The Baby Chase

Captain Jumperoo and Freedom Girl

2010-08-03T06:34:00.000-07:00

I'm at work right now (which is a Very Good thing, believe me!) so I can't really post. But I wanted to share this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UnOp24SPgso

What Makes It All Worthwhile

2010-07-11T17:21:00.000-07:00

I never have time to write anymore--I barely can make time to pee, for God's sake. But I'm going back to work in a week and might actually have more time then. (Or maybe less, as work is also overwhelming and scary right now--especially as I've been gone for FIVE MONTHS and have completely forgotten how to be a lawyer and talk to everyone as if they're three months old.)

But I wanted to take a quick moment to show you all this. Because, hell, it's so cute even I can't stop watching it, and I have 24/7 access to the real thing.

Crap. G's suddenly awake and is about to wake up D with her wailing. I've told her that she'd cry a lot more if she were a singleton. Lucky girl.

Gotta run.

The Love Infusion

2010-05-21T16:08:00.000-07:00

I know I’ve been out of touch for awhile. Mostly it’s just because I’ve been crazy-busy, what with caring for two helpless little people. But it’s also because I’ve been less needy, and more satisfied, than I have been in years.

Don’t get me wrong. Taking care of two babies, even fairly good-natured babies with a LOT of help from my husband, is hard fucking work. And it can be fairly tedious as well—I’m starting to understand the age-old, and fairly sexist, saying “a woman’s work is never done.” Because I’m never on top of what needs to be done. There’s always laundry to fold and bottles to wash and feeding, diapering, and holding/cuddling/entertaining to be done. And that whole “sleep when the baby sleeps” thing is a total crock. Because the housework really does have to get done, and I can’t sleep on command, and the most I can get—after feeding/diapering/soothing/swaddling both—is maybe an hour of real sleep, which messes me up more than it helps.

But what I want to tell you all—want to shout from the rooftops—is that it’s SO WORTH IT. Yeah, yeah, part of this is the antidepressants talking, and thank god I had the foresight to go on those at the first sign of trouble (a couple of days after I wrote that last post, in fact), rather than try to tough it out. It’s so nice not to be so sad, crying all over my babies every time I tried to feed, always feeling like I’m not doing enough for them. If I had advice to anyone about to have a baby, it’s to seriously consider antidepressants.

But my newfound happiness isn’t coming from my pill bottle. It’s that this really is exactly what I wanted. I love these babies so much. And so does J—watching him with them makes me love him even more than I already did. And all this love and support has poured in from family and friends, sometimes from where I least expected it. All this infusion of love into my life—it’s a heady feeling. And maybe because I went through so much to get here, I feel like I deserve it.

And then, on Mother’s Day (which I still think is a crock of shit holiday), this happened, and my heart stopped beating for a moment:

And the next day this happened:

And my heart nearly exploded.

So yeah, my back is killing me (seriously, it’s bad), and my nipples hurt, and I can only put a baby to the breast four times a day (I pump the rest of the time) and sometimes I feel like feeding G is more of a wrestling match than a joint effort, and I’m living on 5 hours of sleep a night. But all of these things are temporary—hell, they’ll last a lot less time than my journey through infertility. On the other hand, the love I’ve found—the love J and I have created—is permanent. (J often responds that he didn’t “create” these babies, but I disagree. You can “make” cookies even though you use ingredients from the grocery store, can’t you? J chose our donor, which is one half of what makes these little guys who they are.)

My yoga teacher tells us that to have a child is to forever wear your heart on the outside of your body. I’m sure that will be scary someday. But for now it’s glorious.

The Grind

2010-04-09T05:55:00.000-07:00

Eleven days in, and J and I are really struggling. We seem to have moved beyond the fun and exciting phase and entered The Grind.

It's not just the lack of sleep that’s bothering us—it's that we feel like we aren't getting a moment to enjoy the babies. This is especially true for me. At least J gets to feed them their "top off" bottles, and burp and change and re-clothe them. And that might not sound like much fun, but it's a hell of a lot better than my relationship with them, which consists of me fighting with them to get a decent latch, and struggling to keep them on the breast when it's hurting so badly. It really seemed like they were both on their way to being champion feeders, but we seem to have slid backwards. Or maybe Dex is actually doing better (he had his tongue-tie fixed on Wednesday and now appears to have a decent latch, but it's hard to tell because my boobs are so sore that it might just hurt even if he's doing everything right). But Gretchen's latch is going downhill fast—she's doing a lot of chewing on me rather than sucking. And then if she doesn't get a lot of top-off milk she screams for two hours. And when your baby is hurting you feeding eight times a day, it can wear you down fast.

I'm also really on the border of not having enough milk for them. Each of them is getting a full ounce of top-off bottle after every feeding, and that's almost exactly what I've been able to produce. The problem is that it isn't enough. When they feed well at the breast I don't manage to pump that much, and even then they always want more, which means that sometimes they cry through an entire cycle where we were hoping to get our precious 1 1/2 hour of sleep. It isn’t a medical problem—they gained five and four ounces respectively in three days earlier this week. But they’re not satisfied. And unhappy babies just plain suck.

This morning I realized that I'm on the verge of giving up breastfeeding altogether. I just want to start enjoying being a mom. I want my babies to stop being mad and me, and I'd like to stop being mad at them. In either event, we'll probably be supplementing with formula by the end of the day. No matter how hard I've been pushing at the pump (and I've REALLY been pushing—I pump till dry after EVERY feeding), I can't seem to get my milk supply to kick in more. I am more exhausted than I ever thought was possible. Every day I think I’m as tired as I could ever be, and every day I discover a whole new level of exhaustion. We're on a strict 3-hour timetable for feeding—it's really the only way to get 8 feedings in a 24-hour period, which is the minimum. And with G's size we can't yet go four hours at night with a couple of short feed cycles during the day.

When people used to say their child was sleeping for three or four hours at a time, I would ask myself—what’s the big deal? What’s so bad about getting a few three- or four-hour sleep cycles in a night instead of eight straight hours? But what isn’t generally explained is that the three-hour clock starts at BEGINNING of one feeding session, not the end. So if you add in how long it takes to wake, change, feed two sleepy babies at the breast, burp them, supplement with a bottle, burp again, change again, lull them back to sleep, and then pump for at least 15 minutes (which I have discovered I can’t skip even once at this critical stage of trying to get my milk to come in enough to feed two), two hours can go by easy before you even look at the bed again. And then you have to decide—is it worth a catnap, or should you just stay up and get something done? J and I have managed to work the cycle down to an hour and a half, with him doing the bottle supplementation, burping, and changing. But we still usually only get an hour and a half at a time, and that’s if everything goes perfectly. Maybe that works out three times a night, assuming no one's refusing to go back to sleep. And we can't really sleep during the day yet. Too much to do with doctor's appointments, etc.

J and I refer to Super-G as our small-mouth bass—her head is so tiny that, though willing, her mouth is too small for a latch that doesn’t hurt. (She has mastered the hippo mouth, which is hilarious, though we don’t always manage to get it on the boob at the right moment, and often there are tiny hands in the way.) The lactation consultant who we saw on Tuesday recommended that I put her on a nipple shield, which I’ve been using for Dex (more on that below). I was willing to try that (and trust that we could get her off it later on, when she’s bigger), but the first time we tried it at home she HATED it and “bit” down so hard on the shield that I yelled out and immediately started crying. And believe me, once I start crying these days, it’s hard to stop. Can’t tell you how many times I’ve cried all over my breastfeeding babies. She did it one more time that feeding, and did it again on the next breast (though not so hard) the next feeding. So I said “fuck it,” and ditched the shield. I’m already at the end of my rope, and the last thing I need to be doing is fighting with BOTH my babies every time I have to feed them, which is essentially my entire relationship with them right now.

And Dex has had his own set of problems. In the hospital, he was trying to feed, but would always pull back from what looked like a good latch into a terrible one at the last minute. And, desperate to make breastfeeding work with this baby, I would let him. So my nips were getting mangled, to say the least. Then we took him to the pediatrician the day after we got out of the hospital, and he noticed that D was tongue-tied, which kept him from sticking his tongue out to suck when his mouth was wide open. So we started using a nipple shield with him, which allowed me to keep feeding him at the breast while we waited for an appointment to get the string tying his tongue down snipped.

Through fairly Herculean efforts on my part, I managed to get Dex an appointment with an ENT on Wednesday, and managed to get my HR department to get him enrolled on my insurance in time to not have to pay out-of-pocket for the procedure. The procedure was pretty scary, though it only took moments. Ended with poor Dex wailing through a wad of gauze sticking out of his mouth, which was just pathetic. But within a few minutes he was trying to feed, and he managed to get a pretty nice, pain-free latch a few minutes after that. The problem now is that I can’t tell if he’s adding to my tenderness problems or if I’m just so sore from G’s feeding technique that he’d hurt me no matter what he did. In either event, with either of them on the boob I just sit and watch the clock and try to hold out for 15 minutes before I call it quits and hand them off to J for the top-off bottle.

This morning I managed to pump enough that we are doing one “pump-only” session (which is how I’m writing right now—after five days of computer withdrawal I finally got wise and moved the pump to my computer desk), while J feeds both from the bottle. Just to give my nipples a solid five hours off from the evil twin mouths. I’ll call the hospital lactation consultants today, though I’ll have to pay a chunk of cash to go see them in person (which I probably will do). But my guess is by the end of the day I’ll be introducing formula. This shouldn’t feel like a failure to me. I know that, I really do. But I was so proud of having gotten this far without, and truly believe that we were into the home stretch with this.

I know this will get better. But it’s really hard to see that future right now.

Introducing--BABIES! (In J's Words)

2010-04-06T18:01:00.000-07:00

Introducing . . . (drum roll please) . . . the fabulous new additions to our family! Meet Gretchen ("Baby B") and Dexter ("Baby A") (probably “G” and “D” from now on, but I’m so happy with the names I had to share). Dexter was born 6 pounds, 4.8 ounces. Gretchen, or “Super-G” as we like to call her, was born 4 pounds, 12 ounces.

In the past week I have had no time to eat or sleep, let alone blog or catch up on any of the thousand e-mails waiting for me. Parenthood is the most beautiful experience in the world, but trying to keep up with the feeding of two insatiable tiny creatures is brutal. We’ve had a couple of night/day cycles where we’ve gotten less than an hour or two of sleep. Last night J suggested that he take over one feeding with pumped milk (a scary prospect, given that I’m pumping after every feeding but just barely staying ahead—we have to give them a lot of “top off” after every feeding because they’re so small), and I literally started to cry at the prospect.

Anyway, could write for hours, but I only have about five minutes. Thought that instead of trying to re-create the story through my eyes, I’d give you a sampling of J’s e-mails to our friends and family in the first week of our babies lives.

3-31-10

Hey folks,

here's the update from Wednesday morning - no time for personalized responses to all of your great thoughts.

Yesterday afternoon, after a very rough 24 hours, we finally had a lactation consult and it was life changing. Since then, we have had excellent feedings with both Gretchen and Dexter, every 2-3 hours. They are champion eaters both. Got into a great schedule last night - fed them both and sent them off to the nursery so we could sleep for 3 hours! They came back - we fed both again and sent them back to the nursery and we slept for 2 more hours. 5 hours for Holly with an hour break for feeding - a better sleep schedule than she's had in months and she is ecstatic. And caffeinated now, after some Starbucks this morning.

Dexter is eating now - so far not too traumatized by this morning's rude snipping. Gretch is out in the nursery getting checked by the pediatrician. Everyone seems healthy and happy. We're in the hospital for another night tonight and are debating whether to go on Thursday or stick around for one more day of support (assuming, of course, that Gretchen passes her car seat test - she's very small and when uncovered, shakes her arms uncontrollably - it's quite pathetic and cute).

Thanks for all your wonderful thoughts. More updates and pictures to come (but to be honest, all the pictures look the same at this point - when we get home, at least they'll have different clothes and surroundings).

-J and H

Hey,

Just a couple more pictures. Can't resist the cobunking pictures. And there's a picture of Dexter and H trying to wade through the DC government bureaucracy to add the kids to the insurance (still unsuccessful).

-J

********

4-1-10

Hey gang,

Here are some more pictures. Life is full of ups and downs here at the hospital. Dexter is getting better - we'll follow up with his heart condition - the irregular beat found at birth, but the cardiologist didn't think there was any issue.

Both kids have some jaundice and may need to get some light therapy. Gretchen hasn't pooped in awhile - the pediatrician is not concerned - just something to keep an eye on.

H is working out the breast feeding. She's had 3 lactation consults and all have taught her more than the last. She is honing her technique and her regular milk has come in.

Gretchen failed the car seat test today. She is too small for the seat we have. Any volunteers? We need a new car seat specifically designed with a minimum weight of 4lbs. Ours has a minimum of 5lbs and she doesn't fit right in it, even with blankets and special padding. We are being released tomorrow, so we need this tonight, ideally. Please contact me directly if you have the time to run this errand for us. There is a babies r us in Silver Spring with the correct seat, but there may be some available at other stores, like target - I haven't had time to research (if you can't make the run - maybe you can help with phone calls for me).

Thanks. Going home tomorrow. First pediatrician visit scheduled for Saturday - 8:30am!

-J

Hey Gang,

Crisis averted for the moment - thanks for the offers of help. H's Dad was able to run out and get a car seat for us. We'll try it out in the morning.

More info later - waiting for real food from Armand's to arrive. Hot pizza - can't wait.

-J

*******

4-2-10

Hey Folks,

Hoping to be released this morning or some time today - they say check out is 11am, but no one believes it.

Kids are with the pediatrician for their routine morning check up. Jaundice appears to be getting better over night. Both kids had great digestive movement in the last 12 hours - especially Dexter, who had an epic movement last night (songs will be written).

Kids were demon twins last night as we had a double meltdown that lasted upwards of 5 hours, with occasional breaks - while one fed, the other screamed. Sometimes the feedee screamed as well. Thankfully, the feeder never lost her cool. Is it cute when Dexter wails so loud he gets hoarse? - sort of. At least it's quieter.

But after a night in the nursery (for two 2 hour stretches so we could sleep), two little angels appeared in our room this morning, content to eat and sleep.

Gretchen will go for her car seat test later this morning. No new pics today. They all start to look the same at this point. This weekend - we'll send out more. They'll be the same, but in different clothes and blankets with a new background. Perhaps some action shots of Valentine [the cat] hiding from them (a streak of black down the hall).

-J

*********

We are home!

Took forever to get out of the hospital, but we finally left at 4:30pm, just in time for rush hour.

