Fact Friday….A Day Late

I missed posting my little tidbit of info about me yesterday.  After an emotional and physically painful week that left me in tears when my Chiropractor asked how I was yesterday morning, I am finally in a better place!   So what could this week’s little bit of info be?

I am addicted to Burt’s Bees lip balm.   I am so addicted that I have one by my bedside and in almost every purse/bag I use on a regular basis.  If I somehow forget it and have to use J’s blistex….I am a very unhappy camper.  My favorite kinds are the acai berry (with the purple cap) and the mango (with an orange-ish cap).  Yep, I LOVE me some Burt’s Bees.

Do any of you have any addictions?

Hope you all have a fabulous Labor day weekend!

Hugs~Dawn

Wisdom has left my mouth (along with a molar)

Ladies…if there’s one thing I can recommend NOT to do doing your 2ww…it’s getting 2 teeth pulled.

At the end of this last school year, J convinced me I should really go in and get my teeth cleaned since we now have dental insurance.  J is religious about getting his 6 month cleanings done where as I have not been to the dentist since we very first started dating almost 4 years ago and has to get my top and bottom right wisdom teeth removed which resulted in dry sockets.  I was on vicodin for at least a month and it was just awful.

See post here about what led up to yesterday’s teeth pulling.  Needless to say, my thieves didn’t work, although, I think if I had started using it as soon as I realized the pain from the filling wasn’t going away, it would have.  Either way, I was already supposed to get my wisdom tooth out on 29th ( I had already cleared this with my RE) but the molar moved it up to yesterday.  Now, I absolutely hate having to take tylenol even when I’m not in a 2ww. Not wanting to put all the toxins of OTC and prescription drugs into my body is THE reason I got into Young Living.  Now I’ve been having to take it every 4-6 hours for the last almost 2 weeks and I absolutely hate the effect it could be having on my potential little bean.

I am of course worried about dry sockets.  A blood clot pulled out on both sides last night and I’m just praying they clotted up again.  I applied ice every 10 minutes last night like they said and have only drank from a cup and eaten soft foods (good way to be pushed into eating a little healthier).  I’ve swished 3 times so far today with a drop of thieves in water and have been applying moist heat as often as possible while running after three 1 year olds.   My right side that was giving me all the pain before the surgery hasn’t hurt at all, but my left side definitely does.  That was the wisdom tooth and they had to dig deep.  It was sideways and impacted (or is that the same thing, lol).

Anyways, that is my advice for the day…do everything you can to avoid wisdom teeth being removed during the 2ww.  Hope you all are doing well!!!

Hugs~Dawn

 

The Importance of Timing

Ladies…I am so frustrated right now!  As we all know, timing is everything with infertility.  Well, I triggered on Monday and had my IUI on Wednesday and guess what?  Yep, I am almost positive that I just finally started ovulating about 2am this morning.  Which, if you look at a normal cycle for me before the follistim…I was guessing our IUI would have been yesterday or today.  I can tell you it would have been a hell of a lot more convenient if it had been today and apparently, my body doesn’t care if it gets a trigger shot, it’s going to ovulate when it wants to.  It is now 7:30am central time and I am feeling it in my right side quite a bit and after a night of not nearly enough sleep, I am up and have already put a call into the nurses line to see if there is someway to check and see if I’m correct.  

These things are way too much money (especially on straight injectables) to have the timing off.  Feeling ready to cry (although that could be a combination of lack of sleep and frustration with J and his newly single pal for keeping me up with the loud music coming up from the basement).

Update:  The nurse finally called back a bit ago.  She said that it is very unlikely that I did not ovulate within the 36-40 hours after the shot and that maybe I’m feeling a smaller one that ovulated on its own.  She also said that sperm lived up to 72 hours so there should still be some left but I thought that was only with unwashed sperm.  I thought I’ve read that washed sperm do not last nearly as long but maybe I’m wrong.  Anyone else know?  I guess I just need to have faith right now and not doubt His plan.

