How NOT to Distract Yourself after a Blastocyst Transfer

Today, a couple of the perils of working at home hit, well, home. During our last IVF in May, resting at home after the retrieval and transfer was a delightful novelty because, wow, I never get to spend this much time inside my own cozy four walls! This time, not so much a novelty. I'm usually at home anyway. So now I'm bored and stir-crazy. I've been reading, but that leads me to the second pitfall of working at home. Today, I received a package from Amazon, and I was all eager excitement in thinking that the remedy to my boredom had arrived. You know that smile on the outside of Amazon boxes? Well, that smile is a LIE, because that box did not contain the pretty pretty British version of the seventh Harry Potter book that I had to order from the UK to match the rest of my set that I started reading and collecting during a summer in England. No, that box held books that I had ordered for work. Books that are not for me. Books that will not entertain me during this interminable Monday. Alas and alack!

While I'm on the topic of things that I do not like today, let's talk about estrogen patches. My current opinion: they just might be the worst part of this whole IVF process. The shots, sure they hurt, but they are over and done with quickly. The patches? Slow torture. The large, shiny things stick and un-stick in the most ungainly way. The two that I applied last night to my stomach crinkle and buckle every time I move. They have started to peel off, and I'm still supposed to wear these two for about 28 more hours before I exchange them for new ones. I've applied butterfly bandages (the best adhesive I had on hand; note to self: buy surgical tape at Target) to their edges, and now five different sticky things are sliding around my skin and adhering to each other instead. Maybe I can find a better place to apply them, but for now they have been bothering me all day long. They even bother my unconscious! Last night, I dreamt that I had some sort of heart attack due to too many hormones coursing through my body. Some medical person told my recovering, breathless, heart-racing self that it was because I had worn two estrogen patches instead of one. "Nurse Answers told me to wear two!" I protested, only to discover that I had a new version of the patch, one that was twice the size and twice the dose of the ones that the fertility clinic had used before. So I had, in fact, overdosed on estrogen patches based on outdated instructions. That was my dream, played out in my sleeping mind within the first seven hours of wearing these silly patches. They are not my favorite.

Of course, all the book-less boredom and pestering patches will be worth it if this blastocyst takes hold and gives us good news in a week...

*By the way, what do you all think of the new font size? Before my transition to working at home, I worked on a behemoth of a desktop that had a monitor with very low resolution, so I only recently realized that I might have been making you all very squint-eyed with my type. Apologies if that was the case!