It's a Go!!! IVF #2 has officially started!

We started Lupron yesterday.  So far, so good!  I'm not a crazy lady yet!  LOL No hot flashes as of yet. Lupron is meant to shut down your whole cycle similar to that of menopause.  But since they are only giving me a microdose it really shouldn't come with too many side affects of menopause such as hot flashes and mood swings. LOL

For those who are curious as to how I give myself the shots of Lupron this is how it goes:
I have a little vial of the liquid Lupron that has this rubber stopper on the top.  I take a diabetic syringe (which has a very skinny and short needle attached to the end of it) and I draw air back into the syringe until the number 10.  Then I insert it into the rubber stopper on the vial and let the air out into the vial.  Then I turn the vial upside down and draw out the medicine to the 10.  Then I use an alcohol swab to clean the area on my stomach, I pinch up an area of fat on my stomach, and then I stick the needle in and push the plunger. It's not bad at all.  After my last IVF, I'm now a pro!  LOL   The needle itself doesn't hurt when you insert it, but after injecting the medicine it starts to itch at the injection site. They say it's typical.  So it's itchy and red for about 5 minutes afterwards at the injection site and then everything is just fine.

I also started a low dose steroid yesterday which I will continue through my IVF cycle. This is suppose to keep the inflammation down and hopefully help keep me from hyperstimming again (linked to the blog from last time).  I really don't want to have 2 1/2 liters of fluid drained from my abdomen again!  That was terrible.  But this doctor is going to go really slow so that I don't over respond to the meds and make too many eggs. So it will be a longer and slower egg growing process than last time.  It's great to have lots of eggs, but when they go to retrieve them something has to fill up that space of what was once there. So fluid begins to fill the space and sometimes so much that is drains out of your ovaries and into your abdomen pooling around your organs and lungs. Which is what happened last time, and comes with some really scary and life threatening complications such as blood clots, difficulty breathing, etc. I thankfully did not get the blood clots last time!  But...I'm not going to worry about that...because we won't have that happening again this time, RIGHT!  ;-)

I hadn't been sick for over a year and then at the beginning of this month I got a viral throat infection, and now I'm sick AGAIN.  I think I have bronchitis, in fact I just know.  I was around some pecan trees the other day and I know it set my allergies and asthma off.  There is one thing is this world that I am OFF the charts allergic too and that's pecan trees. It's funny because I'm not allergic to pecans themselves, I can eat those just fine, it's the pollen from the trees that gets me. Growing up we had 5 pecan trees. It was horrible.  My poor parents, I feel so sorry for them, they didn't know until way later that the trees were what was causing it, but by the time I was 7 years old,  I had had bronchitis 13 TIMES and pneumonia TWICE. If my Mom hadn't been a nurse I would have been hospitalized at least a few times.   I was a sickly kid. Then they found out what was causing it all and I had to stay on asthma meds for a really long time.  So then I only got bronchitis like once a year.  As an adult it has gotten a lot better, but I have tried my best to keep myself away from pecan trees, that is until we went walking the other day!  LOL  It's a good thing I still have the antibiotics left from a couple weeks back when I was sick, but didn't need them because it was viral and not bacterial infection.  Saves us the $$ and time of having to go to the doctor.

Please cross your fingers and pray this will be the last of me getting sick. I can't be getting sick for any of the other stages of this IVF process or I am sunk!  Which would mean they would have to cancel the cycle because once I start the egg growing meds I can't be taking anything else.

Other than that, we are doing really good!  We found a house to rent. I will post about it tomorrow and put up some pics.  It's super cute.

Well I guess that's about it for me. Thank you all for following our blog and the prayers and support that have come with it!  I have a good feeling that we will be getting to make an announcement super soon!  The doctor says we have a 60% chance of getting pregnant this time. So the odds are definitely in our favor!  And we also have a wonderful group of  friends and family cheering us on!

Take care everyone!

S & G