My Eggs Are Growing...Slooowly

We managed to get ourselves (and the meds) packed, on the plane and to the clinic relatively unscathed.

Thanks to the advice some of you gave in the comments, we used a regular lunchbag with some cold packs to take the meds with us. I put R in charge of that, which worked out in the end, although I did have a few moments of panic about three hours before we left when I asked him if the cold packs were in the fridge and he said, "Um, I think we have some, somewhere in the garage - I haven't gone to dig them out yet..." Nothing like leaving that to the last minute. I have no idea what he would have done if he hadn't been able to find them.

We were quite the sight going through security at the airport. The terminal we were in has four different security checkpoints. We opted for a lesser used one, even though it meant we had to walk farther, because there was absolutely no line whatsoever.

In addition to the lunchbox with the meds and a plastic grocery bag with all the needles and syringes, we had two laptops and a portable printer, and R has to be hand-searched now because of his defibrillator. I think at one point there were four TSA staffers working to get us and all of our stuff through security. They were very kind about it, even packing one of the laptops and the printer back into a bag for me while I tried to gather the rest of our stuff and R was still getting patted down.

We've been at the clinic for 5 days now, and there's not much to report on yet. I've decided that this part of the process is the medical equivalent of watching paint dry.

I had 45 antral follicles (gotta love those PCOS ovaries!), so the challenge is to get less than half of them to grow. RE started me on a very low dose of stims (75 units twice a day), and has only upped it by 75 more per day so far.

Today was the first day the follicles looked like they've really started to respond, so retrieval probably won't be for 4 or 5 more days.

In other news, I finally got a call from the regular endocrinologist's nurse on Thursday. (I was supposed to get my results from them on 10/30.) It turns out that the bloodwork they ordered on 10/28 showed my TSH level to be high rather than low, like it was a month ago. So the endo thinks I have thyroiditis, which means eventually my thyroid will burn out and I will become hypothyroid.

"Eventually" being the key word. I asked the nurse what the next step is, and she said, "Oh, we just have to wait for your thyroid to stop swinging wildly from one extreme to the other and settle down. Then we'll take it from there."

I said, "Do you have any idea when that might be? Because apparently it's been swinging for about 7 years now, and I don't have another 7 years to wait for it to make up its mind..."

I swear, the thyroid thing explains so much of my life for the past several years. Like, for instance, why when I work really hard on dieting and exercising, even though R and I eat the same things but I eat less of it, and I exercise and he doesn't, weight falls off of him without any effort (except for eating the healthier stuff we cook), and at the same time I gain weight!

My next appointment with the endo is two days before Thanksgiving, so hopefully we'll finalize a plan at that point. (And believe me, waiting for my thyroid to make up its mind on its own is not going to be part of the plan.)