Well lah dee freakin dah

…And, because God must be amused by my last entry, I got up to use the bathroom about 10 minutes after posting it, wiped, and discovered I was spotting brown blood. Mind you, this has not happened on my own without the help of Provera (used it 4 months ago) or Progesterone cream (used last month) since September of 2011.

W.

T.

F.

I know for certain that this spotting is not indicative of a true “ovulatory cycle” leading up to a grand flow because over the last 2 weeks my BBT has been in the very low temp range (below 97.5) and my chart looks like a three year old hand drew it in crayon:

No ovulation dip, no lh surge, no steep rise in temp. Nope. My vag just decided to emit brown blood right now.

My only explanation is… Maybe the diet and acupuncture are readjusting things? Maybe the vitamin D, iron, calcium, magnesium and B complex I’m taking are also causing my body to tweak itself? No. Freaking. Clue.

If it continues much longer, I may be seeing the gyno sooner than May.

My 100th Post

“When I was a girl…we used cigarettes to induce labor.”

Pregnancy 101’s fab post has inspired me to do a 100th Entry post as well!

It’s been a lightening fast five months. The concept that we are now four months into 2012 is crazy. Cray. Zee.

But seriously.

I could not have gotten through the last five months without the support of this blog community. I don’t know what I would have done…”thank you” isn’t enough. I wish I could give all of you a big IRL hug. Your comments, your advice, your funny, poignant, inspiring writing, the way you all bare the rawest, truest sides of yourselves…you are the reason that I feel strong enough to bear this journey. Because, at times, it can be a very lonely journey.

In purely scientific terms, I haven’t really progressed much in terms of where I’m at fertility-wise since I started the blog. After all of this time, I have still not ovulated. Who the hell knows if this new fangled diet will have any impact. There is no way to know if I am any closer to conceiving than I was back in November. These last five months have been a trial to see if my body will wake up and join the party…but I think it’s safe to say after 100 posts that my party is just not cool enough for Syndee and Ali. I will need to resort to more drastic measures to get them to attend, ie: Clomid. Beyond that, I do not know.

On November 10, 2011, this blog was born. I honestly had no idea how blogging would be, or what I would experience through writing, only that I needed to write A) because I needed an outlet to brain dump all of my fertility related anxieties and B) I was driving Hubs nuts with my constant obsessing over fertility. What I have ultimately gained from writing is more than just an outlet. I gained an inlet. I gained a community.

In the course of the blog, and attempting to remedy my ovulation problems I have:

Named my period something other than Aunt Flo

Took Provera, and didn’t even freaking bleed from it (thanks, low estrogen!)

Took Metformin for 2 months (and have subsequently stopped–I couldn’t handle the 24/7 diarrhea)

Took Soy Isoflavones (they did nothing. NOTHING.)

Got a killer bladder infection that I attempted to wait out for a week to see if it cleared on its own. BIG mistake.

Traveled to Toronto.

Sprained my neck in yoga and haven’t been back since. I suck.

Had dinner with an Uber Fertile who loves to use me ordering water instead of booze as an awkward segue into whether or not I am TTC.

Had an awesome Oscars Party at my house.

Named my ovaries.

Met Intuitive Health Lady.

Got Hub’s SA results back

Ate soup dumplings in NYC!

Hung with HRF in Boston!

Started my Elimination Diet and began my Poop Diary.

And now, here we are.

Thanks for coming along for the ride with me. Here’s to another 100 entries!

 

 

Sweet insomnia…how I’ve missed you…

For the better part of my adult life, I have battled insomnia. It’s a vicious cycle of waking up multiple times during the night (usually between 12 and 3AM), falling back to sleep around 5AM, just in time to drag myself out of bed around 7AM to get ready for work.  The lack of consistent sleep at night makes me exhausted and ready for bed around 9PM (real fun for Hubs!).

