Open letter to idiots at the supermarket

Happy weekend, fellow infertility goddesses!  It's a snowy Saturday here in Toronto, which means that people are driving like numbskulls and heading to grocery stores in droves since who knows when we'll see fresh food delivery again.  I mean, this could be it.  Society as we know it could very well be on the verge of breaking down.  I kind of almost hope it is, because that's about all I can think of that would explain the behaviour of people at the supermarket this morning.  Warning:  rant ahead.

One of the things that sucks about having a regular 9-to-5, Monday-to-Friday job (apart from the fact that I have to, you know, go to it) is that it means that a lot of my chores and errands, like grocery shopping, get done on the weekends.  I'd love to have the luxury of doing it on a Thursday morning like my mom used to, but it's just not going to happen.  My preferred time for groceries is Saturday morning.  There's lots of selection since the shelves are freshly stocked, and I get it done and out of the way so I can go on about the rest of my weekend.  Apparently a lot of people think like this, since the store always seems to be super busy around this time.  Which means it's even more important that people observe the basic etiquette rules of grocery shopping, as I shall enumerate below:

1.  Dear old people:  I understand that grocery shopping has changed a lot since your day.  Milk is no longer delivered to your doorstep in glass bottles by nice men in white coats, and you're not on a first name basis with your butcher.  I understand that some of these changes might be confusing to you.  Why are there so many kinds of mustard?  Does yogurt only come in tubes now?  Where did they put the foot ointment?  What exactly is INSIDE a Hot Pocket?  (Answer: No one knows.  Don't eat it.)  I understand that it might be difficult for you to read all the tiny print on the wall of soup cans, and that it might take you a while to choose which one of the 65 kinds of soup you actually want.  No one blames you for this.  You're old and it's loud in here.  But while you're spending an hour studying the wall of Campbell's, do me a favour and pull your cart over to the side and please get out of my way.

2.  Dear grocery store employees:  I'm sure it's no fun being paid 11 bucks an hour to put up with idiots who can't figure out that you put the coconut milk in the baking section instead of the Asian section (side note: why do you do this?).  And yeah, fuck that guy who decided he didn't want those chicken breasts and put them on the shelf with the cake mix.  Last night.  That guy's a jerk.  You're just trying to do your job.  You have to stock shelves.  The peanut butter isn't going to walk itself onto the display (and if it does, we have larger problems).  But please, instead of parking your stocking cart on a 45-degree angle in the middle of the aisle as you work, be considerate and pull it over to the side and get out of my way.

3.  Dear men:  I know, you never come here.  Your wife always does this.  But for some reason she couldn't make it here today so she gave you a list and quite possibly a small child to lug around while getting the items on said list.  But just so you know, the list is not a test.  Perhaps it's not as specific as you like (she wrote milk!  Did she mean 2%?  Skim?  Almond?  What size?  OhgodI'mgoingtofail!) but chances are she's relying on you to actually be able to remember what you haul out of the fridge and put on your cereal every day.  If you can't, just do your best.  If you bring home 2% instead of skim she's probably not going to divorce you.  And if she is, your marriage is in worse shape than you thought.  But while you're panicking and having your existential crisis about milk/your marriage, be a dear and move your goddamn cart over to the side and get the hell out of my way.

4.  Dear moms:  I'm sorry that your husband is a complete idiot and brought home 2% milk last time when you always buy skim.  I have no idea what got into him.  He should know better.  I'm sure it's no fun to have to come here week after week, screeching toddler in tow, while your husband sits on the couch playing Xbox.  You're just trying to do your best and buy healthy food for your family while simultaneously preventing your child from spilling the box of goldfish crackers you just gave him/her to stop them from crying/running away/climbing the shelves/eating dog treats.  Oh, now they want to push the cart!  How cute, they want to push the cart just like mom!  DO NOT LET THEM PUSH THE CART.  They're like tiny drunks on a power trip.  Great, now they're crying because you won't let them push the cart.  As you try to console them and/or threaten them into silence by telling them that Santa is watching, for the love of all that is good and holy move your cart to the side and get out of my motherfucking way.

As you can see, the rules of supermarket etiquette basically boil down to one thing.  Can't figure out what you're doing?  Pull over to the side so others can get by while you figure it out.  Is that really so hard?  Is it?  Really?

Hot mess

I'm here, friends!  Don't send out the search party just yet!

