A Guest Blog Entry (Brought To You By The Great Blog Cross-Pollination)

Geohde at Mission:Impossible came up with the fabulous idea of a blog cross-pollination. The idea is that, upon visiting your usual blogroll, you are exposed to a new voice that you may not have heard before. Like this idea? If you let Geohde know how much you love it, I'm sure she'd have another one...


And now onto the guest blogger post entitled, "Feeling Like Crap".

Huh. I feel as if I should be more prolific. After all, it's not every day that you get to "invade" another blogger's space. And since the whole point of The Great Cross Pollination is to capture the interest of other readers, well, I should be at my very blogging best. I should have something so deep and profound to write about that you are left wondering how you ever lived without my blog before.

Pressure.

Honestly, though, I can't take any more pressure right now. Also, I don't want to give in to the need to be anything other than what I usually am in my posts. After all, then you would be very disappointed when you started actually tuning into my blog on a regular basis. And I don't offer refunds.

Unless you already cheated and clicked on the link to see who was playing the role of Kristen today, I am currently a "mystery woman." So, I will give you some background. My husband and I have been through the wringer of unexplained recurrent miscarriage. For the first year and a half of our struggles with TTC, we had no issues with the getting pregnant part. We basically got pregnant whenever we tried (please don't hate me for that, I knew how lucky we were), but we would lose our pregnancies usually within a few weeks of finding out about them. We had testing done after the third miscarriage and nothing came up as being abnormal, including chromosomally for either of us. After our last loss, we were both in need of a break, so we decided to take six months off and then try again, this time with the help of our RE, who was going to "tweak" some things with increasing my egg quality, progesterone, etc. Well, to all of our amazement, we didn't get pregnant. For six cycles, we went with Femera, then to IUI, and were about to move to injectibles with IUI when we ran into a little snag.

My current amazing medical coverage will be over as of January 1, 2008. I know you might hate me a little for this, too, but my insurance has covered 100% of everything that we have done so far. We pay a measly little copay and the rest is taken care of. I know that this isn't the case for most people out there, so I have been extremely grateful for this wonderful benefit. It has allowed us to make decisions based on what was right for us, rather than what we could afford. This little luxury is about to be over.

We discussed this upcoming change with our RE, who had started suggesting a potential IVF cycle if one or two tries with the injectibles didn't work. That would have put us in January or February. She agreed that it made sense to just move on to IVF with PGD (pre-genetic diagnosis) and heparin a month earlier than we had originally planned.

So, no pressure, but my body doesn't have time to mess around. I have to respond perfectly to all of the medications in order to make it into the final transfers of 2007. Pressure? Nah, no pressure here.

I went in for my baseline follicle check yesterday and my body is already failing. It seems that I am one of the "lucky" few (less than 4% of women) who manage to ovulate even when taking birth control. I had a lovely 13 mm follicle (right on track for CD 5) coming from my left ovary. In order to suppress this ovulation, I am now taking a double dose of birth control pills every day.

Hence the reason for feeling like crap. I have never done well with the higher doses of bcps, back in pre-TTC days, I had to take a very low estrogen form of them. I was already on the higher estrogen dosage to start with for this suppression cycle and now I am doubled from that. My RE warned me that this wouldn't be pretty - it's not. I feel awful. I am nauseated, have a headache, and feel BLECH. And I am suspicious of the increasing EWCM that is gracing my undies. If I ovulate regardless of this increased dosage, then the whole thing is scrapped for December and we will be put in with the January transfers.

We won't know until the ultrasound scheduled for next Saturday. No pressure, no, not here.

Before I close, I would like to thank my gracious hostess, Kristen, for having me on her blog. And of course, the Queen Bee who started it all, Geohde of Mission: Impossible.


Can you guess the lovely honey bee who cross-pollinated my blog?