Just keep swimming

First, I'd like to thank all of you who commented on my last post asking for your experiences with Lupron.  Your comments really show how everyone is different in her response to these medications.  I am hoping for the best.

So far, I haven't experienced anything that I can pinpoint as a true Lupron side effect.  I had a headache yesterday afternoon, but it developed while I was sitting through a 3-hour continuing education course on ethics in legal practice, so that certainly could've been unrelated to the medication.  (heehee)  And I had a little local irritation at the injection site last night--redness, hives, itching--but it subsided within an hour.

Because most of Lupron's side effects are attributed to a drop in estrogen levels, I think the real test will be the three four-and-a-half days between when I stop BCPs on Friday morning and when I start my supplemental estrogen after my baseline u/s on Tuesday.  So it could be a difficult weekend; we'll see.

I looked at a calendar yesterday and realized that, in less than a month, we will have had our embryo transfer!  We have been talking about, and planning for, this cycle for so long that in some ways, it seems like we've been waiting for ages. 

On the other hand, now that we're in it, it seems like it came on fast!  Actually, from our initial consultation to my starting Lupron was exactly two months.  Given all the things that had to be accomplished in that timeframe--committing to a donor, all our infectious disease testing, meeting with our counselor, my mock cycle, my SHG--I'd say we moved pretty fast.  (The original estimate our clinic's third-party coordinator had given me for the shortest time from initial consultation to embryo transfer was 10-12 weeks, and ours will be just over 12 weeks.)

I'd say this is pretty much in keeping with MM's and my personalities.  We may deliberate for a while about things, but once we decide on a course of action, we commit to it and move forward, no more delays.

We've been fortunate, too, in that things have gone smoothly.  The donor we wanted was available.  Nothing came up in any of our testing, or our donor's testing, to delay us.  My mock cycle went smoothly; I actually built the lining they wanted a week faster than expected.  My cycle and the donor's were already close to being in sync, so it didn't take much to get us on the same schedule.

There has been an occasional hiccup, what with communication and coordinating between St. Mungo's and our local clinic, but no real bumps in the road.  Fingers crossed that things continue to run as smoothly as possible.

Oh, and I got some unexpected good news yesterday.  The pharmacy which is providing our donor's medications called me for payment, and I was pleasantly surprised that all her medications were only a little over $2100!  Truth be told, it made me wonder if something was missing from their list. . . . but I don't know for sure because I don't know exactly what has been prescribed for her.  (I have emailed our nurse to double-check, just in case.)

I was also thinking this: I know our donor has required exactly nine days of stims in her past four cycles at St. Mungo's prior to trigger.  Our nurse told me that the average time on stims for donors is 10-12 days (and I have heard of donors stimming as long as 13-14 days).  Maybe our donor's meds were cheaper because she won't need to be on stims as long?  I don't know.

[EDITED TO ADD:  I heard back from our nurse, and nothing is missing.  The lower-than-expected cost is primarily due to the donor needing less stims than average.  Bonus!]


As anyone who knows me, either in real life or through this blog, can probably tell you, I'm not usually a "live in the moment" zen kind of person.  I am doing a pretty good job of "just being" at the moment, though.  Sure, I think ahead to "what if this works?" occasionally--and MM and I talk about it, which is unprecedented for him in the last 2+ years--but for the most part, I'm just taking each day as it comes, putting one foot in front of the other.

Here's hoping that this path is the one which will lead us to parenthood.