I ordered the Co-Q10… Which is twice as much as expected because their daily supply is less than half what my doctor recommended, so I’ll be taking 2 per day.
I hemmed and hawed and decided not to add choline back in after I run out since my doctor was like “eh no evidence it does anything.”
Been going through the internet looking for ways to prevent yet another loss and have landed on… More produce and maybe low dose aspirin?
Also been googling whether there is any validity to “your uterus needs to reset and refresh so wait for a period before you start trying.” Dunno why I have such resistance to listening to my doctor.
Eta: I’ve also been anxious for my prenatals to get here. I ran out recently and ordered them, but they are taking forever to get here and so I’ve been off for about 2 weeks now.
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If you have the time, I’d lean towards waiting for a period just from what little I know about how placentas work and attach themselves. I don’t have advice from my own doc to compare since I had complications and had clear reasons to wait.
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Dosing on ubiquinol is lower than dosing on standard coq10 because of bioavailability. You might not need as much as you think. I know Fett does relative dosages in her book, I don’t recall what she recommends though.
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I am seeing that my doctor’s rec was based on ubiquinone, not ubiquinol, and I believe the latter is more bioavailable. So that would make sense.
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I think I was taking 100mg Vs 400mg or something like that, but double check dosage for sure.
Yeah, I suspect it’s slightly different with a truly chemical pregnancy, but I should probably hold off since I probably started really building that placenta.
Well, gives me time to get back on all my pills and work on eating veggies I guess.
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What are some veggies and veggie dishes you love? (writing/thinking prompt)
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I really enjoy roasted veggies and pan-fried veggies. I like stir frys, but have trouble making them consistently come out well.
I actually am good with most veggies cooked properly but my struggle is typically with the planning portion and remembering to make a side dish of veggies with a main dish.
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I really like bagged salads for adding a side to a main dish when I don’t want to or have time to cook any veg. I’ve also been monchin a lot of peapods and baby carrots lately. Love cherry and campari tomatoes but it’s currently the worst season for them. Apple or orange slices make a great side for a sandwich or frozen burrito. Or with breakfast (I can’t do veg with breakfast, unless someone else cooks it for me).
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Unsolicited advice, but it helped me to start treating roast veg as my cooking snack. I’ll make it first and munch it while I cook the main course. I don’t bother to have it ready along with the rest of the food, and then I have stuff to snack on as I cook haha.
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Grilled veg are an excellent quick alternative if you have a decent range hood or a bad smoke detector. Heat a cast iron pan on med or hi while you coarse chop peppers, onions, broccoli, zucchini. Toss veg with oil, salt, pepper, and wine vinegar (or lemon). Throw on the hot pan for literally seconds and mix around to sear different sides. Also great with whole shishito peppers (serve those with ponzu).
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One of those beautiful “there are no actual rules” life hacks 
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I am pretty sure that I ovulated yesterday? I had no idea when to expect that since the post-BCP bleed happened, and I haven’t been temping or using OPKs. But I had watery CM and what felt like my normal ovulation pains yesterday. When I realized what was going on, I tried using an OPK, and it wasn’t positive, but I’m pretty sure I would have missed the surge anyway.
If I’m right, we’re not going to be able to start next cycle because I don’t think there’s any way we can get all of our tasks done in two weeks. It also wouldn’t be great to be doing stims during our Florida vacation, but I think that’s irrelevant because I just don’t see any way of getting Swan’s testing done, getting the donor eggs in hand, and my getting to Mexico for the meds in the next two weeks.
The problem is, provided my period goes back to being as regular as it was, the cycle after that is also questionable because I’m pretty certain I’m going to have to fly to Colorado to work a festival right during the time when I would have to have the ER (last time I started stims on CD2 and my ER was 13 days after that).
There are actually going to be a bunch of times this summer where I’m going to be traveling for my internship for long weekends and camping, of all things, meaning that refrigeration will be hard to come by.
Does anyone know if there is a way they could tamper with my cycle to make the stims/ER be during a non-busy stretch, despite when CD1 comes naturally?
