I love my old boss!

I went to visit my old boss today. When I had my really awful review on Monday, I sent her an email. I had been meaning to do this. She left our floor a year ago in January, to take a new position that was opening up in Admissions. I miss her terribly. We became instant co-worker friends, and I loved popping in her office whenever I had a minute to chat. Since she has been gone, I've really missed her, and I just wanted to tell her that. In the email response, she told me to stop by sometime, so I went today to see if she was in. She was, and we talked for almost two hours! I didn't realize I was there that long until I got in my car and saw what time it was. She was wonderful. She reassured me that I was a great nurse, and not to worry about what the other nurses thought, as long as I felt I was giving my patients quality care. She said that yes, it does hurt, when it feels like your co-workers don't like you, but again, not to worry. Just let them do their thing, and go about my day doing mine. She also said that she would put in an excellent word for me for any interviews I have coming up.

I have applied to transfer to 6 different floors so far this week. I just feel it's time to move on. I love my patient population. I will miss them. I will miss the people I do like (and feel they like me) on my floor, as well. My job currently is just so draining. Before I started working on my floor, my husband and I went out every weekend. Sometimes Friday and Saturday. We had a great time dancing and hanging out with friends. When I started at the hospital, I slowly stopped going out, to where I would go out about once every 3-6 months, and I never felt like dancing anymore. When I would come home from work, I wouldn't want to cook, clean, any of the house chores. On my days off, I would just lay around and do nothing. I was always so tired! Since taking my month off for IVF, I'm happy again. We went out Saturday night and I had a blast! I actually enjoyed being at work this week (besides the evaluation from my boss.) I have really enjoyed my days off this week, as well. This all leads me to conclude that my job is draining. I don't want to live like this the rest of my life. There has to be a happy medium somewhere in the hospital. So, I'm looking. We'll see what turns up.

Follow-up with my doctor...

I had my follow-up with my Reproductive Endocrinologist(RE) yesterday. He said what he would do differently next time, all things I expected he would say: start out on the highest dose of follistim(hormone to make the eggs grow) and do ICSI(insert one sperm into each egg to make sure they fertilize) on all the eggs, and hope for frozen embryos (so we would have them for subsequent cycles.) He said in the thousands of cycles he's done, I'm the first to have an infection after transfer. Why me? Seriously! So, things changed a little for my start date for the next cycle. I have to take this cycle off (the nurse I talked to Friday was "confused.") and then with my next period I'll start BCP. 3 weeks of that, then we'll start Lupron (to "shut off" my ovaries,) then stimms (follistim, repronex,etc) mid May. So, pushed back a month, I guess. It's ok. All in due time. I have an acupunture appt today, and my weekly massage on Friday, so I'm still enjoying pampering myself! I know all of this will cost enough to write off on taxes next year because of the second cycle, so I might as well make the most of it!

As for my hubby going home in April, we talked about it for awhile last night. He doesn't want to go home until he knows for sure I am pregnant. He's thinking August or September now. That's fine with me. I just know we have to get this over with eventually. I'm also worried about us having enough money during this time. He's starting to work more again, but he's not working as much as he used to, in general. I'm glad I have a good-paying job to support us when he's laid off. And, part of me just wants him to go home so he can come back and we can start our permanent lives together. Everything feels so temporary right now.

*Sigh* Such a bad day!

Today was my first day back to work after our first try at IVF. I started out the day very excited; my peroid started! So, I was to call the IVF nurse and let her know so I could start on BCP. Well, one of the nurses called me back an hour later (not the one I had talked to Friday who told me this) and wanted to know why I was calling her to tell her my period started. I told her about what the other nurse said on Friday, and she said that I must have misunderstood the other nurse. There was no way I could start this early. Basically, she said I have to take a month "off" and have a natural cycle before I start BCP again to let everything heal. I understand that, and am ok with that. I don't want to damange my goods any more than they already are! But, because of the wait, I won't start BCP until April, so I won't be able to do an IVF cycle in April. If I don't do it in April, I would have to wait until June! THAT pissed me off! I got really mad at this and raised my voice. We ended the conversation with I need to talk to my doctor on Wednesday, and that maybe if we do a different protocol and make my period start sooner, I can be in the April group...blah, blah, blah. I guess I have officially become the squeaky wheel.

