Phoebe: Pee Pee Update

Husband was doing great back at work until he forgot he couldn’t run and ran down the hallway and thinks he pulled something.  He says it feels “hernia-ish.”  Again, he was fine until he stepped off of a stair and felt a shooting pain up in his left groin.  Now he describes it more like a ruptured a blood vessel.  I told him to contact his doctor.  The doctor emailed back “it’s probably nothing.”  NICE PERSONAL ATTENTION!

We did the nasty last night for the first time since his surgery, which seemed awfully soon to me (it hadn’t technically even been a week). I was afraid he was going to break something so I just laid there. As if I normally do it any other way. Har har har…

Phoebe

Phoebe: Varicocele Repair Post-Op report

My plan to seduce my husband the night before his surgery went horribly awry. I needed his help putting together a video for school and we didn’t finish it until 3am. He was so tired and done with me and nervous about his surgery after that (we had to be up at 7am to take him), that he was in no mood for sex. The good news though, is that my temperature spiked yesterday, which means that I definitely ovulated ON MY OWN. I am not sure whether that means I don’t have to go back on the Clomid or what, but I guess I have a few months to track it and see if the ovulation continues to happen on its own and in a reasonably timely fashion.  I ovulated around day 19 or 20 this time.

Anyway, this is about the surgery. So I picked up my husband at 11am on Friday and put him into bed. He slept and watched movies all day Friday.  He had to work Saturday and Sunday, and just went in there with an ice pack and worked away. He even went out to dinner with friends both nights and he was fine.

As far as how the surgery went, the doctor said that the veins he found in the left testicle were much bigger than what he’d seen on the ultrasound. The good part about that is that the results we see should be marked. The bad part about that is that there could be veins in the right testicle that did not show up on the ultrasound. However, when the doctor “listened” for the veins in a previous exam (a poor man’s ultrasound, done using a microphone and a pair of earphones), he heard nothing going on in the right testicle. So hopefully there is nothing there.  Let’s hope this is the one and only time the poor guy will have to go under the knife. He’s been up and at ’em since the surgery, but even so, it was nerve wracking and I believe he has been in more pain than he lets on.

In three months, he gets his first sperm test.

Woo to the hoo,

Phoebe

Phoebe: Ovulating on my own! That’s right. On my own. Woo hoo!

First of all, I got locked out of my blog for days. It was so sad. I visited it, but couldn’t get in. It was like being locked out of my own house, but still being able to look in the window. WordPress wasn’t all that helpful until I figured out myself what the problem was. Anyway, all is well and my three readers must be relieved too. I’M BACK, GUYS!

So even though my husband is having his varicocele repair surgery on Friday and we aren’t really “trying” at the moment, I decided to continue taking my temperature and sort of loosely charting.

Side note: I went back on caffeine, and then acted like a heinous douche to my husband several times – where something triggered me, a small annoyance, and I had to turn it into a HUGE, monumental situation that I couldn’t get over. So despite the fact that we’re not “trying” at the moment, I am back off of caffeine.

Anyway, I started to sense my “fertility signs” picking up a couple of days ago and today I decided to pee on a stick. Sure enough, there was a surge! I am going to do it with my husband tonight.

This is meaningful for a number of reasons:  First of all, I am ovulating on my own. Secondly, I am ovulating around day 17, not day 45 or whatever is typical for me.  Third, wouldn’t it be amazing if we got pregnant au natural the night before his surgery?

I don’t want to get too worked up about it – our chances are nearly nil, but what the hell? I am going to use some Preseed to help his swimmers get through and then leave it up to biology from there… I haven’t told him about this plan. I just intend to seduce him tonight.  Penises  seem to work better that way:  aroused and unsuspecting.

Phoebe

Phoebe: Fat and Impotent OK but not Infertile?

I was just wondering on my way into work:  why are the Lap Band, Gastric Bypass and Viagra covered by insurance but infertility treatments are not?  Where is the line drawn as to what qualifies as a “medical” condition?

Doesn’t funding lap bands and gastric bypass just encourage people to get as fat as possible and then treat it with expensive surgery rather than prevent obesity in the first place, which is much cheaper?  I don’t understand our medical system, other than to say it is straight up jacked.

