I've had kind of a tough week. But let me back up a little bit...
7 weeks ago my best friend (since we were 4) told me she was 6 wks pregnant with her second!! She literally told me after she peed on the (3) sticks. She had told her husband (obvi), her mom then me. I felt so honored that she told me even before she went to the doctor. Her simple answer was, "you're my best friend, I need you." She announced on Facebook at 12wks with a super cute pic of her 3 yr old daughter hold the ultrasound pics up high with a "Soon To Be Big Sister" shirt on. It was adorable. She has PCOS and was always told how it was going to be hard for her to get pregnant. Well first month trying... blammo. Pregnant with her daughter (who was born 2 days before our wedding). Her doctor said how it was a fluke and to not expect it to happen again... and wham! Pregnant the 1st month when trying to have the second. I'm so happy for them, they are amazing parents and have really great families.
She got her 12 wk tests back and there was a high marker for Downs Syndrome. She just had more extensive tests last week and has to wait another week for the results and see if she'll need an amnio. I'm asking you all to pray for her, the baby and her family. No matter what this baby will be loved immensely but just praying everything is ok.
On Tuesday I found out that my other close friend is also pregnant with her second child. She is actually due a week after my BFF. This one is a little more bitter sweet because we went off the pill at the same time and were excited to be pregnant together... well she's another one who got pregnant the first month with her son. It took them 6 months to get pregnant with the second, which it still pretty quickly. I didn't think it was going to impact me as much as it has. I think because we both planned to start TTC at the same EXACT time and here she is pregnant with her second miracle and we're still without ours... it's a hard pill to swallow. But... I haven't let anyone know how upset I really am. I finally called my mom and told her today but she's the only one I've really let know how deep this hurts. My husband doesn't even know. I just don't want to be the person who always has a sob story, "oh poor infertile J." The sad sack. No, I can't do that. I was in a really good place with this whole journey before I found out about my friend on Tuesday and I just went into a downward spiral of depression. I paste a happy smile on my face and laugh at all the right jokes (and tell all the right jokes) but when I'm alone I let myself cry. Pathetic. I cry in the car, in the shower... like I said, pathetic. I just need to get myself back to that positive place again. My husband knows something's wrong but I think he's waiting for me to say something. I just don't want this whole infertility thing to consume our relationship. I don't want this to define us as a couple and so far I don't think it has.
So yeah... also, here I am CD43. Yep you read that right... Cycle Day 43. The first day of my last period was July 19th. I have taken 2 tests (one on CD36 and one today) and both negative. No miracle for us this month but I was kind of expecting that... but of course when you pee on that stick you're still holding out hope that it just *might* be positive. I've been seeing the chiropractor/acupuncturist 2x a week since CD14. He is so super nice and his staff is really great. His office is closed next week for vacation and he said when he comes back he wants to try something new. I'm not sure if I screwed my cycle up because I was drinking that FertilitTea, it's screwed up from the fertility meds, or just plain screwed up. I'm also concerned that I didn't ovulate this cycle because I've consistently had a lot of CM (sorry TMI). Today is the first day I've had what I call the "irrational seeing red anger" for no real good reason so I think that AF is on the way. I'm hoping so because I'm looking forward to starting a new cycle with the acupuncture. I will not be drinking that tea this time and we'll see how it goes...
Friday, August 30, 2013
Friday, August 9, 2013
Weight Watchers
Well the Paleo hasn’t been working out the way that I had envisioned. It is a lot harder to be on that strict of a diet when your spouse if not than I had anticipated. I ended up cheating a lot more than I had wanted to so I decided that this isn’t for me at this point. It’s a wonderful diet and I felt really great when I was doing it but it’s so hard to do it when your spouse (and pretty much anyone else you spend time with) is not on board.
My friend K at work mentioned that she wanted to do Weight Watchers and I thought it would be a great idea if we did it together. There is a meeting on Thursdays at 5:45 that works out perfectly with our schedules. Our friend D is also going to do it as well but she’s going to do it online. I’m very excited to try this – I did it about 10 years ago and lost a bit of weight but I heard that the new program is a lot better. It’s hard for me when the hubs wants to order pizza and I’m struggling with: “do I just toss the diet out the window and have pizza too?” or “I guess I’ll get the house salad which is really just iceberg lettuce, some onions, tomatoes which have seen better days and a couple cucumbers – yum.”
The new program is touted as a “lifestyle” not a “diet.” I mean, look how good Jennifer Hudson looks! I follow her on Instagram and she definitely eats normal stuff… including pizza and ice cream! I am going to try and incorporate the “good fats” like I learned with the Paleo. Who knows, maybe that’s something they talk about as well? I’m not a fan of processed foods so that might be hard but the majority of fruits and veggies are “free points” so that’s really great.
