The 3-5

Sweet hubs and I were in a bar again.  This time in Portland, Maine, stopping through for a night of local brews on our way up to Bar Harbor.  It was my 35th birthday.  Thirty-five as in I was now officially in that next category of infertile women.  Those whom specialists deemed it necessary to put in two blastocysts to start instead of one, because of "advanced age."  Nearly two months had passed since our BFN following IVF 1.  I'd since fallen in love with the idea of a domestic private adoption.  I'd been frequenting parentprofiles.com to check the status of other couples in their search for a birth mother.  I read the "recently matched" section with excitement.  This could be us in a year or two! 

In those few weeks since the heartbreak of our failed IVF, I'd somewhat settled into the idea that I may not actually get to be pregnant.  As a coping mechanism, after two years of wanting it more than anything, I was starting to make a mental list of the cons of carrying one's own child.  Weight gain.  My aversion to the empire waist.  Nausea.  Sleep disturbances.  Cankles.  The fear that comes along with caring for and growing something so precious inside of me.  Mind you, if I'd happened to get pregnant at that time, these "cons" would have vanished. 

So we saddled up to the bar.  I'd already tossed a pint of beer all over myself in a tragically sober misfire of the hand whilst reaching for my first sip.  We'd also had our schooner tour cancelled due to the torrential downpour which soaked us as we walked from our B&B to the waterfront.  I spent a good 15 minutes crouched under the hand dryer in the ladies' room and got back in the game.  Hubs and I listed out the pros and cons of another IVF cycle versus moving straight onto adoption.  We were still a little drained from the emotions (and the $5k we spent on injectible stims) of our first cycle.  The list leaned heavily towards forgetting a second IVF.  But somehow we walked out of that bar having made the decision to give it one more shot. 

We'd already decided to take the summer off.  We had trips planned, a family wedding, our pool to enjoy, and evenings better spent on the patio of a restaurant than inside timing our next injection.  We decided we'd like to start stims in August and aim for late August/early September for retrieval/transfer.  We spoke to Dr. M, who wanted to try a lupron protocol, meaning that I'd do a daily lupron injection daily along with our stims.  He estimated a 50% chance for this cycle.  So then I did what any infertile girl does when she's trying to have a baby: I went back on birth control.