Crossing Borders

We still have the kittens. Given my allergies, our lives now involve a lot of costume changes, special baths, air purifiers, and constant hand washing as we cross the borders between kitten land and the allergen free zone. But then of course there is all that delicious purring, playing, protecting us from water bugs and the scientific fact that they are just so damn cute. Anyway, back to business.

I am heterozygous for the MTHFR gene. All the bloggers are right. There really is no way to look at that without thinking I’ve got a cursed little mothafu… well you know, gene. Thank you so much for your comments to my last post. Your questions prompted me to refer back to my lab reports. I’ve read that many people are heterozygous for this gene (some statistics state as high as 50%) but I don’t have my anti-phospholipid antibody numbers at hand nor do I know the statistical mix with my hypothyroidism. Although I have been taking vegetarian prenatal vitamins which contain 1 full gram of folate and 200 mcg of selenium for a while now, with exception of the folate, no one has ever specifically recommended any particular dosages of vitamin supplements to me. I was surprised to read on the internet how much these may be essential to managing my condition.

[This is very unusual for me. I am generally quite anal about getting all the background material on all things of interest. On parenting mulberry says that she will probably be scary mom (the-if-you-even-get-in-the-same-room-with-drugs-I-will-kill-you mom) and I'll be information mom (the-let-me give-you-a-five-part-audio-visual-series-lecture-with-a-field -trip-on-why-drugs-are-bad-for-you-mom). But I digress.]

Our last IUI try in April involved aspirin and later Lovenox and progesterone supplements. Our reproductive endocrinologist kept insisting that the best time to start Lovenox would be with a positive pregnancy test. Both mulberry and I thought that may be too late. It took a while for our doctor to agree that it wouldn’t do any harm to take the aspirin at the beginning of my cycle. After insemination our week one progesterone result number was good, therefore no supplements were recommended. The next week we had a positive pregnancy result but low progesterone levels–that is when we began the suppositories. It was a difficult few days because at the time we didn’t know which way the pregnancy was going.

Mulberry and I are a bit back to the drawing board so to speak on how to start the next cycle. I’ve read that if I tried the complete IVF myself and was successful, my condition predicates an elevated risk to possible problems in the last trimester. One is that there may ostensibly be more preeclampsia result for women like me. We still don’t know how to get sync’d up if we go the route of mulberry not taking any initial drugs and then taking my biological embryos. This weekend we are going to make a chart of all the options we are considering and send more questions to the RE on what it will take to get us there. Mulberry is patiently/impatiently ready to get started again. I want to get on with it again too. We both just want to consider more fully what may give us our best chance. The million dollar answer.