The Dog Ate My DHEA, and other stories

I feel like I've been a bad blogger lately.  I haven't been posting regularly and I'm not even really good at commenting recently.  Bear with me.  It's not that I'm in a bad place emotionally or anything, although I think we all have our good and bad days.  I just haven't felt the same urgency to vomit my emotions all over the internet now that we aren't actively cycling.  Plus there's finding the time; I can't blog from work, and when I get home there's workouts, dog walking, making dinner, cleaning up, and then hopefully some time for relaxing with mindless TV or the internet.  Some nights I'm just frankly not in the mood to spend my evening reading or writing about what's going on in my/other people's uteri.  But I love you all and I know how important the support of this community has been, so I'm definitely not going anywhere!

With that said, here's an update on my week:

First, I got my period.  It was about 4 days late, which would normally have started getting me pretty excited but for the fact that we did our FET last month so I figured my body might be a bit out of whack.  I called in my CD1 in order to get instructions for the Cadillac of all endo biopsies that I'll be doing this month, the Yale Endometrial Function Test.  They're essentially mimicking an FET cycle by putting me on Estrace for a couple of weeks, followed by some form of progesterone prior to the biopsy.  The only difference is that this time, they want me to take my Estrace vaginally.  Which, for those of you familiar with this little blue pill, is particularly lovely as it changes your cervical mucous to a psychadelic shade of blue-green.  I imagine what's happening inside my panties right now is kind of what it would look like if I'd fucked a Smurf.   

Next, I had my first pap smear in two years that did not require a colposcopy.  For those of you unfamiliar with this term, it's a biopsy of your cervix.  Yep, they be biopsyin' err'thing up in here!  (Note: much funnier if you say this in an Antoine Dodson-esque twang.)  For any of you on the fence about getting potential future daughters vaccinated against HPV, please allow me to voice my two cents on the issue.  I had my first abnormal pap waaaaaay back in 2005, due to an HPV infection.  At that point I had slept with a grand total of four people in my life, and had used condoms with all of them except in the later years of a 5-year long relationship with my university boyfriend.  When I found out that I had a sexually transmitted infection, I freaked.  FUH-REAKED.  I wasn't (overly) promiscuous, and yet here I was with an STI.  Worse, I had an STI that could cause cancer!  After a bunch of research I finally realized that I wasn't in fact a dirty slut and that an estimated 80% of women will at some point contract HPV.  But I still had to go to a specialist every six months for a checkup to make sure that the virus was clearing itself from my system and that the abnormal spots on my cervix weren't progressing.  It took two years, but by 2007 I was in the clear.  Or so I thought. 

In 2010 I had yet another pap come back abnormal.  Rather than having contracted yet another strain of HPV, my doctor seemed to think that I was one of the lucky 5% of women in whom the virus can reactivate over time.  (Cue frustration that I keep falling into the shitty 5% statistics instead of the good ones when it comes to IVF!)  So for the last two years, I've yet again been subjected to twice-yearly checkups and cervical biopsies, followed eventually by a Loop Electrical Excision Procedure (LEEP) to get rid of those stubborn abnormal cells.  Let me assure you, ladies, you don't want your daughters to have a LEEP.  While the procedure itself is relatively painless, the aroma of singed cervix is not one that anyone should have to experience.  And the discharge that you get as your cervix repairs itself from being burnt to a crisp?  Let's just say that it's watery and there's a LOT of it.  The biggest maxi-pads that you can find (the ones that stretch from your navel to the small of your back) will not do the job.  So I beg of you, all of you, to GET YOUR DAUGHTERS VACCINATED.  It's been researched.  It's safe.  HPV could be eradicated like polio if everyone gets on board with this, so why would you not?  The only conclusion I can make if you refuse to do so is that you love cancer.  Seriously.  Why else would you not get your daughter vaccinated against something that can cause cancer??  Because you must love cancer. 

Anyway, my pap results are still pending but my gyno didn't find any abnormal spots to biopsy (and this man loves cutting, so if there was something to biopsy he would have been a-snipping!) so I'm tentatively in the clear.  

Finally, as my post title indicates, Buddy got into my drugs this weekend.  Since we got him we've been baby-gating him into the kitchen when we leave the house.  It gives him more room than crating him, but there's nothing he can get at to be destructive.  But last week we started experimenting with giving him more freedom when we're out of the house, and it had been going well so far.  Mostly he just went upstairs onto our bed and napped.  Tonight, however, we apparently pushed it by leaving him alone as we went to M's parents' house for Mother's Day dinner.  Given his...er...vehement reaction to the car ride last time we took him there, we thought we were being kind by leaving him home.  But apparently he didn't agree, since we came home to a chewed up Blu-Ray disc and bottle of DHEA on the front mat when we opened the door.  It seems like he mostly just chewed the bottle until the top popped off, because when I put the capsules back inside it didn't look like much (if any) was gone.  Of course I can't be sure, so when in doubt...Google it!  Turns out that no matter what you do, some other idiot out there has done it first.  Dr. Google, Pet MD assures me that a couple of capsules of DHEA is not harmful to Buddy, although I'll be sure to keep an eye on him for acne and increased body hair.  Obviously not nearly as bad, but reminded me of this: