No Tumor

Ok, so today I'm normal. Or at least within the range of normal. Who knows. They have no real answer for why the bloodwork would be different two days in a row, they just say that's why they send me to another lab. (In my opinion, I should now be going to a third lab as a tiebreaker. But they're the ones with the medical degree, so their opinion wins!)

So we've been cleared to start our IUI, however, my body isn't cooperating. We are going to be gone for a week around Christmas and that's (approximately) the week that I'd need to be having my baseline bloodwork and ultrasound as well as starting my medication. So we'll wait out the Dec/Jan cycle, one last try on our own, and then we hand ourselves over to the doctors for fixing.

Bloodwork Results

Since there's a rule written somewhere that doctors are forbidden to call me with happy news, I got a somewhat disconcerting phone call today. They wanted to re-do my bloodwork since I'm a year older (and quickly approaching advanced maternal age at my ripe old age of 32 and almost a half!) and now some of it is wonky. The one that is bothering me the most is a marker that something could be up with my pituitary gland. My mom has a hundred and one issues with hers, but as far as we know they're secondary to her tumor removal. But what if they're not? What if I inherited some kind of "your pituitary gland hates you" gene? Honestly, when she mentioned that tiny (so tiny they don't always show up on scans) tumor in my head could be causing this, I lost my ever loving mind. But then, I remembered everything I have learned at Brain Tumor Day! You see, I have driven my mom to Pituitary Patient Education Day at Hopkins for the last 3 years. The presentations are usually similar (see: PowerPoint slide with xray of Homer Simpson & a tiny brain) but I know big words like micro-adenoma. If that's what it is, I take a pill and my hormones go back to normal. Who knew that the tumor option could be the best case scenario?

I have to go back tomorrow to a different lab to get the bloodwork drawn again. No stress, none at all, right? Sigh.

P.S. I don't want a brain tumor. Even if a pill fixes it.

Back to Shady Grove

Last year around this time, we started our Shady Grove journey. Since then, we have been successful on our own and suffered a loss. After my miscarriage, it took about 6 weeks for my body to get back on cycle. Then they told us to wait 3 cycles for my body to normalize. That put us in late summer before we were even back in the game. We decided not to run right back to the doctor since we were successful on our own, but decided that if November came around and we were still waiting, we were going back.

We're back.

Dr. K. gave us the same speech as last year. Pill IUI, injectable IUI, or IVF. Since my insurance covers 2 IUIs and they are less invasive, that's what we are starting with. I know that Clomid is taken by zillions of people, but it scares the bejeezus out of me. (FYI, bejeezus is recognized by my computer as a real world because it's not underlined in red. Amazing.) I have such a bad history with reactions to medicine. I don't want to fill myself up with all these medicines and then have it cause some kind of issue with me later on. I worry sometimes that all the medicines I took when I was younger and in search of pain free living are what got me here to start with, so adding more medicine to the mix, particularly one that messes with my reproductive system, is scary. But parents of people my age have taken it, so I guess if it was causing lots of diseases or cancers, they would have taken it off the market by now.