Tomorrow is always a new day

I don’t know how I’m going to keep getting through all the ups and downs of my cycles. The excitement and the hope and the praying for a BFP are crushed in an instant, and then two weeks later it starts all over again. I will keep trying to be positive and keep getting excited and hoping and praying because it’s all I know how to do to get through it. Unfortunately today is that day in the cycle I hit rock bottom and have to pick myself up and get ready to do it all again.

My TTC journey began in March, which is when I threw out the birth control (in my case, the Nuvaring) and began preparing my body to get pregnant. We avoided for one month, then went on our last hurrah as a couple – a nine day Southern Caribbean cruise. It was an amazing trip, and the timing actually worked out that I *thought* I would be ovulating while we were away (but that was the naïve Chef Bud that based ovulation on my period).


In St. Lucia on our cruise...







But two weeks later I had a visit from AF, so not KU yet. I didn’t worry, and I was actually happy because it seemed like my cycle was pretty regular at 30 days. Next month, step up the BD to every other day for two weeks. And again, BFN. Only this month I had some weird spotting prior to AF and was a little nervous about my cycle.

At that point I had been a regular on GP and realized that although I thought charting would make me crazy and super-anal about the process of TTC, I was actually making myself more crazy by not knowing when I ovulated and wondering all month if we were actually missing my fertile window all together. So I bought my BBT, ordered some OPK’s on the internet and got serious. I kept thinking “It’s only cycle 3…this will be my month…the OPK will tell me exactly when to have sex…”

Yet here I am on cycle 6, and today I’m almost certain it’s on to cycle 7. Charting the last 4 cycles has shown me that while I do ovulate (yay!) I start spotting around 3 DPO and start heavily spotting (enough for a tampon) around 7 DPO. AF arrives in full force at 10 DPO, giving me a 9 day luteal phase.

Luckily, once I showed my doctor my charts, he agreed that I have a LP defect. I am happy that he didn’t blow me off, and tell me to wait a year. I know that something is not right and I want to do what I have to do NOW to fix it. This past month I took clomid on cycle days 5-9. My doctor’s reasoning is that if you have a weak beginning of the cycle it will cause your cycle to break down early, hence the spotting and short LP. Unfortunately, the dosage this month didn’t change anything. Today is 7 DPO and I woke up to a toilet full of blood. I think this month is harder than the past few have been because I wanted the clomid to be the magic wand that made everything right.

I have an appointment tomorrow to talk about what next. I’m anticipating changing the clomid to 100 mg per day. I’m also going to push my doctor to test my progesterone. All my other blood work came back fine, but he didn’t test my progesterone level.

I may go home tonight and crawl under the covers and feel sorry for myself, but I will pick myself up tomorrow and put that hope back in to my heart, because I have to keep that hope to get through it. I know my time will come. It has to.