My February Plans

I had plans to stream-line my crazy life in February.

Here are some of the beautiful plans I had for the month.   Some of the insanity was spurred by Chinese New Year.   For CNY, you are supposed to start the new year off all clean, organized, and out with the old.

*No Facebook and that time suck
*No crap foods
*No flying.   I was going to keep away from cosmic radiation for at least 6 weeks and focus on my life without luggage all over my house.   I knew I had to be in Chicago in the beginning of March.
*Cleaning out my garage, closet, and jungle backyard.

Here is one thing I did't plan on and did not welcome:

*Another parent being diagnosed with cancer.

So, the first bunch of items are now disregarded.   My husband and I had a conversation about getting a gardner and I told him really didn't care how much it cost.

Sunday Unfunday

My dad is in the hospital coughing up blood and funkiness showing up on a CT scan.

Meanwhile, I'm 2000 miles away 2 blocks away from Super Bowl City.   I walked through it Thursday afternoon, but that was all I did as I'm not interested in standing in lines for exhibits about a sport I just don't care for or lines for way overpriced food and Budweiser products.   Being from Missouri, I'm used to people standing in line for the Budweiser products;   my sister and I used to joke that they probably have the beer piped directly into Busch stadium from the brewery.

I'm not okay with $10 grilled cheese, though.

Thursday afternoon I went to the Puppy Bowl by Animal Planet that was right outside of Super Bowl City at the Ferry Building.  Maybe someday I will post pictures, but just imagine a bunch of adorbs puppies wrastlin'.

Waiting is fun, and that is what I am doing with my dad.

Serious Conversations at the Pig Under a Roof

So serious my husband had to tweet them.

See?   These two braniacs can't stop thinking!

Can't Find My S*** (Clutter busting, part 1)

With all of the travel and chaos that has happened in the last 7 months, my house looks like it has exploded.   I still get it professionally cleaned regularly, which is necessary with my killer allergies, but the cleaners are getting to the point where they are cleaning around clutter in some areas.

It kills me.  About 5 years ago I swore off crap and went as minimalist as made sense for us.  

My favorite law of physics is the 2nd law of thermodynamics, because entropy, where a naturally  system naturally goes from organized to chaos, is applicable in all areas of life.   This includes socks in my house.

The "S***" in my title really refers to "sock" in my house as one of my dogs is a sock hoarder.   She just carries them around, which we admit is cute and call her our interior decorator, but the number of sock orphans seems to have increased exponentially in the 2 years we have had her.   Yes, yes, 95% or so of dogs' bad habits are really the humans bad habits, but she isn't harming anything (except my sanity), so it is what it is.

Socks aren't the only element of entropy.   The rest of my clothing has came along with it.   When I went minimalist, most things went, and basically all that was left was stuff that matched seamlessly that made me look like a walking bruise, i.e., most items were grey, blue, or purple.

About 2 years ago, after my 2nd failed IVF cycle, I felt I needed to stop hiding in blah clothing and at least pretend to look more like a lady.   This means no more living in t-shirts and jeans on weekends and at least casual Friday and maybe another day at work.  This is also coming from someone who would wail when her mom told her there were two days of the year I had to wear a dress two days a year, which was Christmas and Easter.

As an adult, I am okay with idea of a dress or skirt, but they also fall under "pear-shaped problems" as most dresses aren't cut right and even if they did, even when I was running 30+ miles a week, my thunder thighs rub together.   I know all women have problems buying clothing off the rack, but I really feel most items don't work for us fall-seasoned stone-fruit types.

I read decades okay that my set of genetics is fine as pear-shaped people have lower health risks.   Here's a brief verification.

So, for me, my clutter not only reflects on my mental state, it impacts my mental state.   I'm trying to use February to reset some areas of my life as I at least don't have to travel to the Midwest for family business.

Cancer is teh Suck

My mom has cancer.

The H-fam(ily) (mine) doesn't mess around with illness.   She went straight in with stage 4 metastatic breast cancer.   If you need the fancier diagnosis, it a rare cancer, since the H-fam likes that which is exclusive, called apocrine carcinoma.

For what it is worth, even after she had a PET scan showing the metastases, she still had clear mammograms.   I'm not saying that you should avoid mammograms as they are crap, but in a rare percentage, like my mom, they don't catch it.

For better or worse, her cancer is HER2 positive, which means they have something to target with chemo.   She's been through 6 rounds (a round constitutes an infusion of the professional poison once every 3 weeks) of taxotere+ Perjeta+ Herceptin.   The latter 2 are for the HER2+ component, and she will continue those 2 every 3 weeks indefinitely.   She has had 2 rounds without taxotere and is starting to feel like a human again.

My ART History, or, Never Tell Me the Odds

Yesterday I gave an overview of what goes on with reproductive technology.   Today I am going to bust out some jargon and tell you what I have been through.

Just to keep this a tad bit shorter, most cycles were a flop in terms of pregnancy, so I will  likely only note if I actually got pregnant.

I have gone to multiple clinics, but for now, I won't tell you who they are, for better or worse.   I'm in California, so like my cost of living, we will just agree that costs are high.

