Sunday, January 15, 2012

Mini milestone - drug free pregnancy

Tomorrow I reach a mini milestone in this pregnancy. Tomorrow I can stop taking all the supporting medications that are required when doing IVF, and I can't wait.

Since a few days before my frozen embryo transfer I've been taking progesterone (provera) and oestrogen (progynova) tablets orally morning and night. In addition, I've also had the pleasure of administering progesterone pessaries morning and night. Once inserted I have lie down for at least half an hour. At bed time this is no trouble. Mornings are a different story. For the past couple of months I've had to get up a half hour before I need to and administer the pessary and then go back to bed. This sucks. Weekends aren't too bad. Work days are bad and the days when I'm flying for work have been the pits.

The other hassle about the pessary is they need to be refrigerated, therefore all travel is a pain. At Christmas time Matt and I had a pessary esky that travelled with us everywhere. Every time we got to someone's house we whipped the drugs into their fridge and the ice packs into the freezer. Overnight travel for work is again worse. Early check in is inevitably unavailable and I have to ask the reception girls if I can leave my medications in a fridge somewhere.

Basically pessaries suck and I can't wait to stop having to take them. I've been reading up and apparently the placenta has now taken over the role of production of pregnancy support hormones and can reliably be trusted to make the levels I now need. Before now the corpus luteum (which is created when ovulation occurs) is supposed to deliver the progesterone required to support the pregnancy. I'm not sure why when doing a natural cycle like I did that my corpus luteum (surely I must have made one when I ovulated) couldn't still be trusted to do this role. I do know that high levels of progesterone are associated with higher pregnancy success rates, so perhaps the progesterone support increases the chance the baby will hang in there.

Tomorrow marks 10 weeks by my original numbers and all is still looking good.

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