It’s been just over a year since I’ve written anything here and oh, what a year it’s been. Obviously, there is the pandemic, the election, the continued murder of unarmed black man by the police. Along with all of that, I continued my fertility treatment plan. I had to look back at my last post to see where I’d left off. So, I did test positive for HHV-6. I began a treatment cycle with a pill that’s normally used to treat genital herpes. We were going to have me on it a month then do another biopsy but then Covid happened and my clinic wasn’t doing appointments. I ended up staying on it for several months before I could get a biopsy. Turns out the treatment didn’t work for me. 🤷🏻♀️ We were back at square one.
At this point, my doctor wanted to do a hysteroscopy to ensure all was well before moving forward with a frozen donor embryo. We did that and I had polyps again. So, I had to be put under for a polypectomy and more thorough hysteroscopy. Then we started preparing for our FDE cycle. This clinic is so much more thorough than my old one. Kaptain and I had an appointment with a psychologist then once we had her stamp of approval we got to see short bios for all the available donor embryos. Once we picked our top ones, we got family medical histories and made our decision based on which seemed most likely to result in a living breathing human.
My initial baseline appointment I came in and was feeling just stressed and overwhelmed by everything and my blood pressure kept going up so they kept taking it which made it go up more and more then I almost passed out. When I consulted a doctor, (elsewhere), afterwards I learned that I had a panic attack. Fun times. But on a positive note, my ultrasound and bloodwork were good so we were on track to transfer. I had an appointment 2 weeks later to check my lining and it was little thin after just taking estrace pills orally daily. So, my doctor had me change it to 2 pills vaginally and 1 pill orally. Super convenient. 🙄 These pills are bright blue so do the math. My poor underwear. I went back a week later and my lining looked great so we were scheduled to transfer in a week.
This whole time I’d been working on training my bladder to hold more liquid. This had always been an issue for me in the past so I started drinking 6 glasses of water over the course of every morning and only allowing myself to go to the bathroom every 2 hours. When I went in on transfer day, my nurse told me my bladder was perfectly full. This clinic has you take a Xanax before the transfer so it was exceptionally easy and pleasant. I was able to video it since I had to do the appointment alone. Everything looked so perfect. Spoiler: it still didn’t work.
At this point, we have tried so many different things. One thing I’d never done though was a laparoscopy. My doctor and I agreed it may be worthwhile so we got it scheduled. Not even going to lie. I purposely scheduled it for Election Day. I figured high on pain meds would be the best way to see this election through. Little did I know the counting of the votes would take weeks. 🤦🏻♀️ Doing a surgery 5 hours from home was nerve wracking. It ended up going well. I probably took more pain pills than necessary when leaving the clinic but the ride home wasn’t too bad at all. As far as the findings of the exploratory surgery, they were minimal. I had a couple very small endometriosis spots. A couple of additional spots of scarring. My liver is getting fatty due to how much weight I’ve gained and my appendix is in the wrong spot. Other than that all was well. I went home to start healing up from the surgery and plan our next move.
We went through Thanksgiving and then the first week of December I contacted the clinic about our next and final donor embryo cycle. This clinic is actually closed the last two weeks of December so they let me know I could pay for everything, select the embryo, do the paperwork and be ready to start when the clinic reopened in January. So that’s what we did. This time we selected the embryo off different criteria. Instead of looking at statistics, we went for the one that felt most like us. Biracial couple. Pretty geeky. The woman had struggled with her weight over the years. So that’s our embryo. Funny side story: when I reached out to the embryologist to request it, she gently told me they prefer to use those embryos for couples that are of color or biracial and she had my husband and I listed as being a white couple. I about died. 😹 I let her know Kap is definitely not white and so we are getting our selected embryo.
That takes me up to now. This past week I had my baseline. It even came with another panic attack. It has me really thinking this is where I am emotionally in terms of seeking treatment. I’m overwhelmed and stressed with the whole process. Obviously if this works, it will have all been worth it. But so far nothing has. It’s been 4 years of physical, emotional and financial stress with nothing to show for it. So this will be our last transfer. I am doing a countdown on the appointments. I even asked the nurse if I could start with the estrace being vaginally and orally from the onset in hopes of only needing 2 more appointments after the baseline opposed to 3. Luckily, she agreed. My next appointment is the lining check on the 27th and hopefully all will be good for a transfer on the 3rd. To say I’m not optimistic would be about the biggest understatement ever. I would love it to work. It would be absolutely awesome. But it simply isn’t very likely. That being said, we are both good with this being the last transfer. We are ready for a life without treatment and that will soon be here.
The Wayward Stork 