IVF Cycle #2 Has Begun

We went camping this last weekend.  It was cold, windy, and rainy.  Normally the three things you don't want when you're camping.  Friday was really nice weather.  Saturday was nice, then crappy, then windy, then semi-nice, then rainy....

Let me rewind a bit.  Every April, a group of my friends goes camping.  Pretty much because we're excited for summer to be here, but also to get all the camping gear out to check what's missing, what's not working, etc.  So we don't go very far.  The regular spot for this annual trip is on the river on your way to Granite Rock, which is only about 10 minutes from my house.

I was super excited about Saturday evening, because that's when I start round #2 of injections.  This time around, I'm not nervous at all, because I know what to expect.  Only problem was, that since we were camping, I had to try and make it into as clean of an environment as possible.

This is what it looks like:

It's a total mess. There is so much garbage after each shot, it's crazy. 

So I'm on 250iu of Gonal-F, which is a pen that has a preset amount of meds in it (900iu) and you dial how much you want to dose out at a time.  We call it the epi-pen. There's the pen, and then a package with a needle in it that gets discarded each time. I'm also on 75iu of Menopur.  In the picture, its the two little vials in the center of the pic.  One is the Menopur powder, and the other is a solution that gets mixed into it.  So you take this q-cap and put it on the end of the syringe and you suck up the solution, then push that solution into the powder vial.  Then you suck the new solution into the syringe and take off the q-cap and replace it with the needle end.  There's the gauze and the alcohol pads as well.  And everything is individually packaged.  And that's where you get all the garbage from.  It's quite the process every night.  The only thing I don't like about the entire process is the Menopur burn as its being pushed into me. The Gonal-F doesn't burn, and luckily both needles are very very small.  Rodney gives me these shots each night in my thigh.  Sometimes if the needle goes through a vein, it will result in a bruise, but so far this round we've only done that once.  

I didn't take any photos of my human friends :( but I did get a few of my furry peeps.  Here's Goldie.  She's a slobber-face who snorts like a pig when she breathes and sleeps.  What a girl. 

Here's Lola Rae and her boyfriend Blaze (in the background). Oh I guess I did get a pic of my friends.  There's Carly's feet. You can see the river in the background. 

Back to Round #2.

I'm happy, excited and hopeful, because at this moment, things are going as planned.  I started taking double the meds that I was on last time, hoping for double the amount of eggs.  That's how it works, right?  I'm trying to stay super positive that this will all work out perfectly.  Because for some people it does just that.  For others, multiple IVF cycles have come and gone, and there's still no baby.  I'm going to stay hopeful that I will be one of the ones that has a successful IVF cycle.

Last cycle would have, could have been successful.  But because we are doing this to specifically not have a baby with Huntington's, we cannot put those embryos back inside me.  All I can do, is hope and pray for a better outcome this round.

I found this picture yesterday and I after the conversation the hubs and I had, I really feel like this is what's its all about.  Good things ARE going to happen.  Even if this cycle isn't successful, I'm still positive about our lives and where they are headed.