TTC Friday: Stalking My Own Chart

Like last time, here's a warning for those of you who don't care to know what my lady parts are up to: potential TMI ahead. Come back next week to see my review of Bossypants.

Two weeks ago, I was dealing with unexpected spotting and speculating on potential issues. The spotting stopped after a couple of days but unfortunately, the speculation continues. Here's what my chart looks like for this cycle:

There are several things wrong here:

• My period  is shorter and lighter than it has ever been, including while on birth control. It may not be a problem but it is unusual. On the plus side, I'm not spotting for days afterward anymore.
• The spotting from CD14 - 17 (hasn't happened since that crazy long first post-pill cycle)
• The crazy amount of fertile CM
• The lack of +OPK and temperature shift (those crosshairs are lying)
• If you could see the boxes with my symptoms, you'd see that I've checked off "ovulation pain" nearly every day since CD9. It's that weird pain I described before.

Taken individually, none of these things mean much but all of them in one cycle would seem to indicate an issue. In my last post, I was speculating about low progesterone and cysts. Since then, I've done a lot more reading and am pretty sure that I had the progesterone thing backwards. It's not a lack of progesterone that my chart is indicating, it's an excess of estrogen. I've had an estrogen dominant cycle before and this particulary cycle has some of the hallmarks of that one, so it wouldn't be surprising. As for cysts, I'm still not sure. My mom has a history of them so I'm not ruling that out yet.

The OPKs have been interesting this cycle. I started using them during my second cycle after birth control, when I hit CD30 again without a temp spike. I wanted to seee if my body was gearing up to ovulate multiple times before actually succeeding. So far, I'd only seen one surge and it's been followed by a temp spike just as it should. This cycle, however, the test line has faded in until it was almost positive once a week for the last three weeks, most recently just yesterday, and it has led nowhere. Where Fertility Friend has placed those crosshairs, CD21, coincides with one of the almost positive OPKs and the temp spike on CD23 had me excited until the next morning. Now, I don't know what to think.

All in all, this has just been a very messed up cycle. I don't know if estrogen alone could cause all of this. Maybe that combined with illness and the antibiotics that I took through the second half of last cycle? I didn't think antibiotics could wreak this much havoc. This certainly isn't the longest I've gone without ovulating yet, but it's so disappointing and frustrating to have thought that things were finally back to normal only to have my body decide to change things up again. 

A crazy newbie on The Bump recently posted, to those of us that were frustrated about this process, that it's all good because hey, the trying is fun.

 

In another two weeks, I'll be into month #8. I'll still be on cycle 5. My hormones will still be janked. This shit stopped being fun a long time ago.

[By the way, I did decide to talk to my doctor about all of this when I go for a physical, which I'm overdue for anyway. But actually getting an appointment has turned into a whole separate set of frustrations, which is another post for another day. Not a good time to retire, doc!]