Better than Amazon Prime

I just got an email from the shipping company that The frizzle has been delivered to my clinic.  Now, I am sure that they have not opened the tank and checked everything out yet, but I cannot believe this thing has actually made it to California!  After so much stress, it is probably here.  First milestone.  Of course, it still has to thaw, and stick, and all of that.  But, one day at a time, right?

We used a company called Cryoport to ship it, and it cost a bloody fortune, but they were excellent.  It’s worth the money.  (No commercial here – but if you need to know about shipping an embryo, maybe this will be useful.   Because, it’s not like there’s a ton of information out there about who to call to ship a frozen embryo.)  So, Cryoport provides the cryotank/nitrogen, coordinates with both clinics on pick up and delivery dates, arranges all of the shipments/labels, makes calls to follow up if things haven’t happened when they are supposed to, and they work directly with the embryologists and their teams.  I was pissy about spending the money at first, but once I had all of the issues with this process and Cryoport was completely reliable and proactive, I was glad I went with them.  I got email updates for every leg of The Frizzle’s trip – every pick up and delivery.  I could track The Frizzle and know where it was and scheduled/actual delivery times.  And once the shipping clinic got it together and got everything done they needed to do – The Frizzle was delivered to my clinic overnight.

Now I await the call from my embryologist that it is correct, they only shipped the one we are supposed to have, and that we’ve gotten completely past this first hurdle.  I did my first lupron injection this morning, so here’s hoping everything is as it should be!

Well

Well, I’ll be damned.  The Frizzle shipped.  And just like that, my cortisol levels have returned to normal.

Final PersonalTrainerFood.com Review

I mentioned a few posts ago that I have lost 45 pounds so far this year, and several posts before that I was reviewing Personal Trainer Foods.  So, I thought it appropriate at this point to synthesize my experience with the food and my weight loss.  (Also, to distract myself from the glaring reality that travel and storage plans for The Frizzle have not yet been finalized.  It was supposed to ship from Boston today, but it didn’t.  No one at the Boston clinic has returned calls from either my clinic or the shipping company.  And The Frizzle is not on the way here and no one can seem to tell me anything about it.)

So, back to the subject at hand.  I placed one 30 Day worth of food order from Personal Trainer Foods, in April of this year.  If you open my freezer today, you will still find most of the food there.  I don’t have the heart to throw it away, and I don’t have the stomach to eat it.  I threw away anything red meat.  Everything I tried that was red meat was just completely inedible – brisket, fajita meat, etc.  Done – in the trash. And I threw away a lot of the vegetables.  I like my vegetables overcooked and soft – that’s how I cook them.  But these were grossly mushy when heated.  The green beans, though, are a notable exception.  The green beans are good.  And despite the Personal Trainer Food money back guarantee, you have to tell them within a very short number of days from receiving the food if you don’t like it in order to get a refund.  There’s no time to try one of everything if you have a good assortment of items within that window.

Here’s what Personal Trainer Foods did for me:  every time I set my mind to being on a strict eating plan, I forced myself to eat the Personal trainer Foods for the first two days.  They are so gross, that it helped motivate me to cook healthy and tasty food on my own.  And those two days help reduce my appetite and sugar cravings.  So, by going through that process every time I “fell off the wagon”, I developed a plan that works for me.  I can cook my own food – which is fresh and delicious, and even though I have to make time to do it, I TRULY APPRECIATE being able to eat healthy tasty food.  And every 2 weeks, I give myself one day off and eat whatever food it is that has been calling to me – pizza, Thai, ice cream – whatever I want.  And the next day, I go back to my own cooked, healthy, tasty meals.  And I don’t need to use the Personal Trainer Foods as a crutch anymore.

Now I just have to figure out what to do with the freezer full of food I have that I just am not going to eat.  I actually think I keep it there as a little mental reminder to stick with the plan I have developed or I’ll have to eat that stuff again.  We all have the little things that motivate us, right?

An Embryo by Any Other Name…

Our embryo travel crisis is not over yet, but I am trying to remain calm.  I mean, I don’t have much choice or control over what’s happening, so it isn’t doing me much good to panic.  It did totally take the wind out of me today, though.

