not quite there yet.

I’m strangely enjoying trying to concieve again. I know it’s possible that IVF won’t work. And it definitely may not work this first try out. But i still walk around with this strange golden glow feeling in my belly. Like i have a secret. Or something really exciting is going on. I’m doing something useful.
Also, the whole science-fabulous aspect of it is exciting. the mixing of vials and liquids and powders. the injections, the seeing results with the dildocam.

I have some things on hold. Like my nervousness.. ambivalence i still may have that swims under the much stronger desire for a baby. The inevitable figuring out what kind of parents we want to be. what kind of household we want to have. I know some of my own daydreams of parenting are at odds with how i’ve lived my life so far, which i find interesting. (i won’t go into depth now.. but things like technology, food, hobbies, being industrious, etc)

I’m definitely nervous about when it DOES work. The guilt i will feel if I’m ever hating pregnancy, or having a hard time with what is definitely a hard time in the first year. Any time i think “this is too hard, why did i do this” .. i wonder if I will beat myself up extra because we will have paid so much and put in so much time to make this happen. I wonder if I will have a hard time allowing me to feel what i feel. Allowing myself to feel what I feel is usually not a problem I have… but I think i might this time.

I read motherrising’s IVF story of her son Satchel, and how she wrote on her belly “Welcome Home” on the day they transferred her fertilized embryo back .. and I found myself wanting to steal that idea. Because something about her sweet belief seemed inspirational.

I joke about child labor farms, but I want to go into this process with as much belief as possible. Which is interesting in a girl who has lots of faith but no religion.. and is an avowed atheist. my faith is not in god or a higher power, it’s in my friends. nature. something underneath.

I had a doctor’s appt this morning. These monitoring appts sure are putting a crimp in my style.. getting up before dark and having to find my way to the city at ungodly hours. and it’s raining! i smell like wet dog.
I’ve been on stims (injections to stimulate my ovaries) for 5 days now and last night I finally was starting to feel slightly swollen and sore in my pelvic area. I also had to pee every 15 minutes after I went to bed. luckily that only lasted an hour(ish).
This morning was an appointment with the dildocam, and it looks like 15 follicles are happily growing away in there.
15 babies!! i’m going to start my very own child labor farm. righteous.

so not all 15 may mature to the point that we’d be able to retrieve eggs, but so far they’re looking great. exciting news.

My friends Mani and Andrew are building a big fancy boat and there are some parts that andrew has a hard time getting to while building. what he needs are 15 little nimble fingered helpers.

ok, ha ha. anyway, 15 follies! grow grow, little lovelies.

holy fuck, i forgot how good Ibarra is. I used to have Ibarra made mexican hot chocolate in San Diego all the time.. but it’s increasingly hard to find up here in the bay area. i only once found a restaurant that served it, and they went out of business.
So at the Berkeley Bowl i found blocks of Ibarra (it comes in blocks, rather than powder. .. and you can grate it into hot milk or even just melt chunks of it.. i start out grating it but usually give up and start just cutting bits of it to throw into the heating milk) and the past two nights Hans and I have been enjoying delicious mildly frothy (thank you, whisk) cocoa.

I’m rereading Little Women. I LOVED LOVED LOVED this book as a girl. I still love it, but it’s tempered a little with eye-rolls at the way women are written… but I know it’s a product of its time. What i find interesting is that right up into my teens, I thought it was a perfect example of how young ladies should be. I think it was a self esteem thing.. the little women were all these things I wasn’t. (patient, demure, loving, sedate.. whereas I was moody, impatient, cranky and potty mouthed)

It’s funny how a little ‘fuck’ thrown into a new blog can make me start to feel a bit more like myself. There’s always an awkward first week or two, in finding my voice. No matter how many years i’ve blogged.. a new one always starts out stilted. strangely formal.

So far I haven’t felt any real side effects to my injections. I have been a little sleepier than normal, but otherwise I’ve felt fine. birth control pills, however, turned me into the anti-heather. The last time I took the pill was 1996, i think. The ring and the shot were fine. neither affected me too negatively. The pill turns me into a cranky, unloving wanker head. Hans would try to be affectionate, and I’d just curl in on myself and retreat. I know that can’t feel very good when the person you want to be closest to just wants you to go away. Luckily, within two days of going back off the pill..I was affectionate and playful again. I have to do them in the beginning of an IVF cycle, so I guess we just have to deal with the occasional 2 weeks of anti-heather.

My sock-elephant came dangerously close to being finished,, but the second ear totally crashed my happy. There I was floating high on my janky but cute elephant when the second ear just wouldn’t go on right. I tried 3 tries and then threw her in a sewing box and I’ll give it another try later this week.

Today we had brunch with our neighbors and another set of friends. Our neighbors live a very short 2 blocks away and we never see them. I know this is partially because of my homebodyness. we go out a lot, but when we’re home.. we seem to stick to home.
Both sets of friends have babies who were born 1 week apart. no two different babies could there be! one is almost 30 lbs at 6 months, and the other is a wee thing. but both are happy smiley drooly things .. whose cheeks you just want to take a mouthful of.