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Yes, some clinics (including my first clinic) batch cycles and do this globally. That’s one of the benefits of long lupron. I think in your case though the concern would be over suppression of the follicles and poor response. You can ask though!
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OK, I’ll check with them and see what they say.
I did the Great Donor Deep Dive last night. I first ruled out a bunch of banks for being too expensive (the price range was truly astonishing, and the more expensive ones you could tell had had their donors get, like, full-on headshots done). Then I browsed the selections based on the criteria that Swan and I had discussed. Swan had to leave for a dog-sitting gig at this point, but I was texting him updates in real-time. I ended up with four “finalists” and, out of those, I had two clear favorites. I’ll get to find out sometime today whether my favorites and Swan’s overlap.
Before bed, I had the idea to do a brief ceremony and ask for a message from the universe/ancestors asking about all four, and in my reveries, I received a moment of clarity that one of my two favorites was the best bet. When I re-looked at her profile with the message I received in mind, I saw that she is also the youngest, is from the more affordable bank, has an extra egg in her lot (she has 7 as opposed to everyone else’s 6, and I think her bank charges by the lot), and is probably closest to my genetic heritage given the backgrounds she lists. I’m still going to ask Swan’s opinion, of course, but I feel like I have good reasons to convince him if he’s on the fence.
If they can get another 8 eggs out of me and add 7 donor eggs to that, there’s bound to be a baby in there somewhere, right?
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Those sound like really good odds!! It’s funny how sometimes these decisions are so easy to make when we stop and give space for the answer to come.
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I’m feeling really upset and kicking myself for waiting to start trying until we did. I had kind of made a timeline for when we should start based off how many kids we think we may want (2 but want to leave the possibility of a 3rd open), fairly close spacing but not too close, and assuming and average of 6 months to conceive.
I was kind of assuming we would conceive faster, given that we conceived on birth control once. I wasn’t assuming a loss. Now I’m like, well frick, the next time we even get a shot it will probably be past 6 months trying, and who knows if I’ll have more losses?
Kind of working through accepting that I’m not one of the people who can plan this shit within reasonable error and I gotta just keep moving forward and see what we can get when we can get it. I am not good at accepting a lack of control though. Whenever I’ve wanted something really badly, it was at least somewhat under my own power and based much more on my efforts and a lot less on luck.
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Hmm, may have hit a snag. After looking at donor profiles, Swan is no longer certain he wants to go the donor route. He said he feels super weird in his gut about having a baby with any of these women he’s never met. Apparently when we were just talking about “eggs,” it was abstract enough to him that he wasn’t stressing about it, but now that he’s seen photos and read about them, they seem like real people to him, and it’s weirding him out.
I was like, well, you’ll have THE ACTUAL BABY with ME, not them—they are just providing the DNA. And he said it’s so weird because he’s never been in a room with them, can’t see how they move and hear how they talk. He has this idea that he might not like them if he met them, and so maybe he wouldn’t like a baby made up of them. He said that he knew the first time he met me that I checked all his boxes, and he wants a baby to be made of me too. And, like, so do I, of course, but I have to face the very real possibility that that is not an option no matter what we do.
He said maybe we should take the money we’d have spent on the donor eggs and just do another retrieval if this next one doesn’t work since the eggs are ~$15k and so is retrieval+meds. I told him to take his time thinking about it—we probably will have some time given my suspicions about my cycle. Of course, it’s his life too, so I’m not going to try to twist his arm or talk him out of something he has a bad gut feeling about.
He also said now that he’s reflecting on how weird he feels, maybe he doesn’t want to do the donor embryos as a fallback plan after all.
So, IDK. Maybe our plan will end up being just to keep saving money up and doing retrievals over and over again until we get lucky or it’s clearly too late? Move to MD where they’re covered? I guess I’ll wait to see what he says.
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For me donor embryo felt less weird because the embryo already exists, but this is so very individual. I’m like, we are a big tent family. Whatever quirks this new baby brings, our family will be richer for it.
I’m sorry you’ve hit a snag. Virtual hugs.
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