Went in to the RE yesterday so they could check my follicular development and decide when to trigger and do the IUI. I did the usual routine – go in, take my pants off, don the paper sheet, lay down on the table, put my legs in the stirrups. In goes the dildocam, up goes my blood pressure…

No follicles on the right. Not a huge surprise as my right ovary seems to be the slacker. The doctor moves over to the left ovary and then is quiet for a while. Then she points out a shape on the screen and tells me that there’s something odd – it doesn’t look quite like a follicle but it doesn’t look quite like a corpus luteum (the follicle after ovulation) either. And look, she says, there’s another one. And my uterine lining is almost 11, which apparently is as peachy as can be. She wants to get my progesterone level and see what’s up with my hormones, but she thinks I might have recently ovulated.  Like VERY recently. So today I get a call from the nurse and she tells me that my progesterone level was 3. M’kay. What does that mean? She says that the doctor thought I had ovulated super super recently, like so much so that the process wasn’t quite finished when I was having my dildocam date. She also asked if we had been BD’ing every other day like good little patients. I assured her we had.

I have some thoughts about this.

1. I had 2 follicles. WTF? That’s sweet! On the strongest fertility drugs available to mankind I made 3 mature follicles (and 2 immature ones) and on Clomid – 2 small pills a night for 5 nights and no shots not-even-one-single-one – I made 2 mature follicles. 1/1000 the trouble (and $) and 2/3 the results. This, I think, is good news.
2. I ovulated on Day 13. That’s also awesome as I usually ovulate on CD 9-10. I don’t know if the Clomid delays ovulation (it must, right?) but I feel like those few extra days could give my eggs the chance they need to mature. And who knows? Maybe all of these supplements I’m taking have improved my follicular environment. And I was worried that the Clomid might thin my uterine lining but I guess that’s not a problem.

So now I’m back to unrealistic hope. Here’s the hope part – 2 eggs instead of one. 13 days instead of 9. Maybe better egg quality from the supplements. Here’s the realistic part – I seem to ovulate every month on my own and have never been pregnant. Why should 1 additional egg make any difference?  It takes a long time for the supplements to work (if they work at all) and I’ve only been taking them for a month or so.

And also….I am not the lucky one. If this process has taught me anything it’s that I am not the exception. In fact, I’m usually the worst case scenario. It seems highly unlikely that I’m going to be the one who, after 3 (but really 1.5) rounds of IVF gets pregnant on Clomid. Who does that?  NO ONE.

And yet, here I am starting my 2WW routine. *sigh* I’m starting to feel like the person Einstein was talking about when he said “Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” That’s me. Insane. Or maybe masochistic. Or both. But here I am.

Hoping.