I have to do something. I went to a big box store with my sister-in-law on Wednesday and I saw the reflection of someone standing next to her and it took me a couple seconds to realize that it was my complete side profile… gut, butt and all. Yowza. You know it’s bad when you don’t recognize yourself. Le sigh. I had lost a lot of weight (60lbs) about 8 years ago. I started to go to the gym every single day and I was very diligent about what I was eating. But that was before I had a 9-5 job, a husband and a house to take care of. It seems like there aren’t enough hours in the day and if I have an extra 2 hours I’d like to spend them with my love not going back and forth to a gym. I do, however, get up and hour early every day and walk on the treadmill. I would really like to get into running but I feel like I have too much bulk on me for that right now – lol. Once I lose some (ok, a lot ) of weight I want to give it a try.
When hubster and I started dating I wanted to woo him over with all my cooking skills – cream sauces included. It certainly wasn’t the low fat/low cal cooking I had been doing for myself. By the time we got married I had gained about 30 pounds. Then when we started the infertility treatment it was a slippery slope… I tried hard to eat well and ignore the intense hunger and cravings I was having all the time on the medicine… well… here we are 40 pounds later and my gut/butt are bigger and still no baby :/
Yep. There’s the quick and dirty. I gained A LOT of weight on those meds.
I have a friend who is starting IVF in September and she is very weight conscious (I think she border line has an eating disorder and I’m not even exaggerating) and I have not told her how much I gained on the meds. We haven’t seen each other in years but rekindled our friendship over Facebook when she message me and asked if we were having fertility issues… I think that’s how we started chatting… anyway we now just text. ALL. THE. TIME. The doctor told her she had to gain 6lbs before she can start IVF and it completely freaked her out. So yeah, I’m not telling her about it because I don’t want her to have any more on her mind than she already does/well with the whole IVF process.
Anyway- I looked up WW and pregnancy and WW doesn’t recommend that you stay on program while pregnant but I found a couple blogs where the woman were on WW and then got pregnant while they were still overweight. They used the WW tools to make better choices while pregnant and added more points/calories to their daily goal. I don’t know- I’ll look into it more if I get to that point. I’m sure my OBGYN will let me know what I can and cannot do.
We are going to start on the week of the 19th… I need something to obsess over to keep my mind off the baby business! I’m sure I will incorporate this next adventure into my blog… so stay tuned!
My friend K at work mentioned that she wanted to do Weight Watchers and I thought it would be a great idea if we did it together. There is a meeting on Thursdays at 5:45 that works out perfectly with our schedules. Our friend D is also going to do it as well but she’s going to do it online. I’m very excited to try this – I did it about 10 years ago and lost a bit of weight but I heard that the new program is a lot better. It’s hard for me when the hubs wants to order pizza and I’m struggling with: “do I just toss the diet out the window and have pizza too?” or “I guess I’ll get the house salad which is really just iceberg lettuce, some onions, tomatoes which have seen better days and a couple cucumbers – yum.”
The new program is touted as a “lifestyle” not a “diet.” I mean, look how good Jennifer Hudson looks! I follow her on Instagram and she definitely eats normal stuff… including pizza and ice cream! I am going to try and incorporate the “good fats” like I learned with the Paleo. Who knows, maybe that’s something they talk about as well? I’m not a fan of processed foods so that might be hard but the majority of fruits and veggies are “free points” so that’s really great.
I have to do something. I went to a big box store with my sister-in-law on Wednesday and I saw the reflection of someone standing next to her and it took me a couple seconds to realize that it was my complete side profile… gut, butt and all. Yowza. You know it’s bad when you don’t recognize yourself. Le sigh. I had lost a lot of weight (60lbs) about 8 years ago. I started to go to the gym every single day and I was very diligent about what I was eating. But that was before I had a 9-5 job, a husband and a house to take care of. It seems like there aren’t enough hours in the day and if I have an extra 2 hours I’d like to spend them with my love not going back and forth to a gym. I do, however, get up and hour early every day and walk on the treadmill. I would really like to get into running but I feel like I have too much bulk on me for that right now – lol. Once I lose some (ok, a lot ) of weight I want to give it a try.
When hubster and I started dating I wanted to woo him over with all my cooking skills – cream sauces included. It certainly wasn’t the low fat/low cal cooking I had been doing for myself. By the time we got married I had gained about 30 pounds. Then when we started the infertility treatment it was a slippery slope… I tried hard to eat well and ignore the intense hunger and cravings I was having all the time on the medicine… well… here we are 40 pounds later and my gut/butt are bigger and still no baby :/
Yep. There’s the quick and dirty. I gained A LOT of weight on those meds.
