ramblings and runarounds

Haven't been updating much, because not much is going on. Haven't been commenting much on your blogs because I've actually been pretty swamped at work. Trying to get a bunch of reports finished before the end of the year so I can get a nice bonus / raise for having accomplished everything I said I would do. In a way it's nice because it keeps my mind off the waiting etc. I am still reading and thinking of y'all though!

In cycle related news, I actually had my first natural ewcm yesterday. So we took advantage. It was kinda fun - our first opportunity to actually try the way most people do. Sort of. Of course my OPK sticks still barely show a second line, but I enjoyed the pretense.

I've also gone back to my ice hockey team. I had decided when the season started that I wasn't going to play this year - I had gotten so incredibly frustrated with the coach over the past couple of years. But I had been hearing that he was doing things a bit differently this year, and I missed my teammates. So I started practicing with them again on Saturday. It was a really good practice - he actually did drills that I felt were helpful to ME, which is one of the things I felt was lacking last year. Fun! Of course, since I wasn't playing with them I joined another team that plays games Sunday nights, with practices every other Wednesday, and I've also been playing Tues/Thurs mornings before work, so now I'm probably skating a bit too much. I'll have skated every day from last Sat until this coming Thurs, then again Sat and Sun. But since I've decided that it's really not the exercise that is causing my hypothalamic amenorrhea, I decided to screw cutting back, until my IVF starts I'm going to be an ice hockey whore! I think doing something I enjoy in my spare time is really the best way to make it fly by.

I've been trying to get reimbursed for the drugs from my last 2.5 cycles that I paid for myself. What a nightmare of bureacracy! My first couple of orders were submitted to my insurance, but then the pharmacy people told me that my insurance only covered mail order pharmacies, of which they weren't one, so I'd have to pay for it myself. So I did, for $2300 worth of meds. Come to find out after I'd paid for all that, looking at my insurance website, that they DID in fact cover the meds. So then begins the runaround. I call the pharmacy. They tell me to call the insurance. I call the insurance. They tell me to call the prescription plan people. Who tell me to call the insurance because they didn't cover it, it was covered as a medical something or other. So I call the insurance, who tell me that the pharmacy has to reimburse me, then submit the claim to insurance again. The pharmacy tells me they'll look into it. Then they tell me they can't do it. Then they tell me they can't do it because the federal government would see it as them double billling me and they would get in trouble??? Then I get a supervisor who tells me that in fact they have two *separate* pharmacies, one for insurance pay and one for self pay, and ne'er the twain shall meet. I have to call the insurance and get a claim form and submit directly to them. Fine. I call insurance *again*. The guy I talk to thinks I'm telling him that they need to get the check that they wrote to the pharmacy refunded. Dimwit. I finally get him to understand what I'm looking to do, and he finally points me to the correct claim form.

Whew!

Now we just have to see what happens when I submit it. I'm not terribly hopeful that it will go through without another multitude of hours on the phone. What a pain in the ass!