Laughing with Sarah

That's the theme of my last week. Up. Up. More up. Up to Rochester. Up for bloodwork and ultrasound on Friday. Up for bloodwork and ultrasound again today. As we get to the fine-tuning business as we near retrieval, up again, perhaps more frequently this week, to watch and micromanage meds until everything is just perfect. I'm not yet sick of the drive, which is good. But I'm also getting impatient and careless. I got pulled over this morning because I was rushing to get up for my appointment and was definitely going faster than the 55 mph speed limit. Thankfully, he was a wonderfully kind State Trooper who, upon learning that I'd never been stopped in Minnesota before, wasn't a regular commuter, and was on my way to a doctor's appointment, gave me a warning and a kindly suggestion to slow down and watch for Troopers down the road. :) Up go my numbers, slowly, finally. After last Wednesday's appointment, they bumped me up to 225 units of Gonal-F and 150 ...

Depending on how you count, we are either five or six days into our new IVF cycle. We started meds on Friday night. 150 Gonal-F and 75 Menopur for starters, and then they bumped me up to 225 Gonal-F and 75 Menopur after Monday morning's blood draw, which was itself a bit of an adventure. (They're remodeling the lab at our local hospital and can't process same-day results, which meant that I went through the bother of the blood draw only to have to drive up to Rochester - a 3 hour round trip - to re-do it that afternoon.) This morning, I rode with a friend up to Rochester for my next labwork. She had plans to be up here for the day and offered to give me a ride, which is lovely, because I'm going to be doing plenty of these round trip drives alone in the next week. Of course, her schedule vs. my schedule means that we left early - shortly after 7am - to get me here in time for my blood draw, which took about ten minutes total, from registration to getting up from the c...

This morning, Sam asked to lie down on the floor for his diaper change instead of being up on the changing table. He held a truck in each hand and talked to me about them (orange bulldozer! yellow wheels!) while he calmly let me change his diaper, put jeans and a t-shirt on him, socks, and his favorite shoes with rockets on them. This placid episode took place after he had awoken at 5:00 a.m., upset for some reason unknown to me (perhaps he was cold?), and I pulled him into bed with us, where he slept straight from 5:00 a.m. to 7:30 a.m. Both Matt and I were awake before Sam was - this never happens! Sam played with his trucks while I bathed and got dressed. He brushed his teeth (and in doing so, gave up the nook that he sleeps with at night), walked down the stairs with me, agreed to sit in his chair for breakfast (and actually tried to help get his legs into the leg holes!), ate his cereal bar and a whole banana without complaining, let me clean him up and put on him a sweatshirt...

I spent fifteen minutes on hold this morning with a customer service rep from one specialty pharmacy, while she waited on hold with a different specialty pharmacy so that she could track down a fax number for me. It is a weird, weird world out there, where your health insurance plan can partner with a different company to provide you a prescription plan, and said prescription company owns at least two specialty pharmacies through which they handle medications that your local pharmacy wouldn't touch with a ten-foot pole, and sometimes those pharmacies get their information crossed, and sit on hold with each other to find you a stupid fax number. All this is to say that today's small (though unconfirmed) victory is that I found the right fax number for the right pharmacy so that the clinic can send in my order so that I can have meds in time to START OUR NEW ROUND OF IVF THIS FRIDAY! Yes, the time has come. I've been writing about it for a while now, because it has invo...