I've been a bit of an absent blogger/commenter lately.  I'm blaming it on the fact that I've just gotten over my third cold in the last month.  You'd swear I was out licking subway poles or something, rather than enjoying the otherwise healthiest year of my life.  I had a smallish head cold at the start of November that went away pretty quickly, then another one two weeks later that was a bit worse but still survivable.  No time off work required, and I even managed to keep up with my workout schedule.

Then my body said FUCK YOU.  It started last Wednesday when I just could not clear my throat.  I felt that annoying post-nasal drip tickle where you can feel mucous in your throat, but no matter how much I coughed it wouldn't go away.  By Wednesday evening I had a headache, and Thursday I woke up with a fever.  Great, I thought, my colds have morphed into pneumonia.  I ended up going in to work regardless because Thursday and Friday were training days on a new piece of software that is going to be very important for my job and I didn't want to miss it.  Plus my doctor is near my office so I managed to squeeze in an appointment.  I'm not normally one to go to the doctor for a little sneeze and cough, but a whole month of it plus a fever had me a little worried and a lot annoyed.

The good news is that it was just another cold.  The bad news is that it was a lot worse than the other ones, and I ended up flat on my back on the couch until Sunday.  I may have missed my second day of training at work, but I still managed to learn a few things.

a.  When people say animals know when you are feeling bad, they are lying.  Buddy didn't give a royal crap that I felt like shit.  Instead of cuddling on the couch with me he stayed upstairs most of the time on his giant new dog bed that we got at a beagle rescue fundraiser a few weeks ago.  Giant dog bed > sniffling feverish lady.  Dog math.

b.  I am a terrible housekeeper.  It's easy to convince myself otherwise when I get home after dark every weekday (gotta love those short winter days), but when lying on the couch in full daylight my slacking in the area of dusting/sweeping was patently obvious.  I don't know how normal people keep their houses clean.  I would have to dust and sweep every day.  Are there people out there who actually do this? 

c.  Daytime TV sucks.  Hard.  Seriously, is Dr. Oz a quack?  He seems like a quack.  QUACK!!

Anyway, you'll all be pleased to know that I'm now recovered and seriously hoping my husband doesn't come down with it, because we all know what giant babies men are when they're sick.

In ladyparts news, this week marks 7 weeks since my last Lupron shot.  I had been starting to despair that my cycles would return on their own, since up until I got sick I was still having the occasional hot flash/night sweat.  After I got sick my fever made me feel like I was in a constant state of hot flash, so that both sucked and made it hard to know what was going on.  But this week I've now gone three days with no heat waves.  AND this morning I had...gasp!...actual cervical mucous!!  It's been drier than the Sahara down there since Lupron, so I really hoped that once my estrogen levels started rising I'd notice something that would let me know what was going on.  Soooo...I'm thinking this means the engines are revving again.  Of course this still means a period is a couple of weeks away, but at least things may be happening.  The biggest issue now is that M is going to be gone on a business trip for the middle two weeks of January, which could be exactly when my FET is scheduled depending on what happens with my period.  Figures, right?  I haven't decided what I'll do at that point, whether we'll wait another month so he can be here or just do it and get it over with.  But it'll be hard to get my bed rest with a dog to walk and no one home to feed me, so that may dictate.  Typical AF, right?  That bitch has the worst timing.

1st Blogiversary / 100th post

Yeah, I may have tweaked my posting schedule a little bit when I realized I was close to having my 100th post fall on my one-year blog anniversary.  So sue me.  I like the symmetry of it.

When I started my blog, we were gearing up for IVF #2 after our first was cancelled due to poor response.  I was beginning to realize that we were probably going to be in this for the long haul, and that getting through it was going to take a lot more support than I'd anticipated.  My endless infertility-related Googling had already led me to a couple of blogs where I'd been lurking, and I started to think that maybe I should just drop the pretense and admit that, since I was apparently already a member of this crappy club anyway, I wanted to be friends with the cool kids.  To do that, I'd need a blog of my own.  So on a chilly Saturday morning I hunkered down with my laptop, found a pretty background, and wrote my first post.

I also think I had a bit of a ridiculous notion that if I started my own blog, I'd get pregnant.  After all, it certainly seemed to me like I came across an awful lot of older blogs that had gone defunct after the blogger had a baby.  Perhaps it worked a bit like reverse psychology?  Start a blog to connect with other infertiles, and that would be the exact time that my body would decide to cooperate by making a baby.  If only it worked that way.

