Under Pressure

You may recall that, way back in January, I attempted a clomid cycle, but my ovaries didn't produce a single mature egg follicle. Were you wondering about all the silence on the fertility topic since then? That silence was the sound of me waiting for that stupid canceled cycle to just end already. I took progesterone pills, I waited, I waited some more, I got a progesterone shot, I waited, I waited some more... and my body finally decided to move on. Weeks and weeks of wasted time. (Along with lots and lots of wasted negative home pregnancy tests -- hope springs eternal, eh?) I finally started a new cycle, this time with 200 mg of clomid. Follicle scan was this morning. The result: only one follicle, not yet mature (only 14mm). We're giving it a few more days and coming back for another scan on Friday, we'll hopefully be able to trigger then, and then we'll do the IUI Saturday morning.

For the last two months, we've been planning a weekend away with three other families, and we're all supposed to be leaving Saturday morning. We were planning to caravan to our rented cabin all together, but the IUI Saturday morning means that we're going to have to leave about an hour after everyone else. And we can't tell them why, because none of our friends know that we've started fertility treatments again. Suggestions on what lie we can tell them to minimize questions are appreciated, because I'm kind of at a loss. Also, I get really nauseous for several days after trigger shots, so the car ride should be a ton of fun.

Thanks to last cycle's ridiculous length, we have a lot of added stress for this cycle, too. S's sister, H, recently got engaged. Her wedding is next March, in a different state. We would hate to miss her wedding because I'm too pregnant to travel. We would also hate to miss her wedding because we have a baby who is too young to travel. (Basically: we don't want to miss her wedding.) I know people whose siblings missed their wedding because of pregnancies, and I think it sucks. You only get married once, and you're usually able to give people an entire year or more of advance warning; is it really too much to ask for your one and only sibling to be available on that day? When I got engaged, I knew that my brother, M, was about to start trying for another baby (yep, he told me when they were going to start trying, which I think is a little icky), and I explicitly asked him to wait a few months so that they wouldn't have to miss the wedding. And they were totally okay with that. (My brother and sister-in-law are very very good at getting pregnant. They didn't want to be in the third trimester during my wedding, so they waited three months, and were 5+ months along at the wedding. I'm unbelievably jealous that they could time it however they liked.) Maybe it was selfish on my part to ask them to wait, but I wanted them to be at my wedding!

Now S and I are in a similar situation with H's wedding. And I haven't changed my thinking on this topic: even with the fertility problems, I think that it would be selfish of us to knowingly try to get pregnant at a time when we would have to miss the wedding if we succeeded.

We figure we'll be okay to travel with a new baby when he or she is about two months old. Our first airplane ride with LL was when he was a little over two months old, and it worked out just fine. Earlier than that would be a problem: our pediatrician doesn't recommend airplanes before six weeks, and it took me a full eight weeks to recover from my c-section anyway. In order to have a two-month-old at the time of the wedding, the baby would need to be born by early January, which requires a cycle that starts in early April of this year. Which is just a few weeks from now. If this cycle fails, and the next one starts on time, a pregnancy from that cycle would be due around New Year's, which would cutting it close but still okay. If this cycle goes long like the last one did, we'll have missed our window of opportunity. I don't think that I could fly in my third trimester while also taking care of a toddler, so I wouldn't want to be any more than 6 months pregnant next March. Which means not trying again until September.

So basically: we have this one cycle. Maybe maybe we have time for one more. After that, we will have to take a five month hiatus before we try again.

After today's mediocre follicle scan, S has already started to lobby for us to just continue trying regardless of the timing. My body's lackluster response to this high dose of medication is likely evidence that my fertility has noticeably declined in just the last two years, and it's not like I was super fertile before. He thinks that we'd be foolish to wait for five months, fearing that it will just get harder and harder to get pregnant, and waiting might mean that it never happens. Which is kind of hard to argue with, you know? But I don't know. I think that planning to miss H's wedding is kind of cruel. Especially since she has her heart set on LL being the ring bearer, which she excitedly talks about every single time we talk to her.

No pressure on this cycle or anything, eh?