Half Full

It's not often that I feel it (even less often that I say it) but today, I feel hopeful.

My appointment this morning did not get off to a great start. I sat in the waiting room for forever watching adorable moms-to-be breeze in and out of the office because my doctor was on call and was running very late. I overheard a receptionist tell her co-worker, "Well, I'm going to get pregnant next March. I mean, I just can't get pregnant in January!" I wanted to hit her over the head with a waiting room copy of "Cookie" magazine. And when I finally made my way back to the exam rooms, my nurse seemed confused as to why I was there. I was lead to my ob/gyn's office and was left to wait. Again. An hour and a half after my scheduled appointment time, my doctor finally came in and sat down to talk to me.

It was worth the wait.

We started discussing my cycles and she looked over my charts--looking at my temps, my OPKs, our timing. She started noticing that my cycles have been quite long, that it doesn't appear that I've ovulated every cycle and that when I have, it's been fairly late. This is when I brought up my concern about PCOS-- as we discussed some of the symptoms, she seemed to think that this could be a likely culprit for why I'm not pregnant yet.

She said, "There is absolutely no reason to wait a year when you suspect something might be wrong and the length of your cycles suggests that something is off. We can wait it out and see what your body does on its own or be aggressive about it." I explained that while I'm 29, Rob is 40 and we want more than one child. We don't want to wait any longer than we have to. She completely understood. So, we discussed the next steps.

Step 1: Bloodwork. Today I had 5 vials of blood taken for testing. Even though it's CD7 (not CD3), she was confident that this bloodwork would tell her enough about what's going on. She will check my FSH, LH, Testosterone, Glucose, etc. She would also like me to come back for a Progesterone (P4) bloodtest approximately 7 dpo if I ovulate on my own this cycle. I'll continue charting to see if I have a temp shift.

Step 2: If the bloodwork comes back as she expects it to (I should get the results in a week), we're going to start with Metformin, hoping that it might cause me to ovulate regularly, and get pregnant.

Step 3: If we don't have any luck with the Metformin, after 2-3 cycles, we'll move on to Clomid (possibly taking both meds together).

I feel relieved and I feel validated-- it wasn't all in my anxiety-ridden non-pregnant head that something might be wrong. And being given this news-- it's almost like a reset button has been pushed. Today, I feel like we're starting over. Is that weird?

Instead of lamenting that we've been trying for 7 months with no results, I feel like this next cycle has the potential to be a fresh start. Yes, we were trying before, but we weren't trying with my body doing what it was supposed to have been doing all along. It's a new chance-- a better chance & maybe it'll happen for us.

Today the glass is half-full. And that feels pretty damn good.