Life as LawWife

D did GREAT with my hCG trigger tonight. I know he was nervous, but he did it just right. It hurt a bit, to be honest, but it's a big ol' needle! I truly felt just a pinch; the sting came from the drug itself.

And now we have to wait two weeks (either from today or Thursday...I haven't decided yet). I'm sure in that time I'll go from the depths of despair to the heights of hope. Should be quite the rollercoaster! 

I had my second u/s and blood draw this morning. I had no paperwork, as Nurse Tina was supposed to have faxed it over ahead of time. When I registered, I asked the registrar (and I thought I'd never see another one of those after college) if there was any paperwork for my labs. No, she had nothing. She called around to various departments (the lab, ultrasound) to see if they had it. No. Well, then. If there's no labwork, the doc will have only half the picture. Ok, breathe. I called Nurse Tina to tell her, but I got the answering machine. Mmph. Left a message. Continued on with the u/s process.

This time I had an u/s tech who told me stuff. Hooray! She saw lots (and I mean LOTS) of tiny follicles. I was starting to get discouraged b/c I thought she was looking at my right ovary. And then she said, "Now let's look at the right side." Whew! I'd been feeling achy on that side for several days, so if nothing was happening...well, you can imagine how disappointing that would be! The right ovary has one good follicle at about 15mm. 18mm is mature, so that's great! My endometrial lining (where a baby would implant, if it were conceived) is 10mm, which is perfect.

Dr. Turd's Florida nurse called awhile ago to tell me that I'm to take one more shot of Menopur tonight (guess we'll have to repeat those "end of injections" photos we took last night) and do the trigger shot tomorrow night. I'll start Prometrium (progesterone) Friday. Woo-hoo! I get to ovulate at a half-normal time of the cycle. This feels weird.

God has been so faithful to us in this. We prayed not to have too many follicles b/c of the sextuplets in the news and really not wanting to cancel a cycle. God provided one good follicle. Praise Him! 

I went in yesterday morning for my first follicular u/s and blood draw. Dr. Turd is in Florida (and why not? he has two practices!), so I had to go to the hospital for these things. And that meant the u/s tech couldn't really give me any information, aside from the fact I had several follies on each ovary and they were small. She doesn't know what Dr. Turd's standard and cutoff are, so there ya have it. The blood draw was relatively painless. It's amazing that even after six days of sticking myself in the belly that I still cringe at having a needle stuck in me. I can't decide if that's a positive or a negative for my sanity.

At a few minutes to 4:00 yesterday, Tina the Incompetent (who is surprisingly more competent now that I'm in the treatment phase...she may need a new nickname...any ideas?) called to tell me that my e2 level was 26 (it would be 200-600 per mature follicle) and that Dr. Turd wants me to double my dosage. That means taking the sodium chloride from one ampule, dissolving one ampule of Menopur, then taking that out and dissolving another ampule of Menopur, effectively making it more concentrated. Ok, then. I can do that. A few minutes later, she called again to tell me that Dr. Turd wants me to use less sodium chloride to dissolve both ampules of Menopur. That means going from 1.5cc of sodium chloride down to 1cc. If you're keeping score at home, I'm using 200% of the Menopur with 75% of the sodium chloride.

So, yeah, that stings more than the previous dose. Ouch. No, seriously. OUCH. 

I really pray this works. At the new dose, we'll use up almost the entire supply of Menopur by Sunday (we'd used 6/20 as of Tuesday night, and now we're going at a pace of two/day; after Sunday's dose we'll have used 16/20). And we can't afford to spend that much money on treatment very often. Bugger.

That's a little melodramatic, but I certainly felt like I was on the edge of SOMETHING tonight. I started my injections tonight. The process took something like 30 minutes, though I hope to get it down to three within a couple of days.

I got the medicine ready as per the instructions, and then I sat there with my belly skin pinched between my fingers and the needle a hair's breadth away from that skin. Paralyzed. How on earth did I get myself into this?! What made me think I could give myself a SHOT?!

I finally did it, though D was the one who actually depressed the plunger. I couldn't do it...I'm not sure it was possible given the angle of my hands. The medicine stung like heck going in, so I hope it works. I don't know how many cycles of this I can handle. I'm so thankful for D; he sat there with me the whole time, as patient as could be, trying to talk me through it. I'm an awfully challenging wife to have.

We went in yesterday to learn how to mix and inject my meds, and while we were there we found out that my bloodwork and ultrasounds have to be done early in the morning (9:00 a.m. all the way on the other side of town and actually into another city) so the doctor can have the results by the end of the day to make any necessary changes. The woman who volunteered to take me said she could do it as long as it was after 10:00 a.m. D is in court every single morning next week (when the u/s and bloodwork would occur), so we knew we'd have to come up with something.

After D dropped me off and returned to the office, I hit the sofa with my book, some yogurt, and my heating pad. My phone rang, and it was a woman I hadn't heard from in a couple of months. We'd gone to church with her for six months, and she was the one who took me for my pre-surgery bloodwork back in November. After catching her up on my life, she out of the blue volunteered to take me to my appointments! This is a pretty big deal b/c she lives within a couple of minutes of the hospital. Yes, that means she has to drive all the way here (about 25 minutes), get me, and take me back there (another 25 minutes), all with two little kids. How generous!