For the record, in IUIs they only want to see a few follicles since they can't control how many fertilize.   This is how Jon and Kate made their 8.

April 2013 IUI#1--4 mature follicles
May 2013 IUI #2--3 mature follicles

June 2013--adopted a really ugly dog named Pepper who apparently was a baby-making machine before she got snipped.   Unrelated, but pertinent as she is my warm cuddle buddy.

July 2013 IUI #3--2 mature follicles

Clearly IUI isn't working.  We set up a consult for IVF for September 2013.

October 2013--planned one last IUI--5 follicles, no babies

December 2013--first IVF cycle.   Testing in October showed that I have old lady ovaries, which wasn't revealed in early testing, so my haul is less than most.   7 eggs retrieved, 6 mature, 5 fertilized via ICSI.  2 good looking day 3 embryos transferred and one of the remaining made it to be frozen as a blastocyst.

First time ever pregnant, but it was so short I probably shouldn't have tried  blinking.   They call these chemical pregnancies.

February 2014, 9 eggs retrieved on Super Ovulation Sunday!  (I guess the rest of the US was celebrating Super Bowl Sunday, but clearly they missed the real big event).   7 were mature and 6 fertilized.   On day 3, we transferred 3 meh-looking embryos.

In good news, we got another frozen embryo to transfer.   In bad news, not only did I not get pregnant, something funky was up as my WBC was all whack-a-doodle.   Standard repetitive pregnancy lost testing didn't show any of the main offenders.

May 2014, first frozen embryos transfer cycle with the two freezer nuggets from previous cycles, and yet another chemical pregnancy.   Meh.

I qualified for a free clinical trail at another clinic.   Yes, free to me IVF.   All I had to do was inject a mystery substance into my stomach for a month after transfer and pray for the best.   For what it is worth, this class of drug was already FDA approved as safe for a completely different purpose, so it wasn't like I was expecting to look like a purple zebra or grow an extra kidney as a side effect.

July 2014 gives us fresh IVF cycle #3 with the clinical trial.  I had 10 eggs retrieved, which felt like a serious winner winner chicken dinner for the old lady ovaries, but we only had 4 fertilized.    Two were transferred on day 3, and two were frozen for a time to be determined (and in all honesty, I have still not yet determined that time).

I got pregnant for about 8 weeks this time (yay, mystery substance!)...and then had to have a d&c as my body didn't get the message it had a dead maybe-baby inside of it, also called a missed miscarriage.

That was not a fun period.   It was a would-be-boy who didn't have a number of chromosomes that are compatible with life.

November 2014--attempted IVF that was cancelled due to communication errors at the clinic.   I could ruminate on it and name drop, or I can move on and tell you they fessed up and refunded 100% of my money.   We tried a last minute IUI to at least get something out of it, but IUIs don't work for me.   That a proven fact at this point.

It hopefully goes without saying that I didn't go to that clinic again, though.

January 2015--another failed IVF cycle that was converted to an IUI due to lack of response.   At this point I am frustrated that my body is not behaving and may never again.

I took off three months from the rat-race to give my body a break from all of the insanity.   I also found a new clinic, and in April 2015, my husband bought me a rainbow unicorn.

Okay, it is *probably* not as good a unicorn, but he got a job that not only provided fertility insurance, but IVF coverage at that.  

While we were fiddling around so insurance would be okay with how fast we were going to blow through our lifetime benefits, we did one last IUI in May 2015, just in case something amazing would happen ironically.   Nothing ironic happened, but my lazy ovaries that didn't want to work 5 months before over-responded and they had to cut my meds off early to avoid a potential  E + D + 6 situation.

To quote a young Anakin Skywalker, "Yippee!"

Earlier in the year I found an IVF clinic that had a different approach to stimulating my old lady ovaries, who, for the record, are named Hazel and Agnes.  Their approach is minimal stimulation IVF (mini-IVF), so the amount of meds are similar to an IUI cycle.   The otherwise standard approach to old lady ovary stimulation is to nuke them with high doses of meds, but I think it fried my eggs, as do some other women who have found better response with mini-IVF.

The deal with mini-IVF is you probably are going to do more than one retrieval cycle with embryo freezing, as less eggs=less blastocysts=less to transfer.

Fortunately, mini-IVF made me an ovum-acheiver.

In my first mini-IVF cycle in July 2015, I had 13 eggs retrieved and 6 blastocysts frozen.   In August 2015 the 2nd mini-IVF resulted in 8 retrieved and 4 blastocyst frozen, as did number mini-IVF #3 in Dec 2015.

Go up and review that I used to have to have day 3 transfers due to fear of none making it to the blastocyst stage.

In between all of that, I had one genetically good (genetic testing is done at this clinic on my embryos) transferred on October 2015.   She didn't stick.

And that's the way it goes in the womb of doom.


Here's my IVF summary~

10 embryos transferred, 3 pregnancies, no babies or even pregnancies long enough for baby-bumps.  (Progesterone bloat...well, that's another thing.)

Of the 10 transferred, 7 were day 3 embryos, 2 were untested blastocysts (again, those day 5/6 embryos), and 1 was a genetically good blastocyst.

