Wednesday, May 6, 2009

It's all for a good purpose...

Well, apparently the quiet days are over... Not only do I have more doctors' appointments for the remainder of the week, but I'm also on daily IVF monitoring now. Today it took two nurses to find some blood in my right cubital vein. Luckily the first one didn't dig around too much, so the second one could still use the same spot to suck some blood out of me. Everyone seems impressed that I come prepared now with hand warmers (in case they need to find veins there), and with a glass of water (in case I get woozy after the bloodletting). So keep your fingers crossed that my veins will tolerate the daily bloodletting from now on...

On top of everything, the side effects of the hormonal treatments are supposed to make me superovulate are starting to hit me. This means that I get the occasional hot flash, that I feel bloated, and that for the last two days, I've been battling a serious headache that just doesn't want to go away. Today I've started having food cravings, too. First sweets (I devoured a bunch of crackers with Nutella hazlenut chocolate spread on them), and now salty and sour (I'm noshing on some green bean salad in vinaigrette). I suppose it's like menopause and pregnancy all rolled into one. What a strange combination!

So I'm trying to remind myself that this is all for a very good purpose. The doctors think we may end up with eight eggs or so. Not all of those will be fully mature, nor will all of them fertilize properly, but we're hoping that we'll get enough embies to freeze that we'll have at least some chance of having a child after I'm done with the treatments. So I need to remember this when I'm not feeling so chipper: I'm investing in my future, in DH's future, in our future -- and most importantly in our potential future kid's future! And in the grand scheme of things, hot flashes, headaches, nausea and the rest of the side effects are but a small price to pay for that.

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