For the last few months, I was doing great with insomnia. I had quit caffeine and immediately began to notice an improvement in my sleep. Mystery solved! However, over the last week or so, the insomnia has crept back in. I had wine last night…so maybe alcohol did it? But there have been nights this week I haven’t slept where there was no alcohol at all. I’m thinking it might be the Provera. I’ve been having some cramping, headaches, night sweats and general lethargy on these pills. I’ve also been feeling a little bit like this guy:

You know the feeling? It’s like my brain has been left in a case of frosted glass. I try to smudge the glass so I can see clearly, but it just fogs up again. Everything is dampened and muted. Cracking a smile feels like an exercise in fakeness. I snapped at Hubs yesterday because he didn’t want to make dinner reservations for our two-day trip to Palm Springs next week and instead preferred to keep things looser on the trip. You would have thought that he had just told me he wanted a divorce.

I believe that I have always had mild to moderate depression. I have never been on medication for it, but sometimes I wish I could pop a pill now and then that makes me feel like this:

I have read about PCOS and depression being linked (there was a great article I read on Soul Cysters about PCOS, depression, and slightly elevated testosterone levels that really hit home). Or, perhaps my malaise the last few days has been due to the Provera…? Dunno. All I know is, this sucks…and the big question is: what infomercial should I watch? Slap Chop, or Proactiv?

How do you solve a problem like Provera?

Something tells me Mrs. Von Trap did not have to take Provera to start her period…

I’m not sure how I feel about Provera. I started “brown blood bleeding” (scientific term) ever since the second pill….I’m trying to figure out what that indicates hormonally (most women only bleed AFTER 10 days of Provera), but I’ve had no such luck with my dysfunctional “bestie” Google in figuring that one out. I spoke to my doctor yesterday about whether or not I should continue to take all ten days of the pills. He said to keep taking them, and that I should get a “full flow” after I stop the Provera. The first “full flow” day will be my CD1.

Provera thus far has given me absolutely no period symptoms or side effects. In that way, I feel great, but I am sort of wishing for sore boobs, cramps, or something to indicate that SCFFF will arrive “normally” when all is said and done. I also hate having the brown blood weird stuff. It reminds me of the first time I got my period and thought I crapped my pants.

I feel like I’m in a holding pattern right now, and for someone very impatient, this is not a great thing. When I’m waiting and bored, I tend to Google really awful things like: “Progesterone birth defects”.

On a side note, Lisa, an old friend from elementary school just posted a random “hello” on my Facebook wall. The last time we saw each other was a little bit over a year ago when we were going out to dinner with another old friend of ours who announced at that dinner that she was 3 months pregnant. This was before I had started trying at all, so I was blissfully unaware of my journey ahead or the pain/jealousy that could ensue if this exact same dinner happened to me now. Life was puppy dogs and rainbows back then. I still lived in a world where penis + vagina = immediate babies.

This pregnant friend (we’ll call her Sarah) revealed that she had been “trying” for… TWO WHOLE MONTHS before she got pregnant! Again, this didn’t phase me because I didn’t have anything to compare it to. However, Lisa got a little quiet at the table when she was asked by Sarah if she and her husband were “trying”. Lisa revealed that she and her husband had been trying for about 8 months, and she had recently bought a really fancy digital BBT monitor in hopes of helping things along. Sarah began telling Lisa all of her “strategies” for getting pregnant like doing it every other day during your “fertile week” and all of the other bullshit that people who get pregnant in  two months  immediately advise. At the time, I thought Sarah was doing Lisa a huge favor by telling her all of this. But now I know that Lisa knew all of those “tricks” and was most likely sick of hearing them from a friend who was 3 months pregnant when she had been trying for 8  months. As I look at Lisa’s Facebook page, I see that she still has not announced a pregnancy, nor does she look pregnant in any of her recent pictures… I can’t help but wonder what sort of struggle she might be going through now, over a year later, and how much that dinner may have made her sad.