This racing around in the morning is going to get really old really fast. I had to be at the doctor's office between 8 and 8:45 again this morning for bloodwork and ultrasound. I got a little smarter today, though. I gave Alison her milk to drink in the car (which I had done on Wednesday) and brought half of her breakfast with me so she could eat it while we waited. That way, all she still needed to eat when we got home was her oatmeal. That worked out well. There weren't all that many ladies there this morning, but it still seemed we had to wait forever. We didn't get home until almost 9:30 again. After Alison finisher her breakfast, I vacuumed the house (including the basement) and ran around with a Swiffer duster finishing up the cleaning I didn't get to yesterday.

The ultrasound went well. I've got a couple of more follicles, and the big one is measuring at almost 20 mm. Laurie said she thought I'd probably stim through the weekend, have bloodwork and ultrasound again on Monday and time for prodecure on Wednesday. That would have been fine with me. When she called with my test results in the afternoon, she told us we'd be timing for procedure on Monday. Ack!! All righty then!

Traci and Kevin got her at about 12:45 this afternoon. They had a much better drive today than they did yesterday. I gave them the 50 cent tour and they really liked the house. (Phew! As I said before, I don't know why that was such a big deal to me, but it was.) Traci liked what I did with the bathroom. Our shower curtain has a seashell/underwater jaquard print to it, so I got some seashell stamps and stamped the bathroom walls.

We've pretty much spent the day/evening just hanging out and watching Alison bounce off the walls. It was nice to have someone to keep Alison occupied while Kevin gave me my shot. She does pretty well staying in the living room while he's doing it, but every now and then she'll sneak down the hall and poke her head in the bedroom. While he's not doing anything bad, I just don't think she needs to watch her father jamming a needle in her mother's rear end. After tomorrow night, we get a slight break on the injections. That will be nice.

Oh my gosh, what a long day. We had to be in Ann Arbor for Alison's appointment at 9:30. We left in plenty of time to be there, or so we thought. At 9:00 we were about 10 miles away from our exit off US23 when we suddenly came to a stand-still. The right lane was closed three miles ahead. It took us 25 minutes to go those 3 miles. I called the doctors office at about five after nine to let them know we were stuck in traffic and would get there as soon as we could. We ended up being about 15 minutes late. The appointment itself took most of the morning, running from here to there and lots of waiting. You can read more about it here.

We put Alison down for her nap when we got home and I started my cleaning frenzy. I took about half an hour off to talk to my mom about how things had gone. Traci and Kevin were supposed to have been leaving Nashville at about 8:30 their time (9:30 our time) and arriving at our house around 7:30. I had precious little time to finish up all the picking up and dusting and stuff. Traci called around 5:00 to tell us they were at her parents' (near Dayton) and would be staying there for the night and coming the rest of the way in the morning. Geez!! I could have taken a nap this afternoon instead of killing myself cleaning. Well, at least I'll be able to go to bed early tonight.

Well, all those shots really are doing something. I had bloodwork and ultrasound today. The bloodwork came back fine. The ultrasound showed 10 follicles, one of which is already at 15mm. Wow! Because that follicle is big, it's time to start the Antagon injections. They will keep me from accidentally ovulating on my own, which would really suck. It also means we have to up my Repronex from 5 amps to 6.

I commented to the nurses today that I don't remember being this tired the last time we did this. It's been like early pregnancy without actually being pregnant. We all came to the conclusion that it's because there's a toddler in the mix that wasn't there the last time. I can't just take a nap whenever I feel tired and I can't just sleep till 9 or 10 if I'm still tired when the alarm goes at 7. If we're successful, the fatigue passes quickly because this is a real drag!

I've been finishing up odds and ends of projects this week. I'm thisclose to finally finishing the slipcover for one of our living room chairs (which I started more than 2 years ago). I've got most of the laundry done and the sheets on the guest bed and the guest towels have been washed. All I have left to do tomorrow is dust and run the sweeper. Oh, and take Alison to Ann Arbor for her appointment with the orthopedic surgeon.