Currently in the freezers-

From July 2014 cycle, 2 day-3 embryos
From July 2015 cycle, 5 genetically tested blastocysts - 1 good, 4 questionable
From August 2015 cycle, 4 genetically tested blasts-1 good, 3 questionable
From December 2015 cycle, 4 biopsied and not-tested-yet blasts.

There is one more cycle that we have paid for but not gone though yet, and whatever comes from that batch gets tested with the potential ladies and gentlemen from the December cycle.

Primer to my ART History

I'm not artistic, so unfortunately, ART in my world stands for Assisted Reproductive Technology.

Pull up a chair and your beverage of choice, because here is the info you need to even begin to understand my ART history, which tells you a bit of where I am at.   For the record, through all this effort and the tens upon tens of thousands of dollars spent, I do not have any small human beings to call me "mom."

First, allow me to introduce you to some brief introduction on human reproduction.   Women are born with millions of eggs, right?   But what happens to all these guys?

Each cycle your ovaries recruit a set number of immature eggs to step their game up to be potential baby-making material.   For an average women of good baby-making age, which, for the record, is not me, they may recruit around 20 eggs per month.  In the two weeks of the cycle leading up to ovulation, a women's body produces follicle stimulating hormone (FSH) and lutenizing hormone (LH) to feed the one who usually wins the reproductive lottery and matures to be released for potential fertilizing at ovulation.   Occasionally more than one egg of the 20 or so becomes mature, and that contributes to fraternal twins.

ART provokes the ovaries to have more of those starting eggs become mature.  This can be done by either pumping LH and FSH into the women vial a needle in the gut (or their subcutaneous location of choice), taking a pill that tricks the pituitary gland to producing more of those hormones, or a combination of the two.

There are two main techniques in ART-IUI & IVF.   IUI stands for intrauterine insemination, and used to be referred to as artificial insemination.   It is also similar to turkey bastering that you may see jokingly in the media.

Sorry about putting that image in your head.

At absolutely best, IUIs only have a 15-20% success rate, but for most couples it is much lower.   It is often used first when couples do not have any discernible fertility problems that accelerate the jump to IVF.  It is also many times cheaper than IVF, so couples, fertility specialist, or, insurance providers, for the lucky few with insurance, may pursue this route first before investing the amount of a gently used Honda into IVF.

You've probably already heard the term IVF, or in vitro fertilization.   Tube tube babies is neither an accurate term or a fair one to the families going through the process.  With IVF, the women is usually hyper stimulated to mature as many eggs as possible and they are removed in a minor surgical procedure.   The eggs are then fertilized by placing each egg in a dish with a bunch of swimmers, and hopefully one of the sperm decides to get with the egg, hence the term in vitro fertilization.   Most IVF procedures in the US now use a method called ICSI instead of letting the the eggs try to woo the sperm in a petri dish and hoping for the best.   With ICSI, a winner-looking sperm is selected and injected into the egg.   ICSI has a much higher fertilization rate.

So, now we have a fertilized egg.   Congratulations!   Now what do we do with it?

Most labs will culture the embryo to either 3 days or 5 days.  Day 5 embryos are also called "blastocysts," or sometimes merely "blasts" to those in the know.

The embryologist will take a peak periodically at the embryos through their development.   For the first 3 days, a healthy embryo should be doubling its cells roughly every 24 hours.   A day 1 embryo should have 2 cells, a day 2 should have 4 cells, and the ideal day 3 embryo will have 8 cells.   On day 4, the cell division in the embryo, now called a morula for this stage only, starts to crazy accelerate, and by day 5, or sometimes 6 for the slackers, they will have many, many more cells.

For the record, the blastocyst stage lasts maybe 4-5 days, but once they reach the blast stage in a lab, they need to be transferred or frozen.  Frozen embryo transfers, in many clinics, have as a good if not better success rate than fresh transfers.

Once an embryo becomes a blast, you can pull a few cells out of the outer layer, which will become the placenta, and test to see if there are the correct number of chromosomes.   For me, this is a loaded factor that I can discuss at a later time, but an embryo that tests with the correct number of chromosomes has a higher chance of implanting and becoming a healthy baby.

Many clinics prefer to transfer blastocysts, but some will transfer day 2 or 3 embryos based on quality and quantity.

Overwhelmed yet?   Good!   Welcome to my life!   Tomorrow I will share my ART journey with you.

Star Wars Spoiler Post

About a month ago the internet was ablaze with theories on Rey's origin.  

Episode VII leaves you with either the generic impression that Luke is her father, or maybe Leia and Han are her parents.   This thought-provoking article suggests she is a descendent of Obi-Wan Kenobi.

However, I think the internet world need a reminder that, "Luke, I am your father," was ground-breaking and shockingly not expected, so I think that the revelation will be equally earth-shattering.

May I please suggest my theory?

 Rey
=

Admiral Ackbar 

+ 

A Twi'lek

Now that I put it out there, you can see the resemblance, right?

Also, why do female Twi'leks wear head covering and the males have nekkid heads?

*All these images mostly likely belong to Disney.