pills, pills, pills, and patches

I do plan to write about week 11 sometime, especially since I never blogged about week 10 but... here's what's really, truly exciting to me this week...
for the past 11+ weeks, I have been taking the following:

• prenatal vitamin, 1x day - no biggy (well, actually it is the "biggest" technically, but no side effects, nothing to complain about)
• projesterone, 3x day - I hate this one. I will spare you the details, but I preferred taking it as a shot twice a day over it's current form and the side effects associated with it
• estradiol, 1x day - undesirable, but tolerable
• estrogen patches, 4 every other day - these are basically 1x2 inch stickers that I put on my abdomen. at first it took a little trial and error to figure out where to put them so that it hurt least when I ripped them off and also so that my clothes didn't try to move them. after getting that down they're alright, but they're basically like band aids, including the aspect where they gather fuzz and gunk around the edges. except that unlike band aids I wear them every day so trying to scrub that off started to make my skin bleed.

so here's the great excitement... I know this is not exciting for you, but it is SO exciting for me... I will keep taking my prenatal vitamins (I'm on my second bottle of 100), but around week 10 I got to start tapering everything else. I now take my projesterone only once a day, my estradiol every other day, and I'm currently on 2 patches, switching to 1 patch on Monday. I AM SO EXCITED!!!! by Friday I'll be done with everything (except the prenatals).

if you want to know a little about the biology:

I still need all these hormones, but around this time the placenta is mature enough to start making its own and doesn't need help via pills. all the little week-by-week websites say that now you should start getting headaches and various other minor side effects as your body starts producing these hormones, but since I've had them all along I'm just like, oh... so that's what those headaches were probably about - a thing (mostly) of the past! (I read this awhile back so my terms might be off but the reason I was taking the pills is because in a natural situation there would be this "thing" (a corpus luteum) that I guess is made by the ovarian follicle when it released the egg that would be providing a minor amount of these hormones up until the placenta could take over. since I had a frozen transfer there was no corpus luteum, so I had to take the pills to make sure I got those hormones.)

so while a lack of pills may not be an exciting thing to blog about, it is a very exciting thing in my life. hurrah! yay! and there was much rejoicing...