The Cellar - The Beauty of Two Pink Lines

The following involves a good deal on the topic of menstruation, so guys, if you're grossed out you might want to talk amongst yourselves about lawnmowers for awhile. :)

I have an uncooperative body. I have a long history with various hormone regulation drugs, beginning at the age of 15. Thus it was no surprise that, when my husband and I started trying to have kids a year and a half ago, there were difficulties. Normally, you have to try for a year before a fertility doctor will even speak to you, but that's assuming that your body is at least functioning normally on a superficial level. Since mine wasn't even doing that (after going off my hormone regulation drugs--which share a lot of properties with birth control pills--we waited four months and I did not manage to have any kind of cycle on my own,) they kindly let me see the fertility specialist before the standard one-year requirement.

I started Clomid a little over a year ago, at varying dosages each month. I started having a cycle again on the medication, but this was not necessarily an indication that I was actually ovulating, as my monthly blood tests proved. A normal woman would have blood drawn on the 21st day of her cycle, to determine if she'd ovulated around Day 14 as is typical. Except then they figured out that my cycles were about 5 days longer than a "normal" cycle, so I had to have two blood tests each month--one on the normal day, and another 5 days later, in case my cycle was longer because I was ovulating later than normal. All of them were negative anyway.

This was in addition to the dozen or so other blood tests I had to go through to make sure, for example, that my progesterone and estrogen levels were normal at a variety of times throughout the month, and my sodium levels were good, and my testosterone levels were right, and my thyroid was okay... I am on a first-name basis with all of the medical assistants in my doctor's office. And here's the really funny part: I have terrible veins. Apparently they're tiny, and they like to "roll". A normal person's inner elbow has at least one distinct blue line running down it--not so on mine. Whenever I have my blood taken, they have to stick me with the needle at least twice. There's a little-known law (or maybe it's just policy, I don't know, but I've seen it at more places than just my gynecologist's office) that says that if a nurse fails to find a vein after the second try, she must pass the task off to a new person. I once had my blood taken by a doctor because they ran out of medical assistants to use on me.

Then there were all the other more invasive tests, to verify that my ovaries weren't covered in cysts, and my fallopian tubes weren't blocked... Even though the former test came back negative, my doctor said she still had a hunch that I might have cysts, they just might be so small as to not show up on the sonogram. So in addition to the Clomid, she put me on glucophage, which is a medicine for diabetics that makes you more sensitive to insulin. For some reason, and no one really knows why, glucophage also happens to cause ovarian cysts to shrink. Because of this I ended up on several diabetes mailing lists, and I get junk mail about it all the time.

After the first month on glucophage, still no ovulation. But the second month, I did! But the third month, negative again. They bumped my Clomid up to the maximum they felt comfortable given my body size, but I still was only ovulating every other month. And, of course, not getting pregnant on any of them.

Around June, I went back through all of my receipts and determined that, through office visit and prescription copays alone, we had already spent more than $1,000 trying to get me pregnant. Which was, of course, nothing compared to the money we'd spend on more intensive treatments like in vitro if it came to that. (If you want to know where the saddest and most pathetic people on the internet are, visit an infertility messageboard sometime. Some of these women have been trying for more than 10 years because they just can't afford the stronger treatments.) And of course that had a whole slew of other complications besides the money, not the least of which being multiple births.

Supposedly, Clomid only raises your chances of twins by 10%, and your chances of higher-order multiples are not increased at all. Which is all well and good from a statistics standpoint, but anecdotally, my doctor said she had actually had two patients in her office get pregnant with triplets on 50mg of Clomid, the lowest dosage. (At my peak, I was on 150mg.) The real nightmare was both of them had smallish frames like me, and it was recommended to both women that they "reduce," which is a polite way of saying abort the weakest triplet. One of them did, and had healthy twins. The other said she couldn't bear to--and lost all three of them. Not really a decision I wanted to have to make.

And now, fingers crossed, I won't have to.

I was expecting my period yesterday, and this morning I took a pregnancy test. Two pink lines have never been so exciting!

I am telling the whole internet this, ironically, because I can't tell my family and friends yet. I am still at a very high risk for miscarriage, and I simply couldn't bring myself to call everyone back in a few weeks and say "Nevermind." We're waiting at least until after the first trimester before we share the happy news.

Of course I did get to share the news with everyone at the doctor's office. When I called the nurse to let her know that she didn't need to call in another month's worth of Clomid for me, she literally yelled out into the lab, "Hey, y'all! 'Clodfobble' had a positive test!" And there was cheering in the background. :) I go in tomorrow to begin a whole new slew of blood tests, and at 8 weeks I will have another internal ultrasound, at which point they will in theory be able to tell me how many embryos there are. Hopefully it's no more than two. But I admit I've always wanted twins. :biggrin: