What the H*ll Do You Mean, My Estrogen is Too High?

My estrogen is too high, or rather, running of the risk of getting too high for IVF. Really? Really! After 19 days of stimming, my cycle could be cancelled because I have too much damn estrogen?! Seven days ago, I had too little. Now I have too much. 19 days of stimming. Six or seven monitoring ultrasounds, three gonal F pens, 523451532 blood draws, a vial of shattered Lupron. All this and maybe I don't even get to ovulate the 17 damn eggs I have in me right now. What a waste. I just can't reconcile all of this work and heartache for *nothing*. I've already cried today. Now I'm just pissed. I'm mad at the world. I'm mad at my doctor-unfair or not, I'm not quite sure yet. I'm mad at fertile women. I'm mad at Facebook (because today, of all days, there was another pregnancy announcement), I'm mad at my body. I'm mad that it's cloudy and cold. I'm just mad. And sad. And scared.

So the ultrasound today showed about 17 follicles, ranging in size from 13-19. My lining was a 12. Meg, the nurse practitioner, absolutely ruled out being able to safely do IUI and we talked about converting to IVF. It all seemed good. I was excited. I was relieved because, as you might recall, I considered this cycle cursed only five days ago. Meg did mention that my estrogen cannot be above 5,000 or 6,000 (can't remember which) on the day of retrieval or else we would have to cancel. She gave me some medicine (can't remember the name) to take if my estrogen was too high and it's supposed to bring it down.

Well. I got my blood tests back. My estrogen was a 4070. Pretty damn close to that cut-off and I'm not even ready for the procedure yet :( And that was with decreasing my Gonal dose from 225 to 150 last night. So I went from 1529 to 4070 with a decrease in meds. Crap. So Meg called and told me to decrease my Gonal to 37.5! Please, God, let that tiny dose of Gonal stop my estrogen from rising any higher! I'm scared of OHSS, but I'm also scared of cancelling. All that work! All those eggs! All that time! And for what???!!!

So I'm pretty down. I'm anxious. I'm mad and I'm so gosh darned tired. I remember being super tired towards the end of stimming with my daughter. It's alarming how quickly treatments can turn my life upside-down again. A few months ago, everything was going well. We wanted another baby, but it was not a focus. We were enjoying our time with Alex, our time with each other. Now it's like baby making is all I think about. How my day goes depends on blood work results. Every pregnancy announcement is a slap in the face. And I feel more and more different from my "fertile" friends. This is precisely what I did not want to happen. I didn't think I would have to go through this pain again. I thought having one child would alleviate some of the aching. But the ache is still there, just different. It comes from a different place. A place of wanting to give my child the gift of a sibling, of wanting to make my husband a father again, of wanting to complete our family.

I keep trying to tell myself that things will work out the way they were supposed to. I think of my miscarriage. I cried for days when that happened. I mean, cried. I have never cried like that. It was all I could do, I could barely do anything else. God, what a low point. But if I didn't have that miscarriage, I would never have had Alexandra. Things worked out for a reason. I hope things work out again, for a reason. But I'm afraid they won't. I'm just afraid.

Please God, give me a chance this cycle. And please, let us have one more healthy baby.