Surrounded by feckin' eejots

I swear, you gotta be on your game with IVF, otherwise things could go badly wrong.

So, I had a lovely therapy session. She really calmed me down and got me thinking positively. We discussed everything I'd done to get ready for this cycle, how I was going to be in the best place possible to get pregnant. Lovely, lovely. The best ever, in fact. We hugged, she wished me luck and I asked if she was sticking around for a bit so I could use the restroom (I'm often the last patient of the day and didn't want her to walk off while I had her restroom key). Off I went to the restroom, to shoot up.

Except there was someone in there, taking a dump. Groaning and taking a dump, actually. Making weird little grunting noises, in fact. I decided that there was no way on this earth that I was going to shoot up in a stall next to someone grunting and defecating. Just think of all the poop vapor that could infect my needle stick! So I peed, washed my hands and went back to the therapist's reception area.

Where I promptly opened my pants and shot up with Ganirelix, just as the therapist walked out to collect old magazines from the magazine rack. "Oh" she said "I didn't realize that's what you were doing, you could have stayed in the office, or used an empty room". I explained how I didn't really care where I shot up, just so long as people didn't think I was using heroin, and just so long as there was no-one doing their business in the next stall. But she stayed to watch, because I guess it's mildly fascinating watching someone stick a needle in their belly.

So then I needed to change the estrogen patch. I put the first one on on Sunday. It was leftover from the aborted "monster cyst" cycle. I undid the new packet which was from my new prescription and a teeny tiny eensy weensy little estrogen patch fell out onto my hand. Not the monster patch I'd just removed from my arse but an eensy weensy dainty patch. The petite lady-sized menopause patch and not the plus-sized super shrivelled ovaries menopause patch. I looked at the wrapper. It gave the dose as 0.025mg per day. I'm supposed to be using 0.1mg per day. It was a quarter the dose it should be.

I started panicking a bit. How on earth could I not have noticed? But then I thanked my lucky stars that I knew it was the wrong damn size and didn't just blindly assume that it was right. I stuck it on my arse anyway. I left the therapist's office and called the nurse on call number at Big Clinic. Except being after hours you have to speak to the answering service, who'll call the fellow on call. I got through after many many rings. Someone said "hello?", promptly dropped the phone at their end, and then didn't respond when I was saying "hello? hello? Is this the answering service for [Big Clinic]?" I hung up, thinking "eff this, I have a brain in my head, I can figure out what to do".

So while I drove home I figured out that I got patches which were one fourth of the normal dose (I'm good at math, clearly). Therefore, all I needed to do was put four patches on at once and I'd be golden. Except then I'd be out of patches. So that's what I did, and put a call in to the IVF nurse asking for a new prescription that I can take to a local pharmacy, being as menopause patches are covered by my insurance.

And then I looked at the box of patches, thinking "how on earth did I miss this?" And there, plain as day on the box was the prescription label saying "0.1mg", which is what I'd looked at. And there, right underneath was the box saying "0.025mg". Which I'd somehow overlooked. But the idiots at the pharmacy, who do this for a living, and who should effing know better and check these things had put the wrong label on the wrong box. Feckin' eejots. They shall be getting a piece of my mind over the phone in the morning.

I mean, can you imagine? If I hadn't used the damn patches before I'd be on a quarter of the dose, thinking everything was peachy, and ruining my cycle. Damn feckin' eejots. You gotta be on your game, people. Check everything twice!