Ugly Toes

I ran on the treadmill this morning, and surprisingly it was significantly easier than the running I've been doing outside with Molly. I ran for an hour, and didn't get the overwhelming tired feeling I've been getting outside. A sign of how bad it's been: on last weekend's 5 mile run, I actually stopped around 3.5 miles and sat down for a few seconds! I'm going to guess the big difference is that I have water on the treadmill (as I did in Hawaii, where I was able to run farther on a daily basis, even with the hills, than I have here) and I don't outside. Guess I'll have to try to run with the water bottle and the leash.

But water won't help with my motivation. I want to run, but at the same time, I'm so frustrated with lots of things, especially how slow and fat I feel, that I don't want to run. Which is dumb, because not running isn't going to help with either of those things.

Now that we're back from vacation, and starting to get back on schedule, I've started counting calories again. I have so many pairs of pants in my closet that are just mocking me because I can't wear them right now. And since the added weight isn't helping me out very well, why bother carrying it around when it just annoys me?

Things with the whole trying to conceive process suck ass. We had our appointment with the RE back in March, and it went fairly well. I had started feeling guilty beforehand about going in when it hadn't been so long, but then the RE said that it wasn't normal to have these long cycles and made it sounds as though I should be seeking help even if I wasn't trying to get pregnant. So that made me feel better. She set me up for cycle day 3 bloodwork, telling me to call when I started my next period. I was on CD42 at that point.

I just finally went in for my bloodwork today. While we were in Hawaii, I called on CD64 because my temperatures kept spiking up and then dropping down, and I was pretty confident that I wasn't going to ovulate and I was getting annoyed because every day that I stayed in cycle 4 was going to delay starting any kind of evaluation and treatment. She agreed this was odd, and called in a prescription for prometrium (progesterone) so that we could induce my period and get on with testing. And so after 79 days (!!) I finally moved onto cycle 5, but only because of artificial hormones. I kind of wonder how long things would've gone otherwise.

I'm honestly doing okay with the not being pregnant side of things. And it really isn't a terrible thing, financially, since every month I'm not pregnant is another month we can save money. What is really hard for me is that I feel like, once again, my body is failing me. But breaking down in a marathon is one thing - I can't even fucking get my period!

Once we get the blood results back, we might know more. Obviously something changed with my body while I was on the pill. I could have PCOS, although I lack a lot of the symptoms. Or it could be related to hypothalamic amenorrhea; she said it was possible that the only reason I had been getting a period was because of the weight I had gained. Of course, I now think that theory is shot to shit since I didn't really get a period, and I'd cut back on running, too, in the hopes that maybe fewer miles would help.

HA would be much harder to treat than PCOS, but I'll find out what the problem is and our options on Tuesday. I'm hoping it's something as "simple" as clomid, and not IUI/IVF because getting time away from work for that would be very difficult without everyone knowing what's going on. And while I've talked about some of this stuff with J, this isn't really something I want everyone to know about.