Start your engines

A belated Merry Christmas to you, blog friends!  I hope you all had wonderful holidays with turkey and eggnog and presents and awesomeness.  Sorry to leave you hanging with the drama of my last post.  Our power stayed out for just over two days after the ice storm last Saturday.  We kept popping into the house on our way to and from work to make sure things were still OK, and to deal with minor issues like water seeping out of our freezer as things defrosted.  Full power was restored Christmas Eve morning, just in time for us to pack everything up and head to the in-laws' place for the holidays.  We ate a lot, lounged around in pyjamas, and in general had a wonderful relaxing time.  Unlike many of you, there are no other kids in M's immediate family so we didn't have to deal with constant reminders of our infertility, although Skyping with my sister and niece on Christmas morning was a little hard.  Seeing some of the pictures of her little face while opening her presents...well, let's just say that it made me wish more than ever that we had our own child to spoil.

It seems like it's been a while since I've updated on actual ladyparts stuff.  Well, after a full two months of absolutely nothing happening down below, I think I would have had to have been in a coma not to notice the engines revving again.  First the hot flashes started dissipating, and somewhere around the second week of December I finally stopped having any hot flashes or night sweats at all.  Then, much to my amazement, I started getting cervical mucous.  And oh, the cervical mucous!  This shizz was beautiful.  Calling it "EWCM" doesn't do it justice, my friends.  Copious in amount, slick and slippery in texture...it was like gold.  Snotty, slimy, mutantly stretchy gold!  Never one to look a gift horse in the cervix, M and I humped like rabbits every second day until it went away.

Something else that happened this cycle that normally doesn't was ovulation pain.  In the past I might have gotten a twinge or two, but this month I was downright uncomfortable.  At one point on the day that I think I ovulated, I was walking the dog and my ovaries felt like two bowling balls jostling around in my abdomen.  It was almost like how I felt post-egg retrieval.  I have no idea if this is a good thing or a bad thing, or if it means nothing and it was just more noticeable because my system was restarting itself after two months of inertia.  Either way, I am as confident as I can be without charting or using OPKs (because I gave up on those a long time ago) that I ovulated on December 18th.

So now I'm in a two week wait.  It's something that I haven't experienced for a while, and I'd kind of forgotten how much I hate it.  I mean, let's face it, I'm not pregnant.  It would take a bloody Christmas miracle.  Not even Dr. Google can find me a single story of someone getting pregnant their first cycle off Lupron Depot.  And before you start asking, the answer is no, I'm not having any symptoms.  At least, none that aren't totally imaginary and/or explainable by a million other things.  You know, the usual.

The real concern that I have is how long my luteal phase is going to last.  This is important because my clinic is currently closed for the holidays.  It reopens on January 2nd, so if I get a period any time before New Years' Eve I can't go in for Day 3 monitoring...meaning that a January FET is not going to happen.  I'll have to wait a whole extra month to get some closure on this whole "own eggs" thing.  My normal luteal phase is long, at 17 days, which would put me safely into the new year with a period on January 4th.  Even a standard 14-day LP has my period arriving on January 1st, which is in the clear.  But as we all know, my uterus is an asshole so for the first time in the history of ever I'll probably have a 12 day LP, putting me just outside the Day 3 monitoring window.  The suspense, it never ends around here.