Lurpron: Day 4. Stims: Day 2

It's a gray overcast Sunday. A cold morning with a bit of a breeze and a chill that makes me think we're in for another 40 days of rain. Ugh. So much for my morning jaunt to the farmer's market with my sunglasses, sandals, and shorts on. It'll be sweats and tennies, I won't fit in with the Los Gatos beautiful people. I never do actually. But who gives a damn?

Today is day 2 of my stims. I've been using up the old UK urofollitropin from IVF#1, some leftover Bravelle from my cycle buddy AP, and tomorrow I start using the Gonal F pens that I got from yet another friend. This cycle certainly has been patched together with a smorgasbord of drugs. I was so fearful in my first cycle of buying any drugs from infertile women selling their leftover stims online. I had to have everything perfect. New drugs that hadn't touched the hands of non-pharmacy staff. Everything had to be "just so". Even my injections were timed to the clock. Morning injections precisely at 9:00AM. Evening injections at 9:00PM. I doubt I was ever 15 minutes off in my first cycle. A lot of planning and precision. A lot of good it did me.

This cycle I notice that I am definitely feeling a bit more relaxed, less stressed, but maybe a bit more pessimistic (or is that realism knocking on my brain?). I'm sure much of this has to do with the fact that we're not in the throes of a move...that my mom has been moved out of house she was living in down in Los Angeles...that said house has basically been renovated and all that needs to be done is slap a "for sale" sign on it by yours truly. (That will be done as soon as our beta is in...no stressing over a house sale right now).

This time I'm also okay if my injections are a half hour or so off. It doesn't even register or raise my blood pressure even the tiniest bit. I bought and borrowed drugs from friends. I wasn't panicked by questions of, "Did you store these correctly the entire time you've had them?" or "Gosh, I wonder if it's okay to mix Follistim, Bravelle, and Gonal F?" I'm almost to the point where I might even do something so drastic as to lower my own dosage of FSH just to see if it would yield better quality eggs. But I did say ALMOST. I'm not there yet. But I AM close to it. What is also interesting is that I haven't yet encountered a night of hotflashes, sweating through my PJs, as I did in the first IVF. So far, this has been quite a different cycle, and I say this fearful of invoking the jinx...so far it has been much better.

Now what is paradoxical about having all of these feelings of "calm" is that I have been running around the house and yard Fung Shui-ing the high hell out of everything. How is it that on one level I can feel so calm and relaxed about this cycle, but on the other hand I've resorted to chopping down tree branches, removing shrubberies, relocating potted trees, rearranging furniture, etcetera, all in the effort to get that damned Qi ("Xi", as my acupuncturist spells it) to come into my house, and into my uterus. It doesn't make a shred of sense unless we agree that my feelings of calm having nothing to do with logic. It's an Alice in Wonderland sort of thing. But much of it is very tongue in cheek.

As I was telling Pamplemousse,

I was having great joy yesterday saying, in a very matter of fact voice: "You know dear. That branch on that tree is just going to have to go. It's blocking the good Qi that's trying to get into our house."

He cut it off and would say to me, "Can you feel it? The Qi? Can you feel it rushing in now?"

We had a great laugh at it and actually got the yard a bit cleaned up. Anything I wanted fixed around the house is now addressed as being "having bad Fung Shui".

"Sweetie, the book says sticky doors are bad Fung Shui. Can you please fix that?"

My friend over at A Velvet Cage said I should put in 8 red fish and a single black into the fountain...Supposedly the black one absorbs the negative energy or something. (Yeah, okay....) Very silly. But we need fish...so it'll be 8 red, and 1 black. And why not? They'll be a conversation piece when people say, "Oh, you have just one black fish..." and I'll have a witty story about Feng Shui ready for them - J will roll his eyes and run for cover.

Off to acupuncture...