My MIL is finally gone. I am so glad. It was not a pleasant visit. For the last week I've been made to feel unwelcome in my own home. And I've also been made to feel that I could not interact with my own child. All this because my MIL lives far away, doesn't get to see Alison very often and wanted to be able to "bond" with her. As a result, my fairly well behaved child is gone and I have a spoiled brat on my hands right now. How on earth did that happen in only a week?

Now the work of getting my house back in order and my daughter back under control begins. We are having company in again on Thursday. My best friend from college and her husband are coming. This is a visit I'm really looking forward to, but am also slightly dreading. They've been to visit us once before, but they've never been to our house. That's where the slight sense of dread is coming in. What are they going to think of our house? I'm not sure why it really matters, but it does. It probably stems from the fact that they built a brand new house a few months after they got married. I've been there twice now, and in reality it's not that much bigger than our house, and they haven't really taken such great care of it. We been working like crazy trying to get odds and ends projects finished up around here before they come. There's still a lot of things I'd like to do, but I think the house is looking pretty good.

Oh well, whether they like the house or not, it's going to be fun having them here. I just hope Alison cooperates. :)

What a busy day. I got myself, Kevin, and Alison up this morning and we all raced around getting ready to head off to the doctor's office. Kevin had the day off because his mom is still here, so he wanted to come with me, since it's probably the only appointment he'll be able to make it to during the stim phase, since he's going to be taking most of next Thursday off when we take Alison to U of M for her appointment with the orthopedic surgeon. I suppose we could have left Alison home with grandma except that 1) she wasn't up yet and 2) Laurie had been disappointed that she hadn't gotten to see Alison when we were there the last time, so I thought we'd take a chance that she'd be there this morning and bring Alison in to see her. Besides, I'll have to bring her by myself a couple of times next week, so having help keeping her occupied this time was nice.

I had to be at the office between 8 and 8:45. There are no set appointments for this, since the nurses are the ones doing everything. It's first come, first served. I was trying to get us there as close to 8 as I could, in the hopes that we wouldn't have to wait too long. We got there at 8:15. Not too bad, but we still had to wait half an hour. They can zip right through the list when it comes to drawing blood, but they get a little backed up when it comes to the ultrasounds. We got home at about 9:30. Since we didn't feed her before we left, Alison wolfed down her breakfast! I'm happy to report that, with a history of being hard to draw, Julie got my blood on the first try without even having to dig around. Hooray! My ultrasound was good, too. My uterine lining was .5 and I had about 6 follicles already. Laurie was tickled to see Alison. She had seen her once before, when she was about 11 weeks old, when I stopped by to donate the unexpired leftover meds that I wanted to clear our of my cabinet. She's still just about the only person who thinks Alison looks like me.

Before we left, I talked to Laurie about the problems we were having getting in the Repronex and she told me that she knew they had it in stock at the Walgreens in Saginaw and at Meijer in Saginaw, so if my Walgreens couldn't get it, they could either get it from the other Walgreens or call the script in to Meijer. Problem solved. She also gave me a refresher course on how to take the meds and explained the new ways Gonal-F is packaged and how to administer them. I went in to pick up the meds they had for me today after Alison went down for her nap, and got home just a few minutes before Laurie called with my test results. Everything looked good, but my E2 was a little high, so instead of 4 amps of Gonal-F and 4 of Repronex, I'm to used 5 and 5. Since I now knew that I had the Gonal-F pen, she talked me through how to use it, and I did my first injection after I got off the phone. The Gonal-F pens are subq injections. Since I did all of my injections intramuscularly last time, I'm to go ahead and try them subq until my next bloodwork and ultrasound (which will be on Wednesday), and if necessary, we can switch to IM. I'm going to like doing them subq for the time being at least. It's one less shot in the rear, and one less shot that Kevin has to give me. He still has to do the Repronex, though. He did his first injection tonight and did just find, despite being very nervous.....it's been 3 years since he's had to do this, you know.