And yet, as I was flipping through my blog reader the other day, I realized that fully 40% of the infertility blogs that I subscribe to are either now pregnant or parenting (yeah, I did math!).  It's something I hadn't thought about when I started making blog-friends and getting so invested in others' stories.  That eventually they would move on, and I might not.  Some days, when I read about yet another BFP, I feel like a kid who's been left behind in school, with all of my classmates graduating to bigger and better things while I sit here, doomed to repeat the year all over again.

Please don't get me wrong.  I'm definitely happy for those of you who have had your babies or are on your way to that, and I hope nothing but good things for your pregnancies.  But it's an odd irony of infertility blogging that you eventually end up reading/hearing/knowing more pregnant people than you ever would in real life!  And yes, it's different...except when it's not.  Some days I'm feeling good and it's easy for me to chime in and comment on a pregnancy-related post.  Then there's the others, when I'm feeling low or I'm reading a post that's asking for advice on diaper genies or cracked nipples, and I find that I just have nothing to say.  That's not my world.  My world is still follicles and stims, blastocysts and CD1s.  I know no one blames me when I don't have it in me to comment on pregnancy stuff...but I at least wanted you all to know that I wish I could.

When I look back at my first blog post, what I'm struck by the most is my first comment.  The lovely Tutti, who no longer blogs, wrote the following:

I am *so* glad you are here! We've all lurked. All wondered if we should join the club. All been afraid to make the plunge. I don't make promises often (like you said, no crystal ball) but I PROMISE you that you will never regret having this blog. The support and love you will receive and give is something that you cannot get anywhere else. Welcome m'dear.

How right she was.  Thank you all.

Limbo

When I first started reading infertility blogs, I remember looking at bloggers' TTC timelines and wondering what the hell was going on with all the down time.  There seemed to be such huge gaps between various tests and treatment cycles, on top of the unfathomable intentional breaks that people seemed to be taking.  WTF? I wondered.  If you wanna get pregnant, just get on with it already!

Oh, how naive I was!  I didn't realize just how much waiting is involved in this whole process.  Doing the math, I've calculated that we've only been actively trying to get pregnant for three months out of this whole year.  An IVF cycle in January, an FET in March, and another IVF in September.  That's it.  That's all we've been able to do.  The rest of the time has been waiting for cycles to start (February), having an endometrial function test done (April), giving DHEA supplements time to work (May to August), and now doing Lupron treatment to fix my lining (October - present).  That's a whole helluva lot of waiting.

 

You look like I feel, baby.

This week marked 5 weeks since my last Lupron shot.  My RE said my period should return within 6 to 8 weeks.  Soooo...AF could be here next week.  Or it might be three more weeks.  Or my body could be totally whacked and need a boost to re-start.  I have no idea.  All I can do is sit here and be impatient, because I really really just want to get this over with.  I want to know if I'm going to have my own baby, or if I'm going to be trying to have someone else's.  

Then there's the dread.  I've come to learn that it's typical when you've had a few IVF failures.  Lately it's taken the form of me being unable to sleep while I worry about having a disabled child.  My thought process goes like this: I have crappy eggs.  Older women have a higher percentage of chromosomally abnormal eggs.  If you're over 40, close to 90% of your eggs could be abnormal.  I'm closing in on 38, but my ovarian reserve was assessed to be that of a 43-year old.  So where do I fall on the abnormal egg scale?  We've only ever had one embryo, so we haven't ever bothered to do pre-implantation genetic screening (PGS) since it's not like we have options of which one to transfer.  I suppose if we were made of money we'd do the testing anyway and wouldn't transfer anything if our one embryo came back abnormal.  Since we're not, we're going to put it in and take the chance.  But I really don't want to bulk up my infertility resume by adding a miscarriage.  And the prospect of a disabled child is daunting.

Both M and I have one cousin each with rare chromosomal disabilities.  Neither one of them is hereditary (that we know of) so our RE wasn't worried about it being an issue for us.  I bring it up only because both of us have watched our extended families dealing with the many challenges that come with having a child who will essentially never grow up, and who will need some form of care for the rest of their lives.  While our cousins have enriched our families' lives in wonderful ways, I can't help but wonder whether they would ever have existed if they had been IVF embryos with abnormal PGS results.  Or if the technologies had been available at the time, would our aunts have chosen to terminate their pregnancies knowing the many health problems their children would have to endure?  It's a fraught question and I quite honestly don't know how I would answer it myself.  What I do know is that I would have a very difficult time even thinking about terminating such a hard-won pregnancy, but depending on the severity of the disability it might be a very sad necessity.  In the case of a milder disability, what would we do?  How would we manage?  We don't have family living close by, so we'd largely be dealing with things ourselves.  And since this would likely be our only child, there'd be no sibling left to take over for us when we're gone.  Is it fair to place this burden on my extended family?  Or worse yet, have our child end up in the care of the state?

