Tired of malfunctioning

Originally, I had an ultrasound scheduled for Sunday morning. The office called late last week though and requested that I come in on Saturday morning instead. The purpose of this ultrasound was to look at my uterus and my ovaries to make sure that it all looked good and to determine when we would schedule our IUI. I had been looking foward to this appointment for days and had been counting down, trying to calculate the date of our IUI and subsequent due date if we were successful in getting pregnant this cycle.

The day of the ultrasound finally arrived and we met the nurse who was going to do the ultrasound. She was very nice and laid-back and we had the whole office to ourselves since it wasn't a normal work day. I was feeling really good about it and was anxious to see the results of our efforts with the medications I had been taking over the past few weeks. My husband had never seen an ultrasound before, so this was all new to him. The nurse was very good about explaining everything on the monitor, though I think it will be a few more ultrasounds before he really understands what he is seeing.

We started with my uterus. Everything looked really good. No fibroids (which I knew) and my lining had a good measurement. Then, she moved on to my left ovary. It looked like a typical polycystic ovary and after looking around, she found that the biggest follicle on that ovary was only half the size it needed to be at this stage of the game, measuring at 8mm. That was a disappointment, but we still had one more ovary to look at. However, as she moved over to the right ovary, it was clear that things weren't any better on the other side. She found another 8mm follicle on the right side with nothing else promising.

The rest was a bit of a blur to me. She calmly told us that we wouldn't be scheduling an IUI this time, but that we also wouldn't waste the cycle. My husband and I are trying on our own this month and if by day 35, I haven't had a period, I'll take a pregnancy test. If it is negative, we'll go to the next step in this whole infertility process. The next step is adding injections to the mix. We had already planned an HCG injection to trigger ovulation, but it looks like my pituitary gland is not doing its job, so before we trigger ovulation, we need to have FSH injections to trigger my follicles to develop at the correct rate, so that they are big enough when it is ovulation time. The plan is still to have an IUI because I want to make sure the odds are in our favor that we'll have a positive pregnancy as soon as possible and an IUI would guarantee that some good swimmers will at least make it to where they need to be to get things started.

My emotions have been up and down. I'm really trying to stay positive about all of this. I'm frustrated with myself that we didn't just go ahead and start with the injections, but I wanted to be a little less aggressive the first month "just to see" if we could pull it off. I am equally irritated that my body is malfunctioning and that I am not one of those women who can just say I want to get pregnant and it will happen. No, it will not happen if I just stop thinking about it, or if I just stop trying. I'm so tired of hearing that! Believe it or not, some people really have to work at it for it to happen.