This morning I went in to the office for my second mid-cycle ultrasound and blood test. I must have been wrong about the size of the follicles on the left side, because I saw on my chart that on Saturday there was one that I had missed. It was actually the second largest of all the follicles.

Today's ultrasound done by the RN, showed that the largest follicles had increased in size. There were still three larger ones: Right side: 18 mm, 14.5 mm Left Side: 15 mm. There were also some smaller ones that were 12 mm or smaller. The plan is to ovulate three eggs. I'll be taking Gonal F for one more night. Wednesday night I'll take the Ovidrel. Friday morning my husband and I will go in for the insemination.

As I was scheduling appointments and paying the bill, the RN came up to me and said that if I am negative for a pregnancy this month, my husband and I should schedule tests for sperm antibodies. She said that they normally do this after three failed IUIs, and my husband and I have already had four. I'm not quite sure what this all means. The doctor never spoke about this. Our plan was to do two or three inseminations with the injectables. Then the nurse said that if we were going to go right to IVF, then we wouldn't need to worry about the tests. I told her we weren't planning to do IVF right away, so we would probably need to do the tests. I don't trust this nurse. I really don't think it was her place to advise me about what tests to have done. I'll wait and see what the doctor thinks. I'll go ahead with these tests as long as they don't prevent me from having another injectables/IUI cycle next month. I assumed that sperm washing and IUI's prevented problems with antibodies, so I should probably do some reasearch on what this sperm antibodies testing entails.

In the last week, including today, I have discovered that two of my semi-infertile friends are pregnant. I say semi-fertile, because both have experienced infertility (inability to get pregnant in a year), but have had sucessful pregnancies without any medical intervention. I haven't been feeling too down during this cycle, but the news I heard today was a little hard. The hardest was that I found out that my old friend I used to teach with, whom I told all about my surgery this spring, is 18 weeks pregnant. I also found out that she had a miscarriage before this pregnancy. Was she pregnant when I talked with her? Had she recently had a miscarriage without telling me? Did I talk about miscarriages when I visited with her? There's all these questions. I'm a little upset that I opened up to her, but she didn't share much of her experiences with me. I think I'll be a little more cautious about what I share with her.

A few more days and I'll be at the boring, waiting part of my cycle. I'm not looking forward to that.