Baseline Went Well + IF On TV Rant

First off, thank you all so much for your continued support! It really helps me to stay positive and calm during this whole IVF thing.

I can say that St. Louis is at least 20 degrees warmer than Eastern Iowa and I miss the warmer temperatures, no snow, and general spring-iness compared to my current location of dreary winterville.

The baseline appointment went well. I think I got my first Antral Follicle Count, done by the actual RE which was super-cool, and the total count was around 22 or 24. He couldn't tell if it was 11 or 13 on the right ovary  and at least 11 on the left ovary. The lining was "paper thin" so he was very happy with that. I'm having my E2 and LH drawn at lunchtime today (no time before work to do it) and they should have the results before close of business.

Also, with such a "high" AFC, he is lowering my Follistim dosage from 150 IU at 7am and 150 IU at 7pm to 150 IU at 7am and only 75 IU at 7pm. He said he doesn't want to "blow me out of the water" and that we can always increase the dosages next Monday if the ultrasound shows that its necessary. Honestly, when I did Femara/Clomid and Repronex over 8 days for our IUI cycles, I always had a front-runner by that 8th day of what I called "mini stims". I figure with all they've done to set me up for this stimming period, any combination of Follistim and Repronex (to be started 2 days after the Follistim) should show pretty good growth by Monday by which I'll have stimmed 4.5 days already.

So as long as my E2 and LH levels look good today, we'll continue as normal. The drive down (4 hrs 45 min) and the drive back (5 hours) weren't too bad. DH and I are getting along pretty well yet. We tend to bicker when we spend too much time together, so I'll be trying really hard to carefully pick only the necessary battles so as to keep the peace.

As for my rant, if you watch How I Met Your Mother, and you didn't watch last night's episode, then don't read any further as there are plenty of spoilers. But I want to get out how DH and I felt about the episode:

Cheers: To CBS and the HIMYM writers for bringing infertility to Prime Time television. Marshall and Lily have been trying to have a baby for several months and no luck other than a false positive, so they went to Lily's OB/GYN who recommended they go to a Reproductive Endocrinologist. I was thrilled that they actually said on the air what an RE is and the process, albeit quite a shortcut, to seeing one. There were laughs abound as the RE was Barney's "doppelganger". Once that got straightened out, Lily was tested and when she got the results, seemingly within a day or so, she was told she is "extremely fertile", leading Marshall to suspect that he is in fact the problem. At this point, DH and I were cheering for Marshall to have sperm issues like DH. He was actually getting really excited that this might be shown on TV. So the RE tells Marshall to "give a sample" (this made us laugh), so Marshall goes to the special room with the nudie magazines, etc. There was a bit with images of other men popping up in the room saying they'd been in there and done the same thing just minutes prior. He couldn't do it so he went home to produce the sample (within an hour as the clinic was closing), where his parents had arrived for a surprise visit. We laughed, and actually continued to cheer for Marshall's possible male-factor diagnosis. It was nice to see the scene where Marshall told his parents that they were having problems getting pregnant and how his folks said they love them and if they want to be parents then great, and if they need to adopt or use donor-anything, then it didn't matter to them. We appreciated that scene because we have had more than one conversation with both sets of parents about our issues and they've both been supportive.

Here is where I Jeer:

Jeers: to CBS and HIMYM writers for taking the easy route and not following through. We thought it unreasonable to make people think that if you want to see an RE you'll get in immediately if you're under 35 and have been trying for 6 months. They didn't show how you'll see a nurse first and they'll have all the tests run and tons of paperwork filled out. Whatever. Anyways Marshall got his semen analysis results pretty quickly and was told his sperm are fine, blah blah blah. We did get faked out at first with Barney disguising himself as the RE and telling Marshall he'll likely never father children. Yeah. We cheered for that diagnosis. Are we sick people? So Marshall and the gang, sans Lily, go to the bar and celebrate with champagne for his fertility. The entire episode had numbers in each scene, starting at 50 and going down. The last scene, the numbers began to count down to "1", where Marshall and Lily met up outside the bar and he shared his great news of how fertile he is. She in turn told him his dad had a heart attack and had passed away.

We were both so sad to see that Marshall's dad died as he was Marshall's best friend, other than Lily. So that's going to be a sad story line for awhile. However we felt so gypped as an infertile couple, hoping that the world would get a true glimpse as to what an infertile goes through but with hopefully a funny spin on it. Just so we could feel more connected to a show that we already love, I suppose. We couldn't get over how they pulled the rug out from everyone like that. We woke up this morning saying we were still upset about the whole thing.

Perhaps we need to stop watching TV. We use it as an escape from all of "this". I guess we'll have to deal. But still. CBS could have done even better in my opinion. When the episode was over, I said, "That's it! I'm blogging about this tomorrow!".  And I did. It feels better to get it all out.

Over a TV sit-com. But it feels better.