Back in Acupuncture, Meditation & Estrogen Patches

Yesterday I had my first acupuncture session since the day of our FET #1 in December.  It was mostly for relaxation and relax I did.  It was one of those sessions where I pretty much dazed off into sleepy-land but I awoke with a jump feeling like my stomach had just squeezed or my airway had constricted- it was a little bit of a shock!  I’m still not sure what happened since I was so out of it.  It was just before she came in to end the session- she said I could stay longer if I wanted but I was ready to come out after that jolt!  I gave myself a little extra time so I was a bit more with it by the time I started driving.

Just as a side note, I’m feeling pretty out of it today too, I’ve had an awful headache all day.  I think it is a result of another jolt last night around 3am.  I awoke to a blocked airway for sure this time, (sorry if this is a little gross), but it seemed like there was some kind of thick post-nasal drip/mucus thing happening in the back of my throat that completely blocked off my nasal passage for breathing.  I think I’m kind of strange in that I can always only breath out of one side of my nose at night, so when that’s blocked off- forget about it!  I’ve never had this happen that I can recall, especially when I’m not even sick with a bad cold or something.  I don’t know what happened.  But at 3am I was wide awake.  Then I felt (again, possibly TMI) blood dripping where it shouldn’t and so I hauled myself out of bed and sure enough it was soaking through my underwear.  I proceeded to freak out a little.  Typically at this phase in my cycle, the blood flow starts getting pretty light, and this time it seemed to be getting heavier- plus I thought there would be even less blood this cycle after the scraping.  So I was terrified that I must have some infection that is causing me to bleed more and more instead of starting to taper off.  Needless to say, this kept me awake for a while.  So, crappy night of sleep combined with stressfulness of not being able to breath and thoughts of some horrible infection that would keep us from transferring- resulted in me feeling like crap today!

Yesterday I also broke down and purchased the circle + bloom FET meditation series.  I figured I want to do this right and maybe this will help.  By the time I got it purchased and downloaded it was past midnight, not the best time to try it but I’m looking forward to fitting this into part of my routine.  If anyone is interested there’s a discount code here.  I know a lot of other infertility bloggers have tried it.

I hope this headache is just a delayed onset from my normal period headache and that nothing is going terribly wrong inside my uterus so that I’m still on track for the FET!  I’m meant to start the estrogen patches tonight, then the ball really will be rolling.  I’ll have to review my estrogen patch tips to refresh my memory on best practices!

I leave you with a quote from the yoga class that I dragged myself to earlier today, that I think strikes a major chord with all of us dealing with infertility, or any other major life challenge that feels unfair.  Some of the positives for me are the good friends I’ve made throughout this process and the things I’ve learned about  my body and my health.

5 Tips for Progesterone-in-oil Shots and Estrogen Patches

I wanted to share (and document) some of the things I’ve learned during my FET.  The requirements are already so much less than going through IVF, but I’ve found some things that have helped make this routine a little easier.

First, the progesterone shots- they are, shall we say, unpleasant.  But, honestly, it hasn’t been as bad as I had feared after my brief stint of doing them when we thought we might go through with the fresh transfer.  Things have been much more calm this time around and a big part of that is that my husband has been here to give me the shots.  I had to do several on my own before, and it was rough.  Not impossible, but for me, it works better when he’s here!

5 Tips for Progesterone Shots:

1. Ask your nurse to circle the appropriate area on each side so you know where your target is.  Nerve damage is a serious risk if you stray from the correct zone.  You can redraw the lines when they fade, but my husband hasn’t needed to as he can see the little pinpoints of his past injections to know he’s in the right area.
2. Get a small ice pack and apply it for a few minutes before.  I’ve read some things that say not to do this as it might cause the muscle to tighten, but my nurse suggested it and I find that the ice and the heat in the next steps compliment each other well.
3. Heat the oil in the bottle before you draw it into the syringe.  Heating the oil helps to thin it, which helps it go in more easily and move through your muscle tissue where the progesterone can be absorbed.  We have a shoulder/neck heating pad that we microwave for 1.5 minutes then nestle the bottle in while I’m icing and while my husband gets the needles, alcohol wipe, and band-aid ready.
4. During the injection, I like to have something to distract myself, whether it’s music or a TV show or something.  Right before he does the injection I try to take a few deep breaths (which is tricky laying on your belly!), and relax all of my muscles as much as I can.  Then while he does the injection, I count to myself until the needle comes out.  He started at about 30 seconds, now it’s down to 20 and even faster a couple of times!  It helps my mind stay busy and my body relaxed until it’s over.
5. Then heat, move, and massage!  As soon as the band-aid goes on he places the already warmed heating pad over the area and I takeover holding it on while moving my leg around to exercise the muscle a little to help the oil move around.  Then after he’s cleaned up the equipment he takes over doing a little massage.  The deeper massage is actually good even right after the shot because for me it actually doesn’t hurt until the next day, doing more massaging right after and again the next morning has worked really well.  We alternate sides each night and I make sure both sides get some massage action at least once a day.  Usually the soreness is mostly gone before the next shot on each side.  It’s still not great, but if by some chance our FET did work and we do have to do this for several more weeks, I think I can handle it, which is saying a lot!  I was really dreading the start of these shots!