Fact Fridays

I’ve decided there is a lot more to me than just infertility.  So I have now declared Fridays, “Fact Fridays”.  I will use it to share a tidbit about myself each week.  This week’s fact is:

A clean kitchen floor makes me deliriously happy!!

After having our 3 nieces last week, plus daycare, plus 2 shedding dogs and then being either sick or gone last weekend…our floor was just gross in my opinion.  Especially because the babies are in a stage where they throw a lot of their food on the floor.  Rocky gets most of it, but not all of it.  As soon as the kiddos were picked up today, I got cleaning.  🙂

Now, I guarantee it will be dirty again by morning.  The dog will shed, hubby and the roommate will come home and get dirt or food on the floor, but for now, I have peace in knowing it is clean!

IUI #4

Well, IUI #4 is in the books.  It was not any less painful unfortunately, but oh well, hopefully, this will be our last one for a good long while!  J’s counts were some of the best yet.  Post wash was 84 million, 77% motility of Grade A sperm and 80% motility with Grade A and B.

Last night I woke up in the middle of the night due to the fun tooth pain I’m having and I think for the first time, I cried out to God in anguish and boldly asked that this be our time.  I have cried out before but I would say it was more in anger then in anguish and sadness.  I think I prayed over this like I never have before and I prayed again as I was laying on table for the 15 minutes after the IUI.  I have been more in His Word lately reading Psalms and Proverbs and I think that it is really helping me in my prayer life.  

For now…I’m not being the best childcare provider because I’m laying on the couch with my hips propped up watching them as they play.  I know that they say you don’t need to do that but I just want to give this the best possible chance.  Progesterone starts tomorrow evening.

Overwhelming

If I could some up my weekend from Friday until this afternoon, I would only need one word…overwhelming.

A little background…I was diagnosed with scoliosis in the 9th grade.  I was one of the lucky ones that was able to get it corrected through chiropractic adjustments instead of surgery.  Once I got out of hs and moved to CT…I only went when I would go back home on vacation and even then it was just to be on the safe side and because my chiro was HOT (but turns out, not that great at his job as we found out a couple years ago).  Anyways, in 2005 I was in a pretty bad car accident and I found a chiropractor out in CT who will forever be my most favorite person.  He got my back in better shape then it had been since the scoliosis after lots of physical therapy.  I have tried a few different chiropractors in WI since I moved home but just couldn’t find the right one.  The last one I had was a woman and although I love her as a person, she didn’t have the upper body strength to do the adjustments I was used to and what she did do was just pure pain for me.  I couldn’t figure out why my back, butt, and upper legs were so sensitive these days.  Just the babies standing on my legs can cause a lot of pain and just poking me in any of those spots really hurts now and it never used to be that way.  After seeing my CT chiro while we were on vacation, I decided that I needed to go back to having a male chiro when we got back home.  The leader in our marriage group through Church is a chiro so I decided to give him a try and finally made an appt. for this past Friday.  I had been talking to my family at my niece’s bday party the Wednesday before and I don’t know why but all of a sudden, I wondered if what I had going on was Fibromyalgia.  Anyways, I went to see Dr. L on Friday morning and I described everything that was going on and asked him if it could be that.  He asked me a few more questions and in the end said that he does think I have fibromyalgia.  Say What?!  I seriously thought I was just being my hypochondriac self that I used to be when I was a kid.  Dr. L said that it is not an actual disease but a classification of symptoms that so providers have a name for it when they need to give info on a patient to another provider.  He said that the 2 things that have found consistent with it is that 1.) It is brought on by an emotional and or physical trauma and 2.) that aerobic exercise is the best thing to help keep the pain at bay.  Dr. L and his wife have also gone through infertility and have adopted their 3 children so they know our whole story.  He thinks that my Dad passing away and the infertility is probably what brought it on.  Our plan is to get my back and body back into working order so that I can start exercising on my own at home again.