Phoebe

Phoebe: Fertility Musings/Melatonin for Reproduction?

Now that I have quit the IVF birth control pills (wtf?) mid-cycle, I am starting to feel better.  At around 3pm on Tuesday, all of a sudden something shifted and I suddenly went “oh, right” and just started to feel better.  I think the jet lag from Asia is finally wearing off (this is the worst case of jet lag I have ever had), and the hormone roller coaster is calming down.  Between the Clomid and the birth control pills, I was on a ride I wasn’t even aware of.  Now that we are doing the varicocele repair surgery, I’m not going to lie:  I am glad I don’t have to take any more hormones, at least for a while.  That, plus gnarly jet lag, seriously f**ks one up.  In ways one never expected.  For the past couple of weeks, I have felt despairing, self-pitying, self-flaggelating and melancholy.

Another thing I realized about it all is that once we really decided to embark on this baby-making thing and not just “not try to not try,” something shifted in my identity.  I started changing from hot mama to mom.  Not that moms can’t be hot (MILFs, anyone?), but there’s a shift in mindset that begins when you start thinking about motherhood.  As a superficial example, it just so happened that right around January, my sexy, sporty manual transmission Audi was getting to that point where it was sucking up more dough than it was worth, so we decided I needed a new car.  We figured I may as well get a mom car since we are the type of people to keep cars for a long time (like ten years long).  Certainly within the next ten years, there will be baby seats in the back of that thing!  So I got a Honda CR-V.  OK, so now I am driving around the mom car, which is big and cozy with an automatic transmission.  I have the mom car, but I am not the mom.  Also, when we were in the midst of our IUI cycles, the doctor told me to stop working out so much.  I normally go four days a week; he told me to cut down to three.  So I did.  But I kept eating the same amount (which is a lot, which is why I work out so often), and started to grow a little tummy.  I was OK with it thinking, “I am preparing my body for motherhood.”  But again, mom body and no baby.  I got a “sensible” shoulder-length haircut.  Mom haircut and no baby.  We’re looking at houses and worrying about school districts.  Mom mentality and no baby.  Now that my husband is getting his surgery, we won’t be trying again for around six months.  So now I am back to working out when I want and drinking caffienated coffee and eating sushi and all that – the old me.  I know a baby will come eventually, but in the mean time it’s like I’m between identities and it’s uncomfortable!  Of course the lesson in all of this is to enjoy the present tense, no matter what it is.  A couple of days ago, feeling really down, I went to yoga and the teacher read this quote:  “Once you realize that the road is the goal and that you are always on the road, not to reach a goal, but to enjoy its beauty and its wisdom, life ceases to be a task and becomes natural and simple, in itself an ecstasy.” It was just what I needed to hear.

In other exciting news, for the past few nights, I have taken Melatonin to fall asleep and I think it’s been making me unable to wake up in the morning and has given me weird dizzy spells.  I was looking up the side effects on the internet when I came across this on the University of Maryland medical website:

Melatonin also helps control the timing and release of female reproductive hormones. It helps determine when menstruation begins, the frequency and duration of menstrual cycles, and when menstruation ends (menopause).

Anyone heard of this before?  Should I continue with it to regulate my irregular cycle while we are waiting out the results of my husband’s varicocele repair?

Also, in all of my research and whatnot and thanks to all of your fabulous comments, I have come to the conclusion one always comes to in a medical situation:  NO MATTER HOW GOOD YOUR DOCTOR IS, YOU MUST TAKE CONTROL OF YOUR OWN MEDICAL CARE.  Our doctor is very competent and a professor in Reproductive Endocrinology at UCLA, meaning he has access to all of the latest information as well as technology.  And still, without us asking the right questions and asking for a referral to a specialist, we may still have been wasting money and time doing IUI after IUI rather than getting the detailed analysis of my husband’s sperm that determined there to be a severe male factor infertility there and the IUI’s to be 100% pointless!

That’s all for now.

Drinking ‘caf and yoga-fying to my heart’s content,

Phoebe