Wednesday, April 27, 2005

Little Miss Know-it-all

Sometimes I think this whole process would be easier if I were more complacent, less involved, more docile, less confrontational. Generally, I pride myself on the research I do, the information I gather, and the questions I ask. But sometimes I think it would be easier to be the kind of person who just trusts the doctors and doesn’t question or challenge.

Okay, maybe not.

Except for today, when I got all worked up about the progesterone test I’m supposed to have one week post-IUI/ovulation, which would be tomorrow. The thing is, Evil HMO often takes several days to get lab results back (they often send my blood to another city for processing!). So if I get the test done tomorrow, they might not have the results before the clinic closes on Friday. This wouldn’t be a problem if I didn’t know that there are two reasons to check progesterone - to see that I ovulated, and to make sure that the levels are high enough to actually be useful. It’s the second point that concerns me. If I were to need progesterone supplementation, as I know many people do, and they didn’t get the results until Monday, then I couldn’t start that until Monday.

I’m having a weird visit with Hope. On the one hand, I’m hopeful that it would even matter that my progesterone levels were satisfactory, therefore I’m depressed at the possibility that there would be a need for supplementation that we wouldn’t know about until Monday.

Of course, I called the clinic - they close early on Wednesdays, so I asked the receptionist to check with the RE (or one of the nurses) to see if there was any point in my getting the progesterone test run today instead of tomorrow, and now that it’s several hours past closing time, no one has called me back. So I’ll just do it tomorrow (early, of course, in case that helps things at all).

See? This would be so much easier if I didn’t think the test results mattered so much (or so promptly). And maybe I should pretend I’m one of those people who just trusts the doctors, since if it were really a problem they would have (or could have) told me to take the test a different day. Maybe the results will come back in plenty of time, or they'll be normal. (Me, with normal test results? That would be cause for celebration!)

So maybe it’s all fine.

It would be for the docile, complacent me.

5 comments:

  1. Cass, the clinics I've been to don't even test my progesterone levels, and it was making me insane. (One of them even gave me the idiotic reasoning that "by the time we got the results back, it would be too late to do anything about it for this month anyway." Sound familiar?)

    But I finally gathered that there's no harm in taking progesterone supplements, and my doctors have been perfectly happy to prescribe them even without knowing whether I needed them. So that's what we do now. Maybe your doctor would agree to call a prescription in for you tomorrow, so you can start taking it while you wait for your lab results?

    (And hey, thanks for all your nice comments on my blog!)

    ReplyDelete
  2. I agree with Persephone...see if you can get the supplements anyway. With my IUI, it was automatic...the nice, cold suppositories...what fun! It can't hurt, so go for it!

    Hope you get them!

    Hugs,
    Kate

    ReplyDelete
  3. I triple the sentiment--get some Prometrium and go to town. Can't hurt.

    Waiting on lab results is excruciating.

    --Bugs

    ReplyDelete
  4. Knowledge is such a double edged sword. I decided a while ago that being a doctor is a lot of guess work with a bit of schooling thrown in. Dr. Google wins in my book most times.

    I agree with the others that the progesterone can't hurt. Shove it in (mouth or otherwise) and keep everything crossed.

    ReplyDelete
  5. I hate waiting on test results. Taking some progesterone just in case doesn't hurt anything. I'm taking progesterone starting before I ovulate to prime my system (to coordinate my surges better) and my doctor assured me that I would have to take a lot more than I am to screw anything up. Progesterone supplementation is no big deal, it is a very, very common thing. But I know, this would be so much easier to not have to, like 90% of the population.

    xxoo,

    Emily

    ReplyDelete