Getting home wasn't too bad, though. We got home, fed them, ate dinner, and crashed for an hour.

We're finishing another feeding right now and hoping to get another couple of hours.

Now that we're home, I'll probably stop with the daily updates so we can all get on with our lives. Thanks for all the good thoughts.

-J

********

And, of course, some more pictures:

The Family

Daddy and Skinny-Legged Super-G

Mommy and Floppy-Necked Dex

Labor Pains

2010-03-27T16:09:00.000-07:00

I had envisioned March going one of two ways—either I would simply be pregnant until March 29, when the scheduled C would go forward, or I would go into labor earlier and have earlier surgery (and maybe have to deal with the whole preemie thing). Either way, I figured I wouldn’t have to experience much “labor.” And I certainly didn’t anticipate having to deal with labor pains for at least a week before the babies came.

Is this normal? (Is there any “normal” when it comes to pregnancy?) For more than the past week, in late afternoon or evening, the contractions begin. Mind you, I also have contractions during the day. But they’re not regular, and they tend to be brought on by activity. In contrast, the evening contractions are coming every 8-10 minutes. Or maybe even closer, because I’m still having trouble figuring out what’s a contraction and what is just—for lack of a more precise term—pain. Dude, it hurts! The contractions tighten my abdomen and speed up my heart rate, and sometimes I whine and whimper as they get intense. But then there are also all these other pains in my abdomen—sharp stabbing pains, like one of the babies (okay, let’s lay blame where it’s due—it’s always Baby A) is trying to cut his way out from the inside. And then there are the pains in my even-lower torso (sometimes across my lower back or butt, sometimes in what feels like the bottom of my bladder, sometimes in more unmentionable places). And these extra pains aren’t on a schedule, they just hover around and in between the contractions, sometimes making it hard to tell the difference. Do I count those when I’m trying to figure out how far apart the contractions are? Who the hell knows?

But none of this really matters, because the one clear truth is that none of this is “real” labor. How do I know? Because it eventually goes away—sometimes by midnight, sometimes not until 4 or 5 in the morning. If it were “real” labor, I would have real babies, by now, right?

And so I wait. I hurt, and I wait. The one bright side is that at least I know the babies are coming out Monday morning no matter what. I can’t imagine wondering if this was going to keep going for weeks on end.

I guess I’m going through some figurative labor pains as well, which are a lot more interesting. This morning J and I went to a breastfeeding class. I had signed up for one weeks ago, but missed it (along with most of my other classes) due to hospitalization and recovery. When J mentioned that we could take a make-up class today I jumped at the chance (though I wasn’t even sure I could sit through the class). It was kind of funny to be going to a class like this when we’re going to be putting this very information into use the day after tomorrow (unbelievable!). I’m so glad we went. It seems like feeding the baby is about 80% of caring for the baby, and I was feeling frantic at my lack of knowledge about how it all works (especially with twins). Now I’m feeling a lot more confident.

In between all this whining, fussing, and desperate last-minute preparation, J and I are finding some excitement creeping in. Every day this week J has announced that this is our “last Thursday,” or “last Friday” before the babies come. Or he’ll mention, casually, “Did you realize that in three days our lives are going to change forever?” And then we’ll start giggling in disbelief, because neither of us really can get our heads around this idea. “Really,” we’ll say to each other (a la the SNL Weekend Update segment), “Really. We’re going to be parents on Monday. Really. They’re just going to hand us two babies and expect us to take care of them. Really.”

We started trying to conceive in June 2005. I was only 33 years old—the ideas of infertility, repeat pregnancy loss, adoption or IVF or the use of donor gametes never seriously having crossed my mind. In the past last five years, this naivety has been stripped from my soul. As I told a friend who was afraid she’d scare me with her high-risk-pregnancy stories, I’ve seen the boogeyman. J and I have been through three IUI cycles, one FET cycle, and five IVF cycles. We’ve had intense battles with the blood-sucking HMO over coverage for infertility, surgery, treatment for J. I’ve negotiated a shared-risk contract with my fertility clinic and taken out a second mortgage to cover the costs. I’ve had dozens of sonos, close to a hundred blood draws, and have lost track of how many sharps containers J and I have filled with our various injections. We’ve seen five pregnancies, and four miscarriages—one of which was an especially heartbreaking ectopic pregnancy. We’ve researched adoption, even gone so far as going to an international adoption meeting at a local agency. We’ve seen me through major surgery, and we’ve spent hours in front of my computer choosing a donor.

And god only knows how many tears I’ve cried. Huddling behind a closed door in my office, trying to regain control long enough to escape down the stairs (because waiting for an elevator is just too exposed) without anyone noticing, or praying no one would knock on my door while I waited for the xanax to kick in; hiding behind sunglasses while I walked through a neighborhood full of happy, screaming kids—playing basketball in the street or running through the sprinklers or the inflatable pool in front of their houses; rocking back and forth in my bed, wondering how long I could let myself go before giving myself a migraine. And the one time I heard J cry when I had to give him the bad news over the phone—just one cycle where we got a negative beta and it was just too much for him—when listening to him sob on the other end of the line broke my heart all over again.

I’m 38 years old now, and while I’ve been beaten and battered by the last five years, I wear my scars—literal and figurative—with pride. I would never wish this experience on anyone, but I’m not sorry about who I’ve become as a result, or what this has done to my marriage. I once thought that when I finally made it through this phase of my life (and that’s how I always made myself look at infertility—just a phase I had to get through, one way or another, to become a parent) I would look back on these years as “lost” years, years wasted on tears and obsession and desperation. But I don’t. I’m not even sure that they were the worst years of my life. Certainly infertility has been the worst thing that’s ever happened to me. But in these years good things have happened, too. In some ways, I feel like I’ve finally grown up. I finally feel like a real lawyer in a job that could well satisfy me for the rest of my career. I finally took the steps necessary to heal my chronic lower back problems, and I feel more confidence in my body’s ability to cope with aging than I have in years. And J and I have grown to love and appreciate each other’s strengths more than I ever thought possible. I couldn’t have chosen a better father for my children, and just thinking of him holding one of my babies makes my heart ache.

I’m scared about next week. Scared that, no matter how good our intentions, taking care of two babies is going to overwhelm us beyond our ability to cope. (It doesn’t help that much of the support promised from various friends has evaporated in the cold reality of their own job schedules and family obligations. And I can’t blame them—annual leave is precious and free time is hard to come by these days.) Scared that when neither of our needs are getting met, J and I won’t be able to maintain the cohesion we’ve achieved over the years. Scared that being stuck at home with two babies while J escapes back into theatre la la land (which will happen about three weeks after the babies are born) will make me bitter and resentful, or lead to post-partum depression.

But underlying that fear is a confidence that even if the beauty and magic of parenting doesn’t show up right away, even if J and I start sniping at each other, even if I get depressed and bitter and angry, this is going to be wonderful someday. We will get through this and still love each other, and we’ll love our babies more than anything we ever imagined. And I’m not sure I would have this confidence in myself—and in J—if we hadn’t traveled through hell and back together.

The day after tomorrow it all starts. I’m going to be a mommy. J’s going to be a daddy. And we’re gong to be a whole new kind of family. As J puts it, on Monday our lives change forever. To which I can only add: Hallelujah. It’s about fucking time.

Down the Rabbit Hole

2010-03-22T21:32:00.000-07:00

(Prelude: I never wrote about it, but on February 26 I was hospitalized with a kidney stone. After five days, we agreed to have a stent put in—not to solve the problem, but to make it tolerable until after the pregnancy when they could actually do something to get rid of the stone. But some asshole anethesiologist talked me out of the agreed-on spinal block, which was a safer/more rational form of anesthesia for a woman 33 weeks pregnant with twins—he did this moments before the operation when I was wacked out of my mind on morphine and desperate to do the procedure—into general anesthesia, which carried a much greater risk of aspiration. And so I aspirated some of my stomach acid into my lungs, woke up in the recovery room with instant pneumonia, and spent four days in the ICU trying to breathe, with the doctors freaking out because I was having preterm contractions and was in no condition for a c-section while so ill.)

I’ve been home from the hospital for two weeks, and still haven’t been able to get myself to write about it. Which is a shame, because my memories of those 11 days, or at least the back half of them, could prove useful in a med mal lawsuit someday. Which is a possibility, though by no means a guarantee. And I’m already having trouble remembering what it was really like, remembering the physical pain and claustrophobic panic of the ICU, the sinking feeling of being totally duped by my anesthesiologist, and the sure knowledge that if I’d just had the mental wherewithal to say “no” to his suggestion that I switch from a spinal block to general anesthesia, I could have been home already, maybe even working, rather than struggling to breathe and wishing I wasn’t exposing my babies to yet more medicines, x-rays, and other interventions I’d hoped to avoid.

But right now that seems so far away. I’m in another place entirely—waiting for my world to change. I don’t know when it will happen, exactly. And I don’t know what I need to do to get ready for it anymore. J’s been working 16-hour days for the past week, maybe more. I’ve actually lost track. And though I’ve had some friends come by, it isn’t the same as having a real life outside of the bubble I’m floating in.

When I first got home I was still recovering, still healing, and desperately weak. I lost 15 pounds in the hospital, which sounds great in theory, but so much of it was muscle mass. I’ve never seen my arms so skinny.

Despite my weakness, I had a purpose. Every day, I would have a new priority, just one thing to I would have to deal with. I only had a couple of worthwhile hours a day to get stuff done. The rest of the time I was sleeping or resting or trying to get my feet up to reduce the swelling (the swelling was so bad in the hospital that even my slippers wouldn’t fit—I came home in hospital socks—but it suddenly went away (thank God!) about four days after I got home). The first day it was setting the wheels in motion for my disability insurance to process, and figuring out how to work my sick and annual leave around that. And then there was all the baby gear, bedding, and clothing that had been unpacked and arranged by the group of family and friends that had come to set up the house while I was in the hospital, just in case we came home with babies. I had to find space in my closets for more stuff, find ways to arrange everything so I knew where it was. And because any day could bring the babies into my life, each day was critical for getting ready. In fact, last Tuesday night I knew I was at the brink of total insanity when I vacuumed the house. That’s right. I’m on bedrest, but I vacuumed. I just couldn’t take it. The floors were disgusting, and J is at wits end just doing the essential stuff, so I couldn’t ask him. I actually hoped he wouldn’t notice (and if he did, he didn’t mention it). In short, my nesting hormones had taken over and I was helpless to resist.

And then the next day I was done. Oh sure, there’s plenty more housekeeping to be done. The fridge needs cleaning out and the mountains of crap balanced precariously on my dressers needs a home. And I guess at some point I need to get out the bag of tubes and bottles and mysterious paraphernalia that goes with my breast pumps and figure out how it all works. (Though I’m planning on renting a pump from the hospital the first month, so I’m counting on them showing me how it works.) But the basics are in place, and, like flicking a switch, the nesting instinct has switched off. And the house is getting gross again, because suddenly I just can’t face it anymore.

Last week J and I were faced with an unexpected choice. We went to our doctor’s appointment last Tuesday, fully expecting to be told that two days later—when I hit 36 weeks—I was to go off the procardia (the anticontraction medication I’d been on since arriving at the hospital in late February) and we would let nature take its course. If I went into labor, we would do a c-section immediately. If not, we stick with the 29^th as our scheduled date.

But the doctor said we could stay on the drugs all the way up to the 29^th if we liked. It was our decision. Mind you, this “choice” probably gave us a false sense of control, because the procardia won’t keep me from going into labor if my body really forces the issue, nor does going off it guarantee that labor will ensue. Part of me desperately wanted to stop taking the drugs. But J really, really, really needed me to stay on them for another week. I know a lot of people won’t understand how someone’s job can be that important, but he has a show to finish and he has classes to teach. He’s trying to convince his university to hire him full-time, an event that could lead to him being a tenured professor, rather than a freelance lighting designer who’s gone all the time. We’re desperate for this to happen in the next few years, as I don’t fancy raising these kids on my own. And he’s got some important classes next week (though now it’s looking like Thursday’s class is less important). Besides, we all know that bigger babies are better, and 37 weeks is better than 36. So I decided to stay on the drugs, as hard as I was struggling.

And then, late last week, the pregnancy took a turn for the stranger and less tolerable. I was up all night last Thursday and Friday nights with contractions. By Friday I was timing them, and they were averaging 10 minutes apart. Not real labor, not enough to warrant emergency surgery. But not something I could ignore either. By 3 a.m. Saturday morning J and I decided that it was just too much to expect to stay on like this for another week, and I stopped taking the procardia. We fully expected to have the babies on Saturday. But despite stopping the anticontraction meds, the contractions slowed and faded in the wee hours of the morning. By Saturday afternoon I had given up and gone back on the procardia. I still had the occasional contraction on Saturday and Sunday, but it looked like we were back in the waiting game. So I put on my game face and decided to settle in for the long haul.

Then last night—Sunday night—the contractions started again. Again, just outside of the reach of true labor (averaging 8 minutes apart for several hours), painful but not so bad I could be sure of a c-section if I went to the hospital. (Mind you, the LAST thing I think I can cope with is more time in the hospital and coming home still pregnant. I refuse to go to the hospital with a false alarm.) Again, I called J at work at about 10 p.m. and asked him how he felt about having babies that night. This time I stayed on my drugs, though. And sure enough, after a long and painful night, the contractions slowed down around 5 or 6 in the morning, allowing me to get a bit of sleep, an hour at a time. And then they faded away almost altogether, appearing only once or twice an hour.

When this happened on Saturday I was pretty chill about it, despite the fact that the contractions caused me to miss my allergy shots, which I desperately need this time of year. But today has been different. I don’t know if it’s that I’ve been home too long alone, or whether the all-day headache (likely from aforementioned allergies) wore me down, or whether I’m just having another hormone shift. But instead of being chill about waiting, or excited about the babies, all I feel is empty and tired and depressed.

The contractions are back tonight with a vengeance—it’s been going on for hours. They are starting to hurt like hell, but they still aren’t more often than 8 minutes apart. I never knew someone could be in sort-of, limbo-labor like this for so long. It’s so frustrating.

I expected J to be on his way home at 10. My procardia dose was due at 9, but I figured I’d wait and talk to him. At 10:45, I called to see if he was ever getting out of rehearsal. As soon as I heard his voice I started to cry. He told me that he’s in as good of shape as he needs to be this week, and we agreed that I should just stop taking the drugs.

So maybe I’m having babies tonight, or tomorrow. Or maybe not. Maybe my body is just going to keep fucking with me for another week.

