Sequel in pre-production

Well, this is happening. IVF 2: Return of the Frozen Embryos is coming soon to a theater near you.

My sonohysterogram wasn't that bad, but then, I didn't remember it being anything to write home about after my first IVF either. If you look carefully you'll see that it doesn't even appear in my writing from that time except as a brief mention in my first post. I mean, there's a little bit of cramping and what I perceived as a deep burn from inside my uterus, but a partial list of things that hurt more than a sonohysterogram would include stubbing my toe, grazing my hand against a hot teakettle, and slicing open my thumb with the blade of an open pair of scissors (all of which I've done this week. Go me.) Yes, I was completely freaking out the whole time, but that's old news.

More interesting was what the test found - my uterus is fine and dandy, but my ovaries are back to making trouble. They were so quiet for so long but it's clear now that when I stopped nursing back in August, the mini-pill alone was not enough to stop me from ovulating, and there was evidence of that on the scan- including a brand new cyst. It's on my right ovary, 4 cm, and in an interesting departure from our usually scheduled programming, may not be an endometrioma. The current theory is that it's a simple ovarian cyst common in women of reproductive age, so it may go away on its own (shrink? rupture? nobody seems to want to discuss that with me...) and the only real risk is that if its a functional cyst then it could mess with my hormones at the end of my upcoming 20 days on lupron.

Wait, what? Lupron? Already? Yes, friends, I will start it later this week. Almost one year to the day after the birth of my beloved first child, I will begin injecting myself again with drugs in an effort to give him a sibling. I thought we had more time before this whole process started again, I really did. Can I really do this again? Can I disrupt my life, my husband's life, and now my child's life by going through the same terrible process as in 2011-12? Getting this diagnosis meant choosing the best of a series of bad options for my body going forward. I hate that, basically, my kids are wrapped up in those choices. There are two separate decisionmaking processes here and in an ideal world we could tackle them separately: first, what should I do to keep my body as healthy as possible for as long as possible? And second, do we want to add another member to our family?

Our decision is to move forward with the FET in early December. It's a compromise in a lot of ways but I hope and pray that it's the beginning of the end of this whole IVF nightmare. A huge amount of questions remain unanswered - will our incredible luck hold, and will I get pregnant again? If this cycle doesn't work, will attempt another one? If this cycle does work, and we still have an embryo or two left in the freezer, will we try for yet another pregnancy? How far am I willing to go to try to reproduce before I give up, hug my child and husband tight, and wait to see what my body does next?