IComLeavWe

The last time we met, IComLeavWe, way back in May, I was newly pregnant and had no idea how difficult the next four months would be.

Here's an excerpt from my last ICLW post:  (I sound kind of excited, don't I?)

"I signed up for this month's ICLW right at the end of last month's close and SO MUCH has happened since then!

My first IVF was a success (so far) and I am 5 weeks 4 days pregnant.  I'm feeling tired, my boobs are sore, and I'm having some other random symptoms, but they come and go in frequency and intensity so often that I often doubt that I'm really pregnant.  Although I really have no good reason to believe I'm not.

My husband and I have were TTC for 20 months, since the middle of our Costa Rican honeymoon.  We had a chemical pregnancy last September in month 14 which spurred us to go to see an RE.

I started acupuncture in January, and have done 3 unsuccessful Clomid IUI cycles since then.  We started our first IVF with an antagonist protocol in April, had our retrieval April 26th and our transfer of 2 embryos 5 days later. 

Our first ultrasound is in 8 days and I can barely handle the wait!  I'm sure my husband thinks I'm completely crazy by now, but I guess that's part of this pregnant after infertility adventure!"

That's a pretty accurate summary of our story up until that point.

I have shared basically EVERYTHING that has happened since then which has caused my blog to get a lot more attention.  Much of it positive, but some extremely negative.  I'm not going to rehash old issues, but here is a summary of the past four months:

At our 1st ultrasound, we found out that we were pregnant with Quads after transferring 2 embryos (1 split into triplets, the other was a singleton). One of the triplets didn't progress past Week 7, so we were then pregnant with Triplets (1 set of identical twins, 1 singleton).  We decide to reduce the pregnancy to a singleton based on the risks of a triplet pregnancy and my individual risk factors.

I had only a couple of weeks that I felt "good" the entire pregnancy.

At 23 weeks I started bleeding and contracting and was admitted to the hospital.  I stayed there on Magnesium and bed rest to lessen the contractions for two weeks before my water broke.  I had contractions, sometimes extremely painful, the entire time.  After my water broke, they stopped trying to prevent labor in case of infection and I went into labor and had my son less than 24 hours later. (There was no determined cause for the bleeding or contractions.)

My son Dylan was born at 25 weeks and 3 days on October 7, 2012 - 2 weeks ago.  He's doing pretty well in the NICU and will be there quite some time.

Now I'm pumping 8 times a day, visiting Dylan twice a day, and trying to stay sane.

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Here are a few topics that I know I want to write about during ICLW:

• Single Embryo Transfer.  This is the one thing that we would have changed.
• Postpartum Emotions after having a Micropreemie
• Dylan's Birth Story
• Pumping

I have another site devoted to Dylan's progress.  If you'd like the link, you can email me.  I don't want to link it to this site.

Welcome!