What color is my parachute?

As I prepare to start my next medicated cycle, I can’t help but ponder the stories of my fellow IF bloggers. (To those of you who don’t have PCOS, I apologize—this is going to be a very anovulatory-focused post.) I wonder whose story will most closely resemble mine?

There’s Carrie, one of the fortunate few who ovulated and conceived on her first cycle of 50mg Clomid. Now she’s just waiting to get past the first-trimester jitters. While Carrie is an inspiring story to those of you Googlers searching for “Clomid success stories,” that ship has unfortunately already sailed for me.

Sharah also ovulated on Clomid, but never got the double lines. Now, she’s trying Femara—just a few steps ahead of me.

K never responded to any oral medication. When she tried injectables, she went through a jaw-dropping 65-day stim period before finally showing some mature follicles—only to land in the hospital with OHSS and no pregnancy to show for it! She’s currently preparing for her first IVF cycle (to take advantage of all those follies next time around).

Cass, my IF blogging Yoda, also haphazardly ovulated on Clomid and Femara. She ended up going to IVF, but only because they also had a MF issue. She was fortunate enough to get pregnant with twins on IVF #1.

And Samantha never responded to anything but injectables. Just like K, they seem to put her ovaries in overdrive. She just finished IVF #3 with a cancelled transfer, and is hoping one of the upcoming FETs does the trick. I think many of us in the IF blogging community is hoping and praying that one of those frozen embryos sticks, because Samantha has gone through more than anyone should go through.

I know there are many, many more stories out there, both PCOS and otherwise, but these are just the ones that stick out to me. I feel like I’m completely separate from these stories, because I ovulated on Clomid—-but only sorta. I don’t know if ovulation on CD28 really counts. I think my body just released the egg because it was tired of holding it up, not because of any hormonal signals. So I don't really know whether to count myself as a "non-responder" to Clomid or not. An anonymous commenter recently wrote that she got pregnant on her first cycle of Femara. That's wonderful, but my next question is, "Did you try Clomid at all?" I don't think she did. I fear that because Clomid was so fickle with me, other drugs will be too. That's being pessimistic, I know, but that's where I am right now.

I guess the good part of my situation is that my “plan” is clearly defined. If Femara doesn’t bring my cycle down to about 33 days or less, I’ll suggest going back to Clomid (i.e. drug that turns me into the bitch from hell) and trying 150mg. If not, then it’s straight to IVF for me. Dr. Hot doesn’t believe in doing injectables without IVF, and after reading many of your stories, I tend to agree with him. I just hope my body makes up its mind quickly, rather than waffling back and forth, deciding to respond at random times.

For those of you who don’t have problems with ovulation, congratulations on making it all the way through this post! I’m sure you learned more about the “what ifs” of PCOS than you ever wanted to know.

Welcome to my world

For more than half of my life now, I’ve had a strong suspicion I would be an infertile. I had good reason to believe so—at age 14, when I FINALLY got my period, she visited me for two months, then she went away. Poof. Like I had never reached womanhood at all. My worried mother took me to the OB/GYN, who promptly put me on birth control pills. Only she and my mom called them “hormone pills,” so I wouldn’t tune in to the fact that I essentially had a free pass to have as much sex as I wanted. It worked. Not that I had much of a choice—I didn’t have my first kiss until I was a freshman in college.

But I was no dummy. I knew that if one does not have a period, she does not ovulate. And if she does not ovulate, she does not conceive. As life went on, I became more and more concerned about my chances of having children. I asked new doctors, and they told me not to worry about it until I was ready to start a family. There were no tests that could determine whether I was reproductively challenged. One boyfriend even broke up with me because he wasn’t sure whether I would be able to have children, and he wanted his own biological progeny (there’s a real winner for you). After that break-up, I begged my doctors for tests and got them. They put me through the standard blood tests for PCOS (polycystic ovarian syndrome), which came up negative, and told me I had nothing to worry about on that front. Ha.

It wasn’t until March of 2006, one year after marrying M (a wonderful guy who knew about my situation and wasn’t opposed to adoption, if that was what it took), that I went off the Pill for good and tested my luck. A friend who was experiencing secondary infertility became my Yoda and taught me how to temp. Lo and behold, I ovulated my first cycle, which was 40 days long. Then, nothing. I went to see a new OB that summer, who diagnosed me with PCOS (who knew it was a diagnosis of exclusion?), put me on Provera, thinking my body would trick itself into cycling normally. Nothing. That November, she put me through the traditional infertile work-up (bloodwork, HSG, etc.) and finally put me on Clomid. The short story: 1st cycle, 50 mg, didn’t make me ovulate. 2nd cycle, 100 mg, did work but I didn’t get pregnant. 3rd cycle, 100 mg, again I didn’t ovulate.

The statistics say that 80 percent of PCOS women are able to ovulate on Clomid. I’m proud and honored to be one of the unlucky 20 percent. I sought information on the Internet (gotta love the Google MD), and found a score of infertility blogs. I thought to myself, “Self, you’re a writer! Hell, you write for a living! Why shouldn’t you join this community of women bonded together by a single obsession—the desire for a child?”

And so begins my experiment. We’ll see where it leads us.