The other part of my day makes me cry. My work. I had my yearly evaluation today. I know I have not been the best nurse I could be this past year. I know you are not supposed to bring your personal life to work. I just have too many things going on for me to keep them inside and at home all the time, and it reflects in my work. I know it does. Anyway, my boss has us do peer evaluations, and she takes those into account for her evaluation. Some of the things the other nurses said really hurt. They were just being mean. I can't wait to be a stay-at-home mom. Then I won't have to work beside people like them on a daily basis. And my boss. She has not an ounce of compassion in her. I have to find a new job. I'm just worried about switching during IVF. I'm going to look tomorrow for openings. The things I don't like about my job outweigh the things I do like about my job. Although, I love the patient population I work with. I will miss them badly if I leave. And, most of the nurses' aides, and a couple of the nurses. I just don't know what to do...

It's negative. Now what?

Yesterday was the anti-climax of our first attempt at IVF which spanned three months and ended with a big letdown. I cried for about half an hour, called my husband, cried some more, then went out for lunch with a friend who is also having infertility issues. She has been trying to get pregnant for about as long as my husband and I have been together (3 years or so.) Her and her husband are saving up for their first IVF cycle and trying to find a job with good insurance.

I had already made plans with my family to go to the girls' state basketball final last night, so I knew I had to keep composed once I left my house. My mom and dad are the only family members who know what I'm going through, and 10 family members went to the game last night. Mom asked me on the phone (while we were both driving to my grandmother's to meet) if I was pregnant or not. I told her no, and she said "I'm sorry." That was the end of the conversation. All the women in my family (who have tried) have no issue with getting pregnant. I am an oddity, and my mom doesn't know how to handle this. She supports me, but sometimes just doesn't know what to say. This was one of those times.

It's ok. I have my friends. I have great friends. I know all of them care about me. Some of them just don't know how to support me during this time. Some of them are very good at listening, and asking the right questions without making the wrong comments. Others are just "there for me," and I understand that. I'll take all the support I can get. I've also come to find great support from my "on-line friends." During my failed IVF attempt, I found two infertility message boards that I have leaned on. www.ivf-infertility.com and forums.fertilitycommunity.com

Everyone I've talked to since yesterday keeps telling me to grieve this loss. I understand this. I feel I am grieving, slowly. I cried when driving back to my home this morning (the game was two hours away and I stayed at my grandmother's last night.) I cried for about 45 minutes. When I got home and saw my husband (he was at work yesterday when I got the call, and I had left for the game before he got home), I broke down crying, and we held each other and I cried for a good 10 minutes or so. I feel I will properly grieve, but we also have to move on. Not being pregnant this time means we have even less time to get pregnant before he goes home for however long he needs to be there.

Now what? Well, I talked to the IVF nurse yesterday and told her we wanted to try again. She said she would pass this onto my doctor, and the team would talk about me in rounds on Tuesday. I have a follow-up with my doctor on Wednesday to discuss what went wrong, and what we will do different with the 2nd cycle. I have already made my list of concerns that I will hopefully have the courage to discuss with him. I am going to be the squeaky wheel this time. So many things went wrong with this last cycle. I want to make sure they don't happen again without a fight.

The IVF nurse told me that "very tentatively" I will start injections again mid-April, and egg retrieval will be around the end of April. I'm excited to move on. I'm not excited, however, to tell my boss. I am a nurse on a very busy unit in my hospital. Nurses who work on "the floor" have to be able to "lift, push, or pull 40 pounds or more." While doing IVF, I was on a 15 pound weight restriction, doctor's orders. Therefore, I couldn't work. It was not fun working out the details of getting time off for this last cycle, and my boss had known since November 2009 that I would need 3-4 weeks off from work. The schedule for April has already come out, and now I have to tell her I need another 3-4 weeks off to try again. I'll let you all know how that goes...

How we got to this point...

So, this is my first attempt at a blog of any sort, and this is my first entry. I think I will just start writing, and explain things later as needed. This is mostly for me, to give me someplace to write down my thoughts. I love my friends, but only a few of them understand one of my issues, and even fewer understand the other. I just need to talk without feeling like the person listening doesn't understand.

In that case, how we got to where we are...
My husband and I met salsa dancing September of 2006. We started dating shortly after that. We got married February 14th, 2008 at the court house with a few friends as witnesses. He thought it would be romantic to get married on Valentine's Day. (He decided this the Sunday before said date. I had THREE DAYS to plan the wedding, although small as it was.) We then had a huge wedding, with over 600 people invited (somewhere between 200-300 actually came), on August 23rd, 2008. It was the greatest, yet most stressful, time of my life up until that point.

Now, here comes the first of my "double whammys:" trying to conceive. I was ready to have children right away. Heck! I tried getting him to have children before we even got married! I always had a feeling I was going to have a hard time getting pregnant. I don't know why, call it women's intuition. So much so, that I tried to convince my OB-GYN to run some tests on me back in 2004, even though I wasn't in a serious relationship. She refused, and said "We'll worry about it when you're married and can't get pregnant on your own after one year." I wish she would have listened to me...

