Practice Makes "Perfect"

Today in our In Vitro journey we did some practicing.  I would like to say that practice makes perfect, but when it comes to producing embryos, we have no control over what will happen.  Sounds promising right?

First we got the low down on the shots.  We learned all about the needles, syringes, powders, and how to dispose of the biohazard waste that comes from them.  We decided Michael would give me all of the shots.  I realized this as I got queasy just looking at the needles.  I remembered that I'm okay with them as long as I don't look at them.  He got lots of practice mixing the powders and injecting the shots into a squishy cube.  I'm glad the engineer of the family will be administering the drugs.  Attention to detail comes in handy here.  The information was a little overwhelming, but I kept telling myself this is a means to an end.  I had a friend recently remind me to take things one day at a time.  I took that and changed it to remind myself to take things one shot at a time.  That helped relieve some of the mental pressure because it is 95% mental.  By the way, I made that statistic up.  It doesn't seem like anyone would be able to actually assign a mental percentage to something like this.

The second part of this week's visit to the IVF clinic was a Mock Embryo Transfer.  Sounds fancy right?  It makes me think back to high school when we did mock trials.  It was nothing like a mock trial by the way.  The nice thing about the clinic is that it's pretty glam.  I guess that's what happens when you don't really have to rely on insurances paying you a premium because unless you hit the insurance jackpot, you're paying mostly out of pocket for these services.  Everything is decorated nicely, and there are flat screen TV's everywhere.  I'm pretty sure I saw Michael eating fancy truffle candy while he enjoyed their finest K-Cup coffee.  While I waited, and even during the procedure, I listened to Katie Couric explain the importance of family dinners.

Anyway, back to the procedure.  It was a quick but uncomfortable one to measure my uterus to determine the best placement for the embryos to have a fighting chance.  This was his practice for when he puts back the embryos in a few weeks.

So as of today everything seems to be in order.  My medicine arrives on Friday, and I get to discontinue the use of birth control pills this weekend.  On Tuesday I will go in for my first blood draw and ultrasound and will begin the stimulation shots that evening.  We don't have any guarantees, but we know no matter what everything will be okay.  I have no idea what the phrase "everything will be okay" will look like, but we've made our peace with that.  I will try to keep you posted along the way.  It helps to be able to write and share what's going on.