Last Day of the Year

I just wrote a post but had to delete it! It was titled Year in Review and it was entirely too negative and I really need to work on that. Hmm...maybe that should be my new year's resolution. It would be a good one to say the least.

So the year wasn't great but hey no one died and we still have our jobs so what more can you really ask for? My skin cancer is gone as far as we know and besides Chris having cat scratch fever we are both pretty healthy for once. Well, he is always healthy and I am doing much better than I have in a long time. We are kicking ass at the gym each night and I rarely ever have to reach for the meds to control my pain issues. Considering its the middle of winter that is a major step in the right direction for me.

Next year will be the last year we try to have a child so knowing the end is near is a good thing. I am chugging along on my plan and will have to admit I am not loving it. I feel like shit constantly and I don't love what I am eating. The fact that I don't like the taste of whole wheat products is really screwing me over here. I have tried all sorts of breads, even ones from trader joe's and at the end of the day my love of white bread is ruining me:) Don't worry, I haven't broken down and had any! I am loosing weight and I will have to say I look pretty fantastic sans clothing so at least I have something to show for my sacrifices.

I really, really need to find a new job although I know in this economy that chances of that happening aren't super high. My supervisor has been driving me absolutely fucking batty and although I can usually keep work at work it has been increasingly making me more agitated all of the time. I do have two apps in for state jobs in the same department so hopefully I will hear something back on them soon.

That's it! Six and a half more hours of work and then a three day weekend!

You ruined Christmas!

This is what I have been hearing at work all week, so you know what? I am done with work for the rest of the week. I would love to say you people have known about Christmas for 363 days, this isn't something new that just popped up. It's no ones fault but your own that you didn't plan to buy your kids Christmas presents and just assumed someone else would do it for you!

Other than that everything seems to be going well. I have lost 5 pounds since I started limited sugar and only eating good carbs! This also included zero exercise as my ankle is just starting to feel better so I was really shocked I lost so much.

Speaking of loosing weight, upping my calories to 2300 a day has not been working. I just haven't figured out a way to eat 500-700 more healthy calories a day and I really need to figure it out soon. Loosing a few more pounds, maybe 5 more, would be good but any more than that and all of my precious curves will go right out the window. Hell I am a 36A as it is, I can't afford to go much smaller. I know what you may be thinking, "is she really that worried about her boobs" and the answer is yes I totally am. I like not being so flat that I look like a boy.

In reproductive news, my RE emailed me and told me I need to completely cut out the every other day red wine consumption as it may mask a glucose issue. I googled red wine and blood sugar as I have never heard this and red wine in fact does lower your blood sugar. Interesting? yes. Think its my problem? No. I have had the fasting glucose test done tons of times in the past few years and it has always come back fine and the red wine is a new thing for me. So as of today the IVF coordinator told me I have to cut out all alcohol, not just red wine and they are going to redo the fasting test in two weeks. I have a feeling that even after that they are going to want me to stay off alcohol until I get pregnant which should be entertaining as I haven't had a successful pregnancy in four years . I may be limiting this experiment to six months...if my periods return to normal and it seems like we have forward movement on the pregnancy front I will continue on, if not then I am done. Oh, and St. Patty's Day doesn't count because I am Irish and it would be a crime for me to not drink on St. Patty's Day.

12/18/2009

No catchy post title for today, just some quick updates.

I met with the NP yesterday at my clinic for my nutritional intake. I thought they said I was meeting with a nutritionist but I must have heard them incorrectly. Anyway, we found out through this cool breathing machine that my body burns 2040 calories a day resting. Wow! I would have though it would have been around 1200 calories a day. Go kick ass metabolism. My BMI is on the high side of normal and my body fat is low which is interesting...guess you can't always use BMI as the be all, end all!

My basic nutrition plan is to keep sugars low, eat good carbs only, eat 600 more calories a day, and keep the carb/fat/protein ratio at 40/30/30. I am switching from using myfitnesspal.com to fitday.com as it is easier to track ratios on fitday. (I will have to say though that myfitnesspal.com is still my favorite in case you are looking for a site to help you along with weight loss) I am so used to eating around 1500 calories a day, I have no idea how I am going to healthily bump it up and it amazes me that on paper at least I should be able to eat more and stay the same weight. We will see how this goes in the upcoming weeks. One quick side note is that she most certainly does not want me restricting carbs as much as my mentor did since I am on the low side of everything as it is.

I did have a minor freak out at the office when I realized I was supposed to have a packet of paperwork filled out for the nutritional intake....and you guess it, the IVF coordinators never sent it to me. I basically started tearing up and shaking a bit because I just can't take them. How can you not get something as simple as sending out a packet correct? Not having it wasn't a huge deal although I didn't know why I was waiting in the lobby for so long and I was supposed to bring along a snack since I had been fasting for 16 hours. There was also an extra charge to use the machine and all of this was explained in the packet. So I sat there for another hour and a half with nothing to eat because I wasn't told and if you know me...if I am starving you can bet I am a bit bitchy. Now I should not be shocked as I never even got IVF instructions from them last time but I was. Ugh. I need to realize that everything they do will be wrong and to just roll with it. I called the satellite office this morning and joked with them about how I just can't take being at the main office. They laughed and said they loved me and that its just the coordinators, not me.

After the NP had me lay all of my issues with the coordinators out on the table I actually had an enjoyable visit. I am going to follow her and my mentor's advice and try this for a few months to see if I start getting my period again. If I don't well then this at least should make my ovarian environment the best it can possibly be. IVF plus arthritis plus winter is a bad combo anyway so we most likely would have waited until spring to try again anyway so it all works out. I go back for a follow up in three weeks where I get to use the metabolism machine again to see if my resting calorie intake per day goes up or down. If you follow the diet but gain no lean mass it should go down, but if you gain a lot of lean mass it may actually go up.