I actually wasn’t too upset by this diagnosis.  I was just happy to know that I’m not crazy and that there’s a name for what I’ve been feeling.  He also believes that it is part of the reason for just feeling like I have no energy and for not being able to remember too much these days.  I’ll go into the next room and completely forget why I went in there.  From there, I went to my Sister’s to help my Mom clean her house before they got back from vacation.  We went out for fish fry after and by the time I got home, I just wasn’t feeling well.  Didn’t sleep at all Friday night from what I assume as a stomach bug.  Slept on and off all day Saturday and was finally feeling mostly better and pretty rested by Sunday morning.   Sunday was spent cutting and stacking wood at my Aunt and Uncle’s house with my family.  I was a little nauseous again last night but have been fine all day today.

Then there’s today…cd9 and I needed to go in for my follie check at 1:40, I also needed to go back to the chiro at 2:20pm and then because my tooth is still throbbing from a filling I had done over a week ago, I also had to go back to the dentist at 3:30pm.  J had to go to school to get things ready for school to start and for football practice to start tomorrow night so Thankfully, my Dear Mom came and watched the daycare kids for me.  Dr. R does the ultrasound and it turns out that I’m all ready to trigger…again, Say What?!!!  I’m never ready to go this early (apparently straight follistim really works well for me).  My lining was already at 8mm (Amazing for me) and I had 2 follies on my right side….one ready to go at 20mm and a small 12 mm. So, I trigger tonight around 10pm and IUI #4 is on Wednesday at 8:20am.  This is all fine and good except that J HAS to be at school all day Wednesday.  So now, he has to his specimen at home and run it to the clinic at 7am and then I have to go by myself for the IUI.  This sucks because IUI’s are not easy and painless for me.  I have cervical stenosis so they always have to use the tenaculum to pull my cervix open for the catheter to be able to get in.  On top of that I have 4 daycare babies that day and no one to watch them at that time ( I was seriously starting to panic)!  Luckily, once again, my Mom is going to save the day.  She works nights but she’s going to ask for family leave and get off at 6am, go home and take a quick nap and then come and watch the kids for me.

From the Dr., I raced to the chiropractor and everything was fine there.  Then off to the dentist…turns out, I now need a root canal…mind you, the tooth didn’t even hurt before the filling, I had just gone in for a cleaning and now I need a root canal.  It was the last straw, I started crying right in front of the dentist and his assistant.  They were very sweet about it when I told them about infertility treatments and everything having to be paid for out of pocket.  Right before I got to the dentist I had been on the phone with my Sister and a good friend of her’s was told she needed one right before they were all leaving to go to Young Living’s conference out in Utah.  Her friend told the dentist that no, she wasn’t going to have it done because she was about to leave and she would just use her oils.  The dentist told her she’d be back in 2-3 weeks needing it done.  That was in June and she’s had no trouble since and she just used Thieves oil on it.  I asked the dentist if I could try my essential oils first and he was very nice about it (not all Drs. and Dentists are).  He said go for it and if it works to come back and let them know what I used, lol.  He also said because it’s my very back moral, he will extract if I don’t want to go through with a root canal but he’d rather save the tooth.  Let me just say, this is the only dentist that I have ever actually liked!!!  Needless to say, as soon as I got home, thieves oil went on the tooth and I will keep doing it every hour or 2 for the next few days or so to see if it helps.  

So, that’s it…my overwhelming weekend.  Hopefully the rest of the week goes fairly smoothly, especially the IUI.  I really hope getting rid of the endometriosis was the ticket and we finally get our BFP this month.   Thanks for reading my book today, lol.  

Hugs~Dawn

CD3 ultrasound

Can you believe that I’ve never had to do a cd 3 ultrasound before?!  I always read about everyone else doing cd3 ultrasounds and blood work and I haven’t had to do either for any of my previous 3 IUI’s. 

