CD1: Thankful for Red Sheets

Woke up at 8:30am and found AF had returned with abandon. Because I had torn my pajama bottoms off in the middle of the night, sweated so much I'd soaked through them, so there was nothing to stop the flow from, well, flowing.

Everywhere.

Thank god I had the sense to put my red sheets on the bed, and all because I had read that red sheets are good pregnancy feng shui. ;-)

So the clock is ticking...gotta start my BCPs by CD3, and that is Sunday.

Despite how much I did not appreciate the way I was treated by most of the staff at Dr. Z's (and I'll say most because there were some really good people there)...I think I am going to return to Dr. Z, because:

1. I responded well to his protocol. 12 follicles, no OHSS.
   
2. His stats aren't cherry picked (hell he treated the 62 year old mother who made news recently.
   
3. He won't cancel me due to my FSH or other tests like the "lupron challenge".
   
4. I won't waste $$ on said tests or time taking them and putting my cycles off to future months
   

Because I'm a Dr. Z vet now, I have a bit of an advantage in knowing that some of his nursing staff has major issues. If I have a repeat of any of the previous problems I probably only need to send an email to Dr. Z, CC the sucky offending person, and that will likely be enough to get Dr. Z to take action. I will be less hesitant to make sure that bossman knows when these particular people do something flagrantly incompetent.

I met with HoldingPattern and ColoraturaDreams for dinner last night and I picked their brains repeatedly over my curry vegetable dinner. It did a world of good for me. I was really on the fence with respect to each RE. I had no gut reaction to speak of between either Dr. Z or Dr. Next so there was no "gut instinct" for me to go on. We poured over their statistics, whether they "cherry pick" their patients in order to improve their stats, whether they'd cancel me due to my somewhat elevated FSH. We talked about the pros and cons of waiting or not waiting.

I think I'm left with the decision to cycle or not to cycle this month. Physically I feel that I was in better shape going into my last cycle. I was doing my daily wheatgrass, yoga a few times a week, eating oodles of my Omega 3/6/9's. I am probably a bit less stressed this time around, but I haven't been great about drinking my wheatgrass, I've missed a few days of vitamins here and there, and I think I've been to the gym once since we moved into the new house early February. So I've been a bit of a slug since the beginning of my last cycle. Will it matter? Or, I wonder, is it more important to not lose time at my age? Some women get pregnant naturally right after having done an IVF cycle...at least those who can get pregnant naturally. If I wait, do I lose a bit of an edge?

Sit back and watch Linda talk herself into doing an IVF cycle. Quick. Go make a batch of popcorn.

There is an arguement that some of the drugs are still in your system 3 months or so after a cycle, but I think that it isn't that the drugs are in your system still, but rather that the eggs that are in your body were there, as pre-follicles, during the last IVF cycle and were exposed, level unknown, to the stims. But what effect would this have, I wonder. FSH at the beginning of an IVF cycle assists in recruitment of follicles...but these pre-follicles were pretty much dormant at this time. Perhaps the FSH will help to recruit or enlist the help of other pre-follicles that might not have been called up? I wish there was data on this. But what I do know is that I took my FSH in the last two weeks of January...so counting three full months forward...this cycle and the next are the ONLY two cycles that will produce follicles that could be affected by the FSH of my first IVF, and alon this line of thinking, one might would assume, that this cycle's pre-follicles might be more affected by the dosage of FSH than the next set due to their stage of growth (bigger = absorbs more drugs...just like an ovarian cyst hogs up more of the FSH).

Shit did that make sense?

I hope so, because on some scientific level it's starting to gel for me.