Monitoring, an Ooops and a (almost!) road trip

Yesterday I had a monitoring appointment to make sure the Lurpon was keeping everything quiet (i.e. non of my follicles were growing) and that my lining was thickening.  There was a check on both fronts (lining is 10.7).  J.T. went with me so he could learn how to administer the-gulp-progesterone shots which will begin later next week.

The rest of the day went just as well.  Lunch with friends, found a new show to binge watch on Netflix (Jane the Virgin), and ordered pizza for dinner.  After dinner I went up to do my Lupron injection and this is where things took a turn for the worse.

I had filled the syringe and was putting the Lupron vial back in its box.  It slipped from my hand and hit the tile floor with a giant thunk.  Well actually the vial is glass so it landed with a crash.  Upon inspection there was a definite crack on the outside of the bottle:(.  It did not appear that any shards were in the liquid and liquid wasn't seeping out, but to be on the safe side a called the pharmacy from which we received the meds which is 3.5 hours from where we live..   Keep in mind it was 8:00...on a Friday night...of course it was.

Now some of you reading this may never have ordered IVF meds before, so you may also not be aware that these meds can not be obtained from your local CVS or Walgreens.  In fact, I have discovered that even though I leave minutes from a city with three fertility clinics and nearly 1 million residents, there is only ONE pharmacy that carries any type of stock for these meds and that this pharmacy does NOT have weekend hours.

The remote pharmacist, Stephanie, was awesome.  After leaving a message in the special fertility weekend voicemail.  I got a call back in about 30 minutes.  She did not have any ready made answers, but promised she would begin working on it and call me back in the morning.  True to her word she called back at 11am.  She called to let me know that the only options she could offer were to go ahead and take the potentially tampered meds (which she did not recommend), to try to get a hold of filtered syringes (which could only be obtained from hospitals or clinics), or drive 3.5 hours to their pharmacy and she would be happy to meet me.  JT did not want to chance the tampered meds, so we began putting feelers out for the special syringes.  I went up to double check the damage to the bottle (I was leaning toward chancing it as a last resort), but to my horror discovered an empty bottle.  That tiny crack was enough to have drained the bottle:(.

So I called Stephanie back...for the 3rd time...on what I think was her personal phone...and told her I was coming to her.  Nothing like a 7 hour unexpected road trip on a Saturday to get medicine you HAVE to have or risk thousands of dollars and lots of time and emotional stress going straight down the drain.  Fortunately the car hadn't even crossed the county line when I got a call from our nurse (who had been contacted by both Stephanie and myself) to tell me I could turn the car around because she hadn't gotten a hold of the closed local pharmacy and someone was going to go in to get me the medicine I needed.  Hallelujah!

So even though this situation put my stress level on overload, God once again showed me two things:
One He's got this.

Two there are amazing people in the world.

We had friends who immediately responded to our request for the special syringes and while they personally didn't have access immediately began asking people they knew who might be able to help.  Strangers in two different pharmacies took time out of their own weekends to graciously and pleasantly help me.  Even though they did not know me, the mistake was mine, and they probably had much better things to do on a Saturday.