Remember when I said we’d start tying in March? Well, we decided to go ahead and try this month. Honestly, I’m pretty sure it was because a friend of ours had a baby 2 weeks ago and after seeing her tiny newborn, we thought, “Why not? Let’s go for it.”
So I called the RE on CD 1 and they scheduled the first appt for monitoring on Feb 20 -CD10.
At the appointment, the ultrasound showed that my eggs were still small – I had 1 11mm and 1 10mm egg and a bunch of tiny ones – but my lining was already thick and ready to go. The Dr. actually thought maybe I had already ovulated. She said the lining usually doesn’t get that thick until the eggs are larger. But I know my body and I knew I hadn’t ovulated yet. Nevertheless, she sent me to get blood work to double check. Sure enough, my progesterone was almost nonexistent, my LH was still low but my estrogen was on the rise. No ovulation.
After we got the blood work results the next day, the Dr. scheduled my next ultrasound appt for Friday, Feb 23, but noted that my blood work indicated that I’d be ovulating in the next 2-4 days. I was instructed to keep taking OPKs and if it’s positive, call. If it’s still negative on Friday, then I should bring the trigger shot with me to the appt and she’d likely give it to me that morning for a Saturday afternoon IUI.
As soon as I got the blood work results on Wednesday, I started noticing fertile mucus and realized I’m probably not gonna have time to take the trigger shot. Sure enough, Thursday morning I got a positive on the OPK. The night before, the line had barely shown on the test, so I was a little surprised. I took another OPK an hour or so later to double check and sure enough, it was positive too. I called the clinic and they just turned my Friday ultrasound appt into an insemination appt.
Friday morning, my OPKs were STILL positive, which actually worried me that we were doing the IUI too early. Frozen sperm live for such a short time (just 24 hours!) , the timing is crucial. If my body waited until Saturday afternoon to release the egg, all of the sperm will already have died off by then. In my frantic last-minute research, I read that most women ovulate around 24 hours after the beginning of their LH surge. That reassured me enough to go ahead with the IUI on Friday morning, which was 24 hours after the beginning of my surge.
The IUI itself was fine and uneventful. 21 million motile sperm after the vial was thawed, which was more than I expected. The only crappy thing was, I had no idea which ovary would be releasing the egg. With the cycle that brought us Mabel, because of the monitoring ultrasounds, I knew which side was releasing the egg and therefore laid on that side for 20 min or so right after the IUI to help encourage the sperm to go in that direction. But because I only had the one ultrasound this cycle and my body didn’t have a dominant follicle yet, I had no idea which side was the winner. So I just laid down for 10 min on each side. Fingers crossed the sperm made it to the correct fallopian tube.
And now we wait. This TWW is way different than the one two years ago. I have a packed work schedule, a quick overnight work trip and a toddler to chase around. I’m gonna have to look through my old posts and see what some of my first pregnancy symptoms were. I’m already tired all the time, so fatigue won’t be noticed. I’m also not checking my temps because my sleep is too erratic. Mabel is sleeping through the night about 3-4 nights a week. But those other nights have us up around 4 or so. So I know my temps would be all over the place.
Once again, I’m committed to not taking a pregnancy test until my period is late. I know myself and I could easily fall down the rabbit hole of peeing on lots and lots of sticks and analyzing whether there’s a faint line. So yeah, not gonna do that to myself. So that puts test day on March 10th! Yikes!
Project Tiny Human 