I bought a calendar for my office today. Here it is:

It’s a necessity, really. Without going into too much detail, my work is deadline-based, and if I’ve got too many deadlines approaching at once, it ends very badly for myself and the people I’m working with. As the saying goes, you can have it good, fast, or cheap–pick two. So I fill out the calendar with due dates for various projects, and I color code them: pink for proposals, green for qualifications, teal for presentations, mauve for meetings, blue for holidays, purple for appointments, and orange for personal things (birthdays, anniversaries, etc.). I really like colors.

As I flipped through the calendar, I started vaguely thinking ahead, first about the immediate future and then about later days (because that’s how we look at time, in order, unless we’re writing science fiction, in which case, everything is made up and the points don’t matter).

The immediate future is all medication, monitoring, retrievals, and (hopefully) transfers. I started my medications last night, and man, what an adventure. My computer wouldn’t turn on, and the site with injection instructions wouldn’t load on my phone, so I had to sit at Kyle’s computer with a bunch of syringes and needles and vials of medication while he messed around with my computer and made sure that Sam was sleeping comfortably. Last year, I didn’t have this problem, because I did so many IVF cycles in such a short window that I never unlearned the process of mixing medication, drawing it up, injecting it, and disposing of the waste.

This year, though, it’s been almost a year since the last time I did this, so I was sort of all thumbs. I got diluent all over the place by accidentally drawing too much air into a syringe, and then I don’t think I mixed one medication correctly. I dropped stuff all over the place, and by the time it was over, I just wanted a nap. That desire doubled about two hours later when the first hormone headache came on–not quite as bad as a migraine, but unpleasant nonetheless.

I’ve got a least another 10-12 days of this (leaning more towards 12; my doctor really likes to push me as far as she can when it comes to stims), if not another 18 (she talked about “coasting” me for a while to give eggs a better chance to develop without me developing OHSS again). At some point in there, I’ll take a trigger shot to tell my body to mature the eggs for retrieval, and 38 hours later, I’ll take a blissful nap and wake up to hopefully hear that they got a spider’s worth of mature eggs.

(I refuse to put a picture of a bunch of baby spiders on here. You’re welcome)

Assuming I don’t develop OHSS again, and assuming that those eggs are mature and good, we’ll do a transfer five days later. We’re going to transfer two embryos this time because so far, we could’ve transferred every single embryo we’ve created at once and had exactly zero children. There’s a risk of twins, which I’m not thinking about right now (dear everyone who’s like “aw, I’d love to have twins”: ARE YOU CRAZY? I’d be fine if we had twins, but I’m definitely not actively desiring that), but I don’t think that risk is very big for us. Really, we’re just hedging our bets to try and get one.

So that takes us through the middle of August. In that time, I’ve got things to keep me occupied–date nights, wedding receptions, work meetings, the usual–but it’s not too busy. I don’t feel really stressed right now, which is a big difference between this cycle and the previous several. I hope it helps.

If this cycle works, my due date would be somewhere between April 24 and April 30. I thought about that and realized that if we went as late as we did with Sam, and my due date was April 30, the baby would be born on May 4, which is auspicious.

(I’m not naming twins born on May 4 Luke and Leia, but I wish I could)

(and anyway, twins are always born early, so that wouldn’t happen)

(but can you imagine? They’d save the entire galaxy. I’d probably name them Mark and Carrie)

(like as long as I’m not giving birth in an ice cream cone, I think things will go well)

So with that in mind, I kept flipping through the calendar, doing the mom thing of jotting down birthdays, vacations, anniversaries, and appointments. All the while, I was keeping track in my mind of potentially important dates.

Assuming a retrieval date on August 4, I’d have a transfer date of August 9.

They’d do a blood pregnancy test around August 19. I’d know that day if I was pregnant or not. I’ll probably know earlier because I’m impatient and will buy a bunch of pregnancy tests, maybe at the Dollar Store, and watch my HCG levels go down from the trigger and hopefully rebound.

They’d do an ultrasound to confirm the pregnancy, tell us if there’s one or two, somewhere around the first week of September. That will be the worst week, even if the pregnancy test is positive, because that’s when I’ll be afraid that we’ll see a repeat of what happened with Finley–a slow beating heart that eventually stops and disappears into nothing.

But maybe it won’t. They’ll transfer me to Dr. Solano then, and maybe I’ll have another ultrasound, and maybe I’ll see another little chicken hawk or two bouncing around inside of me like I’m the home of Cirque du Soleil now. That’d be the beginning of October, probably. I’d have a nuchal translucency scan around then, too, and I’ll want to do one of those blood tests to make sure everyone’s chromosomally okay. Maybe we’ll find out the gender(s) then. If we have two boys, I will feel a sense of panic because that’s three boys.

(also because we have plenty of girl names in mind but zero boy names)

Late October, when we go on vacation to Texas, I’ll be at the beginning of the second trimester and feeling great. We’ll get back, and I’ll count down until the end of November, when we’ll have the anatomy scan. If we don’t do the chromosome test, that’s when we’ll find out the gender(s). Hopefully, everything will measure alright and we’ll keep trucking along.

In February, I’ll have a maternity photo shoot. February is a good time to do a maternity photo shoot at a science museum, I think. I imagine standing underneath a giant T-Rex and feeling less than planetary compared to such a gargantuan lady.

(needs more feathers, though)

The last month of pregnancy will be the worst, I’ll bet, because that’s how it was with Sam. I’ll be miserably rolling from place to place, tired and sore and cranky and ready for it to be over. And then it will be, and our family will grow again, and that will be awesome. I’ll be more prepared this time–every baby is different, but certain things are the same: the lack of sleep, the difficulty of the first couple of months, the gradual development of a routine, the way things eventually find an orbit and stay there for a while.

These dates might mean nothing, but they might mean something. We’ll see. In the meantime, it’s 200 units of Gonal F and 75 units of Menopur tonight and every night until my next monitoring on Monday.