Hooray!

Well, I'm one day off but I am cleared to start stims tonight. Holy cow, how did I get here??

There was so much drama with AF. I swear. But by Friday late afternoon she arrived. But then my nurse said that they only would count that as day 1 if it had started before 4 pm. Grrrrr. But then she said that if I could get my bloodwork done on Sunday morning and it was fine for suppression, then I could start up stims Sunday night. I asked if that was written in my chart so the weekend nurses would understand and she said yes. Foreshadowing....

Some time early afternoon on Saturday I spoke with on of the other nurses and she said "well why don't you just get your bloodwork done now and start stims tomorrow?" So I got all excited and started on a quest to find a lab. Hello. There are no labs that would do my bloodwork on a Saturday afternoon.

I had the brilliant idea to call Houston IVF, which is the sister clinic to CC.R.M. The very nice on call nurse said for me just to show up super early on Sunday and they'd draw the labs, handle the exchange of info, etc. I was actually glad to have a real IVF clinic handling it all rather than a lab, so I was happy.

Mr. LastChance and I got up at the crack of dawn to drive to said sister-clinic, which was way across town from where we were staying, and naturally in the opposite direction of the hospital where I would be spending the rest of Sunday, but what are you gonna do, right? We arrived at 7:30 on the dot. In the end, here's a quick rundown:

--it took 1.5 hours for me to get my blood drawn because--for the love of Gawd--they had to enter me as a new patient and they needed some stupid code that no one knew because it was the weekend.

--it cost $255 for the bloodwork. Why am I surprised?

--there was a woman in the waiting room who came in with her three little boys under the age of 4. Why the F was she at an infertility clinic? For the record, they all called her "Mom" and they were horribly behaved.

--because I was panicking over how long things were taking and how I was supposed to be at the hospital taking care of someone very important to me, I started crying. You know--the whole stress of it all just came tumbling down around me. The lab tech started hugging me and praying over me and that just made me cry harder. Then the nurse who'd helped me get everything set up started hugging me and saying she was praying for me, etc. I started blubbering about how it was my fifth and last chance at IVF and generally made an ass of myself.

Geez, if this is how I am now--pre-stims--imagine me in a few days!

--CC.R.M. weekend nurse called and left a message on my cell saying: "We got your labs and they're perfect. So start stims Monday night!" Click.

Luckily I just had to call her back and told her about my Sunday night plans and she said, "Well, if that's what your nurse said then go ahead." Yeah, no problemo there.


So ladies in the know: what are the odds CC.R.M. will let me just keep my original flight (Wednesday) and get my first stim check there, which will be after four days of stims instead of the usual three? You know, because of my stinkin' clinic schedule at my work, that would make life one million times easier...

But halleluiah--I'm starting those stims tonight. Give me that massive dose of Gonal plus some growth hormone--I'm ready.

GULP.