This will hopefully by lucky #4.  🙂  Fingers and toes crossed and from my lips to God’s ears!  Right now protocol is 75iu’s of Follistim cd3-?.  I will go back in on Monday to check and see if we need to up the dosage or scale back.  As much as the cost of straight injectable sucks, I really hope that between this and surgery, it does the trick.  

This cycle is going on the credit card.  J HATES credit card debt…I know that most people don’t enjoy it but it seriously puts him in a funk.  I, on the other hand, don’t really sweat it as long as we can pay our bills each month with a little leftover.  It is probably our biggest difference.  Of course, he’s more laid back in almost every other area of our life, whereas I like to know what’s going to happen, I like to plan and I like to be on time.

So that’s it…the new cycle has started.  First dose has been injected.

Oh, and this is what I have learned this week…Motherhood is exhausting!!!  3 girls…13, 5 and 18 months…amazingly enough, I’m still getting to bed about the same time and Sadie is sleeping through the night (Thank God), but I am pooped!  I sure hope I have the energy for actual Motherhood when it comes!  Hope all is well with you all and again, please let me know if you’d like to be on my list to send happy/encouragement mail to.  🙂

Hugs~Dawn

Happy/Encouragement Mail

Hi IF Peeps!!

So, I was thinking, I LOVE getting cards and letters in the mail…Love it, Love it, Love it!!!  I used to love writing letters to cousins and friends in other cities when I was a kid and I hate the fact that I’ve gotten away from it because technology is more convenient.

So I thought I would see if anyone would want to receive what my Thirty One Sisters call Happy Mail…I added encouragement because that’s what all of us on IF Island (as one of my Favorite Bloggers, Maya at http://www.dontcountyoureggs.typepad.com calls it) could use.  If you’re interested, please just send me a message at pdot95@gmail.com with your name and address and your blogs name or if you don’t care who sees it, you can always just put it in the comments.  Hope I can start sending some encouragement soon!

Hugs~Dawn

CD 1 of the 34th cycle

Started spotting late afternoon yesterday and luckily didn’t get full flow til today since my RE is only open in the mornings on Saturdays and not at all on Sundays.  If I call first thing tomorrow I will hopefully be able to get the follistim overnighted in time for day 3.  

The last few cycles, I’ve hardened my heart and haven’t cried when AF has shown her ugly head, this cycle a few tears came.  Not many, because we have 3 nieces staying with us this week and I got it right before we were leaving to go to a festival, but a few.  I was really hoping surgery would do it for us and we wouldn’t have to waste any more money that we don’t actually have on treatments.    

My SIL’s best friend is apparently trying to adopt her ex SIL’s baby.  She got pregnant by some guy and then got back together with her ex baby daddy and they didn’t want the baby because it’s not his DNA (SERIOUSLY)!!!  She gave my SIL’s friend legal guardianship.  Now this friend doesn’t even have a home right now (I think she’s living with her Mom or staying with a friend) and she took 8 weeks maternity leave and now has no income coming in to take care of this 7 week old boy.  But she wanted my SIL to babysit last night so she could take the $20 she did have and go out to the bars.  REALLY?!  I hope and pray the State of WI is smart enough to not let this woman adopt a baby.  It breaks my heart, both for the baby and for J and I would have loved to adopt this little boy and give him unconditional love and a stable home.

Heavy heart today Peeps, heavy heart.

Day 28

As I wait and see if AF is going to show up, I wanted to share this video with all of you.  Quite a few blogs that I’ve read have mentioned essential oils lately so I just wanted to share about the company I’m involved with.  Because of their seed to seal process and independent party testing…they are IMO, the best out there.  If you have any questions or would like to know what different oils could help with different issues…including infertility, please let me know.  You can also email me at dawn running@transformationthyme.com.  My website is http://www.youngliving.org/drunning if you’d like to read more info.