Updates and rememberance

Okay, so our ultrasound went well. I was really worried it wouldn't, given the discomfort and especially as he zoomed in on my ovaries... they were basically just black masses of follicles. All over. Every single millimeter. The good news is that most of them aren't mature, or near mature! My biggest ones are 18.8, 17.1, and 16.7 and those are on my right, plus a ton of smaller ones. On the left I have a 13.8, 14.6, and 14.4 among the various smaller ones. Basically they exploded in a short span of time, just like last inject cycle when we conceived V.

The plan? Trigger tonight, then IUI about 36 hours later (Thursday morning). Really really hoping this goes well! With the state of my ovaries I expect a lot of pain/discomfort in the coming days.

It's easy to blow past today and focus on what's going on, because the timing of this cycle fell like this, but today is Pregnancy and Infant Loss Awareness day. I've talked about it before, I talk about it every year, I post about it on social networking sites, and at 7pm I light my candle in memory of the children we lost, my niece that passed away, and the children of my friends and family who were gone too soon.

Pregnancy and infant loss is something that we as a society don't talk about, we skirt the issue, we avoid it and cloak it in silence thinking that silence is somehow better than acknowledging it. It's not. It's isolating and it leaves us to shoulder our grief alone. My children were loved, and lost, in the blink of an eye- while I have much to celebrate today, it doesn't erase the pain of what we went through and those that we lost. It doesn't erase the physical pain, the contractions I endured alone, the trips to the ER, or the suffocating emotional grief... those are a part of my story, and if I didn't have other women there who had been there before to guide me and hold my metaphorical hand I don't know how I would have survived it. So I broke the silence, and I talk about these things no matter how uncomfortable, because someone was once there for me. And now I can be there for someone else.