400th Design On Cafepress - and Another Gratifying Sale

My 400th design - Will Work For The Weekend just came online yesterday in the Cafepress Marketplace. The inspiration for it should be fairly obvious.

I also got my first sale of Untimely Ripp'd, on a toddler shirt. I knew someone out there would get it.

Thanks to everyone for your support!

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. :)

For The Hirsute G.I. Joe Fan

Here is my latest design - an homage to the packaging of the classic GI Joe Adventure Team action figures - "Life-Like Hair And Beard". The perfect gift for that hairy child of the 70s. Also available in full-chest size.

Enjoy!

Another 'Stuck-In-A' Episode

A truck backed into the loading dock across the street. A forklift went in the back. It did not come out. Turns out the suspension was a bit soft and the ramp a bit high, so the forklift couldn't roll back over it. They have driven the truck away now, presumably to find a dock with a lower ramp.

Retrieval & Collection Recap And Transfer Day

Okay, it's been three days since the retrieval and the chosen embryos were transferred back in today. I never wrote further about the retrieval, so I'll start with that.

Retrieval.

Wow. It was only three days ago, but it seems like forever. Let's see what I remember.

We went in Friday morning. From what we had heard of other people's experiences we were expecting they would send me to collect my sperm sample while they were prepping my wife for the retrieval. As it turns out, they had me wait and didn't send me off until after she was done. I snapped the pic and wrote the previous blogget while I was waiting. When she came back after about an hour the doctor told us they had gotten nine good eggs out of twenty. The others were mostly not yet mature, but several had been fragile and had ruptured before or during the retrieval. (We think now they were most likely from the earliest appearing follicles and were just a bit "overripe".)

Well, my wife was still out of it from the anesthesia and her mind latched onto the part about some being fragile and wouldn't let go of it. I and the nurses had to tell her several several times that there were nine good ones - one nurse even wrote it on her hand - until she had recovered enough from the anesthesia to focus and remember it. She cried a lot during that time, of course, and the nurse also explained that that was common - pumped full of hormones, perceptions made strange by the anesthesia, the release of finally getting the eggs out all adds up. Finally, she calmed down and said she was okay and happy that we had gotten nine good ones.

Collection.

Then the sent me down the hall to do my "collection". The room they sent me to was a corner room, with big nearly floor-to-ceiling windows in both the "lounge" section and the bathroom section. Fortunately there were blinds, which I adjusted to block the view from the parking lot below. I could still see the bright blue sky. I could also see the various nude and semi-nude women in the art hanging on the bathroom wall. Maybe I'll post a pic later.

I had been given a scrub kit to wash up with. Based on my experience at the backup collection I stripped down completely to better facilitate the washing. (Rinse water tends to run down the legs, so no shoes or socks. Shirts will hang down and brush against the clean junk so off that comes too.) I also took off my ring for good measure. The nurse had made a point of impressing upon me the importance of thoroughly rinsing - the antibiotic soap (with betadine in it, I think) kills sperm, so gotta get it all off - so I did. The floor got a little wet, so I laid the first sterile towel on the floor after I had finished with it.

The cleaning finished, I moved into the lounge to get down to business. My wife had been joking in the days before that she was going to call out to me as I headed off for the collection: "Skip the Penthouse and go right to the Hustler!" If you recall from my earlier entry we had found that while Penthouse has lots of "socially redeeming" articles, many of them include photos not exactly conducive to the task at hand. Hustler, on the other hand, as very little such extraneous filler. Well, lo and behold, there are a few copies of Penthouse, but no Hustler. I decided to make the best of things and started thumbing through a Penthouse. Some of the girls are nice, but a bit too glamorous for my taste. Seems Penthouse has abandoned the peeing I heard they had begun to feature a few years back to return to a more Playboy-esque style. After looking through a couple I decided to take a look at the copies of the other title in the rack: Black Tail. Good move. While it didn't have the full couples sex spreads of Hustler, it did have much more explicit material than penthouse, and the black women gave it what was for me an exotic touch. I found a couple nice, uh... friendly looking girls without any tattoos showing and completed my task.

I dropped off the sample at the lab and off we went. My wife got a ride down in a wheelchair and I picked her up at the curb.