Matt the electrician is playing tonight, and this will be one of the only shows of his (when he comes to the bay area) that i’ll miss. but my nightly injections must be done at the same time every night.. so i’m a bit of a pumpkin around 9:30.

When hans got home from his hippie co-op last night, he had brought the co-op journals from his years there. I saw lots of pictures of my husband naked at age 20 .. long hair, beard and .. hubba hubba… he was a very fit 20 year old. oh how his mother would weep.

I hereby acknowledge that I know nothing whatsoever about sewing machines. I have two (well, actually I have 3.. they were all given to me. One , which has a hand press rather than foot.. i will return to the friend who gave it to me. the other two I got from my mother in law, and I’ll return the one I don’t end up using to her) and I don’t know how to thread them or run them or do anything with them.
I knew how to do some basic stuff in high school (very very basic) but all that knowledge is completely gone.

Hans has gone to his college co-op 35th anniversary party today. He went to Stanford and lived in a crazy hippie co-op, where they ate vegan and baked bread naked for new recruits. My boy. He’s a not-so-closeted hippie. His reunion/anniversary party today will consist of yoga (he skipped that bit), signing up to cook dinner (which i think he will do), a dance party, and some other crunchabulous things.
I did my reunion-wife bit last year for his 10 year college reunion (2 parties in a weekend) coupled with his company picnic, all on the same weekend. I think this could have been very entertaining, but I decided to stay home today.

So I’m home alone and the loft is filled with sunlight. I’ve been attempting to make a sock elephant but i’m having to hand sew (which I’m not so hot at either) since I can’t figure out the threading of the damn sewing machines. I really really want to learn to sew, but I’m not going to learn it on my own.. that’s obvious.
I have one leg done of my elephant, and a mighty fine leg it is too.

Godzilla is sleeping next to me on the couch, his nose tucked under his back leg. a second ago he was in that weird splayed sitting position that only cats can do, licking his belly and non-existant balls.

Hans won’t be back til late tonight.. so i’ll watch the two movies I got at the vid store.. try to finish the elephant.. and do my injections myself tonight.

I’m not quite sure how my day has gone by so quickly already

I’m missing out on Roller Derby championships tonight, but that’s ok. I’m enjoying my month of laying low.

My acupuncturist, the internet and my IVF paperwork from the hospital. They all have something in common. They all tell me to use ‘visualization’ to help me get through the stress of IVF. The waiting and wondering. The hoping. The doubt.

I visualize with lists. I love lists. When things feel the most out of control, i write lists. Lists don’t always create a solution, but they usually create calm. I see order in the confusion.

Right now the hippie dance jam is going on behind our loft. I can hear drum beats and the howling of the local hippies. They are there with their bare feet, yoga pants, and abandon. Someday we’ll make our way over there and join the hippie dance jam for a night.

to visualize, they tell me to imagine myself pregnant. I visualize myself pregnant. I meditate on pregnant.
to make a list .. I say.. with a cringe at sounding hokey:

Please let us and our baby-to-be find each other soon. this cycle preferably.
and if this happens, i promise to:

us. a family. Hans, Heather and whoever you are to be.

Now the hippie dance jam beats on. me, I’m going to bed. Jam on, hippies.

under water, with my hearbeat
submerged in warm water
with Hans, just about anywhere
in the kitchen, creating something
with friends, drinking a delicious wine
bed on a saturday morning

well, I did this once already. but as i get used to wordpress, it seems to have been eaten.

After the third person asked if I was blogging this ‘journey’ (sounds so new agey) that Hans and I are on.. I figured maybe I was doing us a disservice of some sort by not keeping a diary as we go along.
We’ve been trying to make a mini-us for the past year and a half (abouts) .. six months of that with help from a fertility doc. To no avail (although we had a few chemical pregnancies, which is barely a pregnancy. The egg begins to implant and then it lets go and that’s that).. and in september we decided to go forward with IVF. I’m now a few weeks into our first IVF cycle.
I don’t want this blog to be all about fertility and IVF and babies and all that hullabaloo, but since it seems to be where I’m at lately.. what with the nightly injections and constant doctor visits… I’m pretty sure that that will be a good portion of it. but not all. we’ll see. I don’t really plan on censoring my topics either way.

I’ll most likely link to this blog from my website (whenever i finally get one going) .. and that means anyone will be able to read it. I wondered if this was prudent, since that means grandmas, mother in laws, mothers, and strangers. but to hell with it. I will be honest and forthright, as best I can. and sometimes this will mean ugly thoughts, inappropriate thoughts and the occasional potty mouth. That’s who I am, baby.

I’ve been looking for a new website url for a long time, and I love salt and I love pickles (and pickles are an ongoing joke with hans and I. He hates pickles. hates hates hates. I even bought him a t-shirt for his birthday that says “Pickles are cucumbers soaked in evil”) .. and i realize that they’re both a little steeped in pregnancy imagery, and hey.. that’s ok with me.