Slow and Steady Wins the Race...

Initially, I want to say hello to everyone who may be visiting from RESOLVE.  It is great to have you checking out my site.  Please feel free to check out past posts to get a feel for where my journey is at…and thanks for being involved in National Infertility Awareness Week. 

Next, I want to thank everyone who nominated me for awards over the last week.  I am so grateful and promise to address them in a post in the very near future.  However, knowing how amazing you all are, I also know that you will forgive me for putting my “venting” ahead of the awards just for right now, while I am in the thick of my donor egg cycle.  As an added bonus of procrastinating, I am finding a ton of new amazing blogs through the RESOLVE myth busting challenge, so I will have lots of recommendations for blogs to check out once there is a lull in my cycle madness.

And, as a final side note, I just wanted to give a heads-up to those of you undergoing intralipids.  I did NOT pee opaque white for a day or so, as the nurse predicted.  Without being graphic, things were different than normal, but nothing that would have sent me running to the doctor in a panic.  I would hate for any of you to call the doctor in a panic because your pee did not look like milk, as your doctor might think you are crazy.  As for the infusion rate, my IV drip lasted two hours, although the last 15 minutes or so was just the saline.  I felt none of the fatigue or flu like symptoms that my friends had complained of.  I hope that answers the basic questions that were posed. 

Now…back to it…****************************************************

Once upon a time, very early in my fertility journey, when I still believed that there was a chance that I could get pregnant naturally, timing was everything.  I spent huge chunks of time each month charting, peeing on OPK sticks, and trying to look pretty on certain days of the month to help things along from The Prince’s perspective.  Although my body danced to the beat of its own drum, I felt in control of the cycle’s timing because I was right on top of it, day in and day out.  And I mentally tried to push my cycles along, as if in a race...and as if I were capable of some Jedi mind trick on my own body.  Slowly, our RE took over the timing of my cycles…and I grew more and more impatient and worried.  With each injection, and ultrasound, and schedule change, I felt more disconnected from my body’s timing.  Now I’m in the midst of my donor egg cycle and I have no illusions that I control anything.  I am at the mercy of my donor’s body’s timing.  I don’t even know her medication protocol or what happens at her monitoring, so there is no relief offered for my poor Type A nerves.

For a long time, I was told that my egg retrieval would likely be Monday (yesterday), and that things looked great.   Then, the retrieval was bumped to “almost certainly Wednesday” (which would have been tomorrow).  Then, yesterday when I called to get the final okay on making hotel reservations for a Wednesday retrieval, I was told that the donor is still moving rather slowly and will not be ready for retrieval any time before Thursday.  She is going to come back today for another ultrasound and I will know this afternoon whether we are moving forward, or whether I am extending my wait even longer.  I was quiet on the phone with the donor coordinator (a first), and she (in her infinite compassion) said “There’s nothing to worry about.  I can tell you are worrying, but don’t!  She has 15 to 18 follicles developing and things look good…just slow.”  In reality, I was quiet because I was disappointed that we are back to that "15 follicle" range, when last Friday it had been "lots more than 15," and I was also stunned that I would have to wait even longer for the information I am so desperately seeking - How many eggs we will have to work with, How many will be mature, How many will fertilize and, in the end, How many beautiful little embies will be smiling (theoretically smiling) up at me (from their little petri dishes) telling me “We were so worth the wait, Mom.”

I am trying to be flexible.  I am trying to remember one of my favorite lines from my childhood books – “Slow and steady wins the race.”  (Perhaps this is the real reason that the turtle is a sign of fertility…not the hundreds of eggs it produces…but because it is frustratingly slow).   I’m also hanging my hat on every cliché and over-used expression I can think of – “Good things come to those who wait,” “A watched pot never boils,” and “If you build it, they will come.”  Oops!  Not that last one.  That last one is just a really awful uterine lining joke that I thought up and now can’t get it out of me head.  That’s right…I said it…my mind is so gone I am now writing “uterine lining jokes.”  Anyways, in the end, I am still waiting (albeit impatiently)…waiting for my miracle to arrive, in its own time.