Reminiscing

I had initially started this blog to lament about the difficulties we've encountered with getting pregnant. We've been trying for a while. It's morphed into me talking about things I love, like gardening, trying to get skinny, but still, at the heart, I want to tell our story about starting a family. In honor of National Infertility Awareness Week, I thought I'd tell you our (in)fertility story. How we've gotten to where we are today.

We've started the process with getting set up with a new RE dept in the new town we moved to two months ago. So excited to add more people to the list entitled "People Who Have Seen My Woohoo." Not really. Dr Boy? He's the only person who's ever... uh.... been down to My Lady Town. He was my first boyfriend. My first, everything. All these docs and nurses are part of quite the elite group.

I got the paperwork in the mail today to call on the first day of my next period. To set up an appt for my HSG (hysterosalpinogogram). Fancy way of saying they shoot dye into your woohoo and see where it goes. To check for blockage. And stuff. My MIL is excited because apparently she got pregnant the month after she had one. 31 years ago. So surely simply having the test will work for us. We'll see.

It occurred to me that I should get my whole TTC story together for the docs so I'm not that person who does the whole:

Ummm yeah, so, like, ummmm..... My husband and I..... well we tried to make a baby and it didn't work. Even doctors tried to help out! Oh, how, you say? Well, they like, gave us pills and stuff. Oh! And one told me I couldn't eat sugar what a bee-atch!!! So can you help? I'llbeatotallyawesomemomIswear.

It shouldn't be this hard to remember everything you've done in the last 28 months, but you know what? It's pretty hard putting together everything you've done in the last 28 months. Especially because it spanned three different doctors, three different fertility plans. Three different insurance agencies. Here's my best recollection of everything. Forgive my brain for any liberties with timing.

January 1st, 2009- CD1, after my last Nuvaring (side note- if I were ever to go on BC ever again which I'm not, I'd use Nuvaring. It was magically easy. Magic. Like little elves telling your ovaries to stand down. Not that I needed elves apparently.) I had been on some form of BCP for 9 years.

May/June 2009-ish- CD a billion. No period since January. Which is too bad because I wanted to conceive on our trip to Tahiti in April so I could name our daughter Moorea. (not really.... i promise) Dr Lady Parts gave me Provera to induce menstruation. It worked. She said to wait to months to let my period do its thing, and if it didn't come back, take another round of provera.

July/August 2009-ish- CD 60ish. No period since provera two months prior. Took second round of provera.

Late September 2009- Got my period on my own! I attribute it to elevation. I was at Lake Tahoe.

March 2010- New insurance, new doctors. Got wanded. Dr Awful said the ovaries looked fine. But apparently was too busy to even note that he wanded me on my chart. Piss-poor book keeping, hate him.

April 2010- Round of provera and chlomid (my notes say "2 pills", not sure dose). No ultrasounds during the cycle. BFN. Bloodwork showed weak indication of ovulation.

June 2010- Second round of provera and chlomid. Didn't go back to see Dr Awful because he NEVER RETURNED my FIVE phone calls. And emails. BFN.

September 2010- New insurance, new doctor. The GP who made me do the restricted sugar thing. Diagnosed with PCOS (clearly seen on transvag ultrasound), low thyroid, and a bit of insulin resistance. Started taking 75mg synthroid daily, worked up to 1500mg metformin daily.

mid-November- 2010- Got period on my OWN for the first time in 23 months! Also started acupuncture a couple days later.

Nov '10 through Feb '11- Ovulated according to the pee sticks, three BFN's. Menstruated every 7 weeks or so. GP refused to do any additional testing saying "insurance wouldn't approve" or "there's no way you'll get pregnant this fast".

late-Feb 2011- Moved. Switched insurance again. New doctors again. Vow to start "trying" again in May.

So there it all is. My sordid history. I hope you've enjoyed learning about my ordeals with difficult doctors, differing insurance plans, and broken ovaries. I'm letting my infertility out of the closet.

Realistic goals

I thought I had set realistic goals. Goals which I stuck to even when I knew they were impossible. So I basically set myself up for failure, which is a pretty craptastic excuse to fail, because duh, no matter how much progress you make you'll still fail so why try?

What sucks is I felt like I did try, at least enough to not GAIN this week. Up until weigh-in this morning, I had lost a pound or so. I put in my veggie garden this week, I ran. Downfall? Probably garlic fries at the baseball game. And a carb-fest excuse of an Easter meal because Dr Boy's dad forgot to make my salmon (I don't eat meat. They were having tri-tip.) So lunch/dinner consisted of 3 pieces of parmesan garlic bread and two helpings of red potatoes. Mmmm. Diet-friendly.

Pretty sure I'm bloated from that crap yesterday. So we'll see what happens next week. In the mean-time, I've revised my goal to something I'm TOTALLY going to hit. 175, just in time to go on a 9-day fast/gas station food extravaganza across the mid-west- a real live storm chasing trip. I want to trim down so I'm as depressed when I get back and have swelled to the size of an F-5.

So there we go. More running, more swimming, less parmesan garlic bread.

By the way, one of these days I'll give 'yall a TTC update. Not much, but I haven't in a while so I will this week. Promise.

Today I weigh: 181.6 lbs
Today my BMI is: 27.2
Weight loss/gained this week: +0.6
Goal: 175 lbs
Goal BMI: 26.2 (according to this calculator)
By When? May 19th (I leave for vacation.)

