IVF mishmash

I am definitely feeling more upbeat today than I was yesterday. And I was more upbeat yesterday than the day before. So that is all good, and no doubt due to halving (halfing?) the lupron dose and ending the BCP. I threw my lupron bottle into the trash today with a vengeance. I think if I had had a baseball bat handy, I'd have happily taken it out to the backyard and given it a good thrashing. How satisfying would that have been, to smash the cursed thing into smithereens. I am so glad to be done with it. I think the evil lupron is the source of most of my IVF angst, I really do.

Tomorrow it is on to a whole new drug (new for me, that is), cetrotide. Never taken it before, so hopefully it'll treat me better than 10 units of lupron does. I hope it'll be kind and gentle and understanding of my lady bits. Just enough suppression to prevent LH and FSH release, thanks, but not so much that I turn into a raging homicidal menopause cliché or a weeping hysteric. If you could just get that right, oh lovely cetrotide, I will be happy.

I spent a grand on two vials of sperm yesterday. A fucking grand! Two vials! Dayum, that's a good business to be in. I think I should change career track immediately and open a sperm bank.


I also checked out the new IVF stats (for 2006) on SART. My local clinic did 174 cycles on women my age in 2006. Four of which were me. Me! Little old me appearing in the IVF stats. How fucking depressing is that? I remember when I was checking the stats for the first time, back as a fresh-faced newbie, and thinking, wow these stats are old, man. These are from, like, years ago. Of course, this was back when you could only get the stats from the CDC which are a year behind SART, so the stats have jumped forward a year. But still. I never ever thought I'd still be trying while also contributing to the statistics. It's quite sobering really.

And finally, in this rather jumbled and disjointed post, I have come to realize that one of the perils of blogging through several IVFs is that when you feel that you just must have some information about something vitally important to do with IVF, you end up googling yourself half the time. I mean, surely I don't need to read what I wrote about something? Or do I? Do I just need to remind myself that, yes, I covered that topic a year ago so I shouldn't revisit it yet again. But then, there's that drive to be doing everything possible, to see if that one little tweak will make the difference for egg quality.

So here's the question of the day which I was googling and which I'd be grateful for your opinion on, internets - should one increase protein intake or not? There's a study that says a high protein diet is bad for egg quality. But then again, there's also other people that say you should take a protein shake, like whey protein, every day. And then again, that Harvard study on diet says that you should try to increase your percentage of plant-based proteins over animal-based proteins. As a vegetarian who doesn't always include a protein source at every meal, adding a protein shake would hardly take me into the high protein territory, or make me have too much animal-based protein compared to meat eaters. Then again, I didn't do protein shakes for my NY cycles and had good embryo quality. But I didn't do it for a couple of local cycles either and had crap embryo quality. On the third (fourth? fifth?) hand, isn't it all down to age and stim protocol anyway? Bleh.