The next day the doctor called to tell us we had five fertilize, and we'd know after three days how many we'd have to put back. In the subsequent days we worried about having none to transfer, and fantasized about having them all grow well and maybe even have one or two split into possible twins. (Would we put back in both embryos from a twin pair, or go for a more diverse group to hedge against genetic problems?) In the end we decided to go in with the expectation that since they hadn't called to tell us not to bother coming in there must be at least one to transfer, but that at our age we wouldn't expect more than maybe two.

Transfer Day!

That brings us to today - Transfer Day. We worked this morning, shorthanded but catching up on lost days as well as we can, and closed early to head for the clinic. The nurse had called us to tell us that there had been a schedule change and we were to be there a half hour sooner than we had been scheduled. We had planned on closing up at 1:00, so we ate early and headed out soon after.

We got there on time, with my wife's bladder full to bursting. They had asked that it be full to reduce the angle of the uterus and make positioning the transfer catheter easier. Well, she just couldn't hold it and she had a bottle of water handy, so she went a little in the lobby restroom and started drinking while we waited in our room. The doctor was in surgery elsewhere, as it turns out, and ended up being late. In fact he was late for our original time. My wife ended up going again and drinking some more before he arrived, with the nurse's blessing. She filled up again just in time.

The doctor came in with something for us - a picture of the embryos that would be transferred. There were three, all graded average (3) or above. (5 is perfect.) We smiled ear to ear and marveled at the picture. That's it above, with the patient info removed of course.

She was prepped and the bed raised into position. While the nurse operated the ultrasound to guide the catheter positioning, I held my wife's hand. In hindsight I should have taken off my ring then too. Apparently, they had difficulty getting a satisfactory visualization of the catheter's position. First the nurse tried. Then the doctor draped a sterile drape over the ultrasound paddle and tried himself. Then they swapped on the vaginal probe and poked at her abdomen with that. Finally they used it via her vagina - right in there with the speculum and the catheter. It was during all that that my wife crushed my fingers against my ring. I didn't complain. I just took the opportunity, once it came my way, to adjust my ring a bit to a more comfortable position and let her squeeze as much as she needed. I wish she could have made some adjustments for her comfort too.

After the embryologist checked the catheter and declared that all the embryos had been transferred they removed the equipment and helped my wife into a more comfortable position. After a mandatory half-hour rest, and a talk with the embryologist about my sperm count (up a good deal again, but still low motility) we headed home, with a brief stop at Secret Headquarters to pick up a couple things we had left behind in our hasty departure. My wife spent the rest of the evening in the recliner watching an Office DVD and being waited on (and yelling to me where things were that she wanted.) She'll be taking it easy for a while - only light exercise and keeping cool.

Next stop: the pregnancy test in a week and a half or so.

Retrieval & Collection Time!

My wife is in the procedure room now. After she's done & back here in recovery it's my turn. The art is on the door of our room & is by another husband.

Today and Tomorrow

Today was almost a normal day. We went in to work at Secret Headquarters. My wife had no injections. Other than my ongoing computer problems it was all pretty much a regular day.

I spent much of the day alternating between filling in a few gaps due to a bit of understaffing to help catch up on work time lost to our appointments up to now, and working on my still-glitchy computer. Moving it to the cool side of the desk, while a good move I plan to stick with, did not solve the problem. So, after a quick consult with Answers I did a final system config backup and ran a reinstall from the Win2000 CD. I went with the less radical option of doing an upgrade install. Hopefully that will serve to repair the system. I had to run update downloads & installs for a good hour or more. After that I only had time to reinstall the Comodo firewall (which I had uninstalled as a suspect during my long period of diagnosis) and tweak its configuration a bit before we left.

Overshadowing everything today, though, was anticipation of tomorrow's egg retrieval. My wife is a little trepidatious about the procedure. She'll be sedated for it and we're told that because of the number of follicles to be aspirated it'll take about an hour. I believe they'll be sending me off to do my part while they prep her. I'm trying to keep a light and confident attitude about it all, both to ease her stress and so that I can be sure to be able to "do my part" well enough.

Back before the first progress check, she and I made a "funsies" bet on how many eggs we'd get. She said 10 to 15. I said 15 to 20. That was back before we learned that a half-dozen was good for someone her age, but also before we learned what a large number she would ultimately produce.

If you haven't read it yet, I believe I noted in a previous entry that the Dr. measured 12 good sized follicles Wednesday, and noted on the report that there were about 20 present altogether. They will be aspirating all of them and collecting everything she's got to give.