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Month: August 2018

Day 2 Sort of

Greetings! I have just had my second birth control tablet. Last night I ate some cheese and caffeinated iced tea, so I’m already living it up.

I was also moody during Dungeons and Dragons, but I don’t know if I can blame that on the birth control. Currently in the game we are being held captive by magic wrist bands of some sort. In exchange for our freedom we have to do the bidding of the local colonizers. But I have yet to see evidence that anyone has been freed from these bands before, so as far as I’m concerned, we are just helping oppressors who have not demonstrated they are acting in good faith. My character feels similarly.

I also learned that the app I use to track my period has a “TTC” setting. TTC is short for trying-to-conceive. I think that’s a new feature. I activated it, and there are so many additional components I did not know about! There are charts you can complete, words I did not know before (what is ferning?), and symbols to help identify important times of the month. Fascinating!

I just looked up ferning. I think I’m going to buy a microscope.

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Day 1 Sort of

Greetings! I have just had my first birth control tablet, which marks the official start of the foray into IVF.

I think the birth control is supposed to set internal things to neutral, so when the time is right, they can stimulate the ovaries to produce a bunch of eggs at the same time that they can eventually extract.

Now that I’m back on birth control, I’m thinking about going on a real bender. I’m talking unpasteurized cheeses, caffeinated tea, cured meats, sashimi, really just throwing caution to the wind.

We signed some forms. My sister gets our frozen embryos if we die. I haven’t told her. I’ll leave that as a fun surprise for her to learn about should such a tragedy occur.

Over the weekend I played tennis, and in the midst of the playing, my knee started to feel shaky. This was pretty upsetting, because you need your knees in tennis, and I run a lot when I play. Over the weekend I was also bitten by some treacherous mosquitos – the bites are so big. I scratch and I scratch.

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A Day of Firsts

It is me! I got my period today. It was four days late. This is a first for me.

Anyway, to provide a sense for how optimistic I still was that I was pregnant: I peed into my urine test cup. It was bright red with my period soaked urine. Then I put a pregnancy test strip into the blood soaked cup and waited for the line to appear that would confirm I was not pregnant.

The test strips I use are super cheap, so I wasn’t being reckless with money. I have a box of 100 test strips. I hate those strips because the purple not-pregnant line is so dark. I feel like it’s taunting me every time.

As another first, I am now wearing an organic cotton pad. I bought a pack in Bath, Maine to see what was all the rage. It’s super thick. Let’s see whether organic cotton is any match for my rapidly shedding uterine lining.

Now we begin our journey into sophisticated fertility treatment.

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Lobster Rolls

My period is three days late, but my pregnancy tests are negative. On Sunday morning I woke up with my hands on my belly, because I dreamt I was four months pregnant. As my eyes opened, I knew the only baby I was carrying was a food baby, and specifically, a lobster roll food baby, because earlier I had eaten three, buttery, juicy lobster rolls.

I did a google search for other people with a similar condition (late period and negative pregnancy test, not a lobster roll food baby). One person turned out to be pregnant, and two people ended up miscarrying.

So here we are. I suspect I worked myself up into such a tizzy over starting IVF that my anxiety stopped my nearly clockwork cycle this month. I can’t even attribute this missed period to weight loss, because I have not been losing weight.

Below is a picture of ONE of the lobster rolls I ate. It’s from High Roller Lobster in Portland, Maine. We ate at this restaurant twice: Thursday night and Sunday for lunch. I have no regrets about the number of lobster rolls I consumed. If I physically could have, I would eaten more.

High Roller Lobster Roll
High Roller Lobster
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