I’m so tired. And frustrated. And weak. I wanted to go into motherhood strong and hardy, geared up for the c-section recovery and the challenges again. Instead I feel like I’m limping toward the finish line, both mentally and physically. Which would be great if the finish line was actually the finish, instead of a whole grueling new beginning.

I’ve fallen down the rabbit hole for sure. But I’m not in wonderland yet. I’m just falling and falling, waiting for the bottom to rise up and meet me.

Post-Shower Blues

2010-02-21T16:59:00.000-08:00

I'm in a really weird place right now. We had the baby shower yesterday, and it was really great. It was nice to have so many friends show up and I felt really loved.

Today I just feel ... strange. I don't know--maybe it's post-baby-shower letdown. I still need to figure out what to buy, and I still don't want to buy stuff too soon, but I'm getting kind of frantic to have everything in place so that I can stop worrying about it. I've become kind of stuff-obsessed, probably because I still can't envision how this is all going to work out. Not that I think it won't work out, but I just wish I could picture it, you know.

Oh, and my mother in law really upset me yesterday. My sister, my dad, and several of my friends went in together and put together a fund to hire me a night nanny. They’ve gathered enough to pay for seven nights, and they think they might be able to get a few more. This is a really great present. It doesn’t have to be seven nights in a row—I can spread it out over several weeks. But it does make me feel strange, because the night nanny is really most useful if I’m pumping or using formula instead of breastfeeding, and I still don’t know how that’s going to work out, and I have this fantasy that I’m actually going to be able to breastfeed my babies and all will be well. Then again, last night at 4 a.m. when I still wasn’t asleep and was feeling frantic, it occurred to me that having a night nanny come once a week for a couple of months is probably an amazing thing. And once I got over the idea that now I was going to have to buy the expensive items on my registry myself, I realized that this is probably a really fabulous present, because I will buy the stroller and car seats myself, but I would never splurge on a night nanny myself.

So what does my MIL have to do with it? I ended up arriving ½ hour late to the party (which annoyed me, but I couldn’t rush my friends who were driving with us, because they had traveled down from B’more to come to the shower). Apparently, before I got there—but while a lot of my friends were there—my sister asked my MIL whether she wanted to contribute to the night-nanny gift. And not only did she refuse, she gave my sister a dressing down in front of everyone, lecturing about how she would NEVER contribute to something like that because SHE had twins and SHE didn’t have any nighttime help and so on. (I didn’t get the exact quote.) So she really upset my sister, which just pisses me off. Because my sister has been WAY more supportive than anyone else in my family about all this.

And speaking of my sister, she took me out to dinner last week and told me that she might be splitting up with her husband. She’s already moved out into the guest bedroom, and I think it’s just a matter of months before they separate. The reasons are hard to explain (and when I tried to explain them to J he got really frustrated with me). The short version sounds like a cliché—she’s spent her whole life trying to make other people happy, and as part of that has pretended that she’s fine and not “damaged” (her word, not mine, because I think we learn and grow from our scars) by our rocky childhood (hers much worse than mine), and basically has been faking a happy family/happy marriage for years. But the thing is, it’s hard to explain why the marriage isn’t working. Her husband is a great guy, and she loves him. So there’s no villain here. She just wants out, and it sounds to me like it’s really going to happen. And it even sounds to me like this might be really good for her. I’m so glad that, after all these years, she’s taking a stand for herself and being a bit selfish.

But—to be a bit selfish myself—this really sucks. She and her husband and my nephew have been a HUGE source of stability for me. I mean, for god’s sake, J and I have been planning on executing a will naming them as the guardians of our kids if something happens to us. We love them as a couple, and I don’t know what happens to our tiny little family unit we’ve created here in DC if they split up. The truth is, this family unit right now consists of me, my husband, and my sister and her family. After all my broken/fucked up family problems, I've settled on creating a new family for our children. So it's hard to see that fantasy dissolve.

And it also just makes me sad. Because I want her to be happy, but I’m not sure this will make her happy, and I know it’s going to devastate her husband and hurt her child and I love them, too. And there’s NO ONE I can talk to about this. It’s not like I can talk to J’s mom about it, and I don’t think most of my friends would understand. (Though at least now that the shower’s over I can talk to them about it. I didn’t want anyone to feel awkward at the shower.) The truth is, the person I talk to about stuff like this is my sister, and the last thing I want to do is lay a guilt trip on her when she’s finally finding herself.

Okay, now I’m sitting in my chair bawling. I think I hadn’t realized how upset I was about this before now. It’s just that everything seems to be going topsy turvy right when I need stability more than anything.

And it doesn't help that my body's frequent temper tantrums have me completely disoriented. I ended up staying up too late last night, then was awake most of the night with back pain and burning, screaming, excrutiating heartburn that no drug seemed able to touch. I'm having trouble even finding foods I can eat. Had macaroni with butter and parmesean for lunch today--how sad is that. So then I ended up sleeping all afternoon today, and now it's dark outside and I'm just disoriented and fussy.

I’m worried that I’m going to end up freaking out when I’m stuck at home with the babies. I think I need my job more for structure than for stimulation. When I'm home for several days in a row, especially alone, I get into this funk where I don't know what I should be doing or feeling.

So I’m kind of a mess today.

* * *

Wanted to note that I realized there IS someone I can talk to. Called my BFF in Boston who I sometimes forget I can hit with this stuff, even though her life is very different from mine. It was really nice, and I'm feeling a bit better.

Mashup of Email Rants

2010-02-16T16:14:00.000-08:00

I haven't been able to get my shit together and blog for weeks, so instead I thought I'd just pass on a mashup of email rants I've sent out in the past week:

God, I'm losing it. My doctor today confirmed what I suspected: I'm basically experiencing full-term pregnancy . . . with six more weeks to go. As of three weeks ago I already was carrying about 7 pounds of baby (3.3 and 3.6 pounds). I can't eat without getting stomachaches, nausea, and heartburn, and I can't digest what I do manage to eat. I can't really walk that well, because my knees are getting tweaked and my legs and feet hurt. And nighttime is the WORST. I can't sleep, because my back and hips are killing me. And turning over totally sucks. Sometimes I'm just happy to have morning come so I can give up on trying to sleep. Every three or four nights I get a decent night's sleep, but it's a real crap shoot otherwise. I've thought about trying to sleep in my recliner, but I can't recline it very far before the dizziness/heart pounding starts, which tells me the babies are sitting on my vena cava. And I worry that it'll hurt my upper back and neck so badly it won't be worth it. AARGGHH. Very frustrating.

And my work responsibilities just WILL NOT LET UP. This storm last week really messed me up. I was supposed to have oral argument on Wednesday--and I already was upset that it had been scheduled this late in my pregnancy. Now it's been canceled and likely will be rescheduled in MARCH. And it's not like I can easily ask someone else to handle it. The issues are incredibly complicated and I know the case really well, but it would take days for someone else to get caught up (and that person still might not really get the argument). So as long as I'm hauling my gigantic self into the office a few days a week, I'm really in no position to say I can't walk across the street and argue a case in court. But I REALLY REALLY REALLY don't want to do it. Any teeny amount of stress is kicking my ass at this point. On top of that, I have two briefs (that are interrelated and therefore hard to separate and reassign) due in March. I'd like to just knuckle down and focus on them, but other shit keeps cropping up that needs my attention. And I'm actually feeling so crappy that I'd love to just stop working altogether.

Oh, and I have all this baby stuff to get done too, like meet with our day care person (I think we found someone!), and find a pediatrician, and take our parenting classes, etc. And CRAP, I keep forgetting that I need to meet with our personnel specialist and call the disability people and figure out how to get all of my leave paperwork taken care of, too.

And apparently my pregnancy hormones have finally kicked in. I was snowed in all week last week, which you'd think would lead to blogging, but I was so cranky I couldn’t even get started at it. At first I thought it was stress over work, then I thought it was cabin fever. But finally I realized that it could be those third trimester hormones kicking in. You know that PMS feeling where you're so agitated you just want to start screaming at everything and nothing? That's how I'm feeling almost ALL the TIME. Add in the random panic attacks (also for no reason--simply a physical reaction to having twice as much blood, my doc says) and I'm not good company.

The rest of the time I’m weepy and sad. My sister suggested that I put together some baby pictures of me and J for our baby shower this Saturday, and I got all upset, because there really ARE NO baby pictures of me. (Totally true. My parents took a ton of pictures of my sister, but when I was born they took almost none. My mom had a nervous breakdown after I was born. And those that she did have of me she managed to lose in one of her many moves over the years. I have maybe two or three pictures, which just happened to be in a school project from 7^th grade that I had kept. For a long time I thought my dad would have some pictures (given that he’s an amazing amateur photographer), but when he sent me his CD archives a few years ago I discovered that aside from the ONE photo of me in the hospital, there are no pictures until I’m more than two years old.) Anyway, I ended up sitting on the couch crying about this, asking myself why no one loved me as a baby. Like this isn’t the oldest of old news. But there’s something about being an almost-mom that brings out the strangest thoughts about my own parents. Who suck.

We're making progress on getting the house ready, but that's been kind of stressful, too. Especially now that it seems that--despite everyone's assurances that "lots of people will want to buy you stuff"--no one seems to be buying us anything off our registry. I feel horrible and greedy for feeling so disappointed about this, but I spent weeks putting together that registry (which is okay, I guess, because it's still a good shopping list) and it feels weird to have it ignored. My shower is this Saturday, and it doesn't seem like many people are coming. Again, normally I'd be cool with this, but it's also a little strange. I keep telling myself that it's okay--we have a little bit of money (from last years health care flex account) set aside to buy the essentials, and we have been given a TON of secondhand stuff. In fact, I suspect I have more clothes than I'll be able to use in the first few months (though it's hard to tell for sure). But I’m still feeling let down.

Rest assured, I will somehow get through all of this. But I’m struggling like I never have before. I feel like I’m clawing my way on hands and knees to the finish line, and I’ll be lucky to make it across in one piece.

So . . . how’s everyone else doing?

Babies Have Returned!

2010-01-17T08:34:00.001-08:00

Thanks so much for all your reassurance! I felt better as soon as I wrote my last post. Sometimes just writing about your fears helps take some of the sting out of them.

My babies must have read my blog sometime yesterday evening, or maybe they felt that they had given me the silent treatment for long enough. Baby A was checking in with some strong bumps and kicks. And Baby B--well, I don't know what the hell she was doing. I'm thinking she's either going to be a swimmer or a boxer, because either she was practicing her flutter kick or she was working the speed bag. It was just bizarre. But very very comforting.

Now I have to go back to folding and sorting hand-me-down baby clothes. (And that's a whole new post.)

Rediscovering Paranoia: Where the Fuck Are My Babies?

2010-01-16T05:52:00.000-08:00

I am greatly in need of reassurance, because I’ve entered into a new world of terror. For six months all I’ve thought about is my babies dying. (Okay, that’s not ALL I thought about, but it’s been my overarching fear.) Then, for the last few weeks, what with the constant kicking and every week bringing me closer to viability, that fear has eased.

Now I have a new fear: my babies coming out damaged in some way. And the little monsters apparently are in on it, because they’ve (almost) completely stopped kicking. Maybe that’s an exaggeration—I can’t really tell, because I wasn’t timing or counting the movements before. They’re definitely still alive in there—each one checks in occasionally. But both babies’ movements seem have become less frequent and much fainter.

Here’s what happened (in my paranoid cause-and-effect way of thinking): I think (but am not sure) that everything was normal (i.e. lots of strong movement, mostly twisting type stuff) as of last Wednesday. Then, on Thursday night, I had a really really bad night. I had an incredibly stressful day at work, and my day-long pounding on my keyboard triggered some sort of muscle spasm behind my left shoulder. That night, I discovered for the first time that I couldn’t lie on my back for even a minute or two (before this I tried not to lie on my back, but I kept waking up in that position so I knew it was happening anyway) without the dizzy/heart-racing/nausea feeling that lets you know that the babies are, in fact, crushing the vena cava. And though I never believed that this also could happen sleeping on the right side, it seemed that I was getting that sensation sleeping on that side as well (or maybe I was having a panic attack). And my left side had this throbbing shoulder and sleeping on that was killing me as well.

Sometime in the middle of the night I got up to pee, eat, and see if I could do something about my shoulder. When this shoulder problem used to happen, I could spend 15 minutes lying on my back with one of my “miracle balls” (used for physical therapy) between my shoulder blades. Despite my concerns about lying on my back, I tried this. And despite the fact that I was feeling panicky and dizzy, I stayed there for a few minutes. (Not sure how long—definitely under 5 minutes.) Baby A was kicking when I started this, then his kicks faded away.

A few minutes later I got up and tried to ice my shoulder while lying on my recliner. But the dizzy/panicky feeling remained. At this point I don’t know if it was the pain, a panic attack, or an actual circulation problem. Baby B gave some feeble kicks, and I think I got some movement from Baby A, so I knew they were both still alive after my admittedly foolish move.

And then I started to worry (and yes, this really does sound crazy to me). What if I cut off their blood supply enough to damage them, but not kill them? What if I have brain-damaged babies in there now? What if I’ve ruined their lives, and our lives in the bargain?

The thing is, these thoughts probably would have eased by now but my babies have chosen this moment to go into partial hibernation! Every day they kick—I know they’re alive. But it’s NOTHING like what I was feeling in the past few weeks, or even earlier this week. (Actually, I think Baby B is about where she was before with movement. But Baby A—my baby that NEVER stops moving—seems to kick only rarely now and weakly.)

My rational explanation: earlier this week, for both babies, the kicking was surpassed by a lot of strange twisty motions. (Very hard to describe, but I imagine some of you know what I mean.) My rational guess is that the babies have changed position—or at least Baby A has changed position—and now his kicks aren’t in a place that I feel as much. I also wonder if they’ve gotten bigger and don’t have the leverage to kick like they used to. Or maybe there was just a growth spurt and he’s tired out.

But my rational explanation isn’t doing much for my mounting paranoia/terror. I’ve already decided that if this doesn’t change by Monday I’ll probably call my doctor and see what they think. But for now, please tell me, is this normal?

The 22-Week Sono

2010-01-13T17:58:00.000-08:00

As promised, here are the best of the 22-week sono pictures. (Had our 26-week sono last week, but neither baby deigned to look like anything resembling a baby for the photos.)

And yes, Baby A is shaking his fist at you. I'm telling you, that kid's gonna be trouble.

Pregnancy Kills Blogging!

