The Challenge

It seems official – we seem to have entered the world of reproductive assistance, albeit in a lackluster kind of way.  We had our second appointment with ORM yesterday.  A simple ultrasound and blood work.  I should have had a period yesterday, today, maybe tomorrow? At any rate, so far nothing.  My hormone levels came back low, which they should be at the beginning of your cycle and I had a total of 11 follicles between my ovaries.  Average.  The nurse practitioners words, not mine.  Both blood work and ultrasound confirms my body should be having a period and is gearing up for another cycle.  So the question remains – where did my period go? 

We thought maybe we had lucked out and were pregnant, but that was not the case.  So we move on to the next step.  And the next step is literally one of the first steps in fertility diagnosis and treatment – the Clomid Challenge. If you’ve been reading this blog for a while, you’ll know this is my second type of ‘challenge.’  Earlier this year I did the Progesterone challenge and failed.  Then, the goal was to bring on a period after stopping the 10-day of progesterone. 

This challenge is a bit different.  Starting on Wednesday, I will take 5 days of Clomid, a drug meant to over-stimulate my ovaries into producing mature follicles/eggs and insure ovulation.  It also works to measure the Follicle Stimulating Hormone that your body is producing.  You want this level, the FSH level, to be low.  A low number means that the signal between your pituitary gland and your ovaries is working correctly and more importantly, tells your doctor a few things 1) whether your body is likely to have a positive response to fertility medications and 2) whether you have a low ovarian reserve/poor egg quality.  It is sort of the test they use to weed you out of certain fertility procedures and dictate what your next steps will be.

We will head back in a week from Monday for the 2^nd round of blood work to find out whether I met or failed the challenge.  I imagine we will also find out what our next step will be.  One thing that I truly appreciate is that at each appointment we have had, we leave knowing what will happen next.  They don’t leave us hanging, waiting to find out.  Yesterday, we had our blood work back after an hour and were told what to do next.  There is science here, a set protocol, and it feels good to know that they have the steps laid out for us given any number of scenarios.   Even though we have never been here, been through this before, they have been hundreds of times and know what comes next. It is like a real-life choose your own adventure. 

I guess that makes it sound exciting or at least tolerable, but I’ll be honest, it has been a hard week.  We really thought that maybe we might have been pregnant, and we are still hopeful enough in this whole process to feel crushed when it doesn’t happen.  Brett asked me yesterday, “Who did you use to be before all this?  What did you like to do before?”  We laughed, but then after thinking about it – it’s sad.  This whole thing is so consuming and it does feel like I am lost in it.  I don’t know what I used to do before reading books about fertility, reading other infertility blogs, researching how to improve our odds, doing this meditation, eating this or not eating that, taking piles of supplements…I’m exhausted.  Literally. 

Part of me just wants to sell our house, find a job overseas and move on to a different path, a different dream.  Hoping is holding on and holding on is hard work.  It doesn’t feel like I can be in both worlds – where this is all on the back-burner.  And please, if I can offer up one piece of advice, never say to a woman who is dealing with infertility, “Well, if you just relaxed about it, then it would probably happen” or “If you try to adopt a baby, it will happen.”  Yes, there are cases where this happens but for the majority of women, this doesn’t work.  Worrying is not our diagnosis, infertility is.   

This week, we will celebrate gratitude and I will try to find the things I am thankful for in this mess.  One big thing, after phone calls and conversations and checking and double-checking, is we’ve found out that our insurance company does cover 50% of the costs of diagnostic procedures and testing for infertility.  We think we meet the criteria and hopefully, all that we have paid so far will be reimbursed and the things we are currently doing should cost us half as much.  This is amazing good news and takes that added pressure off of us for a while.  That much we are certainly grateful for.  

So we press forward for now and I am going to try and set this on the backburner, background music to the rest of our life for a while.  Now that it feels like we are being taken care of and our issue is being paid some attention, it feels easier to relinquish some of that hold.  We are in someone else’s hands now, a trained specialist, who is going to do his best to help us because that is what we are paying him for.  There is something freeing in knowing that we aren’t the only two carrying this weight. 

Thanks for all your continued thoughts, prayers, and kind words.  More after our appointment on the 26^th.