And it just goes to show me, sometimes God answers the prayers we haven't yet thought to pray, giving us what we need before we've remembered we ought to ask. Isn't He good? 

I placed my order for the injectables Rxed by the Turd Doctor™ (thanks, Erin! and, no, he's not a doctor of turds). Total cost? Dude. $1,134.40. Yeah, I knew it would be a lot. I just didn't realize quite HOW much. Whoa! Anyway, that's 20 units of the stimulating gonadatropin (FSH), one unit of the (generic) trigger shot (hCG), and 200 pills of progesterone. Insurance covered (or gave me a discounted rate on) exactly one medication: progesterone.

The last time I had an Rx for Prometrium (natural progesterone as opposed to synthetic, which would be called provera or a progestin), my insurance at the time didn't cover it at the beginning. I was paying $140 for 60 pills (~$2.33 each) and took three a day after ovulation. Eventually, insurance started covering it, and it went down to something like $30 or $45. This time, the cost to us is $100.50 for 200 pills (~$0.50 each). Not too bad. I don't know how many he'll have me taking, as I never saw the Rx (it was faxed to the pharmacy).

I'm not looking forward to injecting myself. I imagine the injections will go into my tummy. Poor tummy. And according to one woman who took the same med, it stings like heck!!! Goody! She did tell me that the anticipation was worse than the reality, so now I just have to deal with the bad anticipation until next week. AF should arrive around Tuesday, so then I'll call the doctor and try to figure out when I start taking these shots. Wheee. 

We do most of our normal purchasing with an AmEx card. We get points, and we're working toward earning some rewards. Anyway, that means we need to make regular payments. We've not been great about that, so we end up making semi-regular large payments instead.

Last week, knowing that I needed to pay off D's business AmEx (it gets paid out of his reimbursements from work, earns more points than our personal card, and cannot carry a balance), I logged in to the site. I saw that the personal card was due in a few weeks and thought I should pay a chunk of that. D was off at the bank making a deposit (and withdrawing cash for our carnival excursion), so I added that to Quicken and proceeded to make a quite large payment on the personal card as well as the nearly-as-large payment on the business card. And then I checked our bank balance.

Hmmm, something's not right here. How can it be so different from Quicken? I look through the transactions. Oh no. I had missed inputting our mortgage check (I thought it was already there) into Quicken. And our mortgage check isn't some small sum like $50, of course. Sick feelings began to pervade my tummy.

D comes home from his banking, and he tries to get AmEx to cancel the transaction. Sorry, they can't do anything once the Submit button is clicked. He calls the bank. No, nothing can be done as they can't see the transaction. (We found out Monday that they could have seen the transaction, had they known where to look.) But it was a moot point, since they require 72 business hours' notice on automatic payments. (No, I'm not sure how that's possible since by definition, automatic payments go through almost immediately; only scheduled payments would be affected.)

Oh, dear. And then everything hit Monday evening. Not just the two large AmEx payments, but also two checks we'd written to our church the week before (yes, that means eight days previously but not cashed until our own personal Black Monday). Ugh.

We were quite thankful for the overdraft protection our account has in place, as it kept any of our payments from bouncing. And we were also thankful that the money keeps coming in so we could repay that overdraft protection account immediately and move on.

We live and we learn. And sometimes while we live, we're stoooooopid.

Last Saturday was our sixth wedding anniversary. So we spent the day like newlyweds. Heh. No, not really. D went to a men's breakfast at church and then came home and replaced an outdoor faucet that had burst over the winter (yes, it was my fault; I didn't remove the hose). That took a couple of hours and help from a neighbor. After we got all cleaned up, we went to Abuelo's for lunch. Undoubtedly some of the best Mexican food I've ever had, and certainly the best thing this area has going! When that was over, we came home and took a nap. Yep, we're just like newlyweds!

After our nap, we got ourselves together (finally) and went to a local carnival. We rode the ferris wheel (called something else), the Black Widow, the Ion, and one more thing. You know that the Black Widow (called the spider a lot of other places) and the Ion go up and down in the air, spinning you around. Well, those didn't me sick. Nope, not a bit. They sort of hurt my neck a little, but otherwise, I was good. What made me sick? This. I thought it would be fine, as the little cars just run around on a track, not leaving the ground or anything. That's what I thought until we started going backward. I survived, but just barely. After that, all I could take was the ferris wheel, leaving D to ride the bumper cars and black widow alone. When he was in line for his last solo ride, he sold his remaining tickets to some girl, six for $1. She was all over that! Her friends were even kind of disappointed that he didn't have more to sell.

We had a lot of fun. It was great to just laugh and enjoy the rides, even though this was evidently the ghetto carnival and a town over has a much nicer fair. We don't live there, and D's bosses didn't see fit to tell him this city's carnival is ghetto. Maybe we'll make our way to it if it's in town when we have money again.

Oh, and lunch from Abuelo's held us both over for the rest of the day. That's right, aside from a funnel cake and a cherry Coke, we had no need for more food that day. We both had the fajita chimichanga (D had the steak, and I had the chicken and only half of that!). Turned out to be for the best, esp. since that danged ride nearly killed me!