Our IVF Refractory Period

We're surprisingly good today. Or maybe that's not surprising - as J so poignantly stated last night: "Getting over failed IVF attempts is kind of our speciality".

Here is what we have decided: We're taking 2-3 months off. I have a camping trip in August that I want to go on, Labor Day we're off to Chicago for a wedding, so probably right after that, we'll get started again. In the meantime I'm going to set up an appointment with my doc - hopefully next week to come up with a plan of attack for next time. What I'm going to propose is, on this break, I'll to do the basal temp charts again, I'm going to get an ovulation kit - I'm tracking everything.

I'm going to see if the doc will send me to the lab here in town for the 2-3 days prior to ovulation so I can have bloodwork done, so we can also track my hormone levels during that critical time during the cycle. That way when I go up there next, he will have several months that he can use as comparison for my next attempt.

I'll be taking a break from treatments, but doing a little homework at the same time, which will make me feel like I'm not just sitting on my ass doing nothing, all the while I'm drinking and de-stressing and only being minimally "bothered" by fertility crap.

You know - even though the cycle was a bust, there's something about living on pins and needles for weeks on end. Despite the crappy outcome, there's always a degree of relief to waking up The Day After and knowing that huge important pieces of your life aren't hanging by a thread. Or at least that was my first thought when my alarm went off today: "Man, our IVF refractory period gets shorter and shorter everytime...."