And against my better judgment, I have named the embryo because I hate calling it “the embryo”.  It shall henceforth be referred to as The Frizzle.  I think the name is un-namelike enough that if this doesn’t work, the fact that it had a name won’t be a big emotional thing.

Embryo in Travel Crisis

OMG – so maybe my anxiety dream was right on time.  I got a call from my clinic this morning saying that they do not have all of the paperwork they need to receive the embryo, nor did they confirm they could receive the embryo on the scheduled delivery date.  And if the embryo is shipped as scheduled, they will have to reject it.

BUT, the shipping tank has already been delivered to the clinic that has the embryo and they are supposed to ship it tomorrow.  So, I called the donor’s clinic to see if they can fax over the necessary paperwork.  Then I called the shipping company to find out why the shipment was scheduled if no one had confirmed receipt with my clinic.  Apparently someone at my clinic DID confirm they could receive it on that date.  And there was miscommunication between the two clinics on what paperwork still needed to be transferred.

Thankfully people are willing to jump quickly on this – maybe they could hear the tears in my eyes over the phone.  Because I am panicking a little bit.  Or a lot.  Take your pick.

Just a Little Anxiety….

First off, I have lost 45 pounds this year.  BAM!  Party for me!

Second, we are on our way to frozen embryo transfer.  Our donated embryo from Boston is days away from reaching it’s new cryo-tank home in California.  It should be here within the week. That’s not exactly step one, there have been a LOT of steps to get to that point.  But, it’s a big milestone in this process.  I’ve been super relaxed and focused on other things, which is a great mental approach to this all.  I am thoroughly invested, but I have a more healthy attachment to the process than in the past – less desperate, more hopeful.

But, last night I could tell some anxiety started creeping in.  I dreamed that my friend sent me a picture of the embryo – the kind the clinic takes with their microscope.  And that was cool.  But then,  the dream shifted and the clinic that currently has the embryo decided to thaw it to check on it before they shipped it.  Their plan was to thaw it, check it’s viability for 24 hours, then re-vitrify it and ship it to my clinic.  But they didn’t tell us this, they just did it.  And so, out of the blue I got an email from my friends who are donating the embryo, and they said the clinic had just called and the embryo had regressed to the morula stage and was not likely to survive being re-frozen.  And then she explained using a very long equation that looked somewhat like this: 2(x-y)= 46(z-y)/(x-z)*10<46x(y+zx)  and on and on for like 7 full lines.  I could not understand, and didn’t much care, about the math-iness of it.  All I cared about was no more embryo because some dumb ass decided to thaw it when they shouldn’t have.  My friend felt bad and wished the clinic had told her they were going to do it, too, so she could have stopped them.  And then I woke up.   So, yes, I suppose underneath my collected outer demeanor, I have a nervous streak building about this.

I’m already in the process of prepping my body for the transfer.  I have had a batch of bloodwork, a saline contrast ultrasound to make sure my uterus looks pretty enough, and an endometrial scratching procedure.  I wasn’t actually prepared to have that done even though I asked for it, because the most recent information I had was that the doctor doesn’t do that procedure because he doesn’t think there is enough science behind it.  I knew my nurse was advocating for me though, and that she had done them before with another doctor in the practice, I just didn’t know it had been resolved.  So, both were done – and the saline contrast ultrasound was just a little pinchy, but otherwise just fine.  The scratching, however, that one hurt.  I’ll take “Things I Don’t Want to Hear My RE say for $1,000, please”  – “This catheter is thicker and more rigid than the ones we usually use for other procedures and it’s getting stuck on the ridges of your cervix when I try to push it in.”  Yeah, I could feel all of that.  I did need to go home and take a pain pill and sleep it off – it left me not feeling so great. But, it’s over and I’m fine.  I’ve never done PIO shots, and I am going to do them this cycle – I’m guessing they are going to be WAY worse than the scratching was.

At the RE office there were many jokes by the nurses about the baby being born with a Boston accent and a Red Sox jersey… I’ve been through too much in the past to let myself actually think of this as actually being a baby at some point, so that was a little mentally jarring.   I mean, I know that’s the desired outcome here, but we still have miles to go before we get there, and I haven’t been able to make it through all of those miles in the past and get one of these to actually turn into a baby, so I’m hesitant.  And self protective.  And I don’t count my chickens…errrr, frozen embryos…before they hatch.  Or something like that.