Catching Up On The IVF, and This Weekend

IVF

Okay. If you've been keeping up with my blasts on my other blog you know what happened, more or less. I suppose somebody might come this way via a web search on "IVF blog" or some such, though, and wonder how the cycle ended, so here goes for the record.

My wife had ordered a bunch of El-Cheapo™ pregnancy tests, with the primary purpose of monitoring the drop-off of the trigger shot, whose presence in the body will give a false positive on a pregnancy test. Once you see that fade to nothing you can be more sure of subsequent positive tests. She has been participating in online IVF communities and more than one person there has said that those tests will drive you nuts - particularly if you get all negatives and then finally get a positive blood test.

Well, she went ahead and did the tests, and kept taking them a couple times a day after the trigger faded. They kept coming up negative, putting her into a bit of a funk, until one came up just barely positive. She was ecstatic. She did another a couple hours later. It gave an even fainter positive, but we chalked that up to dilute urine and I talked her into not doing any more until morning. We figured the urine would be more concentrated and the pregnancy further along so the result should be a darker line. She got up to pee in the middle of the night and got nothing. Then again the next morning - nothing. The same that night and the next day. Well, as you can imagine, she and I were in more of a funk than she was before the positive test. I got her to agree to not take any more tests until we got the results of the blood test. She tried, but couldn't hold out and took one the day before the blood test. Negative again.

She did a little research, and found that the positive test followed by negatives is most often indicative of a "chemical pregnancy" which is when an embryo starts to implant then fails. It was a totally unknown thing until recently when the tests began to detect pregnancies early enough to see it. We both went through a bad time then, each of us breaking down in turn over it all. By the next day, we had pretty much gotten our grieving over it done and took the news of the negative blood test calmly since we were expecting it. We had been holding out a sliver of hope, that maybe the urine tests were defective, or her chemistry odd (as mentioned above, they don't work so well for some women for some reason), or that maybe it was a second implantation that had kicked the chemistry up into detectable levels before failing while the first continued. In the end that proved as false as it was unlikely.

While on the phone with the doctor (I was on another line with a customer who called at the same time) my wife told him that if we do another cycle we'd want to do a full workup on her to see what might have gone wrong that we could correct or compensate for. He agreed, of course. We'll be calling in some time this week for an appointment to discuss our options.

The Weekend

This weekend we devoted to getting away from things - a break in the routine activities & surroundings to give us a breather before getting back to dealing with all this.

Saturday we drove to Williamsburg and Jamestown. We had lunch at a decent little deli in Williamsburg next to the William & Mary campus, near the historic district, after driving from there to Jamestown and back looking for a good restaurant. (We had found a place in the guide book that specialized in pies - meat, dessert, & pizza - and were looking for that. Turned out to be basically a shack along the road, so we decided to skip it until we could hear more from someone else who'd tried it.)

After lunch we decided it was just plain too hot to walk around town and headed back to Jamestown again to the museum there. Once there we parked and went in, to discover that what looked like a big air-conditioned museum was actually just a ticket counter, cafe, and gift shop, as far as we could see. The settlement museum and replicas of the three ships that brought the colonists were, of course, outside in the heat. We decided to skip that and take a look in the gift shop. We got some hat+t-shirt bundles. My wife plans to give her hat to her dad. We had planned on staying in a hotel that night and doing more touring the next day, but it was supposed to be even hotter so we decided to go home and try to tour some nearby caverns the next day.

Sunday I was awakened by my wife telling me the internet connection was down. I got up and checked it out. Sure enough the lights on the cable modem were fewer than normal. I reset it with no improvement. I reseated the cable - again nothing. I called their tech support and was put through some voodoo manipulations (part of which - the shutting down of the computers - I skipped since I know that makes no difference to a cable modem when you're using a router) which again had no effect. The phone tech scheduled a visit by a technician monday between 8 and 5. That done we headed out.

We had picked up pamphlets fir various interesting attractions at a rest stop the day before, and there were three caverns with tours within a day trip distance. Two - Luray Caverns and Endless Caverns - are very near each other so we figured on taking the shorter-length tour first then the other if we felt up to it.

We went to Luray first. The web site said the guided tour was about an hour. I think it may be out of date. The tour was an at-your-own-pace walk along a brick path (with the entrance down a pre-OSHA flight of stairs), with guides stationed at interesting points describing them periodically. It took us almost two hours.

Three highlights:

The Princess Collumn, near which some of the bones of a teenage native american girl were found by the man who discovered the caverns. (According to the guide there are two theories as to how the bones got there: either she wandered in and got lost and died there, or she had been buried in the ground above and her bones were gradually washed down a sinkhole and fell through cracks in the rock. Since only some of her bones were there and there wasn't enough light for scavengers large enough to take them away, the latter theory is favored as most likely true.)

A giant stalactite that fell from the ceiling about 7000 years ago. Dripstone has formed over parts of it since, indicating how long it's been lying there.

The Stalacpipe Organ. A man from nearby noticed that the stalactites each vibrated with a different pitch when struck. He went through the stalactites in one room of the caverns and found one for each note on an organ keyboard, then fitted them with electricly triggered rubber hammers connected to a keyboard. For years they had a guy who played it, but he retired several years ago. Now they have it rigged to play automatically and only have it played live for special occasions. The tones are quiet but very nice.

We took lots of pictures, many of which I'm sure were shaky in the low light, but I'll try to pick out some good ones to put in my album here.

After that we went to a local Pizza Hut for a late lunch. We decided we were too tired from Luray - and we had leftover pizza - so we decided to head home. It was still a little early, so we took a scenic route.

Now we're back home, and it's back to the old routine at work and home. I think we will try to make more of these day trips in the future, though.

Oh, and when we got back the cable modem was working again. Probably an outage that we were just the first to report. If we had cable TV too instead of DirecTV I'm sure that would have given another clue. I guess I should call and cancel that technician's visit. :)