Dobry Den!

Hi.

It's been a while. Sorry about that. The past few weeks have been crazy, but you don't want to hear about that. If you've been following my story, you know that we're in the Czech Republic.. like.. right now. And we are! It's amazing. No, it's not paradise, but it's beautiful here. The people are nice enough the the weather is great, although a tad bit chilly (tho you won't hear any complaints from me).

But onto the good stuff - we had our first ultrasound appointment on Thursday. I met Petra (one of the coordinators) and she was absolutely adorable. She was incredibly sweet and accommodating. She listened to each and every one of my concerns and answered all my questions. I didn't meet Dr. Vrana (who has been my doctor thus far) instead I met the other doctor, whose name slips my mind, and he was also very nice.

My ultrasound showed 15 follicles, which is awesome. The largest of which was 13 but mostly around 8 to 10. The doctor was pleased with my results and increased my Gonal F injections from 225 a day to 250 on Friday and 275 Saturday & Sunday. He also prescribed me Cetrotide which prevents the body from ovulating on its own.

My next appointment is tomorrow at 8:30. I'm looking forward to it. I really hope I responded well to the extra meds and my follicles will be much bigger. I'm also secretly hoping that I have even more sneaky little follicles pop up with the extra meds.  The doctor informed me that, even though I have 15 follicles, probably 10 of them will actually contain eggs, and then less than that will fertilize after the retrieval and 4 or 5 will make it to day 5.

This is just an average but pretty accurate. I'm hoping to the be exception and get more than what he assumes I will. Tomorrow he'll also let me know when my retrieval will be. He thinks it'll be on Thursday but we'll confirm this during our appointment.

I'm pretty ready to get this over with. The shots have been making my tummy so bloated. So if my pants aren't stretchy or just way too big, I'm not wearing them. But I realized yesterday that I haven't been eating much. I mean, we have to shop in foreign grocery stores so we don't have a ton of food in our apartment, but I just haven't been hungry. Being puffy really causes my stomach to think it's already full, so I keep skipping meals and not even realizing it. But today we're putting forth an effort to really eat more. I don't want my little follies to be malnourished!

And that's it for now. I've been super distracted so I haven't felt like blogging since we arrived, but I wanted to let you all know how I was doing. Our apartment is super bright and clean. I absolutely love it. The tram is right across the road so it's perfectly convenient and I LOVE public transportation so it's such a treat for me. Today we plan on doing some sight-seeing and touring the city. Altogether we've been taking it easy and really enjoying our time here. It's so nice to have my DH with me 24/7. :)

Hope you're all well! I'll check in after my next ultrasound!

74 Degrees

Let's talk about my thyroid... (try to contain your excitement ;) It was high - 3.62, to be exact. I had no idea it was that high. So, apparently there's different scales to measure your TSH level, and doctors will argue over what's high and what's not, but for the sake of getting pregnant, my clinic said they wanted it around 1.0.  Well obviously 3.62 is not 1, so I had some work to do. They put me on levothyroxine for about a month now and it's been great.

Oh, so the title of the blog.. right. While it's not 74 degrees out at the moment (don't I wish it was), that's the temperature in our apartment. "Okay, so what?" you might say. Before taking this medication, I liked for the temperature to never go over 72. And even that was pushing it. I'd bring it down to 71 or even lower depending on the day. What this meant was that I couldn't tolerate heat. This is one of the classic signs of hypothyroidism.

Let's explore this a little - My basal body temperature (if you're a fellow TTCer, you know you've taken yours every morning for at least a few months), would generally hover around 97.5 in my follicular phase (pre-ovulation) and then 98.1 in my luteal phase (post ovulation). Now that's an average, but I've seen my BBT get as low as 96.7. Yikes. And sometimes it'd get higher than 98.1 but it was usually just for a day or two after I O'd.

I thought for sure this meant that I had a luteal phase defect. I clearly wasn't producing enough progesterone to sustain high temps and therefore I was losing a potential pregnancy each month. But no doctor ever bothered to check my thyroid. And low BBTs are a classic sign of hypothyroidism.

That was until Reprogenesis checked it. And I'm so glad they did because having a high TSH (anything about a 1.5 to 2) can cause miscarriage. Now my BBT has been 98.5 or higher when I wake up. This means that I'm not a giant pool of sweat whenever it creeps above 72 in our apartment.  This makes me happy. And it also makes me feel reassured that these doctors just might know what they're doing. :)

So the moral of my story is, have your doctor check your thyroid! You could be hypo and not even realize it!

IVF Timeline

I've been purposely staying away from blogging for a little bit.  I've felt a little nuts lately with all the planning and preparations that go into doing IVF across the Atlantic. I had a tiff with my coordinator and ended up requesting a new one. That was a huge, unnecessary source of anxiety. Things are much better now, but I have always been one who can only focus on "the now" so needless to say, I couldn't cope.

