CD8, & The Baby Shower

I had my CD8 monitoring appointment today.  My follies seem to be doing great!  I have two good follies (1.8 & 1.6), and one more that might catch up (1.3).  Not bad for CD8!  :)  I will be taking Gonal-f again today, and then hopefully, triggering tomorrow!  IUIs on Tuesday and Wednesday.  I am so excited and nervous!  Excited because well, I always am - I am a perpetual optimist, and having two to three good follies just makes me that much more hopeful.  Nervous, because no matter how well my body responds and how many follies I have, none of that will matter if MH's numbers are too low.  Eek!  Please, please cross your fingers for us. 

I am happy that I had a good appointment today, as it might make this afternoon a bit more bearable.  I have to go to THE baby shower today.  "THE" because it is for the one person whose pregnancy makes me very sad - I found out that this woman was pregnant within an hour of starting to miscarry in January.  :(  She was just a little further along than I was at the time.  While I do okay with pregnant people and baby showers in general, her pregnancy is a different story.  It reminds me of what I (almost) had, and lost, and of how far along I would be right now (7 months!) had my body not failed me.  She is a great person, and I am honestly, truly very happy for her - but I can't help but be sad for me at the same time.  As I said, she is the only person whose pregnancy really draws out these emotions in me, and I feel terrible about it.  I'm sure it's because of how/when I found out. Thankfully, she has no idea, as I am very good at hiding my emotions and putting on a good face.  I'm sure that I will be able to do it again today.  It will be hard though. 

Collection Conundrum

I had my day 6 monitoring appointment today, and am happy to say that all seems to be progressing well as far as my follies are concerned!  I have one measuring 1.3 cm on the left, and one at 1.1 cm on the right.  I also have one .9 cm on each side. The Gonal-f seems to be doing the trick!  I stim for 2 more days, then go back in for monitoring again. Hopefully that will be all that is required before I can trigger - I do NOT do well with hormones! They seem to make me über emotional.  I'm aware of it as it is happening though, so that knowledge seems to at least keep me from descending into actual craziness.  :) When I cry, I also laugh about how stupid it is that I am crying! Lol. My husband thinks it is hilarious.

And the best news - I think that my husband and I *may* have finally solved the collection conundrum!  I think and hope.  See, he has thus far had issues producing a, um, representative sample for testing and IUI purposes.  He finishes, but for some reason only produces about a drop of semen - .25 and .5 ml respectively, to be exact.  We used the withdrawal method of TTA for years and so, I am very familiar with his norm and trust me, this is NOT it! My RE's office offered zilch by way of suggestions of ways to get around the issue and so, I did my own research. I discovered and purchased sterile collection condoms.  I figured it might address his "it's too hard to get it in the cup" issue.  The awesome news is, I think it did!! :). He tried it today, and while it still wasn't enormous volume, it was probably at least twice what it was with cup alone. :). Yay!  I am somewhat concerned with the possibility of losing some boys when they are transferred from condom to cup, but hopefully the survivors will still outnumber last month's swimmers, such that it will be worth it. We'll see what his numbers are like when we do our IUI next week.  Fingers crossed!!!!