This is what goes through my head while I'm tossing and turning at 3am.  And yeah, I know I'm getting way ahead of myself.  Our embryo might not even survive the thaw.  Which would be equally shitty in a different way.  Or, if we wanna go waaaaaay out there, it could implant and be perfectly healthy and I could go on to have a totally uneventful pregnancy and delivery.  I guess it's just that, after so much disappointment, it's really hard to imagine that we'd be lucky enough to finally have such a positive outcome.

Does not compute

You guys are not gonna freaking believe this.

Remember when I blogged about my high school friend Calla, whom I'd suspected had been struggling to conceive and yet announced her pregnancy via posting an ultrasound pic on Facebook just a few weeks ago?  

In the comments, most of you advised me to drop her from Facebook.  I didn't, only because I knew that if I did, my two best remaining friends from high school (one of whom is pregnant herself) would have to deal with the fallout drama.  I didn't want to do that to them.  So I just resolved to ignore the whole issue and go on my merry way.

Then today, I received a message from her.  Just a "hi, how are things?", but it was so out of the blue I couldn't ignore it.  I guess I'm just a glutton for punishment.  I replied.  We exchanged pleasantries.  She asked for my mailing address.  A Christmas card I'll never receive, I thought.  Then, since I couldn't avoid the obvious, I wished her congratulations on her pregnancy.  Her reply (verbatim):

It's still hard to comprehend.  I honestly didn't think it could and would never happen.  I was beginning to accept that it wouldn't.

Obviously there was no closing this can of worms.  What ensued was an hour-long texting session during which she told me that it had taken them four years to conceive.  She and her husband had never done any treatments, I suspect for financial reasons.  But her cycles were totally wonky when she came off the pill, and she said she could never figure out when she was ovulating.  She said the depression got so bad at one point that she could barely stand to be around her nieces and nephews.  But she hardly told anyone.

Of course I told her about our troubles as well.  She knew (through our remaining mutual friends) that M and I were having difficulties, but didn't know the specifics.   I gave her the Cliff's notes version, and she gave me something I totally did not expect: a sympathetic ear.  No platitudes, no "it'll happen when you least expect it", no "just relax".  Just an offer to listen whenever I needed to talk, and a heartfelt expression of hope that things would work out for us.

I still don't think I've picked my jaw up off the floor.  So much of this just does not compute with me.  Why now, after so much silence?  Why bother at all?  And having been through something similar herself, why make a pregnancy announcement like that?  One that she must have experienced herself when she was still on the other side, and known how hurtful it could be?

 

I still haven't quite decided how I feel about it all.  It's a totally weird mish-mash of emotions.  It's nice that she reached out.  I doubt I'll end up talking to her much further about it, but the gesture is appreciated.  And then there's the inevitable pity party.  Of course she can reach out now.  She's all but past this.  She got lucky.  I haven't.  And I don't know if I ever will.  As much as it felt good to talk to someone I know about this stuff, I ended up crying as I texted her and relived all the disappointment.  The loneliness and isolation.  The fear that I'll never see the end of it.  

I guess more than anything, I'm just confused by it all.  Seems par for the course for our relationship, really.

Canadian ART law: Saving us from pig-babies since 2004

A few months ago I alluded to the fact that M and I had settled on a plan for moving forward if our upcoming FET fails.  It's probably obvious to most of you that this plan involves donor eggs.  What may not be so obvious is that for a long time, we didn't think that donor eggs were an option for us at all.  That's because Canada has what are probably the most absurd laws ever to be crafted regarding assisted reproductive technology (ART), apparently written after someone watched Gattaca or Species one too many times and decided they absolutely had to protect the Canadian people from the horrible future that awaited them if ART practitioners were allowed to run amok.  Since I'm a former lawyer with too much time on my hands, I decided to do a little dissecting and illustrate the sheer bullshittery that us poor northern infertiles are dealing with up here.