2010-01-13T06:49:00.001-08:00

God, I thought I was a bad blogger before, but being pregnant is sucking every ounce of spare time and spare energy out of my body, rendering me Worst Blogger Ever. It doesn’t help that I go to bed at 9 every night (often quite panicky about getting to bed before I completely lose my ability to put myself to bed properly), that I’m struggling to perform the bare minimum of my job, and that every spare moment is spent trying to complete my baby registry or plan what classes we’re going to take or appease all of the family that’s come out of the woodwork lately and wants to be a big part of my life.

Oh, and I have SO much to say that that thought of writing a blog entry has been kind of intimidating. So this morning I decided, fuck it, I’ll just say what I can now and say more later, if I get a chance.

So, first, the BIG news. On Christmas Eve, J and I opened the card that would tell us the sex(es) of our babies. Actually, we had two cards—the first was written by our doctor who was looking at the CVS results. The results she had didn’t identify which baby was which, so if they were opposite sexes, she wouldn’t be able to tell us which was Baby A and which was Baby B. So at the next sono appointment we also got a sealed envelope from our sono tech, identifying the sex of each baby.

Before we opened the cards, J gave me two Christmas presents—our babies’ first stuffed animals. For Baby A, he selected a super-soft, floppy donkey. Just fucking adorable. Baby B got a soft, kind of funky-patchworky stuffed dog. Very different, but also cute as can be. J told me that, after he found the donkey, he had a really hard time finding another animal that was different but “equivalent.” Do you go by size? Quality? Price? And then, right there in the store, he realized that this was his life—that this question would hound him every Christmas, birthday, and other special occasion. We laughed for a long time over that.

And then we opened the card. We started with the card from our doc, because if the babies were the same sex there would be no need to find out which was which. J opened it, and I sat there with my hands over my eyes. Finally, he said, “Well, on to envelope number two,” and I started bouncing up and down on the couch, clapping my hands and trying not to be a total sap by crying. Envelope number two revealed that Baby A (the one who never stops moving, and appears to be banging on the walls of their cage in the sono I’ll post as soon as I get home) is a boy, and Baby B (the one who is much more mellow, and always just sits there calmly during the sonos) is a girl.

We couldn’t be happier. I mean, I’m sure we would have been just as happy to have boys and just as happy to have girls, but we really wanted to experience both. So with four years of trying, more than $40,000 in medial bills, and a little help from our friendly neighborhood cryobank, J and I finally seem to have hit the IVF jackpot.

Have tons more to tell (mostly whining, so let’s save that for another post), but I’ve got to get my ass in gear and write this brief.

Love you all, and miss you. I need to get back on track with catching up with everyone, and I’m going to try to do that in little bits and pieces in the next couple of weeks.

An Overheard Moment

2009-12-07T10:00:00.000-08:00

On Saturday night, as I was heading back into the living room where our friends were hanging out with my man J, I heard this conversation:

J's best friend (and current father of a 1-year old): Yeah, pregnancy can be pretty nervewracking.

J: You're telling me. If you had any idea the thoughts that go through my head every time I see [Babychaser's] name come up on the caller ID. . . .

I caught myself blinking back tears. J's awesome, and hilarious, and sarcastic, and I adore him. But he doesn't often talk about how he's feeling, and sometimes it's hard to have a serious conversation with him about this pregnancy. I had no idea he was as scared as I am. And knowing that he's as deep into this as I am really touched me.

My Babies Are Rock Stars

2009-12-04T17:30:00.000-08:00

There are definite upsides to this whole pregnancy thing. This week I started feeling the babies kick. It’s not prominent enough to feel with my hand, so J hasn’t been able to feel it yet, but it’s definitely real. Such a cool feeling. Most people describe the early movements as a fluttering feeling, or like bubbles. I think if I felt that stuff I totally disregarded it. After all, there’s been an awful lot going on in my belly, what with muscles stretching and twitching, ligaments shifting, and my entire digestive system being bent out of shape (literally). These movements aren't fluttery; they actually feel like tiny fists punching out from the inside. I’m sure it will get annoying in a while, but for now it’s just so satisfying. On Wednesday I spent the day at a seminar at the Supreme Court—first we heard the arguments for that day (the property case on Florida’s beach restoration program, a fascinating case involving property law, constitutional law, and whether the Court should recognize a “judicial takings” doctrine), then we had several panel discussions with various experts on Supreme Court practice. (Coolest CLE ever.) I ended up totally spacing out about 10 minutes of one of these panels—on a really cool topic—because Baby A was kicking and I was entranced. So yeah, there’s definitely some falling in love going on.

Also, J and I had our 21-week sono today, and our babies are total rock stars. They’re big for their age—both are measuring at about 22 weeks, and both have strong heartbeats. (Watching a live heartbeat on a sono is incredibly cool—you can see all 4 chambers at work. Really amazing.) As usual, Baby A was vying for all the attention, waving his/her little fists around and wiggling all over the place. But J and I thought Baby B stole the show this time. I think it was the shot we got of the bottoms of his/her little feet, with all the tiny toes. And Baby B had the hiccups, which we could see, and then hear when we were listening to the heartbeat. Again, I’m sure this will annoy me when the babies are big enough for me to feel their hiccups, but at this point it was incredibly cute.

So while I’m definitely still suffering (add back/hip pain to the nighttime mix—sometimes it’s a relief when morning comes because trying to sleep is such a struggle), at least I know my babies are content, well-fed, and comfortable. Narcissistic little monsters.

Can I Bitch?

2009-11-29T15:00:00.000-08:00

Can I take a moment to bitch about my pregnancy? Is it all right, after all these years of trying to get here, for me to mark my halfway point by complaining about how hard this is?

Pregnancy is really kicking my ass. In some ways, it isn’t as hard as I imagined. Given my history of back problems and miscarriages, I thought it was possible that pregnancy would turn me into a true invalid. (It still might, but it’s looking like, if that happens, it will be in the later stages.) And I still remain fairly functional and somewhat active.

But in many ways pregnancy is much harder than I thought it would be. All of the symptoms are totally tolerable—for a week or two. But to feel like crap day after day, with no end in sight, is exhausting. And having to maintain the same level of competence at work while my body is in full revolt is daunting.

Here’s my list of lovely symptoms:

Nausea. That’s right, I’m 20 weeks pregnant and still getting nauseous. No, wait, that’s not quite accurate. I’m getting nauseous AGAIN. My doc says that this happens with a lot of women when they hit 28 weeks—it’s the pressure the baby is putting on the stomach. He thinks that it’s likely, with me carrying twins, this is what’s happening. And he’s right that it’s different from morning sickness. I now get sick after I eat, not before. So I feel ill before I eat because I’m hungry. And then I feel even worse after I eat. Actually, I’ve discovered that the only time I feel really good is while I’m eating and maybe five minutes afterward.

Heartburn. Probably higher on the list of annoyances than the nausea. Everything I eat turns to acid. And then it seems to crawl back up my throat. I’m constantly burping, and when I’m not upright I end up just regurgitating. Sorry if this seems disgusting. It is digusting. And painful. And annoying. I’m taking a zantac before every meal, which helps some, but it’s frustrating as hell.

Headaches. When I don’t eat and drink enough (such as when I’m nauseous or have hearburn), I get headaches. Ow.

Insomnia. Everything is conspiring against my ability to sleep. For starters, I can’t sleep for more than three hours without having to get up to eat. And the amount I eat seems to have little to do with this calculation. So I can’t eat twice as much and sleep twice as long. It just doesn’t work that way. And then, of course, after I eat I get the aforementioned heartburn/regurgitation, which has a way of keeping me awake. Also, lying on my side (which I now have to do) makes my hips and/or lower back hurt, which also keeps me awake. And sometimes, when I’m miraculously comfortable lying there, I STILL can’t sleep. For hours. No idea why. This generally is between 2 a.m. and 5 a.m., maybe later. I seem to do my best sleeping after 5:30 or 6:00 a.m, which really blows when I need to get up at 6:30 to go to work.

Paranoia. This coincides with the insomnia, as I am much more paranoid in those lonely hours in the middle of the night. I ended up with a surge of nausea and cramps last week, which made me so concerned that I called my doctor. He now wants me to push up my sono (scheduled for Friday) to Monday. (Which also sucks, as my fabulous OB’s office almost certainly will be booked and will try to push me off to Community Radiology again, which is where I had to go last month, and the sono tech couldn’t get the TV screen working and would barely turn her screen so I didn’t really get to see anything, and the equipment was crappy and I ended up with no pictures and I SWORE that this month’s sono was going to be in the nice place where I could actually see my babies! Grrr.) A few nights ago I was sure I felt the babies (Baby B, to be precise) kicking, though I’m still having trouble figuring out which abdominal sensations—and there are many—are the babies. Haven’t felt it since, so I spent all night last night wondering, again, if my babies had died. I tend to be a lot better about these thoughts in the light of day, at least.

Exhaustion. I do have bursts of energy occasionally, but they don’t come every day and they don’t last long. Mostly I’m just tired. A couple of weeks ago, when J was out of town, I finished my dinner and wondered whether it was too early to go to bed. I looked at the clock. It was 7:15.

I think I would tolerate these problems better if I didn’t have so long to go, and if I didn’t know it was just going to get harder. I’m feeling a little ripped off—where are the happy second-trimester hormones I was promised? Where is that “I can do anything” burst of energy I was supposed to get? Then again, I am getting two babies for the price of one, and that’s likely the reason I’m having such a hard time.

I know I shouldn’t complain. And I am so unbelievably relieved not to be trying to get pregnant anymore that I am, for the most part, handling this difficulty well enough. But occasionally—like the day before Thanksgiving when the headaches came to the cramps/nausea/heartburn party—I just break down and cry, because I have no idea how to take care of myself anymore. I’ve lost all control over my body, and my desperate attempts to keep myself in line (yoga, acupuncture, chiropractic, walking on treadmill) often seem futile in the face of this overwhelming change.

So lay it on me, folks. Am I the only one struggling through this?

The Long-Awaited (and Just Plain Long) Post About My Mother

2009-11-14T19:44:00.000-08:00

I’ve been promising to write about my mother for as long as I’ve been writing this blog—which is almost two years now. I never do it, though, mostly because it’s such a monumental undertaking. How do I describe the damage caused by the person who was, for most of formative years, the most influential person in my life? How can I keep this blog-length, while capturing the depth of my frustration at the fact that I can’t fully escape her? How can I show how hurt and angry I am that she emotionally abandoned me for her mental illness? And what does it say about me that I’m estranged from my father, and wish I could reach the same distance from my mother?

But I’ve been thinking about this all day, so I’m going to at least give it a start:

My mom is nuts. Maybe not to the casual observer, definitely not on first acquaintance. But she’s crazy. Definitely bipolar. With an edge of paranoid schizophrenia. She’s functional—sort of. A few years ago she found another man sucker enough to marry her and take care of her so she could retire. And you can bet that she hides most of her crazy from him (she can be very practical that way). A few years ago she told me that she never told him that she channels, or anything about that side of her. And all I could think was why the hell she couldn’t do the same thing for me?

I’m doing a shit job of describing this. Here’s the thing. My dad left when I was four. And my stepdad, who came along when I was seven and stuck for 11 years, was such a non-entity in my life that I never even think about him. As parents went, it was all my mom.

And she was the BEST. Or at least that’s what I thought most of the time. We were so close, like two peas in a pod. She cultivated me to think I was just like her, and I thrived on her love and attention. (What this all did to my big sister, “F,” who was classified by my mom as more like my dad, is another horrifying story. I try not to feel guilty—I was younger and didn’t know—but it still bothers me sometimes.)

I always knew that mom was kind of nutty, but I always figured her as eccentric, kooky, a bit of a free spirit. Because that’s the way she described herself, and I was just a kid, so what was I going to believe? And then she went over the edge. Maybe it was the move to Pakistan that did it. That’s right—my mom and stepdad’s bright idea was to move to Pakistan my senior year of high school to teach at an American school there. (The reason? To escape a judgment of back child support against my stepdad. Lovely, no?) Me and my much younger little brother (child of my stepdad) went with them. I was young, eager for adventure, and such a flaming liberal that I had some great vision of going and learning from this unique culture, blah, blah, blah. And I thought for sure I could get into any college if I was applying from there.

I lasted all of three weeks in Pakistan before I bailed out and my mom agreed to let me go back home to Utah to finish out high school. Three days later I was halfway around the world with $500 in my pocket to buy a car, no definite place to live (they just figured I could live with a friend), no one knowing I was coming.

Does this sound normal to you? Because at the time I didn’t know how fucked up that was.

I think going to Pakistan pushed mom over the edge. Actually, I think she was well on her way there before then—she’d been like a zombie the whole summer before. But she went truly nuts there, determined that the cook was trying to poison her, performing “water rituals” (don’t even ask—it’s just stupid and embarrassing), and channeling her spirit guide, who just happened to be Jesus Christ. Not that she was any kind of born-again Christian or anything. She was just putting herself in a trance and hearing voices. (Later—and for a long time—John Denver joined the mix.)

All of this came to a head the next year—my freshman year of college. First the Gulf War broke out and they sent everyone home from Pakistan. And no sooner did they return a couple of months later but my mom went on a full-fledged manic episode. I think she got hospitalized there, but I don’t really know, because all I ever heard was her side of the story, which (again in retrospect) is hard to believe.

But when they brought her home in March of my freshman year, I did believe. I believed everything she told me. I believed that she had found this new, new-agey religion. I believed that her trances were a way to heal her from the abuse she had suffered as a child (now I don’t even know if that abuse happened). I believed that she was fine, not crazy at all. And when my stepdad and aunt tried to put mom in the hospital I stood up to them and prevented it from happening. And when, a few months later, she was found up roaming the streets of DC without her purse or coat and ended up hospitalized (I later learned she had gone to DC in search of John Denver, who was talking to her telepathically to try to meet her, but was thwarted by these other, devil voices that were mixing up his messages), I talked her doctor into releasing her if I took her home to Utah for outpatient treatment, and I flew down to DC from NY, and flew her back to Utah. I was nineteen.

Fast forward several years—years with her ups and downs, years in which she attempted suicide a couple of times (which she would promptly tell me about), years when she quit jobs she had just started because her boss was “out to get her,” years when she tossed her oldest and closest friends aside. For most of this I stood by her. My sister F bailed out early—back when mom first came home from Pakistan—but I defended her.