So, December 2008 we "officially started trying" to get pregnant. Truth be told, we hadn't been using any birth control since July of 2007, but December was when we kept track of when I was ovulating, etc. My husband was getting quite anxious when I wasn't pregnant after the first few months; he was under the belief that I would get pregnant the first month of "trying." When I still wasn't pregnant 3 months later, he wanted me to go to the doctor to see why. I waited a few more months before calling to make an appointment, and my doctor finally referred me to the reproductive endocrinology clinic in May of 2009. I didn't actually go to an appointment until August 2009 for various reasons.

The reproductive endocrinologist (RE) didn't seem too concerned, there wasn't anything in my family history that lead her to believe I should have problems, but she said she would run a few tests anyway. Well, to her surprise (and the whole departments') I have some crazy rare birth defect! I am only the THIRD case they have ever seen at my hospital (which is one of the top hospitals in the nation.) My right ovary is half the size of my left ovary, and it is nowhere near my fallopian tube, although my fallopian tube is surprisingly open. My uterus is also heart-shaped and retroverted, to add to the fun. My RE did exploratory surgery in September 2009 to see if they could get my fallopian tube closer to my ovary. During the surgery they found mild endometriosis, which was burned and removed.

Around that same time, my husband got tested, as well. At first they thought he was fine, but then a varicocele was found. After several sperm analysis, they found that his little guys had a hard time swimming, and sometimes there weren't enough of them. Eventually, he will have to have surgery to fix the varicocele, otherwise his numbers will continue to get lower and lower.

The doctor said we would be a great candidate for IVF (invitro fertilization,) but she wanted to try 3 cycles of IUI (intra-uterine insemination) first. So, we endured the three unsuccessful attempts at IUI, and the ups and downs of thinking we were pregnant every time, before moving on to the big guns, IVF. Luckily, I have a job with good insurance, and they will pay for up to $25,000 lifetime for "infertility issues."

We started our first IVF attempt in January 2010. (I will be brief with this month or so of ups and downs, because I will be more informative later with what IVF is like during our second cycle.) The highlights are: at one point I was taking 3 shots a day, with blood work and ultrasounds every other day. I didn't respond to the medicine as expected, and had only 9 follicles (because of my age, I should of had 20-30.) Egg retrieval was February 19th, and they only got 6 eggs. 5 of those eggs were mature, and only one fertlized when placed with my husband's sperm. So, on February 22nd, they placed one 3-day-old embryo into my uterus and sent me home to wait until my pregnancy test on March 5th. I started having fevers after the embryo was placed in my uterus, and they finally diagnosed me with an uterine infection 4 days later. I started on antibiotics for 10 days, and felt no hope for the baby growing inside of me. Yesterday, I went in for blood work to confirm pregnancy. It was negative.

Now, onto the second of my double whammys. My husband is from Honduras. He came to the States in 2001, after a hurricaine destroyed his family farm, and left the country devestated. We grew to love each other, despite our differences. As he grew to trust me, he told me more about his life, and eventually his status in the United States. To put it simply; he doesn't have papers. I know many people have strong opinions on this subject. Trust me; I did, too, until I fell in love with an immigrant. I made an appintment to talk to a lawyer, to see if there was any way to get (my then boyfriend) "papers." There were too many loop-holes that he didn't fit into, blah, blah blah. We learned there was nothing "easy" we could do. The lawyer left it at "come see me when/if you get married."

After getting married, we joyfully went back to the lawyer to tell him the good news. We started the process of getting my husband more permanent status and the ability to go back to Honduras and visit his family (especially his ailing mother.) We found out that because of the way my husband entered the country, he would have to go back to his home country to await a greencard. Worst case scenario, he will be there for 10 years. I can freely come and go to Honduras to visit him during that time, he just cannot re-enter the United States until they say so. The average for Honduras right now is 8-18 months, so we're hoping he's not there longer than that. We want to get going on things. I am 30 and he is 31. We didn't get married until we were 29 and 30; we feel like we're just starting our lives. But, it is time for him to go home. Work is getting scarce. We can survive on my salary alone (and have at different times during our two years of marriage,) but he owns and runs a farm in Honduras. He has to have money to keep up the farm and pay the workers. He is also the sole income of his mother, who is legally blind and does not work.

This is where our double whammys merge: Our goal is for me to be pregnant before my husband goes home to "do his time." He plans to go home THIS June, in less than 4 months! We are ready to start a family, and if most of our time spent apart is while I'm pregnant, then the time will go faster for me, and he will come home to a son/daughter. I know many people have opinions about this, too. This is our choice, this is what we feel is right for us.

That's what I'm dealing with. Nothing much...