But things are fine now. We sent our payment yesterday so now it's truly finalized. All of my medication is here and I've been on birth control and levothyroxine since 8/20 (CD3). It's now CD17 which means tomorrow I increase my birth control dosage from 1 to 2 a day - morning and night. Right now I have a little tenderness in my breasts but nothing crazy. I feel like this will be a little intense. Honestly, it shouldn't be anything compared to the "big drugs" so I'm trying not to make much of it. I also start taking prednisone around the same time, which is a steroid that will tell the body not to attack the embryo. Great stuff.

Just in case you're curious about our timeline, here's a breakdown for you:

8/20: Start Desogen (birth control)
8/20: Start Levothyroxine (thyroid medication)
9/05: Increase BCP to 1-0-1 (morning & night)
9/06: Start Prednisone & Folic Acid
9/08: Last BCP - continue other medication
9/12: Expected Period
9/14: (CD3) Start Gonal F
9/16: Leave for Czech Republic
9/17: Arrive in Prague & take bus to Brno
9/18: First U/S - do not take Gonal until after appointment for dosage adjustment
9/18: Possible start date of Cetrotide (a drug that suppresses ovulation)
9/23: Second U/S
9/26: Possible Egg Retrieval
10/01: Possible Egg Transfer

So as we all know, in the world of IF we can plan to our little hearts content, but sometimes the body does what it wants to, which means some of these dates are tentative. Who knows when the actual retrieval will be. I think they like to stim for about 10 days, so it shouldn't be too far off the timeline above. But I've always been a good responder, so I might be ready sooner. We'll see.

And just an update on the apartment - I know I said that we'd be staying at that super modern apartment in Brno, but we're back to staying at the Vienna Apartment. I'm pretty excited. Tomas (the owner) has been absolutely brilliant in his emails and super accommodating. I feel confident about staying at this place and it seems like it's in a good part of town that's close to plenty of stores and such.

Well that's it for now - we leave in less than two weeks. Holy. Crap. I still need to buy a new purse cuz mine's been falling apart and that's the last thing I need while running through an airport. So off I go to the store! Hope you're all doing well!

Moving Along

It's been awhile, hasn't it? I've been meaning to write but couldn't quite drag myself to the keyboard. Sure, I've been on the computer, checked the stats of my blog, looked in on some other bloggers I follow, but I haven't taken the time to write down my thoughts.

Why? Well, we all know it fairly well by now: Anxiety. Infertility is riddled with it. Sometimes it's during the TWW. Sometimes it's preparing for a medicated cycle. Sometimes it's just waiting around contemplating what to do next.

I am very anxious. We're down to about two months until our first IVF cycle. Honestly, I'm scared. Scared of what might happen before the cycle... Will we make it there in time? Will I take the right amount of drugs? Will I ovulate early? Will I be sick from the medication? And then of course, what if it doesn't work? How will I handle it? I'm usually a pretty good judge of my reactions. I've known myself for a while. ;) But I honestly do not know how I will cope with a failed cycle. Sure, plenty of warriors have gone before me and completed IVF after IVF, but I don't know if I'm strong enough.

How do you know? Am I cut out for this? I mean, I guess I am cuz I've committed to it this far. We haven't sent them the check yet, but we're all in it. I won't change my mind. I want this. I want to try. I just want it to work.

So, I'm scared. I'm worried. I want to feel hopeful but it's too complicated to feel purely one emotion. I can't be *too* hopeful or *too* scared. I must manage my expectations.

I'm sure it doesn't help that I've been slowly coming off of Zoloft. I've been on 50 mg for almost a year now and I've forgotten why I needed it. It's been really hard. Dr. Vrana (the doctor at Reprogenesis) wants me to stop Zoloft for the cycle anyway so I figured I'd go off of it now before starting BCP and adding that to the mix. But it's been rough. I need some kind of help. I feel like I'm dangling from a cliff.

Okay, so that's my world right now. Here are the logistics:

We've changed our IVF date from October to mid September. We're planning to be there around September 18th. My coordinator at Reprogenesis told me they can modify the timing of the IVF by using birth control pills and I trust them. They've done this a few times.

We've changed apartments too and are staying in this one:   It's similar to the one in my last post, but bigger and looks more like a regular apartment, except super freakin fancy. :)  We'll be there for approximately 16 days and DH will be with me the entire time.

Originally I was gonna fly there alone and then meet up with him a week later, but I realized that this is too emotional to do alone. And I can't imagine having to give myself bum injections. Oh, and I won't have to lift a finger the whole time (which the clinic requires after ET anyway), so that's a plus. And I'm a super newb when it comes to traveling abroad, so it'll help to have someone with me the whole time in case I have a nervous breakdown in the airport.

And that's the plan. I should get my period sometime this weekend which will then be followed up by getting blood drawn for all my hormones (LH, FSH, TSH, Estradiol, and Prolactin). Never thought I'd be excited about a blood draw..