I have a friend who is starting IVF in September and she is very weight conscious (I think she border line has an eating disorder and I’m not even exaggerating) and I have not told her how much I gained on the meds. We haven’t seen each other in years but rekindled our friendship over Facebook when she message me and asked if we were having fertility issues… I think that’s how we started chatting… anyway we now just text. ALL. THE. TIME. The doctor told her she had to gain 6lbs before she can start IVF and it completely freaked her out. So yeah, I’m not telling her about it because I don’t want her to have any more on her mind than she already does/well with the whole IVF process.
Anyway- I looked up WW and pregnancy and WW doesn’t recommend that you stay on program while pregnant but I found a couple blogs where the woman were on WW and then got pregnant while they were still overweight. They used the WW tools to make better choices while pregnant and added more points/calories to their daily goal. I don’t know- I’ll look into it more if I get to that point. I’m sure my OBGYN will let me know what I can and cannot do.
We are going to start on the week of the 19th… I need something to obsess over to keep my mind off the baby business! I’m sure I will incorporate this next adventure into my blog… so stay tuned!
Tuesday, August 6, 2013
Acu/ Chiro Update
Just a quick acupuncture/ chiropractic update! I had an x-ray on Monday and it showed that I have arthritis in my lower back :/ All stemming from that damn accident in 1998 (the gift that keeps on freaking giving!). The chiropractor said that it makes sense that I haven’t gotten pregnant… that with the inflammation and pain I’ve had (for years) in my back I’m not getting enough blood flow to my uterus, that the pain receptors in my brain are sending it to my lower back and away from my uterus… I just thought I had lower back pain because I sit at a computer all day… oh and because I’m a fat a$$. LOL!
Lord I pray that he’s right and what he’s doing at my appointments works. He said that he’s had a lot of patients come to him for infertility and there are a bunch of pictures of different babies in his office (I am optimistically assuming that they are satisfied patients saying thank you, haha).
Fingers crossed!
Lord I pray that he’s right and what he’s doing at my appointments works. He said that he’s had a lot of patients come to him for infertility and there are a bunch of pictures of different babies in his office (I am optimistically assuming that they are satisfied patients saying thank you, haha).
Fingers crossed!
Friday, August 2, 2013
Acupuncture, Chiro... and softcups! Oh My!
I went for my first acupuncture and chiropractic appointment last night… it was awesome! I decided to try an alternative route while on our break from the IF clinic because I have read so many wonderful things about it. I have a friend who tried for 3 years and attributes her 6th IUI finally working because she had acupuncture.
I saw my OBGYN (yearly pap) on Tuesday and of course I burst into tears when she asked how everything was at the IF clinic. She is so sweet and so nice. She told me that the patient she saw before me went through 5 IVF’s and when they decided to take a break she got pregnant at 42. She kept saying to me, “don’t give up, don’t give up.” She said she has many many patients who have taken a break from the IUI/IVF treatments, relaxed, and then got pregnant. She also said something else that I found to be very interesting – she said that “this has nothing to do with God. It doesn’t mean that you’re not a good person, this is all about science.” It was almost like she had been reading my mind. Not that I blame God- there are too many awful things in this world for me to go to a place where I start to blame God. But the part about me being a good person – that’s something I’ve said many times. “Aren’t I a good person? Aren’t we deserving people?” It certainly gave me something to think about.
Anyway, she was very happy when I told her I was going for acupuncture. She said that she has heard many success stories in her office about acupuncture and hopes that I call and give her good news very soon. I went to a doctor who does acupuncture and is also a chiropractor. The first appointment was more like a physical with him getting to know my body and he was doing all these measurements, stretches, and checking my reflexes. He asked about any “trauma” to my body besides what I had written on the forms and I told him I was a passenger in a bad car accident in 1998 and I was thrown out the back passenger window (it’s a miracle that I survived and didn’t have any broken bones). But I landed on my hip and then slid 20 ft on my side. I have tendonitis and bone spurs in my shoulders and as I have gotten older, I always have lower back pain but I attributed it have a job where I sit in front of a computer all day. He said that I’m all “backed up” in my hip/pelvis area because of the accident and that may very well be why I’m not getting pregnant.
Well, that’s surely something.
After he adjusted my back a little he had me go into another room and the nurse put electrodes on my back for some electric stimulation. Then I laid down and he put 11 needles in my body – my forehead, ear, neck, stomach, pubic bone, legs and ankles. I didn’t feel a thing. I only felt a light tap, like he was tapping me with his finger. It was actually very relaxing. Then he took them out, I rolled over and he put 4 more in my back.
I need to get an xray of my spine to make sure there isn’t any arthritis and he said he wants to see me 2x a week for the first month. I’m not sure if it’s going to always be a combo of acupuncture and a chiropractic visit but I feel pretty good today!