I don’t think my mom ever forgave me for growing up. I think she liked it when I was young and looked up to her and was “just like” her. I think, as much as she “wept” when I told her I was being treated for depression in my mid-20s, that it made her love me that much more, because it made me more hers. It was the things about me that were adult, competent, controlled that she didn’t like. She wanted to teach me to channel, so I could talk to my own spirit guide, and she wanted to hypnotize me; she was disappointed when I was unwilling. And she hated the fact that I wanted some emotional boundaries between us; I remember her telling me that I was being “cold,” just like F. (My sister, by the way, is perhaps the best thing in my life besides my husband; she’s not cold, she’s just grown up.) Mom wanted me to be a “free spirit,” and she never could accept the side of me that I’ve grown to like the best—the organized, practical, driven, self-sufficient side. She was ridiculously proud of me for being a lawyer, but I don’t think she ever got why I’m good at it.

I know this post is long on generalities, but lacking in anything concrete. But there’s no time, no space, to get into all of that. I can tell you that about 10 years ago I had an epiphany. By that time mom was a problem, and I knew she was a bit of a mess, but I was still in her camp, ready to talk to her when she was depressed, and willing to see her when she wanted. So I agreed to go with her and her best friend on a trip to the Outer Banks. The trip was a fucking disaster. Mom wanted to listen to Air Supply in the car so we could sing to it just like when I was a teenager, but she’d picked up some Air Supply CD I’d never heard (who knew Air Supply kept writing after the 80s?), and then she was mad at me when I wouldn’t sing. We were driving through North Carolina when she realized that she had the directions, lost the name of the hotel, even lost the name of the town we were going to. And at some point, when we were leaving a hotel, she drove over her own suitcase. She was in bad, bad shape. And when we got to the hotel, I learned that she had downgraded the 3-bedroom bungalow she told me about and had rented one hotel room for the three of us. (This when I was going to bed at midnight and they were going to bed at 9 or 10.) The room only had a microwave, but mom and her friend planned to “cook” all their meals in their hotel room (all three of us were really broke at the time—I’d been counting on a kitchen). And mom was pissed off that I ended up eating most of my meals at the restaurant—she said I was acting like I was too good for them. Really I was just hungry. I was 28 years old, and mom clearly wanted me to be 8 years old again.

It was during that trip that I realized that my mom wasn’t just mentally ill—she was toxic. I realized that it had never been about me. Even when she was doting-all-over-me full of love, it was still all about her. And I realized that she had no idea who I had become as an adult. And when she was lucid enough to see the adult in me, she didn’t like it. (When I told all this to F on my return, she said with a wry smile, “I don’t mean to be flip, but welcome to my life.” It was an epiphany for me.)

Fast-forward again, several more years. Years of me trying to distance myself from mom, years involving some horrifying letters from her vilifying me, telling me that she had never leaned on me, telling me that she had only pretended to need me to satisfy my co-dependent need for self-congratulation. And then one evening after she had decided to move here to DC to be close to us, when we tried to tell her she wouldn’t do so well here, an unbelievable knock-down, drag-out fight in my sister’s house that I can barely remember. The “conversation” lasted 2 hours, and I can’t remember the things she said. All I can remember is that they’re the kinds of things a parent should never, ever say to her child, under any circumstances. (My MIL says maybe it’s a good thing that I can’t remember, but I wish I could. Because sometimes I feel like I’m making this all up, like I’m just a bad daughter. Knowing exactly what mom has said and done would help.)

And after that, after mom had found her new husband and moved with him and his money back to Utah, I had some peace. My sister—who had produced her first and only grandchild—was suddenly the favorite. Which was just fine with me. I would still hear mom’s voice in my head sometimes, and I would still have her stay with me for a night or two when she came to visit. (Visits that were preceded by panic attacks and survived through liberal doses of xanax.)

And then, when my nephew was three and I had been trying to conceive for almost a year, my sister had a miscarriage. F had been four months pregnant, so her loss was pretty public. And devastating. I know mom was upset, but she still managed to make it all about her, not about my grieving sister. Mom told her own sisters (who she’s been competing with her whole life), and her sisters sent F flowers, and then mom spent two days calling to make sure the flowers got there. And then, two weeks after F lost her baby, mom sent her a vicious e-mail chiding her for not sending a thank you note for the flowers. Seriously. I’m not making this up.

A week after my sister’s miscarriage I learned I was pregnant for the first time. Two weeks later I miscarried. Not telling mom was a no-brainer.

That fall, mom came out for her annual visit. She spent the week babysitting my nephew at F’s house, and working on her new book on F’s computer. (Mom fancies herself a novelist. She actually has some talent, but she tries to write these deep, philosophical books—this one was sci-fi I think—that are full of numerology and bits and pieces of trendy philosophy and religion and are basically unreadable.) That Friday, J and I were going to F’s house for dinner, and we were taking mom home with us for the weekend before she flew back home.

I had been in the house less than a minute—J had gone back into the kitchen to help my sister cook, leaving me alone with mom—when she dropped the bomb:

“I was working on my book on F’s computer,” she said, “and I was trying to save and I accidentally clicked on something and this document just popped right open.”

I knew this couldn’t be going anywhere good. My heart started to race.

She went on: “I started to read it and I realized that it was some sort of diary. F had written all about her feelings about her miscarriage.”

I started to feel sick, tried not to hyperventilate.

“And that’s how I learned about YOUR miscarriage,” she said. “Oh honey, you must have been devastated.”

I don’t remember what I said next. Something inane, something about how it was okay, really, I was glad she knew. Which was a total fucking lie, but she’d caught me flatfooted.

As mom kept on talking about F’s diary, and I realized two things. One: mom hadn’t just glanced at this document and closed it when she realized what it was. She had pored over it closely, probably several times. And two: mom’s issue with the diary wasn’t about F’s heartbreak over her loss, or about my loss. It was about what F had written about mom.

You see, F had written some unkind things about mom. (Astonishing, no?) And mom was upset about that. I remember at some point she said “I know, people who eavesdrop should never expect to hear nice things,” and I was shouting in my head that this wasn’t like eavesdropping because F had never SAID that stuff to ANYONE. It was in her PRIVATE diary.

The rest of the weekend was a blur. I know that I told mom in no uncertain terms that she should never, ever, in her entire life, let F know that she had read her diary, and that I would carry the secret to the grave. (This meant that I was going to have to tell F that I had decided to tell mom about my own miscarriage, because I knew it would come up at some point—I think this was the worst violation, having to tell my sister that I had chosen to reveal a secret that had been ripped out of me.) I know that mom at one point—when she realized I was mad—asked me in a plaintive voice “well, after it just popped open, what was I supposed to do?” and I manage to say through gritted teeth: “CLOSE IT”.

Oh, and I remember a conversation in the car on the way back from F’s house, when mom glibly told me that my infertility must come from my father’s side of the family. Even that part of me was something she couldn’t own.

Later that week, mom wrote F a 12-page, single-spaced letter telling her she had read her diary. I don’t know what the letter said, exactly, but F told me that the only reason she read the whole thing was to see if there was an apology anywhere in it. There wasn’t. It was all about the nasty things F had said—in her own diary—about mom. It was bitter and brutal.

F and I came to an agreement that day. No more secrets, for any reason. Not even to protect each other. We are a united front. Forever.

About a month later, mom sent us both a letter. It said that she wasn’t going to visit us anymore, because she was “no good” for us anymore. There was a lot more crap in there, like how she grieved over us as if we had died, and how our father had never loved us (something she’s been telling me since I was a little kid), and god only knows what else. I read it quickly and set it aside. As far as I was concerned, the only thing that mattered was that she wasn’t going to visit anymore. And thank god for that.

But then, a few months later, she started wheedling her way back into my life. I guess I’m the favorite again, right? Every few months I would call her, or would pick up when she called me (mostly I just screen), and we’d chat about mundane stuff. I talked to her just enough to keep her from realizing I was avoiding her. I didn’t want things to fester and get ugly again. Sometimes she would write to me, letters filled with code and innuendo about how F was like my father (code for cold, unfeeling, pretentious), or how she wanted to come visit me, but she couldn’t see F because she had to “protect her from being two people”—one who is nice to mom’s face and one who writes bad things behind her back. And in these same letters she would fawn all over me, like a lovesick teenager. I think her love for me is creepier and more offensive that her hatred of my sister. Neither is deserved or based on anything real. Mom has no idea who I am. And the parts of me that are really ME she doesn’t like.

For the past five or six years, all I have wanted to do was tell her to go fuck herself, now and forever. My MIL would say “it’s not her, it’s that she’s mentally ill.” But I say fuck that. Mental illness doesn’t excuse a person from hurting your children the way she’s hurt us. And if she really wanted to be better she’d see a decent doctor and stay on her medication.

And frankly I don’t care what’s causing her to be the way she is. She’s a snake. She’ll spend years wiggling into your most sensitive parts, then strike out at you when she doesn’t get her way, or when she’s bored, or when it’s winter and she’s depressed. Who cares why? All I care about is protecting myself and the people I love.

But you can’t just write off a bi-polar family member. I haven’t had a real fight with her since that two-hour debacle in my sister’s house 7 years ago. I learned then that it isn’t worth it. She doesn’t hear what I’m saying; all getting angry does is escalate the problem. If I tried to tell her that we’re through, she might go away for a while, but sooner or later she’d be back. Maybe on the phone, maybe in letters, maybe on my doorstep. Maybe on my doorstep with her wrists slit open just enough to make me think she meant it.

So until I’m ready to get a restraining order and make her a ward of the state if necessary, she remains my mom. (And I do consider that a possibility in the long run. But I’m not there yet.) I try to keep up as many barriers between us as possible. Enough to protect me and my family, but not quite enough for her to notice. My goal with her is not to achieve love, or reconciliation. My goal is to achieve total ambivalence, to the point where nothing she says or does can hurt me. (A lot of this is about privacy. For example, she knows nothing about my later IF treatment, nothing about my surgery, nothing about my other miscarriages.)

I did tell her, about two years ago when she was threatening to visit again, that J and I were undergoing “advanced fertility treatment” and that we were not having any visitors until it was over, which could take more than a year. It was a calculated risk—I decided to give up some of my privacy to keep her away. And it worked.

And then I got pregnant. Can I tell you how badly I wanted not to tell her about this? Most people are scared to tell their boss, their co-workers, maybe an IF friend. I was terrified about telling my mother. And not because I was afraid she’d be cold or cruel. But because I knew she’d be thrilled, ecstatic. Especially about the twins. I knew she’d be over the moon. Finally something to lord over her sisters, who have only managed to eke out one grandchild so far. And I knew that, just like snapping my fingers, she’d be back in my life as if nothing had ever happened.

I wasn’t wrong. When I called her and told her she was practically speechless with shock. (Which led me to wonder—was the reason I had managed to escape her so almost completely because she had given up on me giving her a grandchild? Had she lost interest in me?) And then two days later I got a letter full of excited gibbering, talking about how she kept bursting out in song and how every time she thought about twins she started giggling. She talked about “twinspeak” and shit like that. I had made it clear on the phone that she could visit during the summer, not when the babies came in the spring, and that she could not stay in our house. “No room,” I said, which is true (but we will squeeze in our friends who are coming to help soon after the babies come). In her letter, she talked about how she was going to try to find a hotel close by so she could walk there early in the mornings so she could be with me for nighttime help. (This is SO not going to happen. By the time she comes I’ll be handling the nighttime on my own. And I don’t think having her there to help will make me sleep any better. And I assure you, that woman will never be alone with my kids.)

It’s been like that ever since. She’s tried to call every two weeks. (Which also is not happening. I’ll talk to her once a month, maybe. No more than that.) And when we do talk, she tells me that every time she sees a baby or a toddler now she pictures another one next to it. That she’s “always wanted [me] to have twins.” (Why? Why me? What does that mean?) That she loves to picture the twins in their high chairs next to each other banging away, talking twinspeak to each other.

I knew that if I got pregnant she would be back in my life. And I knew that the twin thing was going to make her feel extra-special. But this is distressing and revolting at the same time. I feel like, before my babies are even born, they already are not people. They already are in that special category—twins. Special by virtue of their birth, not because of who they are or will be. For me, they’re just two babies that I happen to be having at the same time. And they’ll grow up to be siblings that happen to be the same age. And yeah, I do hope that they like each other and are close, but I’m not counting on it. But for mom the twin thing makes me, or maybe just my children, celebrities in our family, worthy of adulation. It’s creepy.

I realized several years ago that, until she dies (and believe me, that woman is healthy as a horse), mom is going to be in our lives. Sometimes she’ll adore me, sometimes she’ll hate me, and I honestly don’t know which is worse. (F says being hated is worse. And she’s been on that side a lot more than I have.) But my mother will never actually know me. And she’ll never actually know my children (she’s completely thrown my now-7-year-old nephew away).

And as the years go by she’ll keep getting crazier, and she’ll keep coming back to take it out on me and my sister. (For some reason my little brother gets a free pass. I think it’s because he’s a boy.) All I can do is try to maintain my barriers, my distance. And pray for ambivalence.

Miscarriage Dreams

2009-10-31T12:49:00.000-07:00

WARNING: This post is pretty graphic. Appropriate for Halloween maybe, but consider yourself warned.

For months I’ve been having miscarriage dreams. They show up about once a week, and always leave me completely freaked out. Up until last night, they’ve been pretty much the same. I’m in the middle of an otherwise ordinary dream—no reason for me to suspect I’m dreaming—and I go to pee and find blood on the toilet paper. At first just a little bit, then a few drops more, and then the cramps start to kick in.

It used to take me a minute to realize that this was bad. After all, it’s been a pretty frequent occurrence for me for the past 25 years or so—it’s strange NOT to be bleeding for so long. But then, as realization dawned, I would have that “oh no” moment. I remember the first such dream vividly, rocking back and forth on the toilet saying, “No, no, no, no, no” until J finally heard me and woke me up. And it’s getting harder for me to wake myself up from these dreams as well. A few weeks ago, I had a whole conversation with myself—in my dream—about how this time I wasn’t dreaming and it was real. I actually pulled the oldest cliché in the book—while still dreaming, I pinched myself over and over again to prove I wasn’t dreaming, which eventually managed to wake me up.

Last night my brain decided to raise the stakes, and I dreamed that I had the whole miscarriage. Not the way it would actually be, of course, because it didn’t take more than a minute and didn’t hurt much. It started the same way, some blood in the toilet. But then there was a gush, like when you’re passing a big blood clot, and my babies fell out into the toilet, one right after the other. Luckily for my sanity, they didn’t look like babies—they were just bundled packages that I knew had my babies inside.

It happened so fast—I knew my pregnancy had ended but just couldn’t wrap my brain around it. It was like those dreams (if you have them you’ll understand) where you’ve done something incredibly stupid, like drive off a ledge, and now you’re falling and you know you’re going to die and you know that there’s nothing you can do about it. You’ve passed the point of no return, and it’s just . . . over.

