Wednesday morning I go in to the doctor’s office. It’s been 2 weeks since I’ve been there and that feels like a huge break!

That appointment will be my official start to IVF. Besides the standard ultrasound and blood work, I’ll be meeting with the nurse to go over the meds protocol. I have to bring 1 of everything, so that she can walk me through exactly how to prepare and give myself each of the shots. That’s pretty heavy duty. It wasn’t so long ago that I was stressed about the Gonal F shot and now I’ll be doing 3-4 different shots a day!

I’m anxious, but also ready to get this underway. Hopefully 2 weeks from now I’ll have been through the retrieval and will have had lots of good embryos for the transfer. After all these last few months of feeling like I had become an expert, I have tons of new stuff to learn.

I have a confession to make. It’s likely not a surprise to some of you that know me well, but here it goes.

I watch all shows Kardashian. I don’t necessarily watch on it’s first run, but the episodes are re-run so much, that I eventually catch it. Most of the time it’s hate watching, but I admit to liking Khloe and Kendall and to even growing to like Scott.

I take everything on the show with a grain of salt knowing that much of it is manufactured for TV and that Kris and Kim have become experts at their media personas (and making their millions). So when news came out about then Bruce Jenner’s interview with Dianne Sawyer, I was skeptical. I was one of those that thought this was just all part of their script. After watching the interview, I was swayed to believing it was real and have been swayed even further from watching I am Cait.

While the show is not without it’s superficiality, there is much to learn from the transgendered women who are educating Caitlyn and in turn the audience. Quite frankly, the idea of being trans is hard for me to grasp. I fully respect their transition; I just have a hard time understanding what it must feel like to feel trapped in the wrong body. It’s something that I can’t even imagine, so it is hard to understand. I first met a transgendered male during my time at Smith and it was confusing to me then. I’ve come a long way since then as has some of society. I’ve been taking the opportunity with this show to learn more and to expose myself to the stories of more trans women and men. I don’t think I’ll ever be able to understand what they are going through, but by hearing their stories, I feel like I’m giving respect to their journeys. If you have the opportunity, read any of Jenny Boylan’s memoirs where she tells her story.

What makes these men and women relatable is that they are not without their faults like the rest of us. Having been born trans doesn’t make them any more or less of a saint. I catch glimmers of the Kardashian attitudes when it seems that being a woman to Caitlyn means having a stylist, make up artist and hair dresser with you at all times. Having your hair in an unstyled ponytail and wearing yoga pants is not feminine enough. Those things frustrate me from a feminist perspective, but hopefully she learns as she goes. You can also see that personality wise Caitlyn is who she always was or how she came off through all those years on the Kardashian shows: somewhat selfish and not really interested in how others feel.

Caitlyn finally being ready to live her life how she is, doesn’t mean that her family members can be in the same place she is overnight. She’s had years to come to terms with who she is and being ready to come out, while the people in her life have had months to process this. I think it is unfair of her to not give them the opportunity to grieve their father and embrace the new parental figure in their life.

I know that at the end of the day it is a TV show, so I’m not going to get too critical. For what it’s worth, Caitlyn and this TV show is exposing a certain audience to knowledge that may not have been easy to come by. Whether they tune in to hate watch or to witness a potential trainwreck, they still retain some of what the other women on the show are teaching Caitlyn.

When I went to the first consult back in February, I had two options I wanted to discuss. The first was the path I ended up taking: moving forward with having a child on my own. The second was egg freezing. As the doctor talked to me about the egg freezing process, it became clear to me that it was basically IVF up through the retrieval process. At the time I decided I didn’t want to put my body through IVF and I didn’t want to go through it all alone.

I guess I made a valiant effort at avoiding IVF, but here I am. The upside is that if I end up with extra embryos, they’ll be frozen for future use.

It’s been nice to not be on clomid this month and to be giving myself somewhat of a break. With work being as stressful as it has been and me needing to travel next week, I guess timing was in my favor.

I did receive my meds, which was quite overwhelming. I feel like I have a whole pharmacy in my house.

I also made the decision on payment. After a lot of thought, I’ve decided to go with a multi package option. It was a tough choice because I felt it was being pessimistic, but at the end of the day this journey thus far has taught me that things don’t go they way you expect. Many women on the SMC forum said that even when they got pregnant on the first IVF, they never regretted paying for the multi package.

