Out, Damned Spot!

The last 24 hours… ugh.

Tuesday was my last day of birth control pills, so I went in yesterday morning for my baseline ultrasound and blood work.  I expected this to all be fine, since when I did my Day 3 testing everything was great.  However, I should have realized that the universe was not going to let me off that easy: the ultrasound showed that there is a freaking cyst on my right ovary.

Now, cysts usually aren’t a big deal.  They seem to happen naturally on their own, and go away just as naturally.  If I gave it a week or two, it might disappear. Except I don’t have that kind of time to kill – I have to start stims by 12/2, or wait until January because of the holidays.  I really, really want to start now.

So I left the office with two possible paths ahead of me, depending on what my blood work showed: if my cyst was producing estrogen, my cycle would have to be delayed because the cyst would interfere with the hormones.  If my cyst wasn’t producing estrogen, we could aspirate it and move on as scheduled.

“Aspirate,” is turns out, is a fancy word for “put a needle through the wall of your vagina and into your ovary and suck out the fluid without any kind of anesthesia.”  This is the option I was hoping for.  IVF is so fucked up.

So I waited all day for news.  I did some Googling, which didn’t teach me anything new, and had some moments where I felt very dramatic about the unfairness of it all, but mostly I was surprisingly laid back about it (for me).  I didn’t have any control over the outcome and this probably wasn’t going to be the last minor tragedy I was going to encounter throughout this process, so I might as well get used to staying calm in the face of uncertainty.

Around 4:30, I finally got the call: all of my blood work came back perfect; I would just have to do, as I explained it to Henry, the “needle vagina thing” on Friday, and I could start shots on Saturday as planned!

Of course this whole thing is a headache....  First, I have to do the aspiration tomorrow in the middle of the workday.  Hopefully I’ll be able to come back to work after without much of a problem, because I don’t really plan on telling people that I’m leaving (it’s over lunch, so it’ll just be a long lunch). I know this is a small thing and I’m happy to skip work if it means a baby yada yada yada but it’s still less than ideal. I’m really busy and trying to get all of my work done now so that it’s not a huge deal when I’m out for the retrieval and transfer in a couple of weeks.

I also have to take antibiotics for the next few days.  This was, firstly, annoying when I went to get it filled – I missed the turn for the pharmacy and, thanks to one way streets, it took me 10 minutes to get back.  Then, this morning I was really good and took my pill on an empty stomach, as directed.  BAD IDEA.  Twenty minutes later my stomach was so upset that all I could do was sit on the couch and try to eat something to calm it down.  I thought it had worked, until I stood up and promptly puked into the sink.  I’d managed to keep the pill down for 40 minutes, though, so I think I was able to get most of what I needed from it.  I hate that nauseous feeling, and all I could think as I was sitting there was “If this works, you’re going to feel like this for two months straight.”  Ugh.

Anyway, back to last night, did anyone else see the moon?  As I was pulling onto the highway for my drive home, I was feeling pretty distracted.  I came around the corner, and there was the moon: full, low, huge, and orange.  It looked exactly how I imagine my cyst.

God might not always be fair, but He is funny.