I'll start by saying that the principles behind the Assisted Human Reproduction Act are actually pretty reasonable.  They're mentioned right up front, and include wonderful goals like ensuring the health of children born through ART, preventing discrimination in the provision of ART services, and protecting the health and well-being of women whom the law acknowledges are "more directly and significantly affected" by ART than men.  Sounds good so far, right?  We can all get on board with that!  Let's set up a framework to make sure that all those great things happen!

Or...not.  Instead we could just write a list of all the things that you're not allowed to do.   Let's look at a selection of prohibitions from Section 5, which states that no one shall: 

• create a human clone by using any technique - That's cool.  People aren't sheep.  And heaven knows the last thing we need is another Kim Kardashian. 
• create an in vitro embryo for any purpose other than creating a human being or improving or providing instruction in assisted reproduction procedures - Also fair.  No making embryos for shits and giggles.  But embryologists gotta learn somewhere, so they get a pass.
• maintain an embryo outside the body of a female person after the fourteenth day of its development following fertilization or creation, excluding any time during which its development has been suspended - Wait, what??  Embryos can make it to Day 14 in the lab???  Well then how come none of mine can make it to bloody Day 5??? 
• perform any procedure or provide, prescribe or administer any thing that would ensure or increase the probability that an embryo will be of a particular sex, or that would identify the sex of an in vitro embryo - So gender selection is out?  I don't personally care as I think most infertiles will take what we can get, but there are some cultures out there that have an unfortunate tendency to abort/kill female fetuses/children.  This raises an interesting debate about whether allowing gender selection caters to that discriminatory mindset, or prevents a bigger tragedy down the road.  I don't have the answer to this one.
• alter the genome of a cell of a human being or in vitro embryo such that the alteration is capable of being transmitted to descendants - Ah yes, the Gattaca scenario.  Humans aren't to be bred like dogs.  Pathetic that this has to be legislated, but it's a slippery slope.  It starts with someone wanting a blond kid, and doesn't end until there's a race of super-intelligent white supremacists ruling the natural-borns with an iron fist.  Because movies. 
• transplant a sperm, ovum, embryo or foetus of a non-human life form into a human being - OK wait, this just got weird.  Who would do this?  What female is volunteering to give birth to a gorilla baby?  Good God, there are people who would actually do that for money.  I hate people.
• for the purpose of creating a human being, make use of any human reproductive material or an in vitro embryo that is or was transplanted into a non-human life form - So gorillas aren't allowed to birth human babies either.  At least that's fair.  It's a two-way street, gorillas. 
• create a hybrid for the purpose of reproduction, or transplant a hybrid into either a human being or a non-human life form - A hybrid?  Like a pig-baby?  So you're telling me that pig-babies are out, then?

 

Poor pig-baby.  You'll never exist.  At least not in Canada.

All joking aside, once you get past the prohibitions on pig-babies and birthing gorilla babies (or having a gorilla birth your baby, I don't care, you can't do it so stop asking), you get to the really stupid stuff.  As in, this:

7. (1) No person shall purchase, offer to purchase or advertise for the purchase of sperm or ova from a donor or a person acting on behalf of a donor.

Soooo....yeah.  There's that.  Basically, what the Canadian government is trying to do here is create legislation in support of another one of their main principles, which states that "trade in the reproductive capabilities of women and men and the exploitation of children, women and men for commercial ends raise health and ethical concerns that justify their prohibition".  Which, yeah, OK.  No one wants anyone to be exploited.  But I think we can all agree that there's a huge difference between having a warehouse full of illegal immigrants undergoing egg retrieval after egg retrieval for the financial gain of their underground egg-lord, and being able to pay a willing donor a couple thousand dollars for the pain and suffering of undergoing an egg donation cycle.  As it currently stands, an infertile couple can only compensate a donor for her out-of-pocket expenses.

Sure, yeah, I'll spend several weeks injecting myself with mood-altering hormones, waking up early to have my vag probed, and undergoing a surgical procedure involving a giant needle poking into my lady-bits.  That'll be $62.00 for subway fare.  Thanks!  Clearly, no one involved in drafting the legislation has ever undergone an IVF treatment.  Lucky them.