Everything is all set now for me to simply wait for September 2nd when I start stimulation. The date of the retrieval is not defined because it’s based on my response to the meds, but it’s tentatively September 13th which is the eve of Rosh Hashana. I’m hoping to kick off the new year with some miraculous news!

I feel mentally exhausted. This week has been rough. Not only have I been dealing with all my emotions on where I am in this TTC process, but work has also been high stress with long days.

The upside to being busy at work is not having too much time to think about all the other stuff. It’s still there, though, right under the surface. I also have some decisions to make and I’ve been too tired to focus on them when I come home. I just want to lay in front of the TV and think about nothing, but I need to make some quick decisions.

I am moving forward with IVF and had the nurse and financial consult on Tuesday. There are different payment options and if I want the multiple package option I need to have made a decision 2 weeks before I start stims (stimulation drugs). So the decision would have to be made by this coming Tuesday. I keep waffling back and forth. I also am applying for a program where I can get a percentage off my meds, but until it comes through, I can’t order my meds. I’ll be traveling the last week in August, so for my piece of mind would want to have everything squared away beforehand.

So there’s just all this stress with the prep, while still coming to terms with the fact that I’m even at the point of moving forward with IVF. It’s scary. I know it’s doable, but it’s scary to do this alone. I know I’m not alone in terms of family and friends, but it’s not the same as having a partner at home with you. Multiple shots a day, other pills, your mood being all over the place…

I know I need to just take it one day at a time. There’s no point in worrying about the shots now. I really want this to work. It kills me to think it might not, but I just have to keep going. I have to trust that it will…that I will somehow end up with a child.

I wish I was writing a post about the book I just finished reading or how crazy my work week has been (it has!), but instead I’m writing about how I am not pregnant.

6 months in and 5 attempts later and still not pregnant. The phrase “not pregnant” feels so heavy. It makes the loud sound of a thud in my head and in my gut.

When I started all of this, I knew realistically that I wouldn’t get pregnant on the first try, but I thought it wouldn’t take more than 2-3 tries. I was actually really worried about miscarriage. For some reason I thought it wouldn’t be hard for me to get pregnant, but I had this big fear about miscarrying and how gut wrenching that would be.

Now I just want to be pregnant. The failed attempts have been gut wrenching enough. Getting pregnant will feel like at least the first step in success, but I still can’t even fathom what a miscarriage would feel like. And I hope I never do.

I’m still processing another failed IUI, so I’m not going to go on and on. I’ll be moving on to IVF and will write more once I’ve had more time to come to terms with all of this.

Wednesday I met with the doctor to talk about next steps if I end up needing to proceed with try #6. Of course he prefaced our conversation with the hope that all of this ends up being information I won’t need to use. I hope so too, although I’ve reached the point in the TWW where one second I think I’m pregnant and the next I think I’m definitely not.

Anyway, the next step is IVF. I could continue with IUI, but the truth is that we don’t know why I’m not getting pregnant and IVF takes a lot of the variables out of the way. It seems like a smarter investment of time and money based on how I’ve responded so far.

It will obviously be a much more complex and costly process, but it raises the chances significantly. It also takes a lot of the guess work away in terms of what is it that is not working. With the injectables they will get me to produce around 10-20 eggs. They’ll monitor along the way to make sure there isn’t over-stimulation as that could actually make me really sick. Then they do the retrieval and fertilize the eggs to create embryos, and monitor them. At the point that they put the embryo back into my uterus, we know that it’s a healthy embryo. That whole natural process is something we’re not sure is currently happening on its own. There’s no way to know.

Is the sperm reaching the egg? Is it fertilizing? Is it a healthy egg and therefore starts developing into a healthy embryo? Is it making its way through the tubes to the uterus safely? Is it implanting? It’s not like I have some type of window to see what is actually happening during each of day of my TWW…I wish.

I left the doctor’s office feeling good in the sense that at least I’m ready for Plan B of TTC, but also really hoping that I don’t need it. I still have about 4-5 days left in my TWW, so I’ll have to continue to wait and see.

Just a reminder that even though I have been very open throughout this process, when I do get pregnant, I’m not going to to share it with you guys until I’m safely past the first trimester. I know it might sound weird seeing how much I’ve shared thus far, but it’s just one of those superstitions. Like I said before, you’ll be able to tell because I’ll be writing about other stuff instead of TTC, but I won’t be outwardly telling you.