the calm

today has been a quiet day at home. probably the last one i'll have for the rest of the year. aaron's with patrick at the football game. although it's been an hour since it ended and i haven't heard from him. i saw that app. state lost so he may be wallowing at a local bar.

i've been commuting to hickory to get monitored while i'm on my stims. tonight will be day 8. i'm somewhat feeling my ovaries growing, but not as much as i had expected. some of the girls in my support group talk about how they are doubled over in pain because their ovaries are humongous. i just feel a twinge here and there and that's pretty much it. i guess i won't complain about not being in pain, i guess my doctor knows what he's doing and is preventing me from overstimulating. anyways, i head down to hickory every other day, get a needle prick and an ultrasound to check my progress. when i went in on wednesday they counted 12 follicles/eggs. a fairly decent number, so i'm told. i think they like to see between 10 and 20 at about 20mm in size by the end of stimulation. tomorrow we head down to charlotte to see my RE and hopefully he'll be able to tell us when everything is going to happen. since everything is "progressing nicely" i'm assuming the egg retrieval will be on tuesday or wednesday. and the transfer will be 5-6 days afterwards. i'll be on bed rest for 2 days after the transfer, i guess to help with implantation. then we have to wait two weeks when we go back in for a blood test to determine if i am with child/children.

i'll let you know tomorrow the "when" of everything. it's just weird to think we're less than a week away now. crazy!

hormone threat level: RED

saturday i started my stims. three shots to the gut every night. 5 units of lupron, 10 units of low dose HCG and 225 units of follistim. basically what the drugs are doing is stimulating the growth of follicles (early eggs) in your ovaries. you normally have one egg mature and gets released in a cycle. with the drugs you're hoping you get between 10-20 of those follies/eggs. so those little ovaries that are currently the size of almonds will be the size of lemons or close to by the time i'm done.

so far i haven't really had too many side effects. cept maybe all the pimples that have decided to plant themselves all over my face. so it's safe to say the hormones they are a raging. that should be an indication to aaron not to push any unnecessary buttons. nah, not really. if you're gonna start a sentence with, "don't get mad when i ask..." yeah, i'm gonna blow-up ten folds. i mean i was so mad that i actually did all my shots myself that night. (up until then he'd done them all.) it was surprising to both of us. after a night to cool off, things are back to normal. i'm still tearing up watching commercials and sobbing when cheering at a basketball game (which was really weird). but as long as there isn't any physical side effects, i won't complain too much.

shot through the heart

well, not exactly, more like abdomen.

this evening i started my lupron injections. it was quick and painless. i let aaron do it since he's the "expert" at administering drugs.

this is exactly how it went down tonight. aaron got home from work, did tae bo, called his patients, took a shower, gave me the shot and then we both went to the app. state basketball game. so here i was, anticipating the worse all day and it was over and done with in a matter of seconds. so, yeah, it was sorta a let down but i guess i really can't complain.

i'll be on lupron for the next week and a half. what does lupron do? basically it prevents your body from ovulating naturally. next will be the stimms.

and so begins our journey.

ridin dirty

yesterday i ventured up the road behind our house in search of bottlecaps. there's usually no traffic on the road, maybe an occasional parker or two but for the most part it's pretty quiet. our neighbors had warned us that they've caught kids up there before so that's why they had placed a chain across the road to stop the trespassing.

well, as i got closer to the second empty lot, i could see something glimmering in the sunlight. this is what it was. a crack pipe or meth pipe, i don't know. it's some kind of smoking instrument. i brought it home to show aaron and he started to freak!

i was a little startled by his reaction. of course i knew he wasn't going to be happy, but i didn't think he would go into panic mode. "we should call the police. we can't have druggies hanging out around our house." well i come to find out he just read an article in our local paper about a murder that happened here a few years ago. it's a pretty gruesome crime, so i was beginning to understand aaron's frantic state.

we went back and dragged some logs across the road to prevent any further access up the road. we even found some 2x4s with nails in them to act as spike traps. now i have to contact the electric company about installing a security light at the end our our street. it's better to be safe than sorry.