What probably bugs me the most about this is that, when writing the Assisted Human Reproduction Act in 2004, the Canadian government had the chance to do things right.  They could have instituted a set of controls on egg donation designed to ensure that no one is exploited while still making egg donation a viable option for couples struggling with infertility.  They could have placed a monetary limit on donor compensation, making it less likely that desperate donors would put themselves in harm's way out of financial need or that recipient couples would offer ridiculous sums of money to encourage donors in financial straits.  They could have put a system in place to ensure egg donor health, so that donors can't donate more than a specified number of times per year, or clinics can't put donor health at risk by attempting to retrieve more than a certain number of eggs per cycle.

But no.  Instead, we have the current system which basically outlaws donor egg completely, unless you're able to find a completely altruistic donor.  In my case that would have been my sister, up until she started having her own fertility problems about a year ago.  The other alternative is to go online to the underground marketplace of donors offering their services on fertility message boards or Craigslist.  And yes, both things exist.  I wasn't even searching for them and I found them while researching donor egg options.  Which means that the Canadian government has essentially created the very problem that the legislation was attempting to prevent in the first place.  Way to go, guys.  Stellar job.

As a result, if we want to do donor egg we won't be doing it in this country.  I don't have anyone who can give me eggs for free, and I'm not willing to wade into the black market to buy some.  We had initially ruled out donor egg entirely, based on the exorbitant prices that I was finding for clinics in the US.  But then a co-worker told me about another colleague who did donor egg in Europe, and I started researching.  And donor egg became an option again.  We haven't settled on a clinic yet and we're still in the very preliminary stages of figuring it all out, but at least we have the comfort of knowing that our journey won't necessarily end if this FET fails.  Which is enough to keep me going for now.

The Flaming Infertile

My metamorphosis as an infertile superhero continues.  First, I discovered that my vagina had super-strength.  (Incidentally, "super vagina" is one of the most commonly searched terms that brings people to my page.  That, and some variation of a pet eating DHEA.  I had no idea it was that common a problem!)

Anyway, about three weeks ago I received my second Lupron Depot shot.  Up until then I'd been lucky and hadn't really had any of the side effects that everyone warns you about, like headaches and moodiness and joint pain.  But that changed after the second shot.  Like Dr. Bruce Banner getting dosed by gamma rays and turning into The Incredible Hulk, my Lupron shot has turned me into...

The Flaming Infertile!

This is what my super alter-ego looks like in my imagination.  What a nice rack I've got!

That's right, I've been gifted with the superpower of bursting into flame.  That is, hot flashes.  Although, like The Hulk, I can't really control my powers so well at the moment.  I know because I tried.  I was a bit chilly while I was waiting for my morning train last week, so I actually willed myself to have a hot flash.  It didn't work.  But when they do come, boy howdy!  Roasty toasty bizness up in here!

In all honesty, I actually think I've been pretty lucky in that my hot flashes are fairly mild and they go away fast.  I feel an initial flush in my face, kind of like I just got embarrassed and am blushing (although I've had M watch me when I feel one coming on and he tells me I don't actually get red, I just feel like I do).  Then the heat drops from my face into my upper torso, and I feel like there's a little furnace burning inside my chest and back area.  If I'm home I can pop a few buttons and fan myself, but at work I can't do much but lean forward, since sitting against the cushioned back of my office chair feels like I'm leaning against a black car on a summer day.  Leaning forward at least gets the air to circulate a little.  Within a minute or so, a fine sheen of sweat pops out (again, I'm lucky in that it's not really noticeable) and then...it's all over.  The air cools me, I give my damp nose and upper lip a little wipe and it's done. 

What my hot flashes lack in intensity, they make up for in frequency.  It's nothing for me to have a few of these episodes per hour.  Which is particularly annoying at night, as I tend to wake when it's coming on, throw off the blankets, then cover up again as the sweat dries and I get cold.  I asked my mom what her hot flashes were like during menopause, since I really didn't feel like mine are that bad and I wondered if maybe it had something to do with the fact that mine are medically induced rather than natural.  But Mom said that hers were much the same as mine, so maybe I've actually won the genetic lottery for a change and won't have a crazy menopause to deal with.  

So now it's just a waiting game until my cycle starts back up.  My RE estimated 6 to 8 weeks after the second shot, which gives me a period just before Christmas, but given my past history (my period didn't come back on its own for a year after I stopped the pill) I'm a little worried I might need medical intervention to bring my cycles back again.  Just have to wait and see, I guess.  

In the meantime, I'm continuing to work on developing my superhero costume and figuring out how to explain to my boss why I'm wearing a cape and a mask in the office...