March 9th and March 14th – roughly – will be very important dates
DW is getting her day 0 blood test and ultrasound today. I was reviewing the instruction sheet the nurse had given us. By my calculation retrieval will be done on March 9th and implantation will be on March 15th. Give or take a day. Wow! In a month, at the end of March we will know if we’ve got a BFP or BFN. And if all goes well Dec 06 should be a very special time for our family.
4 Lady Bugs
Interrupted Wanderlust this one is for you.
Over the past month my wife has seen 4 lady bugs. Odd to see them at this time of year in Canada. We are in the middle of winter.
She pulled me up stairs yesterday to show me something. That something was a lady bug in the bath tub. I offered to kill it. yeah, I sometimes make jokes at bad times. She declined my offer.
If you go through some of the post from Interrupted Wanderlust before she got her BFP you will see the importance of the lady bugs.
A Doomed Society
This is some social commentary.
In Western Worlds the course for many is to go to school until they are 23, work until they are 30, then try to have kids. People are getting married later now. And having kids even later.
Many of use in our 30s were brought into the world by parents in their early 20s. My mom was 23 and my dad 25.
It is so ironic now that we have to spend so much effort getting our life on track before we think about children. A degree is standard now for most. And most women want to get a couple of years of work under their belt before they consider children. And of course, so do men.
So we have more and more women and men trying to conceive in their 30’s. Many of them do. Only 1 in 8 couple will be infertile. Although hanging around these blogs it seems everyone is that way.
Fewer and fewer couples have more than 2 children. In Canada we have 1.7 children per woman in 1992. I would think the US is similar.
http://atlas-dev.ccrs.nrcan.gc.ca/site/english/maps/peopleandsociety/family/family1996/childrenathome/1
If we didn’t have immigrants Canada’s population would shrink generation in and generation out. And we would be in a whole world of trouble.
And many of us don’t get not being able to have children until it happens to us. We are told by sex education workers that is only takes one sperm and one egg. Although technically true, that one sperm needs to be one of 20 Million+. A man with just one sperm per go has essentially a zero chance of getting a woman pregnant. We spend our earlier years trying not to get pregnant or catch a STD. I wonder if this could be a pick-up line in a bar of women looking for a good time but not a baby or husband: “Hi, I have a low sperm count!”? Is that funny? Maybe not, my wife will likely groan when she reads this.
Enough. Back to work.
Not so shallow
We are getting to be pros at the injections. The first one I did not go that deep. I think that was a bad thing. It looked like a bad bug bite about an hour after. The subsequent 2 I went much deeper. And no bug bite syndrome on either one.
Don’t Hurt Me
Last night was a new first in my relationship with my wife. I injected her with meds!
At 9:30 PM she got out her drug paraphernalia: syringes, alcohol swabs, instructions and the drug superfact. She read the instructions, opened the bottle, swabbed everything that needed to be swabbed, and filled the needle with 0.25 ML of drugs.
The whole time her hands are shaking and it only gets worse as she goes through the steps and gets closer to the needle being plunged in. I had told her that it was clearly her choice who was going to do the injecting. The shaking is getting worse and she is about ready to inject herself. I’m thinking that this is not going to work, at least not today. The last thing the body wants is a shaky needle being pushed in slowly. So I offered to do it, and she took me up on the offer with the condition of "don't hurt me." I replyed "It is going to hurt."
In it went, a couple of ‘ouches’, a couple of ‘not so fast’ (it hurts when the drug goes in) and then we were done. She reported some stinging sensations. An hour after the area looked like a real bad mosquito bite. By morning the redness and swelling had gone. The only evidence was a little pin prick mark.
Ok – here’s the wild bit. Last night I dreamed she wanted someone else to do the injecting. That someone else was Jack, the doctor off of Lost the TV show. And boy oh boy was I pissed. I woke up mad at her.
Until you’ve had the opportunity to inject your spouse with drugs you might not get this. It seemed to bring us closer, at least from my perspective. Maybe she saw me as the bastard bringing her all of this pain. I don’t know. But I do know the bond is just that little bit stronger today.
A little help
Both my wife and I are gainfully employed and can afford this IVF and ICSI. Of course it will put a strain on our finances, but nothing we cannot manage.
There is a project that we are working on that is starting to gain steam. It would help our, especially my, state of mind it had more steam and started to roar.
It is a B&B guide called
http://www.pillowsandpancakes.com - if you are looking to visit a B&B it would really help us if you tried our site first. Or could possibly plug it on your blogs or tell your friends about it. TIA.
Thanks,
Paul