And with this dream, like all of the others before it, as soon as it happened there was a voice inside my head saying, “but of course, here’s the miscarriage—knew it was going to happen sooner or later.” Of all the things about these dreams that scare me, I think this sense of resignation over the miscarriage, the sense that it was inevitable, is the most disturbing.

I’m not big into dream analysis. I pretty much subscribe to the theory that my brain does a lot of random dicking around while I sleep. But it doesn’t take a genius to figure what these dreams mean.

I definitely have had my worry-dream phases before. When I left home for college I went through a phase where I kept dreaming about bad things happening to my little brother. And when I first adopted kittens I dreamed about some catastrophe happening and not knowing what to do to save them. I suspect that when I actually have the kids I’ll have dreams about bad things happening to them, too.

But I wonder—do women who haven’t struggled to get pregnant have these dreams? Do women who’ve never lost a pregnancy have them? And if not, what do they dream about?

And I’m curious—as the fertility drugs and pregnancy hormones zip around through your bodies, what are you all dreaming about?

The Precariousness of Pregnancy

2009-10-27T13:41:00.000-07:00

One of my good friends—who is about 5 weeks behind me in her pregnancy—just found out that she had a miscarriage. Her baby died about two weeks ago. She managed to stay on the phone long enough to tell me what happened, then said she was sure I understood that she was in no condition to talk. All I could say was “of course,” and “I’m so sorry,” and “call me when you need me.”

How fucking inadequate. And don’t get me wrong—I’m not getting down on myself for not knowing what to say. It’s that I know there’s nothing I can say or do that will ease her pain. I’m helpless in the face that that she-bitch Fate, who seems to steal babies at will, just because.

I was so excited for her. Pregnant on her first IUI, and all I could think of was “thank god.” Because the last thing you want to see is a friend starting to follow in your IF footsteps. And because we could be pregnant together and have our babies together and have play dates and I wouldn’t be alone (as I am, with most of my friends already raising toddlers). And now she’s crushed. And I’m crushed too. And she’s sad and alone. And I’m pregnant and alone.

That is, if I’m still pregnant. Because it’s shit like this that reminds me (as I try to hard to forget), that pregnancy is a precarious state. Any minute it can be snatched away. And why does it seem so much more cruel that you might not even know? You might be rubbing your belly and talking to your baby and planning your nursery and not even know that your baby has died, that all you’re carrying around is a memory of what might have been.

And maybe that’s me. I probably should have rented one of those dopplers, but they were so expensive (and with twins you need the fancy kind so you can differentiate the heartbeats). And besides, I thought there were some things I should maybe try to take on faith—like that my babies will still be alive at my next sono.

I just want to put my head in my hands and cry. For my friend, who is right now discussing with her doctor how to get her child out of her uterus. For my sister, who lost her baby at 4 months in much the same way three years ago. And for all of you out there who’ve had this happen, who’ve had their dreams ripped out of their bodies and tossed to the side for no reason other than it just wasn’t right this time.

And for me, who just wants to feel safe in my pregnancy. But can’t.

Is This That Thing Called "Happy"?

2009-10-19T14:43:00.000-07:00

I’m going to say this right from the start—pregnant blogging makes me feel strange. It’s not just that it’s hard to get a handle on how I’m feeling, when it changes every five minutes. It’s that I don’t want to upset anyone. Believe me, I didn’t give a fuck about upsetting anyone before—I figured life had shat on me one too many times, and I was entitled to bitch about it to my heart’s content. Who was going to begrudge me a rant about the unfairness of life?

But it’s different now. The thing is, pregnancy is kind of hard. I’m actually holding up pretty well—haven’t gotten terribly sick, seem to be on top of my back/hip pain much of the time, am surviving (though not thriving) at work. But even though I know a lot of women are a lot worse off than me, I find it exhausting to constantly feel a bit “off,” to constantly be thinking about where my next snack is going to come from, and to be completely incapable of finding maternity pants that fit right.

And yet this is not what I want to blog about. Because I know there are women out there that would amputate a body part to be in my shoes. Because I know what it feels like to read a blog like that.

On the flip side, it’s almost worse to be blogging about how happy I feel. How excited I am. The last thing I want to do is rub it in for those still in the depths of hell.

But I don’t want to lose the friends I’ve made because I’m afraid to be who--and what--I now am. So here we go:

I am really, really, really happy about these babies. Sure, I’ve had some freakout over the past couple of months, and it occasionally revisits me. At some point it just settled in that the twins are coming whether I’m ready or not, and whether I’m scared or excited makes no difference. So why be scared? Will being scared make me any more prepared for the backbreaking ordeal ... I mean exciting adventure yet to come? Will being scared make me more able to find affordable childcare, or make me heal faster from a c-section? So this week, at least, I’m going with excited. And why not? Being happy is a nice change of scenery for me.

It’s funny that what freaked me out so much at first was this sensation of being swept away by a current of events that I couldn’t control. Because the whole reason J and I have been pining for a child is our feeling that we live our lives in a meaningless rut. Some people have a fabulous childless life, but we don’t. We’re homebodies at heart, and our home has been too damn quiet and empty for too damn long. But when I first learned of the twins, there were times when I’d sit on my couch in my quiet, quiet house and think “what’s so wrong with this?”

But I’ve caught my breath and am ready to sit back and enjoy the ride. After all, I’m on it whether I like it or not.

Two weeks ago I “came out” in my office and to my family. (My sister and MIL already knew, as did my close friends.) One of the nice things about being so open with most people about my IF struggles has been their reaction to my pregnancy. (Of course, many of them don’t know that DS is responsible for our ultimate success.) So coming out to my friends in the office was pretty fun. Also, as unglamorous as having twins will be when I’m the size of a house, or when I’m trying to handle midnight feedings for two, it does make me kind of a celebrity among pregnant people. Everyone is just so damn excited about twins. It’s ridiculous. But I have to admit I’m enjoying the attention. (Not a big shock, if you know me at all.)

Coming out to my mother was a different story, and probablydeserves its own post. Suffice it to say that I’ve done a very nice job of keeping this toxic, bipolar, narcissistic, manipulative woman at the outskirts of my life for the past 5 years or so. And I knew damn well that telling her I was having a baby, let alone twins, was going to tear down my carefully constructed wall and have her crashing back into my world. Which it has. I’m sure I can handle it in the long run, but it was nicer before. (J’s suggestion was to just not tell her I was pregnant—he figured if she ever visited we’d just pass off the little ones as “neighbor kids.”) Anyway, subject for a whole new post.

I’m going to leave you with this, lest you aren’t grossed out enough by my happiness. This picture is going to be a mural on the wall of our already-painted-green nursery:

Me and Mary Travers

2009-09-19T06:29:00.001-07:00

Mary Travers died this week. And while I wasn’t terribly broken up over the news, it brought me back to my childhood music, played so often in both my parents’ houses: Peter, Paul, and Mary; John Denver; Simon and Garfunkel.

So a couple of nights ago—the day Mary died—I put on Peter, Paul, and Mary’s greatest hits while I cooked dinner. As I chopped the green beans I sang along a little bit to “Blowing in the Wind,” stopping when I realized I was getting choked up over the lyrics—pretty damn brilliant lyrics (that Dylan was quite a poet), so this seemed justified—and laughing at myself for being such a sap.

The next song started. I don’t know the title—the first line starts “I’ll walk in the rain by your side.” (Just looked it up. The title is “For Baby (For Bobbie).”) I hadn’t even realized it covered by Peter, Paul, and Mary. I know it a lot better as a John Denver song; it had always been one of my favorite John Denver songs. But as I tried to sing along I started to cry in earnest, tears pouring down my face onto the cutting board.

I cried like this for a couple of minutes, sort of standing outside of myself wondering where the hell this was coming from. And then it hit me: these are the songs my mom sang to me when I was a little girl (back when we were so so so close). And this song in particular, from the time I was just a kid myself, was one I always imagined singing to my own child someday. (The song is written as an adult-to-child song.)

I realized that all of these songs—the songs I was raised on—are the songs I’ll sing to my children. Children that I’m actually going to have. Children growing inside me right now, who could be listening to my voice right now. Do you know how long it’s been singe I’ve let myself picture my future children the way I used to, back when I was so innocent and naïve, when they were an inevitability rather than a fantasy?

And there’s a certain irony to the fact that this will be my kids’ bedtime soundtrack, given my complicated relationship with my mother (a charitable discription) and complete lack of relationship with my father. It’s not that I’ll sing these songs to them because they’re the best songs ever written, and it’s certainly not because this is the music I like the most. But they’re the songs I know—the songs I can sing when there’s no radio backing me up. And they’re pretty, child-friendly, bedtime songs. My family’s version of a lullabye. So I guess this one tiny piece of my heritage will be passed on.

Then “Puff the Magic Dragon” started playing. I kept crying. By then, I was keeping an eye around for J, who was in the next room talking to his BFF on the phone. Because I knew that if that man caught me weeping over “Puff” I’d would absolutely never hear the end of it. Pregnancy hormones be damned, there are limits to what you can get away with in this family. Hell, I was already making fun of myself.

I managed to dry up a few minutes before J got off the phone—he never was the wiser.

In some ways, pregnancy totally rocks.

The Pregnant-Person Doctor

2009-09-13T05:51:00.000-07:00

Yesterday we went to a pregnant-person doctor for the first time. The night before, I mentioned to J that “maybe he would clear us to start having sex again.”

“I don’t know,” he responded.

“What do you mean you 'don't know?' You don’t want to have sex with me?” I asked, somewhat suspicious at this change of heart.

“It just doesn’t seem right,” he admitted, “what with you carrying another man’s child.”

* * * * * * * *

Going to the pregnancy doctor was strange, very strange. There were all these pregnant women in the waiting room, and two of them had teeny tiny babies with them as well. Can you imagine? I mean, I know that women have back-to-back babies, but there was one woman with a baby that couldn’t have been older than two months. And if she’s already seeing the pregnancy doctor, you have to assume she’s at least a few weeks pregnant, right? How the hell did she manage that?

And I’ve discovered that I don’t like looking at hugely pregnant women. They totally freak me out. Is that going to happen to me? It’s one thing to want this in theory, and to know in my mind that I’m inevitably going to end up huge (no escaping it with twins). It’s quite another to realize that this actually is going to happen to my own body. You know, the body I live in? The one I have to live in all the time? It’s just freaky.

The bottom line is that everything looks good, and nothing I told the doc about my medical history (which is all pretty much pregnancy history) concerned him that much. He wasn’t even going to do a sono, but when I told him I really wanted to know the babies were still alive, he squeezed me in with the sono tech. Not much to show in the way of pictures, but two strong heartbeats had me grinning ear-to-ear.

My god, I think we’re really going to do this.

* * * * * * * *

Oh my god, I MUST clarify the opening comment. J was TOTALLY JOKING about the "carrying another man's child" thing. I posted it because he had me on the floor laughing after he said it.

I don't think he's having any trouble at all dealing with the donor situation. Both of us are just so thrilled to finally be on our way to parenthood.

Oh, and the doctor said "not yet" to the sex thing. :-(

In the End, It’s All About Love

2009-09-04T08:37:00.000-07:00

After I wrote my last post, I went back into my bedroom, sat on my bed, and cried for about 20 minutes. And not those pretty Demi Moore tears—I’m talking big heaving sobs, blotchy face, snot-everywhere crying. Then I cleaned myself up, had a snack, brushed my teeth, and went over to kiss J goodnight.

As soon as he saw my face, said “hey!,” stood up, and put his arms around me, I started to cry again. I told him how I felt I was being robbed, robbed of happiness because as a 37-year-old professional, I still couldn’t afford a family in this fucked-up, you’re-really-on-your-own country of ours. Then I dried my tears, kissed him goodnight, and went to bed.

Where I proceeded to start crying and shaking again. At this point a little light went on in my head. Hormones, I told myself. No worries, this too would pass. Eventually I slept.

Since then I’ve felt a lot better. I don’t know—maybe I just needed to have that complete breakdown, to acknowledge both mentally and physically that what is happening to me is totally insane, and that no one should be expected to take it calmly.

I also handed the day care hunt over to J. We have found that there are some “family” day care providers—women who take kids into their home—who are cheaper than regular day care. I had spoken to one, but was so freaked out by her not-so-bright reaction to me that I didn’t think this was an option for us. But J called me on Tuesday (day after my freakout) and said he’d talked to another woman who was amazing—exactly what we’re looking for. Odds are that she won’t have two openings when we need them, but just knowing someone out there like that existed went a long way to make me feel better.

Last night, after I changed out of my work clothes into my sweats and laid down on the bed with J for a pre-dinner chat, he said this: “So I was thinking about all this today. And I realized that, while what we’re about to do is incredibly, unbelievably, impossibly hard,” he paused and I gave him a wry smile, “there is nothing in this world that we will ever love more.”

And I cried again, a little bit. I’m blaming the hormones.

The Money Blues

2009-08-31T19:50:00.000-07:00

I’m having a lot of trouble getting into my pregnancy. So for those of you who can’t imagine anything other than joy at finally achieving a pregnancy—with twins no less—feel free to skip this post. Because I’m pregnant after four years of trying, and all I feel is scared, desperate, and as always, sick to my stomach.

This conversation is about money. So if you’re uncomfortable about that, oh well, this is my blog. Because right now all I can think about is money.

I grew up really fucking poor. Poor enough that ordering out for pizza was a luxury in my family, and I was forced to try to dress myself all through junior high and high school on practically nothing. (Thank god for goth and grunge!) I was flat broke in college, and even more so in law school. By the time I got out of law school I was $110,000 under on student loans, and another $20,000 under on my credit cards, with no full-time job in sight. And then J graduated from design school with another $65,000 in student loans and even worse earning potential.

Ten years later and we’re starting to see the light. We still owe more than $140,000 in student loans, but we own a house and have rehabilitated our credit. We go out to the movies when we feel like it and have HD TV without feeling guilty. We’ve even saved a little, enough that we’ve been able to afford three years of fertility treatment with only a $21,000 loan for the IVF flat rate.

And now that we’re here, now that we’ve reached our ultimate goal, all that is about to come crashing down upon our heads. Because in the next five years we’re probably going to pay more than $100,000 in child care. $100,000! Enough to put me through law school all over me again. Or, more accurately, to smother me with another life-sucking, panic-inducing, soul-crushing debt like my student loans. If I could even get that much of a loan. (Do they give out day care loans? How far will they extend my home equity line of credit—already under $21K for IVF—when home values have dropped so far?) How am I ever going to come up with this kind of money?