I think I'm gonna start writing more technical posts, too. I really want this blog to benefit someone who is considering doing IVF abroad. I've found a few blogs about it and it really helped to read a personal point of view. So at some point I'll write a list of all the things Reprogenesis has required me to do and questions I've asked. Just not today.

Today I needed to force myself to write. And I did. There it is.

Let the fun begin.

We had our consultation today with Reprogenesis in Brno, Czech Republic. It was awesome. They called us over Skype and we voice chatted while parked in front of the nearest AT&T store. We have HORRIBLE cell reception and internet at our apartment, so calling from home was not an option. Fortunately, the AT&T store didn't open till 10 and we had our call at 8 so we camped out there for an hour.

The doctor was really helpful and his English was very good. He answered all of my questions and went through the IVF process in detail. Needless to say, I'm excited. I wish it was October already. And the obsessive organizer in me wants to start taking birth control pills next month so I can know exactly when we'll have to be there.

Part of the process leading up to IVF is being on birth control pills which is done to regulate your cycle. Plus, I think it makes your ovaries "quiet" so that when they inject you with crazy hormones your ovaries will be like, "holy crap, I wanna make 1 million eggs!!!"  Or at least, that's my interpretation of it.

The doc recommended that we do PICSI to give the sperms a little extra *oomph* which will only improve our chances. Clearly these aren't real medical terms, but I'll spare you the gory details. We're planning to do the embryoscope too which will increase our chances an additional 5 - 10% (from a 50% chance of success), and in the world of infertility, that's a lot! Right now we have about 1 - 2% chance to conceive on our own, so I feel pretty good about these odds. The clinic has a success rate of 60% for women up to 40 doing IVF with their own eggs (as opposed to donor eggs). They don't break it down for women under 35, which I think if they did that it'd be an even better percentage. Your chances to conceive start to steadily decline after 35.

So it's been a good day. It's gonna be hard to not have any structure over the next few months. I finished up school yesterday and got a big ol' A. I'm kind of a rockstar at takin' 1 class at a time. Don't be jelly.  ;)

I guess that's it for now. I'm not feeling particularly sassy or funny, so this is more of a general update. Oh and here's a picture of the apartment that I booked (tentative dates, of course) while I'll be staying in Brno. Super cute, right??


It's a 5 minute ride to the clinic and in the middle of everything. There's a grocery store right down the street so I can stock up and eat real food while I'm there. There's a kitchenette and a burner too. Below is the view and the tiny terrace. Yes, I will be drinking coffee out there in the morning. So. Excited.

Control and my lack thereof

Ever feel that you have absolutely no control? Spend two plus years in the trenches of infertility and you will be well acquainted with that feeling. So this is my attempt at control - I'm researching the crap out of IVF in the Czech Republic.

It's intense. At the moment, we're trying to choose a clinic. I have found myself being excited and set on one place, only to stumble upon another website with amazing statistics and great accommodation. Then I realize they're too expensive and go back to the drawing board. It's a merry-go-round. A foreign, confusing, time sucking merry-go-round.

Now don't get me wrong, I'm excited. I'm thrilled. I'm oozing with anticipation of the possibility of pregnancy by the end of the year. After all, I kind of gave up on that idea a while ago. Sure, it could happen. It's possible. It's also possible that a record producer could hear me singing along to some tunes in my car with the windows down and offer me a record deal on the spot.

Okay, maybe that last part's not so possible..

But this is more than a dream. It's really, truly, honestly possible now. I've seen our chances. I've read all the scientific research I could get my hands on. I've seen the glowing patient reviews. That could be me. I want to be that kind of statistic. The kind that gives other people hope. I don't wanna be 1 in 7 anymore. That sucks. It's depressing. And more importantly, it sucks. I said that twice but it was worth repeating.

So that's been my life lately. When I'm not doing studious school-type things, I'm googling hotels in Prague, scouring countless infertility message boards, and counting every penny we can put towards treatment.

I haven't even thought about how painful IVF can be. I can't think about that. It's going to happen.. The pain, that is. So many shots. Some in the tummy, some in the leg, some in the bum.

They're all gonna hurt. But that's par for the course.  I've heard that some people get pregnant by just having sex and that it's fun??? Clearly someone's spreading lies because it's impossible to get pregnant without at least 2 shots, a handful of pills, and a room full of doctors. Right? Or at least that's what I've been told.

I just want it to be October already. I want to have chosen the clinic, talked to the doctors, and ordered the medication. I want to have the plane tickets in hand and my luggage packed. But I guess I'll wait. What's a few months now, anyway? 

In the mean time, I get to have control over my spreadsheet. You know the one - it's full of clinic names, dates, prices, numbers, websites, etc. I'm gonna take it everywhere with me and when I start to feel like I can't control anything, I'll look at my spreadsheet and all will be right with the world.

That's weird, right? I'm weird.