IVF Cycle #2: Ready

As of this morning, I am 16 days in to my current IVF cycle with the same number of Lupron injections behind me. What was only supposed to be 7-10 days of injections stretched into double the time frame and was accompanied by several days of moderate to severe abdominal pain. The pain itself wasn’t necessarily unusual for me but the circumstances around it were, and after a while I started to worry that something more was going on with my body. Even a simple cyst would have the power to cancel my IVF cycle completely and render everything up to this point useless. But we were stuck– there was nothing we could do to move on until I reached the first day of my new cycle, and the wait seemed like it was never going to end.

On Friday I finally hit Cycle Day 1, which means tomorrow morning we will head to our clinic for my baseline appointment. If everything checks out with my ultrasound and blood work, I’ll get a call in the afternoon with instructions on beginning my stim injections tomorrow night. My ovaries will go from quiet and sleepy to slammed into overdrive.

Aside from the bad reaction to my first Lupron injection, the rest have been easy. Every morning I load up a syringe and stick myself in the belly without even needing to think twice about it. The medication itself, however, has been a bit more difficult to tolerate: I’d been on it once before when I was 16 and only remembered that it made me so emotional I couldn’t get through the school day without crying in the bathroom. Back then it was meant as a treatment for my endometriosis, but within a few months I was taken back off of it because I was struggling to function. This time around I feel a little more in control, but there have been many times where I’ve found myself crying before I even really know why. The nausea, motion sickness, and hot flashes aren’t so fun either; my body just doesn’t seem to like this medication. Unfortunately, I’ll need to continue these injections throughout the rest of my cycle, though I will get to cut the dose in half.

It’s hard to know how much Ross understands about what’s happening around him. He watches me do my injections in the mornings, and I’ve tried my best to explain to him that although my medication makes me cry sometimes, I am okay. He has accepted this and doesn’t seem too affected by it, but the other day he randomly looked up at me and said, “Mommy’s medicine is not nice.” He knows when I am going to the doctor and I’ve mentioned that the doctor is checking the eggs in my belly to see if they are growing, but that’s as far as we go. Truthfully, not even Kyle and I dare say out loud what we are hoping for at the end of this, and I am afraid of putting ideas in Ross’ head of something that may never come to be. For now it seems best to keep things simple.