Back to L'IF'e, Back to Reality

It's been just over a year since our last retrieval (likely our last one ever), and the last few months in particular have been nice.

I've been hanging out in The Land of Hope, looking beyond into The Possibility of What Could Be, but not quite ready to venture over and explore that territory yet.

Now I have suddenly - a little bit unexpectedly - found myself there at the edge of that place, the starting line. That En Vogue song, "Back to Life, Back to Reality" seems rather apropo and is apparently now stuck permanently in my head, a taunting reminder that even the ostrich approach can't be maintained forever.

It's time to take a deep breath, pop a pill, and find out if we wind up in The Land of Blissful Joy in about 11 months or if something goes wrong and we just conclude another fruitless trip around Infertility Mountain sometime before then.

As usual, my plan has not gone according to plan. I have not lost the 30 pounds I was hoping for yet, and CD 1 has not shown up. I went from a 30 day cycle to a 16 day cycle to a 19 day cycle to a 23 day cycle to a 43-and-counting day cycle. It occurred to me that if CD 1 doesn't show up soon, we won't have enough time to go to NYC for antibiotics, get another CD 1 and get to Colorado before our communicables expire in the end of April.

So after doing some quick calculations with the help of a calendar, I called the NYC doc last week to ask for some progesterone to induce a withdrawl bleed. I started popping the pills last week.

I'm not quite ready. I like The Land of Hope - it's a nice, safe place, full of possibility and absent of any of the heartache of disappointment. But since it's also absent of children, I guess it's time to move out of this comfort zone, take that step, and see where we land.

Here's hoping that this time it's us kicking infertility's ass instead of the other way around.

Hopeful, but not insanely so

I've been a bad, bad blogger, seeing as how it's been more than a month since I've posted. And I'm not really sure exactly where all of that time has gone, but something strange has happened during that time - I've started to feel like a (fairly) normal person again, for the first time in a long time.

It's hard to say what's prompting this - maybe my wacky thyroid levels finally being normalized through the thyroid meds? Maybe just relief that my dad is (so far) stable? Maybe just that after 7 years of dealing with infertility, I've learned to co-exist with the pain?

Whatever it is, I'm just going to be grateful for it, for however long it lasts. It's not that there's been an earth-shattering change. It's just that somewhere along the way in all of this, I slowly went from being a person with a life and hobbies to a total couch potato who uses TV as an escape and no longer has an interest in hobbies (or even basic chores, like tidying up or filing papers).

For the last month, I've been more social, spent a lot less time with the TV, and finally started to work on getting our home office organized. (We've lived here for 3.5 years, and there are still boxes to be unpacked in there!)

Three and a half years of procrastinating leads to a lot of catch-up, so let's hope this positive vibe sticks around long enough for me to get to the bottom of all the piles of stuff! :-)

We still don't know yet exactly when we're going to go to NY and then CO, but we're continuing to hope for sometime in March and then April. I was in a bookstore the other day to buy a magazine for a friend (and walked out with $50 of purchases - how does that happen??), and I saw a book "101 Things You Should Do Before Your Kids Leave Home." I thumbed through it and toyed with the idea of buying it as a symbol of hope for our FET. Then I put it back on the shelf.

I'm hopeful, but not insanely so. I definitely don't need to tempt fate like that.

Quick hits on some of the other stuff...I haven't been perfect on the "no refined sugar" goal, but good enough to lose about 10 pounds in the first month. The goal is 20 more by the end of April...As I mentioned above, dad is stable so far. I made a quick trip to see him last weekend; I'm going to try to get out there at least once every month or two...School started two weeks ago (one class this semester), and so far it's been manageable. Only 10 more weeks to go before there's a break...I'm on CD29, thought I was going to have CD1 a few days ago, but only had one brief bit of spotting and then nothing since Sunday, so who knows? (I seriously doubt I'm pg, since the timing is off - I was visiting dad the weekend before the spotting, so it couldn't be implantation spotting.)