On to the estrogen patches.  These are much easier than most anything else on our menu in the IVF/FET world, but they too have their own quirks.  I am using the Vivelle dot patches.

5 Tips for the Estrogen Patches:

1. Make your schedule and set reminders or alarms to remember it.  Since these only get switched twice a week and one time is the morning while the next is at night it can be trickier to remember than something you do every day at the same time.  I’ve had a close call sleeping in a little too much on my Sunday morning 9am change.  Luckily I woke up just in time and went straight into patch change mode!
2. Know where you are going to put it before you open it.  I have settled on a pretty good system where I go from low to high.  I use 2 patches so one goes on each side of my belly button and I have divided the area below my belly button into 3 zones: low, middle, and high (just below the belly button).  The idea is that on each patch change you want to keep spot where you just removed the patch free for a week.  So, for example, if I place 2 patches low on Sunday morning, I’ll put them just above, in the middle zone, the next Wednesday night.  Then the following Sunday I’ll put them in the high zone, then start over again the next Wednesday back in low.  I’ll also alternate going a little closer or farther left ant right from the midline every time through.  It’s really simple and I know I’m not overlapping with a recently patched area.  *note that if you are going to be wearing a bikini or something else low cut you might want to plan in advance to put your patches in the low zone that time!  Always think ahead!
3. This may sound silly, but when opening the patch make sure which side peels off!  These patches are basically clear and very thin and so are the peel off bits so it can be hard to tell which side peels off and which side is the patch.  I spent at least a minute or two trying to force the non-peel side to come off and I ended up stretching out the patch a little.  It wasn’t a huge problem, I was not thinking straight and just didn’t stop to think that maybe it was the wrong side until I’d caused some deformation!  Just carefully bend it a little until you see the edges of the peel off part starting to come up, then slide your nail in there and it will come right off.  No need to force it!  I usually stick that side on and then peel the other side off while carefully smoothing it into place, then hold my palm over it for 10 seconds.
4. Think about your waistbands.  Tight waistbands and heavy waistbands can pull at the edges and cause some of the stickiness to shift to the outside and the edge to not stick as well.  I haven’t had any major problems with this, but one time kind of made me nervous.  I had just put on fresh patches, in the low zone that I figured was the safest from waistbands, threw on my most comfortable jeans and was feeling good.  Somehow though, when I was sitting, the inside bottom edge of the waistband put enough pressure on the top edge of the patch to make it start to peel loose.  Since they were new patches and I still had another 3 days to go before I’d be changing them I was a little concerned, but they stayed on like champs.  I’ve tried to be more careful since though.
5. You will have a patch shaped outline of sticky stuff with clothes fuzz stuck to it each time you take off your patches.  Sometimes they will be darker and thicker than other times depending on what you wear!  I’m sure there are other options out there, but I usually just sit quietly with a little bowl of olive oil and rub this on the outline and use my fingernails a little to scrape it off.  I find it’s best to just gently rub the oil around for a few minutes before using my nail, but I’m not always patient enough!  Which means I scrape a little more than I probably would if I had waited… but either way, I get those little patch windows off!

*One more thing for the patches, it usually is less painful to pull them off from the outside corner/edge toward the midline of your body, not the other way around!

I hope these are helpful to someone out there (or at least for me when we go through this again)!  I am looking at just 2 more nights of definite shots before we get our blood test and find out if any of this has done the trick!

FET update: Starting to get real!

