The Surge

12 March 2011

I’ve been peeing on ovulation sticks all week waiting for the elusive LH surge. It’s key to timing the start of my luteal phase estrogen priming for this latest attempt at IVF. I’m not a newbie at using ovulation sticks, in fact I’ve peed on over 50 of them during my TTC journey. My ovulation has happened on day 12 or 13 since I started monitoring my cycles 3 years ago. Usually I get a positive OPK and ovulate the next day. So, I figured this would be easy. But day after day I kept getting the same negative result. I actually had a terrible thought for a fleeting moment “what if I’ve stopped ovulating altogether and my DOR has progressed to POF”. Whoa, push that thought far away! It seems to be Murphy’s law that just when you get comfortable with predictability, along comes change. Not “the change” however.

By Friday afternoon (CD 12) and still no closer to a surge on the OPK, I called my clinic to see how I should proceed over the weekend. The nurse returned my call around 3:30 pm, and offered to send me to my local lab for blood work. She could fax the requisition. The only catch was the lab closes at 4:00, so I sped off and got my blood collected. The nurse said she would call Saturday with the results. Ah, what a relief that this isn’t all dependent on a silly urine test and that I won’t be in limbo all weekend.

Today is Saturday. I spent the morning doing some long overdue cleaning around the house, while awaiting the call. By noon, There was still no call so I called them but had to leave a message on the voicemail, and the recording indicated that the clinic was already closed for the day. Waiting in limbo stinks. What’s a girl in an ovulation emergency to do? Then I remembered that you can check online for blood results done at Life Labs. Log in, and viola, a whole bunch of numbers. Of course, because I’ve been doing enough studying on the side to write my Reproductive Endocrinology exams very soon, I cross referenced them to a table I downloaded from Dr. Google and attempted to interpret my own results. According to Silverdollar MD, the LH and E2 levels looked to be at the beginning of a surge yesterday afternoon. Hmmm... maybe today is the day. So, off to the washroom and POAS. Up pops two lines the same shade. OMG the surge has arrived! We have lift off.

At 1:30 the phone rang. It was the nurse who informed me that my blood levels show that a surge was starting yesterday. Really? I tell her about the positive OPK and she was pleased to hear that everything seems to be on track. So the instructions are to go for a progesterone check on Monday morning and they will tell me when to start my Estrace based on the levels.