The Universe’s Birthday Gifts…

Can I return them?  Seriously.  Last year, I turned thirty just a week before the symptoms of my cancer started showing.  So my gift for turning thirty was cancer.  This year, my gift for turning thirty-one and surviving nearly a year of cancer treatments?  Apparently infertility.

I started the injections for my egg harvest on Saturday, though it wasn’t without issue.  One of the injections was supposed to come with needles for me to draw the medication up.  The pharmacy did not include these syringes, which was an issue.  Holly, Dr. H’s sister and nurse, had given me her cell number if I needed anything.  When I called her, she told me to just add some extra to the other shot and we would make up the two shots I missed at the end when it was more important as it developed the follicles into eggs.

Which, won’t be necessary for me.

After five days of multiple injections into my stomach, which was no easy tasks as I love giving injections but not to myself, I went to Dr. H today all excited.  I made sure that my bowels were empty so they wouldn’t mess with the sonogram, prayed the mass he saw last time wasn’t there this time and that we would see a ton of eggs.  What he found, instead, was still a mass, a thin uterine lining (which should have thickened from the shots) and no ovaries or eggs.  He isn’t sure if the ovaries have been hit by the chemo despite the Lupron or if something else is causing it, but there will be no egg harvest.

Because there are no eggs.

My estrogen levels aren’t even going up because of the shots.

So, no baby.  No harvest.  Heartbreak.

Radiation is still the same: I see and feel no beam of radiation and it’s apparently too early for me to feel a difference.  I will admit, though, that my back felt a little better last night and this morning.  Now if only it would go back to normal…and maybe they’d let me go back to work.

It would distract me from the fact that there may never be a little Elliot…