Floating

This past week I’ve just been floating. Not on a cloud. Not in the skies. I'm just sort of at rest. It’s been nice, but it’s also meant that I’ve been unbloggy and unresponsive to everyone who stepped in and gave me words of encouragement, support, and empathy. Which is kind of a crappy way to treat your friends.

I don’t really have any big news, so this post is going to be boring as hell. Mostly I’ve spent the past two weeks worked up (at one point actually frothing at the mouth) about the elections. But that’s a topic for another day. Here’s how I’ve been otherwise:

We told J’s mom about our decision to bail on Christmas, and she was astonishingly cool about it. With all the crap I go through with my own mom, I tend to forget that there are parent-types out there that are capable of acting like grown-ups. So when it happens, I’m stunned. She’s obviously disappointed, and was relieved by our repeated assurances that this was not going to be a regular thing, but that we just needed to break this negative cycle. But she didn’t lay any kind of a guilt trip on us, which I greatly appreciated. And I told her so, and told her what a great mom she is to both of us. She accepted my mad props, because she knows she could have been really difficult about this.

I went to the gym last Sunday (a week ago), where I weighed myself for the first time in months. As suspected, I’ve gained a lot of weight. Just under 10 pounds in the last six months, most of it in the last three months. Not terribly surprising. I’m no nutritionist or fitness expert, but I’m pretty sure that when you spend weeks on end stuffing your face with greasy carbs, and fail to exercise, you get fat. At least most people do. I certainly do.

The good news is that I’m already on track to lose it again. First, I’ve decided I’m done with laying off exercise during my IVF cycles. Fuck that. It hasn’t worked so far, and I’m beginning to think it’s all a myth. So I’ll do the bed rest after retrieval (I have to, because I always end up somewhat hyperstimulated). And I’ll hold off on exercise during the 2ww, because I’m too scared not to. But I’m going to try really hard to exercise while I’m doing the 2 weeks on the pill, and while I’m bleeding in between, and while I’m stimming. Because my body really needs exercise. I need those endorphins and I need to feel like there’s something in my body that belongs to me, not the doctors.

Exercise for me is a scary prospect. I have a bad back, weak shoulders, feet that require orthotic support, and an overall tendency to injure myself. And once I get hurt I can’t exercise for weeks. So I’m trying to start slow. I love weight lifting, but I’m going to try to hold off for a few weeks and focus on super-safe cardio. Mostly I do elliptical, but I’ve just started swimming. I haven’t been a regular swimmer since college (where I took swimming classes), but I’m determined to give it a shot. I finally found goggles that don’t leak (though they still hurt my eye bones), and I’m working on finding a swim cap that will keep my hair relatively dry (the chlorine strips the fake red out) while not squeezing my brains out my ears. Yesterday I swam for a half-hour, and I ended up feeling like I was floating all day.

Oooh, and I won a work-related writing contest! Which makes me feel really good.

J has his follow up appointment with the endocrinologist tomorrow, which has me concerned. But I was more concerned it would take him weeks to find time to see the doctor, so at least this is soon. I don’t have any idea what’s going to happen. Is he going to be found to have some serious illness? Is he going to be found to have some minor problem that can be corrected and maybe even improve his sperm count? Or (most likely) are they going to have no idea why his sperm are so rapidly diminishing? This is so frustrating.

Like I said, not a very newsworthy post. But I wanted to drop a line in and tell everyone thanks for the love and affection and support, and I’ll get back to your blogs sometime soon.

Love,

Babychaser