Plumbing updates (of all kinds)

On Thursday, I took a shower in my own home for the first time in over a week and a half.  Who knew we had been sitting on one of the most perplexing sewage problems ever encountered by the city of Toronto.

By way of quick update, two Sundays ago (June 8th) the sewer backed up in our basement while M was taking a shower.  A plumber quickly determined that there was a blockage on the city end, out past where we connected to the sewage line, resulting in an inability for water to drain from our house.  City workers had a look and agreed that yes, there was a problem on their side.  After days of assessments and measuring and figuring out how not to blow us all up by accidentally cutting into a gas line, they started digging up the street and our lawn.  Long story short, the main sewer line on our street is exceptionally shallow.  Because our house sits at the lowest point on our street, flow was actually running back from the main sewer line into our home connection.  After days of work to flush out the blockages in the main line and try to alter the angle of our home connection to achieve downward flow, the city proclaimed itself finished and began filling up the giant hole they'd dug on our lawn.

The only problem was, we still had no drainage from our house.  After calling our plumber back, we were presented with the unpalatable news that if there was still a blockage on our side of the sewer connection, we would be responsible for digging it up and clearing it.  He could do the work the next day...for the paltry sum of $13,000.  It made us sick to think of having to spend this much money (especially so close to our DEIVF cycle), but when you have no ability to use your home facilities for over a week you get desperate.  We told him to go ahead.  We would be cleaning out our "rainy day fund" and seriously impacting our ability to do future ART, but a girl's gotta be able to do a number 2 in her own house.

Except the next day, the city contractors were back on our doorstep.  After consulting with Toronto Water, they'd determined that because whatever blockage we were experiencing had been caused by backflow from the city line, it was their responsibility to clear it out.  On their dime.  At which point, despite all the stress and aggravation that we'd been through for over a week, we felt like the luckiest people alive.  

Believe it or not, this is progress.

I ended up staying home that day to allow the city access to our house if needed.  After yet more digging, the city located our line where it branched off from the sewer main.  They decided to break into the pipe to find the blockage, and when they did they found it chock full of stuff that didn't even look like sewage.  It just looked like regular dirt and silt.  They started clearing it out by shoving a hose up there, at which point I ran back inside and down to the basement to make sure they weren't sending yet more sewage gushing back into our house.  I watched as the water level in our basement drain (which had been hovering at about 2 to 3 inches below the floor) started burbling, and then all of a sudden dropped about 2 feet.  I ran upstairs and outside to tell them that whatever they had done had worked...and found about 4 city workers standing at the top of the hole, pointing down inside it and howling with laughter.  

Inside the hole, the poor guy who had been doing the work with the hose (the youngest guy on the crew, so presumably the newbie), was puking his guts up.  I don't know what the fuck came out of that pipe when he finally unblocked it, but you know it can't be good when the guy who deals with sewage on a daily basis is vomiting.  But at that point I honestly didn't much care.  If I'd been allowed to I probably would have jumped down into the cesspool and hugged him, since for the first time in ten days it looked like we were finally nearing the end of this thing.  And we still had our $13,000.  

*****

Now for my internal plumbing update!  In the midst of all the sewage insanity, my Czech clinic had given me instructions to stop my magic European birth control pills on Monday.  Thursday ended up being CD1, so I started my drug protocol the next day.  For anyone who's interested, it looks like this:

- 2 mg estrogen (Estrofem, similar to Estrace) orally three times a day (no smurf cooch!!)

- 5 mg predisone once per day (for immunosuppression)

- 100 mg anopyrin once per day (similar to baby aspirin, which I could have substituted if I had to)

I had kind of hoped that all of the anxiety and stress that I was feeling last week would have completely dissipated once the city figured out the sewage issue, but unfortunately that hasn't been the case.  While my stress level has dropped considerably, I'm still finding myself uncomfortably anxious a lot of the time.  All of my worries about donor egg are probably worthy of their own separate post, but suffice it to say that I'm far from certain that DE is going to work for us.  I'm worried we're going to discover a problem beyond poor egg quality, like that M's sperm is worse than we thought and more than partially responsible for our poor fertilization rates.  Or that I have more serious issues with my lining.  Or that it just won't work, and we won't know why.  I'm terrified of failure, because I honestly don't know if I can go through the stress and aggravation of coordinating a foreign cycle again.

As it stands, we're waiting for our donor to start her period and her stimulation protocol, which I'm hoping may have been sometime over the weekend.  We've held off booking flights and hotels because of expensive change fees if we have to shift our dates, but obviously the longer we wait the more costly flights are going to get.  I'm just really looking forward to the point where we can feel like we are headed off to a vacation in Prague.  In the meantime I've tried to take my mind off things this weekend by spending some time outdoors hiking and having a picnic with M and Buddy.  Oh yes, and by drinking copious amounts of wine.