The Irony...BCPs!

How strange to think that those little pills we took to keep us from getting PG, are now the very thing I have to start off taking for my IVF cycle. AF finally arrived this past Saturday so I have officially started the process for IVF/ICSI #2 with BCPs! Can I just say they make me feel like crap?! Headaches, moodiness, bloating...wait, that could be any other day :-) Assuming that all goes as planned I should start stims on 1/19/07. My RE is switching up my protocol from my last cycle...last cycle I did BCPs and Lupron then started on 225 IUs of Gonal - F. This time we have nixed the Lupron and I will be doing Antagon, Menopur, and Gonal-F starting 1/19. At ER, I will also be starting on Estrace (Estrogen) and BA in addition to the wonderful PIO shots. Hopefully this will be the right combination!

How did we get here???

I ask myself that question quite frequently these days and still haven't come up with a good answer...so I will just start off with the basics about us. I decided to start this blog for several reasons, probably as my own personal therapy more than anything else, but also as an easy way to keep friends and family informed on where we are in our cycles and as a resource for others out there who are on the same roller coaster ride that at times seems never ending.

We started our search 3 long years ago with a conversation at one of our favorite restaurants. Of course I immediately went home and trashed the BCPs and commenced to determining the optimal days for the "BD". Of course the thought was that in just a few short months we would have our own little bun in the oven. I had already concocted all kinds of ways that I would spring the happy news on my hubby, now I think he knows my cycle better than I do...so much for a big surprise! Well after a year without so much as a glimmer of the stork's tail feathers we made an appointment to get checked out with a fertility specialist. Well lucky for us, everything came back perfectly normal...my tubes were open and clear, no endometriosis, the swim team had plenty of members and were pretty strong swimmers...so, what does all that mean? Well we are both perfectly healthy, young (at that time 28-me, 27-my dear hubby), and Unexplained! It has taken me quite some time to come to terms with that diagnosis, in fact I still scour the Internet, books, my fellow infertile friends, the RE, etc. looking for some kind of "fix-able" problem. As you can see from our journey we have been through multiple clomid/natural, clomid/IUI, and injectible/IUI cycles. Our very first injectible/IUI cycle we achieved what we both had hoped and prayed for - We were officially pregnant!! Unfortunately a few short days later the stork decided that it just wasn't our time and we lost the pregnancy. So after a couple of months to regroup we went back at the injectible/IUI cycles thinking that we had surely found the winning combination. Now a year, one failed IVF, and one failed FET later, we are still left wondering "How did we get here?"