If a shot in the back side doesn’t make things feel real, I don’t know what will!  We started our progesterone shots on Christmas day (Merry Christmas to me!) because we were able to get our transfer date moved up from Jan 7 to Dec 30!!  I feel like we are officially in the home stretch now and it’s a little exciting and definitely scary.  My simple regime of changing estrogen patches every 3.5 days has been kicked up a few notches with the addition of the progesterone shots, doxycycline, and prednisone pills (also still taking my levothyroxine, vitamins and baby aspirin).  I feel very out of practice coordinating all of this pill popping with my eating and already busy supplement schedule!  Right now it goes something like this:

• wake up: levothyroxine
• 30-60 min later: breakfast, including smoothie with Vitamin C, greens, seeds, nuts, fruit
• lunch + prenatal multivitamin, CoQ10
• 2 hours later: first doxycycline
• late afternoon: protein shake + B12 + brazil nut
• dinner + Omegas + Vitamin E
• ~8:30pm: progesterone shot
• before bed: second doxycycline, prednisone, baby aspirin
• I’ll also mix in some vitamin D, iron, chlorophyll, and antioxidants depending on the day- haven’t quite fit these back in to the normal routine yet!
• estrogen patches are changed every Wednesday evening (9pm) and Sunday morning (9am)

We decided to follow the advice of our embryologist and RE and just transfer the single best quality embyo and keep the other 2 on ice.  I still have mixed feelings about this, but I think it makes sense.  I have seen so many successes in the blog world lately (congratulations to you all!), I can’t help but hope that maybe there’s a chance this could possibly work… it certainly is the best chance we’ve ever had.

The FET is strange in that I’ve only seen my RE twice in this whole process, and the 3rd time will be at the transfer itself- I had one other visit just for bloodwork with the nurse, but all in all, so much less checking up on how things are progressing.  It makes me a little nervous not to have the frequent reassurance that things still look ok!  I guess I just have to trust that the estrogen patches are doing their thing and all of these new meds will help me be ready on the 30th.

Since this is my first transfer, I’m not really sure what to do to prepare.  I want to spend a substantial part of the next few days cleaning things up around here so I’ll feel like I’m in a healthier environment while I’m on bed rest (2 days following transfer day).  I also want to start a list of things to do while on bed rest to be a little bit productive, like write thank you cards for Christmas gifts… along with the unproductive activities like watching a lot of movies!  I’m also trying to get a lot of things out of my system now that I won’t be doing after transfer- like going ice skating yesterday, eating popcorn and ‘cooling foods’.  I’ve decided that I’ll respect the bed rest orders for the most part but I also want to do some things to help promote blood flow and keep my body warm so it doesn’t have to waste energy heating up.  So that includes a few reclined yoga poses and warming foods.  I’ve also scheduled an acupuncture session which I’ll do a few hours before the transfer.  I’m not sure yet if I’ll do any others during the wait.

If anyone out there has any other pre or post transfer recommendations I’d love to hear them!

I hope everyone enjoyed some moments of the holidays, even though I know many things can be difficult for those of us in the infertility trenches.  I’ve been feeling pretty good (other than my increasingly sore back side!), taking things as they come!  Hope you enjoy my little illustration!

FET update: Lining in the Zone!

I feel I must apologize for my lack of posting recently, I really thought that starting the FET would get me back in the swing of things!  It has been harder than I expected to jump back into my infertility-focused routine…

My break this fall after our first IVF cycle was nice- I didn’t blog (though I did catch up on posts from many of you a couple of times), I barely kept up with supplements, I was not eating my normal food- had to eat what they had for us, and I really didn’t think about it all very much- my mind was busy.  It was nice having a little escape.  I thought that getting back home and planning the FET, starting the medications would spring me right back into my careful eating, supplement taking, blogging, yoga-meditation routine etc.  But, for some reason, it hasn’t.  I’m easing back into my eating routine, but not as careful as I was- part of that is also that it’s tougher around the holidays.  Still not the greatest at remembering my vitamins, and I have been super lazy on the blogging, yoga & meditation.  I’m not sure why- I worry that it’s my subconscious telling me that the transfer isn’t going to work and letting me make it a self-fulfilling prophecy…  if that makes sense!

I started my estrogen patches last Wednesday (12/10).  I am using 2 Vivelle patches on my belly that get changed every 3.5 days.  These have been pretty easy so far, I’ll post more about them later… My RE scheduled me for the transfer on 1/7, but I was concerned about stretching out the time on estrogen for so long just because of the holidays.

I went in for my next appointment today, my lining was already 10+mm, so I asked if we could move up the date for the transfer.  I’m hoping to hear from him soon.  I am really hoping that scheduling around the holidays won’t cause us to do the transfer at a non-ideal time… after everything we’ve put into getting these 3 embryos, we really don’t have many chances to waste!  I am thinking we’ll go along with the recommendation to transfer the best one alone now, and possibly the other 2 together if this one doesn’t work out.  I just can’t shake the feeling that the one by itself won’t work for us.  I have this strong feeling that if it works for us, it’s going to be twins.  Crazy, I know!  I’m just so worried that all of our transfers will fail and I guess that will mean we pack up and move to New Zealand!  Our kid free place we’d love to live!

Anyway, for now I’m continuing with the 2 patches and we’ll see about all of the rest!