Doing IVF and having a life

I'm writing this while sitting in the garden - gotta love this spring weather.

Tomorrow I go for my next blood test, which hopefully will show that the Lucrin is down-regulating my FSH and LH and that I am ready to start stimulating. Still no sign of my period. Not sure if that will delay the stimming or not.

Tomorrow I am also going for a job interview, which I stupidly scheduled for 9am (I've now rescheduled). It wouldn't have been a problem getting my blood test done before then but I'd completely forgot about needing to be back home to give myself my Lucrin injection at 8.30am. Anyway, I've rearranged things so it will all work out.

But this does raise the question of fitting in IVF cycles and still managing to have a (semi-normal!) life. I am eternally grateful that I don't still have my very long-working-hours full time job while I am going through IVF. Quite frankly it would have been a nightmare. But I'm still finding organising my personal life around IVF a bit of a challenge.

We are (hopefully!) going to a friend's wedding interstate in a couple of weeks. The only problem is that it falls at around the time that we might be having embryo transfer (fingers crossed). So, being the analytical, anal being that I am, I decided to generate a spreadsheet to see what the likelyhood would be that we are going to have to give the wedding a miss.

I've got a lovely colour-coded excel spreadsheet with 3 different scenarios, varying by the length of stimulation (10 days or 12 days), and also when I will start stimming. Then there is the embryo growth time. Will it be 5 days for blastocyst transfer or Day 3 embies, or maybe even longer? There are so many unknowns since this is my first cycle. Its impossible to know how many days I will be stimming for, and how long the embryos (hopefully there will be some!!) will take to grow.

So the plan is that I will buy a fully flexible ticket to get me to the wedding and then change it at the last minute if I need to. I would be desperately disappointed to miss out on the wedding, but this is just more important. Travelling away from home for days at a time suddenly takes on a new significance when you are having blood tests and ultrasounds every other day.

So much for the social life. As I've mentioned, I don't have the work considerations to think of, but lovely husband certainly does. He is often travelling interstate and his high powered bosses don't take kindly to unexplained absences. He's decided to just tell them what is going on so that he can be around for the egg pick-up and sperm 'deposit' when he needs to be. He reckons that if his bosses know up front what is going on, they will be much more willing to let him fly back to Sydney or miss meetings on random days. I think he's right although I wouldn't want to be telling work people such personal details.

Still feeling impatient to get started. I need to prepare myself for the blood test news tomorrow - perhaps I will need to wait a bit longer before we get started. What I will be like during the two-week-wait doesn't bear thinking about. Lucrin still going well, notwithstanding the fact that I stabbed myself in the thumb with a needle this morning. The needle guard didn't want to come off, but suddenly flew off and I stabbed myself. I chucked the needle and used a new one - didn't want to take the chance that I'd blunted it a bit on the thumb and so it wouldn't go into my lovely stomach roll so easily.