Ovulation watch!

Well, it happened....I somehow knew it would! Shortly after my lunch break yesterday (Thursday), I received a voice mail message (remember I've been in San Antonio this week on a business trip) from Wendy saying that she'd gotten a "light line" on her ovulation test strip. This is the moment we'd been waiting for in that according to what we've been told, a light line on the test is the precursor to a dark line and a dark line means ovulation is due within the next 24 hour period. Wendy called PacRepro (in San Francisco, where we're getting our inseminations done) and they told her that she should "come on down" with the expectation that her test would show a dark line today (Friday) and that once the test showed a dark line they'd inseminate her that day.

I was about 1.5 hours from being completely finished with the class I'd been teaching but all I could think about was how to get done and get my butt to San Francisco...and to get Wendy on a plane to get there from home. It's like somebody shot me up with a huge dose of super-charged adrenalin! Wendy went ahead and made her plane reservation and while my students worked on a lab exercise, I started checking on car and hotel reservations in San Fran and also began to look at my options for changing my flight from San Antonio-Portland to San Antonio-San Francisco.

In record time, I finished up class, made all the reservation plans and changes to my flight itinerary and by 7:00pm was on my way to San Fran! Wendy arrived ahead of me by not much over an hour and made her way to the hotel via the hotel shuttle. I followed upon my arrival in a rental car. Whew!

As you can imagine, we were both excited about our first insemination attempt and were simply going to sleep away the night until time to do the morning ovulation test, make the call to PacRepro to set up our time for the first big try. Well, we slept. Wendy got up and took her test around 8:30 and....light line! What?! We were both trying to figure out what that meant since we thought that this test should've shown a dark line! So, we called PacRepro and they told us to wait until mid-afternoon, test again and call back.

Off we went to breakfast and to find a bookstore to pick up some more reading material and pass the mid portion of the day waiting until we could test again and call back to PacRepro. We finally returned to do one more test. Once again, the test was a faint line. So...day 1 of ovulation watch ends without an insemination attempt and we're on hold until tomorrow morning's test result.

This is the part where if we were a heterosexual couple, we'd just stay in bed (and not for naps..if you know what I mean) for all of today and the next several days and that would be that. But, for us, getting pregnant is about more specific timing. Frozen sperm lives about 24-36 hours...the egg lives about the same amount of time. So...we have to inseminate within the same time window as when the egg should find it's way down the fallopian tube and into place. If the sperm were "live", they could live up to 5 days and simply lay in wait for Wendy's egg to drop into view. But our little guys have been frozen and they don't have as long a time to find the egg.

So...here we are. Waiting and testing and trying not to be too crazy about the whole process. It's actually quite surreal at this point....just knowing that in a matter of a few days we could be pregnant. We both know that having it happen on the first try is not a high percentage occurrence, but we're feeling positive and going to give ourselves over to the process for the next couple of days. Our mantra is receive, receive, receive....

Keep us in your thoughts and wish us luck in the timing! We'll keep you posted!

- Karen