I know it sounds strange, but I swear I can feel the meds working almost as soon as we're done giving the injection. I guess we'll see how they're doing on Wednesday.

I really hate dealing with insurance companies. Dealing with infertility and the treatments that go along with it is stressful enough, but having the insurance company in there mucking things up makes it that much worse. Stimming for in vitro is rather time sensitive. You have to start them by cd 3. My doctor's office called in my prescriptions yesterday, cd 1, and, after Kevin received an e-mail stating that everything was in and approved and he called and checked for sure with the pharmacy, I went in to pick everything up after he got home from work. When I got there, the only thing they had for me was my syringes and my antibiotic. I was told that they had to call for approval on just about everything else and it was going to take a few days to get it straightened out. "A few days!!!!" I said, "I don't have a few days. I need to start these meds tomorrow!" Well, I was told, you'll have to talk to the doctor's office. How am I supposed to do that, I said. It's 5:30 and no one is there. One less than helpful pharmacy tech said that perhaps the doctor could just reschedule my cycle. Um, I don't think so. I left everything there and got out of the store before I completely lost it. I came home in tears and told Kevin what happened. He whipped out his insurance card and called the insurance company to find out what the problem was. When our insurance was switched to this company, we consulted the prescription drug pamphlet to make sure that the meds we use for in vitro would be covered and they were all on the list. Since Kevin didn't know for sure what I was supposed to be getting, I had to talk to the insurance lady. She was very nice and was able to manually override what ever it was that was preventing the request from going through and then called the pharmacy to make sure they were able to submit it and get approval. She then proceded to tell me that I should try to give them more notice in the future. Well, gee....why did your comapny send my husband and e-mail stating everything was approved when it wasn't? We could have been working on this all day if it had sent him one saying there was a problem.

So, after Alison was in bed for the night, I went back to the pharmacy (lucky for me it's open 24 hours). Well, here's what we have for you.....we've only got 10 of the Repronex, and we're having a hard time getting it in....hopefully we'll be able to get a drop shipment from the manufacturer on Saturday. Great. I'm supposed to take 4 amps a day, so those 10 amps you have will last me 2 1/2 days. We've only got 3 of the Antagon, the rest will be in by tomorrow. Ok, no problem. I won't need those right away anyway. We don't have any Gonal-F. It will be here tomorrow morning. Ok, as long as it's here tomorrow morning, that's fine. I won't have to start it until after I hear from the doctor's office, so I can pick it up tomorrow afternoon. Everything else was ready.

I would like to say that I am very grateful that we have prescription drug coverage, because I was able to walk out of Walgreens tonight with several thousand dollars worth of drugs that I only had to pay about $135 for. I just wish we didn't have to go through the hassle that we so often do when trying to get prescriptions filled.

For the last 3 1/2 weeks, we've been in the inactive phase of our in vitro process. All I had to do was remember to take my pill every day, stop them on the appointed day and wait for my period to start. Today begins the active phase of our in vitro cycle. In other words, AF is in the house. I called in to the doctor's office today and got things going. They are going to be ordering my meds today, and I'll be starting them on Friday. I'm to go in on Friday morning (cycle day 3) for bloodwork and baseline u/s. That is one of the things I hate the most....having to have a transvaginal ultrasound when I still have my period. But I have learned that it is virtually impossible to go through infertlity treatment and come out with a shred of modesty left. When we went through this three years ago, I'd swear my doctor was more familiar with my intimate parts than my husband was.

My MIL is visiting right now, and I'm really not thrilled with having to be doing this stuff while she's here, but there's nothing I can really do about that at this point. I had really hoped to keep this kind of quiet (meaning I didn't really want her to know we were doing it), but the timing didn't work out that way. She doesn't retain information all that long, so maybe it will just slip her mind and she won't be constantly asking about it.