Today is cd16. I got my first “high” on the CBE Fertility Monitor on cd14 and then it went directly to a “peak” day yesterday and today. I read in the booklet that you can get 1 – 5 days of highs before the 2 days of peak so I guess I’m right on target. I drank a quart of the FertiliTea every day up until cd15. I have read conflicting things online that you can drink it all through your cycle or that you need to stop at ovulation so I figured better to be safe than sorry and just stopped at ovulation. But I ovulated around the same time as I usually do when I’m on all the medication so that’s pretty amazing. Who knows if it’s the tea or just a fluke cycle… guess I’ll have to see what happens next cycle with the tea.
Ok… has anyone heard of softcups? I read a lot about them online and they are used as an alternative to tampons/pads when you have your period but online a lot of people are using them for after they have sex to keep the sperm in there. Let me describe them to you… they look a lot like one of those rubber “livestrong” bracelets and it has a silicone piece on one side like a “cup.” You pinch the sides of the band together and insert it and the idea is that it keeps all of the sperm from coming out and closer to the cervix. I think that the good swimmers go to where they are supposed to go right away and then whatever comes out are the “rejects” (lol) so I'm sure about the effectiveness of this. But women were swearing up and down that that’s how they conceived. I looked them up on Amazon and they aren’t that expensive and again the women were singing its praises. It can’t hurt to try it I guess but I can only imagine what the hubs would say when I take one of those out of the nightstand after sex…
I saw my OBGYN (yearly pap) on Tuesday and of course I burst into tears when she asked how everything was at the IF clinic. She is so sweet and so nice. She told me that the patient she saw before me went through 5 IVF’s and when they decided to take a break she got pregnant at 42. She kept saying to me, “don’t give up, don’t give up.” She said she has many many patients who have taken a break from the IUI/IVF treatments, relaxed, and then got pregnant. She also said something else that I found to be very interesting – she said that “this has nothing to do with God. It doesn’t mean that you’re not a good person, this is all about science.” It was almost like she had been reading my mind. Not that I blame God- there are too many awful things in this world for me to go to a place where I start to blame God. But the part about me being a good person – that’s something I’ve said many times. “Aren’t I a good person? Aren’t we deserving people?” It certainly gave me something to think about.
Anyway, she was very happy when I told her I was going for acupuncture. She said that she has heard many success stories in her office about acupuncture and hopes that I call and give her good news very soon. I went to a doctor who does acupuncture and is also a chiropractor. The first appointment was more like a physical with him getting to know my body and he was doing all these measurements, stretches, and checking my reflexes. He asked about any “trauma” to my body besides what I had written on the forms and I told him I was a passenger in a bad car accident in 1998 and I was thrown out the back passenger window (it’s a miracle that I survived and didn’t have any broken bones). But I landed on my hip and then slid 20 ft on my side. I have tendonitis and bone spurs in my shoulders and as I have gotten older, I always have lower back pain but I attributed it have a job where I sit in front of a computer all day. He said that I’m all “backed up” in my hip/pelvis area because of the accident and that may very well be why I’m not getting pregnant.
Well, that’s surely something.
After he adjusted my back a little he had me go into another room and the nurse put electrodes on my back for some electric stimulation. Then I laid down and he put 11 needles in my body – my forehead, ear, neck, stomach, pubic bone, legs and ankles. I didn’t feel a thing. I only felt a light tap, like he was tapping me with his finger. It was actually very relaxing. Then he took them out, I rolled over and he put 4 more in my back.
I need to get an xray of my spine to make sure there isn’t any arthritis and he said he wants to see me 2x a week for the first month. I’m not sure if it’s going to always be a combo of acupuncture and a chiropractic visit but I feel pretty good today!
Today is cd16. I got my first “high” on the CBE Fertility Monitor on cd14 and then it went directly to a “peak” day yesterday and today. I read in the booklet that you can get 1 – 5 days of highs before the 2 days of peak so I guess I’m right on target. I drank a quart of the FertiliTea every day up until cd15. I have read conflicting things online that you can drink it all through your cycle or that you need to stop at ovulation so I figured better to be safe than sorry and just stopped at ovulation. But I ovulated around the same time as I usually do when I’m on all the medication so that’s pretty amazing. Who knows if it’s the tea or just a fluke cycle… guess I’ll have to see what happens next cycle with the tea.
Ok… has anyone heard of softcups? I read a lot about them online and they are used as an alternative to tampons/pads when you have your period but online a lot of people are using them for after they have sex to keep the sperm in there. Let me describe them to you… they look a lot like one of those rubber “livestrong” bracelets and it has a silicone piece on one side like a “cup.” You pinch the sides of the band together and insert it and the idea is that it keeps all of the sperm from coming out and closer to the cervix. I think that the good swimmers go to where they are supposed to go right away and then whatever comes out are the “rejects” (lol) so I'm sure about the effectiveness of this. But women were swearing up and down that that’s how they conceived. I looked them up on Amazon and they aren’t that expensive and again the women were singing its praises. It can’t hurt to try it I guess but I can only imagine what the hubs would say when I take one of those out of the nightstand after sex…
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