A day care center is pretty much out of the question. The going rate around here is $300 per kid per week. Which amounts to about $30,000 a year. Maybe a nanny would be cheaper—if somehow J can manage to be home most Mondays we could try to find a 4-day-a-week nanny for $400 a week or so. Sure, I could find a nanny for a bit less, but I’d be risking my career by hiring an illegal. There is a chance that we can find a “family day care provider,” a woman who takes up to 8 kids into her home at once. But the one person I called sounded so stupid on the phone she completely freaked me out. Even if we can find placement for two at a place like this, can I really trust one person taking care of 8 kids to handle my two small babies? And will we have to split them up into different homes to get them placed?

And for any of you who think I shouldn’t be thinking about this yet, guess what? The waiting list for day care for infants at most places is 12-18 months. At least. So I can’t afford to wait until I’m less freaked out about my pregnancy.

On top of all that, I keep hearing such terrifying things about a twin pregnancy. Leaving aside the specter of super-preemies, two people, one of them my nurse, have told me that there is no way I’ll be able to work the entire pregnancy. A woman in my chiropractor’s office told me that everyone she knew who was pregnant with twins had to stop working after 5 or 6 months. But I can’t stop working—I make somewhere between 2/3 and 3/4 of our entire household income! I don’t even have enough leave to pay for the maternity leave I plan on taking AFTER the babies are born. So how am I going to survive if I burn all me leave before they even get here? I can’t even think about how fast we’ll go into the hole if I have to take unpaid maternity leave. I’m sure I could work a few weeks from home at the very end, but if this turns into something more than that I’m fucked. So again, all I keep hearing about is ways in which I can’t afford this.

I want to be happy about this pregnancy. I want to just shrug my shoulders and say “oh well, these things will work themselves out.” But I’m not sure they will. Will I look back at these last few years as the only years of my life that I wasn’t living paycheck to paycheck, wondering if I can afford to go to the movies or buy myself a new pair of jeans? Did I dig myself out of a lifetime of poverty only to get sucked right back down into it?

I’m so jealous of people with money. Sometimes I’m just sick with envy. When I told my sister about my childcare concerns she wrote back that, yes, it’s really hard. That when she was paying for a nanny one day she reached into her account and there was no money left. And all I could think of was: what did you do then? You reached into that giant family trust fund your husband has. What am I going to do when the bank account runs dry? I have no trust fund. I have no parents who can bail me out. I have no backup.

I think some of this funk must be hormones, which are sloshing around in my body like crazy. And a lot of it is probably due to the fact that I’m exhausted and nauseous. I haven’t slept through the night in two weeks—I have to get up every 2-3 hours to eat something.

I want to be happy. I feel like there must be something wrong with me. Because I’m not happy right now. Oh, I’m not sorry we did this. I know it was what I wanted. But all I feel right now is scared.

HEARTBEATS!!!

2009-08-25T00:55:00.000-07:00

We went into yesterday’s sono expecting to check up on the little bleed in my uterus and maybe check the size of the embryos to see if they were still doing okay. I thought my RE had said that it would be too early to see the heartbeats. But the moment the dildocam honed in on the embryos, there it was. A little fuzzy ball of emptiness (which I’m told is amniotic fluid—eek!), with fuzzy little ball of substance in one corner (yolk sac), and a blinking fuzzy light in the center. Just winking away, like an old-fashioned Christmas tree light. And the moment the second, even fuzzier embryo came into sight, yet another blinking light. Two tiny heartbeats, blinking away on the screen at me. In these incredibly tiny creatures less than a centimeter long. Living inside me.

It took my breath away.

There was a new nurse working the cam and machine, so it took her awhile to take all the measurements and such. I just lay there, staring at the machine from my extreme angle, and watching J stare at the machine at almost as bad of an angle from the other side of the nurse and RE. I still didn’t know what to expect. But suddenly they turned the sound on, and I got really excited. I didn’t even know that sono machine—my old friend lo these many years—HAD sound capability.

The sound was mostly static and I didn’t think I’d be able to really hear much. I could see the soundline graphic jumping, so I knew she was recording the heartbeat. Then the nurse told me to hold my breath when she said to. And then she said “hold your breath now.”

And as I held my breath I heard the most amazing sound. Wump, wump, wump, wump, wump. The unmistakable, universally recognizable sound of a heartbeat. The sound of life. I almost gasped, which would have ruined their recording. And the moment she said I could breathe the words “oh my god” came out in a rush.

It took them longer to get a decent recording of Baby B. (Apparently Baby B is going to be both fuzzy and shy.) But I didn’t care. I just lay back on the table while a couple of tears leaked out the corners of my eyes. J looked at me, and I looked at him, both of us seeming to say to the other: well, this is it.

And then it was over and my RE was handing J a card with a high-risk OB’s number on the back and wishing us luck. And that was it. Released from IF care. Finito. Three years with this RE and I’m suddenly done (assuming nothing goes wrong).

I took some time saying goodbye to my nurses, the two women who’ve seen me through the most traumatic years of my life. One of them—who I’ve become particularly close to—was as close to tears as I was. And they both told me I had to come back and show them my big belly. And I told them I would. But I added to J as we walked out the door, “just not during morning monitoring. That’s just not fair to the other women.” I know. I’ve been there.

So now it’s on to a new doctor, one who treats pregnant women. I already feel like I don’t belong there. And my next appointment isn’t until September 11. That’s two and a half weeks away! I feel adrift, unmoored.

And then I spent the afternoon trying to research day care. (I was going to wait until the second trimester, but my sister—who’s always telling me not to worry about things—told me this was one thing I really needed to worry about NOW, especially with having to place two infants.) And then I spent the evening freaking out about the ridiculous impossibility of paying for daycare for two.

Welcome to a whole new world, Babychaser. Right?

A Whole New Roller Coaster

2009-08-21T08:46:00.001-07:00

I am six weeks pregnant today, which means I’ve “made it” halfway through my first trimester. So I guess I’m supposed to feel all “whew, it’s halfway over, surely I can do that much again!” But of course this is a total joke, because I’ve been pregnant for less than 4 weeks and have only felt pregnant (and known I was pregnant) for two weeks, which means—wait, let me do the math—that I’ve really only made it 25% of the way through my first trimester.

However, I’ve hit a much more important milestone. I now have officially “made it” past the length of any of my other pregnancies. And given that much of our prior miscarriages primarily, we suspect, were due to wimpy sperm, and give the super high-charged professional sperm we used this time, both J and I are suddenly starting to feel like we’re going to end up actually having a baby or two.

So we’ve stepped up for a whole new roller coaster ride. Some of which is pretty cool, much of which is sucky, and all of which is scary as hell. Mind you, this roller coaster is WAY better than the crap-ass, rickety, piece-of-shit IF/ART roller coaster, and I’m oh-so-glad to be here. But it’s still a whole new ride.

To start with, there’s the physical. Every day I tell myself, “if this is as bad as my ‘morning’ (read: ‘any time of day’) sickness gets, I can totally survive this pregnancy.” And—with the exception of some random symptomless days—every day it gets a little bit worse. I have lowish blood sugar already, so I’m used to the frustration of having to constantly feed myself. But this is ridiculous. This morning I had a cup of 4% cottage cheese while I was making my lunch, then went to brush my teeth, and by the time I was back out in the kitchen gathering my stuff to leave for work the nausea/hunger was back, and even worse than before.

I took a couple of deep breaths, muttering something to myself about not really liking these kids growing inside me so much. Then I got out a yogurt and began to feed again. As my nausea rose up with the first bite, I had this image of my babies as petulant gods inhabiting my body. “Accept this offering,” I said aloud, breathing deep and taking another bite. “Please, just accept this offering and leave me be.”

It really could be much, much worse. As long as I keep eating, and eating, and eating, I seem to be able to keep the nausea at tolerable levels for fairly brief periods of time. And my energy levels, while low, are also acceptable. I’m still getting work done (for the most part) at work, which is the most important thing. As I said yesterday, if this doesn’t get much worse I’ll survive it okay. Then again, given that I’m only 20% into my first trimester, maybe I shouldn’t hold out too much hope that it won’t get worse. (I also know it’s folly to count on the “first trimester” lore, but I just can’t think of being sick an entire pregnancy right now.)

But even stranger is my topsy-turvy emotional state. This is where the roller coaster really gets moving. I’m up, I’m down, I’m sideways. I just don’t know what to think. On the one hand, I can’t help but start to get excited about finally having children. On the other hand, I feel like I should keep squashing those feelings down. Because what if this doesn’t work out? What if this beautiful glimmer of hope is snatched away from me, again? One of my friends (totally fertile mother of two) just told me she had a miscarriage last week. She was three months along, but was told by the sono tech that the embryo had died at about 6 weeks. (Can you imagine so little monitoring? Thank god for IF!) Six weeks, I thought to myself, that’s right now for me. What if my embryos just stop developing? What if their little hearts never start beating?

But despite the fear, last night J and I started talking about baby names. Not a serious, look at a list conversation. But, aside from his presumably facetious insistence on naming our baby “Jebediah,” J and I haven’t talked about baby names since our first miscarriage three and a half years ago. Some lessons are learned the hard way.

And it isn’t just an up and down roller coaster, because there’s also the twists, the curves, the g-forces taking my breath away. Because while in my head I know that I do want twins, my heart and soul are FREAKED AS HELL about it. High-risk pregnancy (or do I mean higher risk?), virtual guarantee of preemies, two infants to care for (while probably recovering from a c-section), and so so so much to pay for (like day care for two?). I wonder if I will even be able to bond with my babies if I’m stretched so thin?

My friends who know about this want me to be thrilled, but I find myself a bit shell-shocked instead. And I refuse to fake happiness. Any sane person would be frightened or at least seriously overwhelmed at the prospect of twins. I have every right to be freaked.

All this aside, last night I had an image of going on a family vacation with two kids (not babies), who could play together and talk to each other, and run around together and wear each other out, and I got a soft warm feeling deep in my heart.

I’m sure that happiness and hope are coming. Right now I’m just focusing on surviving the ride.

Double Your Freakout

2009-08-17T11:55:00.000-07:00

It’s a good thing a picture’s worth a thousand words, because I’m finding myself speechless. Or at least as close to speechless as I ever get.

So . . . um . . . TWINS! This is good, right? This is what I wanted? We all sat down and agreed that twins was the best possible scenario—the only way I could get the two children I wanted.

So why do I keep shaking my head as if there’s something loose in there, and why is there one recurring thought looping around my brain: What the fuck have I done?

I’m sure I’m happy. Really. Somewhere inside me there is happy. And I’m definitely not sad or anything. Just completely freaked out. Seriously, what the hell was I thinking? What the fuck have I gone and done now?

I’m also a bit tense, as usual, about my health and the health of the pregnancy. My RE saw a “small bleed” in my uterus, and has given me strict instructions not to exercise for several days. (She wasn’t clear on how long, but I’m going to give it a week—we’re doing a check-on-the-bleed sono on Monday.) Also, my ovaries apparently are still enormous. So I’m worried that the bleed could get worse or my ovaries could freak out some more.

I’m also upset that I have to stop exercising again. I’m not exercising hard—just walking on the treadmill at a moderate pace for about 30-40 minutes a night. But that exercise is critical to the health of my lower back, which is FINALLY starting to feel better after weeks of stiffness and pain from the retrieval/transfer bed-rest time. My back just doesn’t do well with sitting around. It likes action.

If it’s just a week, I’ll survive. But I really need to be exercising to feel healthy and strong. And I really need to feel healthy and strong because holy fucking shit I have TWO embryos living inside me!

Like pregnancy with one wasn’t scary enough.

Finally, does anyone know what the odds are that both embryos will make it to “baby” stage? I have no idea, and didn’t want to ask my RE. (Seemed like a morbid question to be asking at this point in time, no?)

I Feel Nothing (But Fear)

2009-08-16T04:27:00.001-07:00

Apparently I can't be appeased. Even though Eva’s beta-calculator made me feel a lot better about Friday's beta, between yesterday and today all of my pregnancy symptoms seem to have disappeared, including the need to eat every two hours. Paranoia still dwells deep in my heart--and now I am worried that even if the embryo HAS stopped developing, the sono won't show it. (Does anyone know about this? Can the doctor tell from the sono whether the embryo is still alive? I can’t imagine how.)

It doesn't help that for the past two nights in a row, I've had a dream where I went to the bathroom and discovered that I had started bleeding, just a little bit, just like the start of my period. In both dreams I totally lost it. Very upsetting.

I woke up this morning (after a really long night's sleep where I only had to get up once and eat a tortilla) convinced that the embryo already had died. I can understand the lack of nausea—that comes and goes. But where is the hunger? Can that just disappear for a day or two?

I'm feeling a bit less certain about a loss in the light of day, but I wouldn't mind some mad hunger or morning sickness to make me feel a bit more--pregnant.

It must be frustrating being my friend right now. You probably just want to shake me. I know I do.

The Frustration Continues

2009-08-14T12:27:00.000-07:00

Beta = 2024

Sigh. Why can't it be higher? By my calculations, this is just above 66%. Barely adequate.

When do I get to feel GOOD about this?

Going into the weekend a bit less confident. Sono on Monday.

Sigh of Relief

2009-08-12T12:34:00.000-07:00

Beta = 1219!

(For those of you who've lost track: Yes, that's more than double.)

One more blood test on Friday, just to be sure, then a sono on Monday to see what's in there.

Very relieved.

Don't have time to write, so wanted to pass along this article J sent me. He thinks we really missed a golden opportunity to pick our donor (he was leaning toward the young George Clooney):

Who's your daddy? A celebrity look-alike.

Personally, I think this feature is awesome!

Less Than Double—Why Can’t It Ever Be Right for a Change?

2009-08-10T13:14:00.001-07:00

So my beta today was 584, not 652 like it should have been. My nurse was so chipper when she called with my “great” numbers that I had to call her back after I realized that wasn’t double. She said my RE “wasn’t worried about it,” and that we’d “just check one more time,” then schedule the sono.

I’m so confused. I’ve had a much higher beta—into the 2200s before it crashed—and they still were checking every two days. No one was even thinking about scheduling a sono. So why is everyone okay with this? Is it because my progesterone is high (70 on Saturday, 74 today)? Is it because it’s okay for the beta not to double the first time, but after that it has to double?

All I know is, last time they told me my beta hadn’t quite doubled, but not to freak out about it, I was in the hospital 24 hours later with an ectopic pregnancy and a broken heart.

My friend suggested that maybe there was more than one, but that one has stopped developing. Again, that makes sense to me but I don’t really know.

