Cycle 17, CD 10

I didn't do well when I was on clomid. For those three (back to back) cycles I was a mess: agitated, hyper-emotional, angry, frustrated, weepy. It wasn't pretty. At the time, I thought it was me. I thought that for some reason, I just couldn't handle the stress of trying to get pregnant.

At the end of my 3rd (failed) clomid cycle, I vividly remember sitting on the edge of the table, paper sheet over me, and giving myself a peptalk while waiting for the doctor to come in. In my head, it went something like this: "Tutti. You can do this girlfriend. There is no reason to cry. People feel uncomfortable when you cry so keep it together. You can treat yourself to a large Frappuccino after this if no tears are shed". Within .3 seconds of the doctor walking into the room I was a bawling, sniveling disaster, flapping my hands in front of myself saying "I don't know what is wrong with me". Dr. D gave me a big hug, told me that what I was going through were classic clomid symptoms, and that I'd feel better after 27 days when all the drugs were out of my system. I stopped crying for a second and sputtered, "You mean... I'm not going crazy?"

This was one of the reasons I was so willing to move over to injectables (despite my fear of needles). Dr. D said the side effects were a lot less than clomid. But I think when I heard her, in my head that meant "no side effects" (because who are we kidding, anything was better than my clomid-induced-psychosis). So here I have been assuming for many more cycles that there were virtually no side effects and that my crazy was 100% my own.

It wasn't until I started feeling it creep in over the last week. That horrible feeling of anxiety, the wiggling chin ready to burst into tears when I thought my coworker was being rude to me (in all likelihood, she probably wasn't), the snapping at my husband for no real reason. And that's when the light bulb went off. Could how I'm feeling be drug induced? Could all of this stuff I've been feeling be made worse because of the hormones I'm on? I made logical sense, but I never put two and two together. It wasn't until my forced hiatus where I started feeling better that I realized there was a link: crazy on clomid, slightly crazy on injetables, and relatively normal when not on meds.

Dr. D confirmed this at my u/s the other day. She looked at me as if to say, "come on now, you didn't think the meds had no effect on you, did you?"

I totally did.

I'm not saying that if you aren't on meds you don't feel pretty damn horrible while walking the seemingly endless road of infertility. But it's this weird hard to describe hyper-emotional-turning-on-a-dime-psychosis-of-drastic-proportions that is just so not normal *me*, that just made me wonder who I was turning into.

I'm still a crazy bitch at times and I'll always be a crier, but at least I'm not as bad as I thought it was.