I just got done with a 56 day cycle - almost 2 months of delay without warning due to the amount of lingering medication in my body from the injections I did in December. Sometimes your body just decides it needs a break and there is no way to know its coming. Or maybe your emotions gave you a warning to it, because I was feeling very emotional following my embryo transfer the week before I could take a pregnancy test. I was very sad, I didn't feel pregnant, I just felt off. My estrogen reached 1400 for the transfer occurred so its no surprise that I had to wait so long for my period.
Nobody warned me that this would happen when I started doing the IVF injections. It would have been helpful to know this was coming just for my sanity's sake. IVF is a big waiting game, you wait for your hormones and eggs to grow to a certain size, you wait for the next call, the pregnancy tests, etc. So having irregular cycles from the medications is probably not surprising, but when you are not warned in advance about it, it can be very frustrating! I can't even count the number of pregnancy tests I've taken at this point waiting for a period to come :(
There are theories that estrogen levels that are often elevated leads to a condition called "estrogen dominance." Estrogen levels in your body beyond the natural levels that occur in a normally functioning menstrual cycle can prevent a period from occurring, as I recently found out, as well as cause a whole lot of other issues. I am recently experimenting with whether or not drinking a day or two per week might raise estrogen levels beyond what the synthetic estrogen is already doing to see if that impacts the success during IVF as well. I have had a headache for the last two weeks from the time that my period should have come, which I'm attributing to being estrogen dominant currently as well.
Since I've started IVF, my periods have been all over the place. My cycles have ranged anywhere from 22 days to 57 days while going through these treatments. Sometimes that may be because of a protocol, birth control, or the levels of other hormones in your system. This is why its important to pay attention to your body and what is going on with it. In my case, this is where I need to relax and stop stressing about the next steps as much as I am feeling impatient about it! I still have such a hard time realizing that I have no control over this process. When your whole life revolves around being able to plan your future family starting, letting go of the ability to control things is the hardest challenge I've ever had to go through.
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