The One!

As most of you  know, I decided to keep this IVF cycle information and timeline current instead of blogging about it with a delay. This is both good and bad.  By doing this, I give up the big & awesome reveal if when this works and also the "safe" 3-month (1st trimester) wait before telling people!  Hey, I think I can handle that.  The response to this round has been amazing!  There have been so many prayers and well wishes coming our way as we go through this, yet again!

Tuesday was my egg retrieval surgery and all went well.  Of course, last time I was the ONLY person there for surgery and I was treated like a queen! We all had so much fun joking around and laughing before surgery.  This time around, there were five of us, and I was 5th on the list! Wowzers! I had to pass the time somehow, so I started taking silly selfies...something I hardly ever do!  Hey...a girl's gotta pass the time somehow!

I also was more prepared this time around in the sock department.  I searched high and low for the socks that were THE ONE! I think this sums it up pretty well!  Bad Ass!  Because you have to be some sort of bad ass to put yourself through this time and time again right?!?

Now let me just warn you....if you thought these socks were bad ass...just wait until Friday's transfer!  The socks I bought for transfer day are beyond amazing!  So appropriate! 

So let's move on to transfer day and what to expect.  Dave and I got the call about my eggs and our embryos. They retrieved 8 follicles.  In those 8 follicles, there were only 7 eggs. Of those 7 eggs, 4 were mature and 3 were immature (not ready to be fertilized). So now we're down to 4 possibilities.

Of those 4:

1 didn't fertilize

2 were growing slowly

1 fertilized perfectly

They called us back later that day to express their deepest apologizes, but the 2 that were growing slowly haven't made the changes they wanted to see, so we are left with only the one that fertilized.  

Ok, I'm not going to lie, I was sad and disappointed at first....who wouldn't be?!?  The odds seemed like there were stacked against us.  Then it hit me like a ton of bricks...I needed to snap out of it!  No matter how disappointed I was, I'm still in a place where some women only dream they could be.  So I decided to come up with a bunch a "silver-lining" quotes and nicknames for our one and only embryo that we will transfer tomorrow!  Here it goes!

• It only takes ONE
• This is THE ONE
• Our ONE and only!
• ONE perfect embryo
• ONE hit wonder
• ONE stop shop!
• The lone survivor
• The Lucky ONE

This will work!  Tomorrow we will transfer our one perfect embryo at 8:30am and it won't have to fight another embryo to find a place to snuggle up inside of my womb.  It will get first pick of were to find it's home! :)  I have to stay positive and trust in the plan!

I can't wait until tomorrow!  

I stumbled across this quote on my friend's Facebook page the other week, and it's PERFECT! I keep looking at it as we get closer and closer to transfer day!  This is the ONE!

Here We Go....

                                                       ***WARNING*****
The "F" word will be used a lot in this post.  It will be an adjective, a verb, a noun and possibly even an adverb.  If you get easily offended by it, then this isn't the post for you.  If you don't mind the word, love the word, and even use the word yourself, then this post will most likely make you laugh a little :)

So we've raised the money we needed to fund this last and final IVF attempt...thanks to our dear friends T&A (HA!  just writing that makes me laugh! I have such a dirty mind...) and also all of our amazing friends and family that donated their hard earned money and their prayers!  This doesn't happen overnight like someone thought (future blog post maybe...), this process will take 1-2 months before I even have my little embryos to transfer.

I never thought I'd do this again after our failed attempt back in May.  We got the devastating news of the failure on a Tuesday and our 11th wedding anniversary was that Friday.  Needless to say, we weren't in any kind of mood to celebrate, so we decided to have a "Fuck-It" anniversary! Nooooo not like that!  :) Yes, I have a dirty mind, yes I blog and write about my hoo-ha, yes I usually don't have a filter (outside of work), but no that's not what I meant! I meant we just said Fuck It! We made our anniversary a fun-filled day of crazy stupid things we normally wouldn't do.  We skipped the romantic dinner filled with candles and roses and a quiet place for two and opted for fun and chaos at Shogun (an awesome hibachi place). We could go there and eat and have fun and be surrounded by people...no time for serious talks or crying! We then decided to go to the oceanfront (perks of living in Virginia Beach!) on a whim and walk around with our toes in the sand.  We came across one of those touristy haunted houses on the boardwalk and Dave said we should do it!  My response...Fuck-It..let's go!  We (or should I say.."I") screamed and we both had a blast. Then we fell upon one of those Old Time Photo places where you get dressed up and take cheesy pictures, we both looked at each other and.....you guessed it!  Fuck-It..lets do it!  Damn those pictures were expensive!!!  We ended the night at a carnival we saw when we were driving home! So much fun, so much wasted money...but no tears!

This IVF attempt, I noticed I was more stressed out than normal.  More than any other time before.  You would think that after 4 IUIs and an IVF, this 6th time would be cake, but I wasn't!  I was a hot freaking mess! Before we even began the process, I was a wreck.  I think most of the stress came from knowing it wasn't our money, it was other peoples money.  I'm not used to that!  All the people that donated their hard earned money to us so that we could try one last time! What if it didn't work, would they be mad? Would I disappoint everyone? Would I let everyone down if my body failed us again? How could I look at anyone ever again if this didn't work?!? Needless to say, my blood pressure was through the roof!  The stress of letting everyone down was killing me inside.  I finally realized that I had to come to a place where I could just say Fuck-It again.  Not in the sense of not caring about this round or not trying my hardest to do everything right, but a non stressful-fuck it-it's out of my hands-kind of attitude.

Well I'm happy to report...I'm there! Fuck it!  :) Here we go! Knowing this is our last and final time has me now more at ease. I started birth control a month ago and finally finished that and I'm happy to report that the bitch inside of me when on those terrible pills stayed hidden away (well I think she did....you  might want to check in with Dave on the real answer!) I'm now doing my Lupron injections and no real side effects (yet) this round either.  Last time, I wanted to do EVERYTHING perfectly and by the book.  They told me to take the pill around the same time everyday, and I all but set a damn alarm to make sure it was swallowed at 7am on the dot every morning. Same thing with the injections.  This time...much more laid back and relaxed.  Today, Dave even gave me my shot while I was still in bed! HA! It's like breakfast in bed, just minus the food, and the flower, and the breakfast tray! Damn..I got gypped! I guess it really isn't like breakfast in bed after all! All I got was a shot in the gut! Oh well... I'm switching up some of the bandaids from last time.  Maybe I'll go back to the store and find some neon circles so I can create a polka-dot belly!

Last time it didn't work and I didn't everything "right". I even made sure I had a lapse in my blog posts so that I could announce my pregnancy in a kick ass way...remember how that worked out?!?  Yeah not that great! This time, I'm still playing by the rules, but maybe they're just a little bended this time around.  Fuck it....what can it hurt?!?  They say stress can be a big factor in not getting pregnant, but it's not like this process is a walk in the park with cute little unicorns running next to me the whole way.  It's a stressful thing to go through, so let's just try to make it as fun as possible!

So for this last and final round, I plan on keeping everyone up to date as much as possible and I'm asking for as many prayers as you can spare! I plan on having fun this round, so buckle up everyone because it's going to be a fun and crazy ride!  Fuck-It...right!