I also emailed my RE this morning and asked him about putting me on metaformin to see if it will help with my egg quality the next time we do IVF. We will see what he says about that . My mentor told me to always just email him directly with any questions...so we will see if he was alright with that. I just saw him two weeks ago and don't want to waste more time and money just to ask one question.

Mentor Update

First off let me just say my mentor seems like a really great person. I was told that neither one of these patients he hooked me up with ever had success, but the one I met with already had a child. I will have to admit I was slightly confused and a little shocked that I was told by the doctor that neither ever had a success before. And beyond that I was told the one that I met with never even had a miscarriage, she had absolutely no successes. I am sure he was just getting patients mixed up but I am sure I had a quick holy shit look on my face.

So here were the recommendations...

1. For PCOS patients, drilling before IVF to try and ward off OHSS(great but I don't have PCOS)

2. Taking the eggs early and not trying to wait for the smaller ones to catch up. This is what my RE did with both of his major problem patients. They didn't get as many mature eggs, but the ones that were mature were better quality.(I only stim for 7 days as it is so this wouldn't be an option)

3. Starting ganirlex early in your cycle...as in day 2 or 3 so you can stim longer and hopefully get better quality. This would be ideal for women like me who only stim for 7 days which most REs don't feel is long enough to get a quality, mature egg.

4.Coasting at the end of stimming as the belief is that some women's ovaries just can't handle all of the stimming and that ruins the quality of the eggs retrieved.

5.Taking dex or even better a Prednisone taper pack before and during IVF. (we already did this)

6.Taking cipro or another strong antibiotic before IVF. The thought on this and the dex is that it will clean you out of any infections that the zpack wouldn't. (we did this also)

In regards to the diet and lifestyle changes my mentor suggested that I read Fertility Foods. Don't bother with it as I can sum it up in one sentence...weight training and a low GI diet to keep your blood sugar level though out the day. My mentor followed this a bit too much in my opinion, the book says nothing about cutting out all carbs but that is what she did.

I picked up Jillian Michael's new book, Mastering your Metabolism(and rebalancing your hormones) yesterday and it does a much better job of explaining insulin resistance, why you should keep your blood sugar level, how you do it. There is also a chapter on all of your hormones, what will happen if they are out of whack and what foods you can eat to readjust. She gives PCOS a decent amount of space and states medications that be the answer if you diet and exercise don't work which I loved(I can't stand the people who claim diet can change everything). Also, I wouldn't even call it a diet as there is no calorie/carb/fat counting involved. I highly recommend reading this book.

Both books stress that weight training is more important for women than cardio.

So I am feeling pretty eh about the whole thing. While these suggestions may help a lot of women who had similar problems(lots of quality eggs, no pregnancy) but I fail to see how I can work any of those in to help me.

What I am excited about is the whole nutrition/exercise aspect. I am way heavier on the cardio then I am on the weight training so it will be interesting in the next month or two to see if my hormones start to balance out at all.

The mentor adventure begins...

In her usual fashion my IVF coordinator is still sucking. To my dismay, they did not get rid of her as they assured me they were going to after all of the issues I had with her during my last IVF. Regardless after a week my clinic now has my email address(although I email with sucky coordinator so how she couldn't find it I clearly don't know) and I am now hooked up with my mentor.

I sent her our story and she emailed a few quick things back and said that she wants to meet soon. She tried for 7 years to get pregnant, some cycles with my doctor, some with Cornell and then she did the out of the box protocol with my doctor(I still don't know what this entails) which resulted in a successful pregnancy. Like us, she is unexplained. Unlike us her embryos always appeared to be good but none of her 10 previous transfers took. So at the end of the day my doctor has "diagnosed" both of us with unexplained egg quality issues.

The one quick thing she did tell me was that she took 6 months off of treatments, started exercising with weight training and cut out a lot of sugar. After a lifetime of irregular cycles, her cycles returned to normal on this regimen which I thought was interesting. She is bringing me a bunch of literature when we meet for dinner and I am going to hear the rest of her story. I do know that my doctor wants me to follow her diet and exercise regimen since they believe this was key to her successful pregnancy. I am really looking forward to this meeting and will report back when I know more...

I finally had my WTF appointment from my last IVF yesterday and the RE told us that we are going outside the box for our next attempt. For those of you who don't know me, which is probably most of you here is a quick summary....ttc for about 4 years now, 4 miscarriages(2 early that we would have never known about had we not been dealing with IF and 2 chrom. flukes), unexplained IF, and all of my embryos die when we use high doses of stims for some unknown reason. We looked into adoption but DH does not feel comfortable with it and while I don't agree I support him so that is why we are cycling again.

My RE had two patients last year that he sent to New York because he could not figure out what was wrong with them. Both cycled with different clinics and neither got pregnant. These patients apparently are like us(on the board) but to the max with getting their own information, my RE said they know more than he does. He tried completely out of the box protocols with both of them and they are both due within the next two months. He is hooking me up with them via email so they can share with me their stories and their wealth of knowledge and he is hoping I can also get some hope back in the process. I will find out in the next week exactly what the protocol is but he said it involves drugs that generally are not used for IVF and that he is one of the only clinics that will try a non-conventional protocol. The only thing I do know is that it is not the clomid IVF cycle that we had talked about a few months ago so who knows what the drugs are he is talking about.

I will update once I know more as this may be useful to other unexplained ladies that conventional protocols don't work for. I feel like a guinea pig but since we have run out of options I figure why not give whatever this is a whirl.