Out of My Hands and Into My . . . .

Here I sit in the dreaded 'two week wait' - the period between ovulation and when a pregnancy can be detected. I think the TWW is dreaded by most women because it's a time when nearly everything is out of your hands. The only thing you can do is wait and see what happens. (Actually, in my case that's not true. Everything may be out of my hands, but thanks to progesterone and estrogen supplementation, that's just because everything is in my vagina instead!)

My coping method for stress is to do something. Anything. So the TWW is the antithesis of how I productively deal with stress. Thus, I've used the time to do a bit of research on how this cycle has gone. And the result is that what I've found doesn't bode well for the success of my cycle.

Study after study, in the context of IVF, have found that having a progesterone level on hcg day that's over 1.5 ng/ml is correlated with extremely low clinical pregnancy rates. The hypothesis appears to be that the cause is an endometrial lining that is no longer conducive to implantation.

Hmmm. . .let's think back to my cycle. Lining, per ultrasound on injection day? Cystic patch. Progesterone level? 2.59. Well, crap.

I couldn't find any research on this topic specific to IUI/TI, so I'll hope it's less applicable here, but I know better than to expect a miracle. Time to prepare for the next cycle by asking my doctor how we manage this.