IVF Cycle 2, Stim day 4

Wow, it's hard to believe it's been two months since my last post. After my 1st IVF cycle failed, I wasn't crumpled in the corner crying or anything, but I felt like I needed a month to get myself back on track. I tend to get really fixated on things so in the month leading up to the cycle and then the cycle itself, I really immersed myself in doctors and medicine and infertility blogs. When it was over I really needed to step away from all of it. Far away. It felt like a thick layer slime I couldn't wash off. So even though my doctor wanted me to go right into a new cycle, I told her I needed a month off. And in that month I kind of forgot we were trying to have a baby. I didn't take my temperature, and I barely kept up with the blogs I was reading. I felt free.

When I started my period that next month I called the clinic to let them know, then made plans to go in for my baseline ultrasound and bloodwork. I'll be honest, I didn't want to do it. I'd moved on to other fixations in my month off and was busy planting gardens and trying to finish up a writing class. I could easily have rationalized needing another month off. But I went in for the ultrasound, anyway, and by noon that day I was deep in the trenches of the frustration and the angst of IVF, again. I think it was a combination of my not wanting to do it in the first place, and the rushing to get to the early appointment and then into work to finish an important project by a deadline that did it. Then when I called the pharmacy to get my meds, I learned that I have a $10,000 lifetime max on infertility meds which I would reach only a few days into the cycle. So, I needed to come up with about 5 grand in a couple of hours. I was already on cycle day 3 because my clinic was closed the day before for Memorial Day when I should have been planning all this. I threw in the towel and immediately went to a very bad place. The place you go when you know it's time to come to terms with never having children. It was bad.

There are so many things I swore I'd never do when I started this journey. I won't put us into financial ruin for this. I won't resent women with babies. I won't let infertility define me. Yet here I sit with my giant box of meds, part of it paid for with borrowed money, some of it free from my clinic and the rest from a kind and generous new friend who is pregnant from a successful IVF cycle. I never thought I'd be one of those women who would need to take charity meds dropped off by pushy pharmaceutical reps, yet here I am injecting myself twice a day with samples usually reserved for cancer patients having emergency IVF before chemo. It is a mix of intense emotion, bad and good. Appreciation, embarrassment, dread, hope.

Tomorrow I go for my first monitoring ultrasound. I'm trying to stay busy. I'm trying to stay fixated on gardening so I don't get stuck floundering around the pain I feel in my ovaries today. It ain't easy.