Texting

Me: I just took a sip of water from a cup but accidentally spilled it down my v neck and it dribbled down to my belly button. You married quite the talented lady.

DB: Sounds hot

Getting my hands dirty

Quite literally.

I am so very excited to get work going on our new vegetable garden! Yesterday my father-in-law came over to help me scope out the land. Basically, to decide how the heck to do this with the craptastic clay soil we have here. There were two options, as we saw it.

1. Rent a rototiller and till the hell out of the soil, adding a bunch of good stuff into it so things will grow.

2. Build a raised bed and fill it up with good stuff so things will grow.

We ended up going with option two, since I found relatively inexpensive soil and boards to build the planter. I had gone back and forth over the raised bed issue for a couple of weeks, annoyed by the amount of soil needed, but encouraged by the better rooting that could take place. We found some boards in the scrap pile at the hardware store today and the decision was made.

Plus a rototiller won't fit in my car.

So now I have an ambitious garden planned... Did I mention it's 8 feet by 8 feet? I'm frickin' crazy. On the menu this summer:

1 zucchini *

1 jalepeno

1 anaheim pepper

2 bell peppers **

2 purple tomatoes of some sort (in a clay pot ~ 2 ft tall) **

2 heirloom beefsteak tomatoes of some sort **

2 cherry tomatoes **

1 sweet basil

1 purple basil

2 cantelope

1 watermelon

Here's where it's going to go:

I'm ridiculous excited about the possibility of making purple bruscetta if the purple tomatoes and purple basil survive.

Ummmmmm holy crap I'm in over my head. And to think, I wanted to start off with a SMALL garden....


* free from a friend who accidentally bought a 4-pack
** free from the horticulture dept at the local university. i live in an awesome college town.

Mah Glutes Are Gahn

Not in an "I have no ass" kind of way, but more in an "I used muscles I'm not used to and now they don't work so I might as well have none" kind of way. I helped a friend put in her summer garden yesterday, and we successfully planted ~20 different plants (of course the true test of success will be in a couple of months). I also ran/walked 3.5 miles in the morning, when I otherwise would have been asleep and dead to the world. Both felt great at the time*, but have left my rump feeling roasted, and my thighs tenderized. Since I wasn't alone for either, they felt more like socializing than exercise.

On a side note, I absolutely LOVE gardening. When we lived in a townhouse (before we moved up here), I planted a topsy turvy and a clay pot with tomatoes. Year one produced mild success.

Look at the size of that thing! Not bad for a porch!


Mmmmmmm delicious!


Topsy-tastic! Some sort of yellow cherry heirloom variety that was delicious.

Note that there are no photos of my 2010 fiasco of a porch garden. A combination of April travel and a newly-diagnosed diabetic cat had that year bound to fail before it even got root. Ha. I'm funny.


But enough about my love of dirt. And things that come out of it. Though I'm a little obsessed with vine-ripened tomatoes. I think I may plant about a billion of them this week. Nomnomnomnom....

OK for real enough now. Moral of the story is that I got off my sorry dead arse and MOVED and ENJOYED it. That's the point. I also did pretty well food-wise. I avoided all things super delicious at a festival in town (including cotton candy, a slushy, bag of chips, and mmmmmm frozen lemonade). I walked a lot. I did have a few drinks at a bar Friday night but ordered rum and diet coke :) Yes that counts a diet-conscious choice. Let me live in denial.

So things are going slowly but surely in the right direction. I feel good, and am starting to go down, down, down. Slowly. But slowly that'll speed up too :) Just like my 5K time.



* Just kidding the run felt like crap. It was hotter than the last time I ran, and humid, and I felt like my entire body was going UP and DOWN with each step I took on the run part of the intervals. Thank god for the awesome coach I was running or I would never have gone as far. It did feel good after though.


Today I weigh: 181.0 lbs
Today my BMI is: 27.1
Weight loss/gained this week: didn't weigh last week
Goal: 165 lbs (wedding weight!!!!)
Goal BMI: 24.7 (according to this calculator)
By When? April 24th (Ha! I'm funny.)

Moving is a cold, hard, beeatch

I knew that it probably wouldn't be good having, for all intents and purposes, an unlimited food budget for 40 days. Combine that with a poorly equipped kitchen, and a new busy schedule complete with 6am start time for work, and you have a recipe for diet disaster. I had high hopes of continuing to lose weight while on per diem, but alas, those high hopes will have to go back on the top shelf from whence they came. I'm up about 3 pounds from the last time I weighed myself before the move, about 6 weeks ago. I'm up 6 pounds from my lowest weigh-in. I knew things weren't going to be good when I put on my favorite pair of jeans last Wednesday, and they were tight. They weren't the most comfy pair to wear to work, but I was bound and determined. I had hoped that maybe the dryer at the temporary apartment was shrinking them, but now that the evidence is in, there's no excuse.

So here we are. Things are gonna change, for real this time. I'm starting to run. Intervals for now, but eventually I'll be less crappy at it. I'm starting to swim. Gotta get the full use out of my pool membership! So I'll see you all in a week, McFatty's. One week. Less pounds. More exercise. Less food. More healthiness.

So there.


Today I weigh: 181.6 lbs
Today my BMI is: 27.2
Weight loss/gained this week: didn't weigh last week
Goal: 165 lbs (wedding weight!!!!)
Goal BMI: 25.5
By When? April 24th (which is clearly, not going to happen)