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.

A new year

I'm a big believer in the New Year being the time to make a change and new start. I've had great success in the past with setting myself goals and establishing new attitudes for a New Year. I put a lot of thinking and hope into having a great new year and then being mentally refreshed and ready for 2011. Like a shedding of the 2010 skin. Unfortunately my New Year didn't go as I planned, and instead of feeling New Year was a new start, I felt stuck in a rut. I dragged all the worst bits of 2010 into 2011.

Now, I know this is completely psychological and that I could just start a fresh anyway - but I had hung my hopes on this fresh beginning. Maybe this would have happened even if I'd had the perfect new year that I'd imagined... who knows.

All I know is that I spent a lot of time considering what I should do in 2011 and despite my earlier resolve, I find mid month I'm already wavering.

Having felt the drain of the drugs in December 2010 I decided that I would make a fresh start in 2011. I would take January, February and March 2011 off the drugs and the blood tests and try and attack the other issue that has continually bothered me about our infertility - my weight. 

Half way into January I'm feeling normal again without the physical drain the drugs were on me. Instead of early morning blood tests I'm finally using the ovulation tests I bought online (I figure some monitoring can't hurt). Then this morning I think - maybe I should just get a blood test, to be sure. But I know that would be a short and slippery slope back into the full monitoring and drug cycle again. So right now I'm just saying no, to drugs and blood tests.

Tackling the weight has been slow getting started. I decided I needed to tap into a real program versus just trying to go it alone which was what I did incredibly unsuccessfully in 2010. The floods have messed with that a little with offices closing down and meetings being postoned. But I'm hoping to get a meeting next week and get started on tackling the weight with some help. I am trying on my own, but I just don't seem to get any traction.

Not the brilliant start that I had hoped for - but it is just how things have gone. Perhaps it is just a slow start out of the blocks.