Author Archives: Kaitlyn

An Exercise in Futility: IVF#2 (and fallout from IUIs 3-5)

Super-Secret Post Concerning cycles 47, 48, and 49 (August, September, and early October 2015) This post is really long. I’ve decided to add a tl;dr section. Our doctor didn’t care that we had a third loss in our preceding IUI since it was so early as to be deemed diagnostically insignificant. This seems to be consistent with other practices. We proceeded with a slightly different round of meds to try to improve my egg quality and resulting embryos, over the […]

Summer IUIs – Gravida 3, Para 0

Super-Secret Post Concerning cycles 44, 45, and 46 (May, June, and July 2015) In May, we kicked off a “three-pack” of IUIs. Our clinic has a pricing option where you pay upfront 200% the price of one IUI and get three credits. You can use those credits within a two-year window unless you have a live birth from one; in that case you lose any unused credit. But basically it’s no extra money unless you get pregnant on the first […]

April Fools

Back before I knew any better, and with a long track record of elaborate online pranks with lead up and “photo evidence”, I took advantage of access to a 12-week scan of an older friend’s baby and carefully cut together my own name with the letters available to “photoshop” (MSPaint) my own scan, posting that our “big news” alluded to the day before was a baby (it was actually the fact that we were moving across the country after graduation […]

Time-Travelling Progress

Super-Secret Post Concerning cycle 44 (Mid-May, 2015) In mid-May we had our debrief after the roller coaster of the last 6 months of IVF and its protracted fall-out.

Apologies to my RSS subscribers

Hi everyone, Since I usually draw people in with links from my social media, this post will probably only find the eyeballs of those who visit the website manually or subscribe via an RSS reader (and it’s my intention to take it down once I’m done with the work). I’m going to do some WordPress plug-in testing for a volunteer gig and instead of setting up a sandbox WP I’m just going to add a bunch of junk here and […]

Writing for different audiences

I’ve reached a point in my timeline where I completely stopped taking notes for this blog. I found an online support group which is actually palatable and all my writing has gone there. It’s very different than writing for the blog. For one thing, it’s real-time. There’s an off-topic thread every day where we talk about everything from that day’s medication side effects to random plans for weekend. Often there’s a small fertility tie in (“I’m on vacation but this […]

Well, there’s that

Good news: ANA was negative. It’s never lupus*. * Except for all my online buddies who have lupus.

The things you never get back

A bonus post about why after a year or two you can never really be cured of infertility, even if you eventually manage to have healthy babies. The money The money that could have been a family vacation (or three), allowed the house you buy to be just a bit less of a fixer upper, given you a little breathing room to job search a little longer, or hell, to help out others whose need is so much more than […]

Jon Stewart, ComicCon, and infertility have more in common than you would think

Waiting for post-IVF follow up Super-Secret Post Concerning cycle 43 (approximately April 2015) In between our cancelled FET and our follow up 6 weeks later we were on the road three times and went to our local ComicCon. To say we kept busy is an understatement. The first and third outings were road trips back to where we went to university, but the middle trip was 4 days in New York to see a taping of The Daily Show (and […]

FET #2 from IVF #1

Super-Secret Post Concerning cycle 42 (approximately March 2015) Ah yes. Cycle 42. The answer to life, the universe, and everything. The second frozen embryo transfer had the upside of familiarity going for it. We already knew the protocol and were familiar with all the medication and schedule. This was only the second time ever in our treatments that we were repeating the same thing as the previous cycle, and knew exactly what to expect.