All I know is that before this, a doubling beta was essential. There was no wiggle room. And now everyone seems pleased with my less than double. I’m confused and scared. Do any of you understand how this works?

I can’t believe I have to go another two days before I can feel good about this. Fuck.

4:47 A.M. (A Preview of Today's Attractions)

2009-08-08T01:50:00.001-07:00

My plan had been to pee in a container this morning, refrigerate the pee until I went to the RE's office for bloodwork and my allergist for my shots, pick up a HPT on the way home and TEST. This plan would (1) allow me to not cry my way through my morning, and (2) give me a chance to pick up a HPT. (I didn't trust myself to buy one earlier in the week.)

But I woke up at 4:35 this morning with the thought: "Hey, do I still have a HPT from last year?" Guess what? I did.

Seriously, who expected me to resist?

The news is good, though I wish the line were darker. Silly, silly me.

I'm relieved, but so amped up/shaky I don't know how I'm going to get back to sleep.

A warning for all of you newish readers who are inclined to jump up and down and congratulate me: I'VE BEEN HERE FOUR TIMES. THIS IS GOOD NEWS, BUT IT'S JUST STEP ONE.

Beta later today. I'll post.

(You know what I love about this blog? You're finding out before J, who is blissfully sleeping away.)

* * * * * * * * * *

Update: BETA = 326!

Feeling Too Good to be Pregnant? (Oh, and I Might Lose My Job.)

2009-08-05T12:10:00.000-07:00

I’ve done 5 ART cycles before (4 IVFs, one FET), and I’ve gotten pregnant three of those tries. And I have ALWAYS felt like crap. Crappy when I was pregnant. Crappy when I wasn’t. I’ve never kept a symptom log or anything like that, so I’m not really sure what symptoms came with what results. But I do know that sometimes my bad symptoms stopped abruptly, and it seemed that that corresponded with the decline of the embryo.

Here’s the thing: I feel really good. Not completely pain-free, mind you, I still have some cramps and twinges. But I feel strong, clear-headed, and energetic.

This worries me.

Here is a list of what I have always thought were my pregnancy symptoms:

Insomnia
Tiredness
Headaches
Cramping
Backache
Tender breasts

In fact, the insomnia and tender breasts have been my most reliable symptoms. After my FET last year, which was my last pregnancy, I had insomnia and very sore breasts for days. Then I tested positive, but it was a very faint line. I knew it might not last, but hoped for the best. Then one night, before I even had my beta, I slept like a baby, and when I woke up my breasts didn’t hurt (they always hurt the worst when I’m getting up after lying down for a long time). And I knew that my embryo probably had died. And I was right.

Now? No such symptoms. Nada. I’m a bit fussy at night, but I think it’s more due to stress and worrying than anything else. And I’m having some mild occasional cramping, but nothing serious. Even my lower back pain seems to have disappeared. But most upsetting—my boobs feel fine, normal, not a hint of soreness. (And yes, I’m constantly feeling myself up to check.)

Does this mean I’m not pregnant? Does it mean it didn’t work? Or were all those symptoms just symptoms of my impending PMS? Were they never pregnancy symptoms in the first place? Does a healthy pregnancy feel different from an unhealthy one?

Or maybe this is all just because I’m so much healthier than I was a year ago. Or maybe, though this seems a stretch, this is all because I did a cycle with lupron? Does lupron change things that much?

I’m not going to lie—I’m going to be pretty devastated if this didn’t work.

On a wholly unrelated note (related only in the sense of can-you-believe-this-fucking-timing?), I might lose my job before October. Our office is conducting massive layoffs—as many as 20 attorneys out of 200. And while I have put a lot of years into this job, I work in a very exclusive division in which I’m the baby. So odds are that if my division has to lose one position, it’s going to be me.

This is a threat that’s been hanging over my head for more than 6 months. It’s so upsetting to me that I haven’t even wanted to mention it to you. In May, our union voted to give up our 4% pay increases and 2% bonuses for next year to prevent them from laying off 12 attorneys. Now, just a few short months later, the government is back for more.

This is a shitty fucking time to be looking for a job. The only people in the area hiring are the Feds, and it can take more than a year to get into one of those jobs even after you’ve been selected (which takes forever too).

And this isn’t such a great time for me, either. Can you imaging job hunting pregnant? Losing all your saved-up maternity leave? Or going into a job knowing you need to do more IVF—with the inconsistent schedule, hormones, and everything else involved. The bottom line is that I feel ill-equipped to change positions now. I’m used to being able to come in late if I have doctor’s appointments, work from home if I need to. And I’m used to being able to wear sneakers all day (bad back), which I can’t do if I’m in a job where I’m in court all day. And I don’t want a high-stress job, but that seems to be all I’m qualified for.

On top of all that, it’s a real blow because I fucking LOVE my job. I had planned to stay in this job for the next 30 years, no joke. You give up a lot to work for the government—money, prestige, support staff, office supplies. The tradeoff is supposed to be job security.

So this sucks, big time.

But you see what I mean, right? This news alone should have me all physically fucked up—I don’t react well to stress, and this is as scary as it gets. But I feel okay. Calm. Capable. Energetic.

I’ll know about the pregnancy on Saturday.

I’ll know about the job by the end of the month.

Welcome Home!

2009-07-26T14:06:00.000-07:00

Welcome home, my four little friends. We do hope you enjoy your stay. Here in my womb it’s warm and dark, and just the right amount of squishy. There’s only one radio station, but it’s got all the chart-toppers loved by up-and-coming embryos all over the world, including heartbeat and bowel gurgles, livened up with the occasional enthusiastic (if often off-key) singing, screaming at various ball players, and a healthy smattering of “blue” language.

So come on in, pick a corner, unpack your DNA baggage, and settle in for a nice, long visit.

Your room may seem spacious now, but if you all decide to stick around it could get a bit cramped. So while we do appreciate your patronage and wish you all the best, we would appreciate it if at least two of you decide to try your luck in the great outdoors. Go camping, maybe see some sights. Washington, DC is lovely this time of year.

Feel free to decide amongst yourselves who’s going to stay and who’s going to go. (But if you find one of you is more stubborn and cranky than the others, be sure to encourage that one to check out early.)

Oh, and our lawyers tell us we have to advise you of the following:

If you all decide to stay, we may have to ask one or more of you to leave. Politely, of course, but we will insist.

- the Management

* * * * * * * *

So we decided to roll the dice. My RE gave us 15% odds of twins, and about 3-5% odds of trips or more. (By the way, I LOVE a doc who will actually give odds when asked.) She says that they can hook us up with the best reduction specialists around, in the unlikely event that it’s necessary, and that there’s only a 1% chance that reduction would cause miscarriage of the rest of the pregnancy.

She calls it aggressive. I call it desperate. But really, what’s the difference? The truth is, I’m happy with our decision. And I’m not sure I would be happy if we hadn’t gone all in.

Oh God, How Do I Make this Decision?

2009-07-25T05:44:00.000-07:00

Five eggs. Four embryos. And my RE wants to put them all back.

And I’m completely freaked out by this.

We put four back last summer, but they were fertilized with J’s sub-par sperm, not with commercial super-sperm. And we ended up with a not-surprising negative beta.

My RE says that she doesn’t think the risk of multiples (beyond twins) is very high. Which, by the way, makes me kind of sad, because it means that maybe we’re not changing things SO much by going to donor sperm—maybe my chances of getting pregnant, even with a donor, aren’t as high as I thought.

I am so unbelievably torn. On the one hand, this cycle was pure hell (still is). And it was Cycle #5. I don’t know how much more of this shit I can take before I crack, or my body gives out completely. I REALLY REALLY REALLY NEED THIS TO WORK. Obviously, putting back four embryos greatly increases the chance of it working.

On top of all that, even assuming all four are capable of becoming bona fide fetuses, how much of that chance do I lose by freezing a couple of them? I know that a fresh cycle is a lot more likely to succeed than an FET. So what if we just transfer two, it doesn’t work, and then the FET on the other two doesn’t work because they didn’t do well with the freeze/thaw process?

And I would like twins. Yes, yes, I’m sure that if I actually have twins a year or two from now I’ll be wondering how it was possible that I ever wanted twins. I know they’d be so hard to care for as babies. But I want more than one child, and twins are my only shot at that. We put back four, there’s a higher likelihood of twins.

BUT, on the other hand:

Triplets? Quads? Reduction? Two and a half years ago, when we did our first IVF, when J and I decided to put back three embryos, we agreed that we would somehow try to survive triplets. Now I just think that’s out-of-the-question insanity. No way am I up to carrying trips, and no way am I up to caring for three babies at once.

So if we got incredibly “lucky,” we’d be looking at reduction. I haven’t Googled this process (too scary), but it sounds REALLY dangerous to the remaining fetuses. I imagine the odds of losing the whole pregnancy, or inducing pregnancy complications, are really high. What a fucking nightmare.

The other option is to put back three and freeze the one. But this sucks, too. Does this mean, if this cycle doesn’t work, that I’d have to go through a whole FET for just one embryo? (So suggests my shared risk contract.) Or could I do another fresh cycle and combine whatever frozen leftovers I have for a later FET? No idea.

This decision sucks. Maybe worse than any decision I’ve had to make. If I don’t put all four back, I’m going to spend the next two weeks freaking out that I’ve made the wrong decision. And if I do put them all back, I’m going to spend the next two weeks freaking out that I’ve made the wrong decision, and then another several weeks (assuming positive beta) wondering how many are brewing in there.

I’m almost hoping that one of them died last night. Which is just so, so wrong.

Less is More?

2009-07-21T12:52:00.001-07:00

Unfortunately, the fog that is clouding my brain this week is blocking my ability to write—both in my blog and in my job. My fingers feel clumsy and words slosh around in my brain willy-nilly. Which of course makes me stressed out about not getting good work done while deadlines loom. In short, I’m a mess.

Here’s the skinny: this cycle is all about making high-quality eggs. Which is why my RE put me on the lupron. So I’m making fewer eggs. And I am trying really hard to be positive about this, but it’s scary having a twice-as-hard cycle for half-as-many eggs. It looks like I’m going to end up with between 5 and 7 eggs. Back in my heyday (and I so like the idea of an IVF heyday) I used to produce 11-13 eggs.

Then again (I keep telling myself), none of those 13 eggs turned into a baby, did it? I actually really like and trust my RE, so we’re probably on the right track. But no one can look at a sono and say “Hey, those are some great-quality eggs you’re growing in there!” And when what you hear is “only two on the left ovary,” and “they’re growing, but slowly,” it’s hard to feel like you’re doing a really good job.

My ovaries hurt. My lower back hurts. All I want to do is sleep, but I’m getting even less sleep due to the repeated early-morning trips to the RE for bloodwork and sonos.

Sometimes I think that this definitely is going to work. We’ve come so close so many times, even with J’s lackluster sperm. How could this NOT work with supercharge, high-test, commercial sperm? Right?

But I know that the odds are still 50-50 at best. And when I think of what the next three weeks may bring, all I can feel is tired.

How to Blog Through Mood Swings

2009-07-16T14:10:00.000-07:00

I meant to be better about blogging this cycle. Really I did. I find just knowing that other women are reading my blog satisfying, and I get a lot of comfort and wisdom from the comments you all leave on my blog, as well as from reading your blogs.

But it’s hard to settle on a post when you’re mood is swinging around like mad. I come up with an idea for a blog, then an hour later I’m in a totally different place, and can’t imagine following through on my original idea. Here are some of my half-baked post ideas from the past few days:

How crappy I feel. (And there are so many variations on this theme: bloating sucks because it makes me feel fat and ugly; if I’m so damn tired all the time why can’t I sleep at night; name that abdominal pain; headaches make me feel worthless; hot flashes in mid-summer in DC are redundant, yet still awful; and the list goes on . . . .)
How much I just want to crawl under my desk and cry.
How I wish my husband would realize how hard this is on me (stressful, full-time job + doctors appointments + hormones + physical strain + insomnia) and offer to do EVERYTHING he can to help me without me having to ask.
How I get these strange bursts of energy (from the Lupron, I think) that make me kind of manic—talking really fast, laughing loud, and (when I can harness it) working really efficiently—and how that’s kind of fun.
How sometimes I feel so drugged that it feels like I’m pulling my facial muscles through mud just to smile at someone, and it takes a concentrated effort to talk without slurring my words.
How sometimes I find myself so full of hope this cycle I catch myself assuming I’m going to be pregnant in a few weeks and won’t have to do this again.
How hard I find it to believe that this might work.
How frustrating it is to have to plan out August assuming there might be a miscarriage that will pull me out of work for a week or more.
How each IVF cycle gets harder, rather than easier, because even though you know better what you’re doing each time, the pressure is also higher each time, and how sometimes the pressure seems so intense I just want to scream.
How sometimes I think that at some point my body is just going to give up and stop producing eggs no matter what drugs I take, and I have to approach each cycle as if it were my last.
How work is a blessing, because it allows me to focus on something other than getting pregnant, something that I have some measure of control over.
How angry I am that our office is announcing more RIFs, because I just can’t cope with that kind of fear on top of everything else I’m dealing with.

And, my favorite:
How much I hate belly pics of pregnant women, because I don’t need a glaring reminder that my normal condition is way fatter than that cute little four-months’-pregnant girl who’s just starting to poke over the top of her low-rise jeans.

But I’m not going to write about any of those. Instead, I’ll just give some updates:

Another sample of our donor became available, and we bought that one too. Which I think is making both of us feel a little better. Nice to know that if we have to go again we don’t have to pick another donor.
Despite my paranoia, I am producing eggs. Unfortunately, Lefty is running behind again. Stupid lazy ovary. Step up and be a man, dammit!
The Harvest is looking to be mid-week next week. My money’s on Thursday, though Wednesday’s running a strong second.

I’ll let y’all know what I find out in my monitoring tomorrow.

That Bitch Lupron

2009-07-10T11:51:00.001-07:00

Guess what? Lupron causes insomnia. And headaches.

Fucking bitch.

"Our Guy"

2009-07-07T10:11:00.000-07:00

We found our donor!

Last week I was sick as hell. This is the second time in two months that J has brought home a cold, been sick for 2-3 days, then cheerfully moved on with his life while I am sucked into a two-week-long tailspin that (at least last time) ended in a round of antibiotics. I swear, next time that man gets the sniffles he’s sleeping in the car.

And all this while we were mid-donor-search. I had ordered “personal profiles” on five more guys, and had flagged a couple of them for J to look at and order medical records. I told him earlier in the week that I really needed him to go through the medicals—he’s in a lull right now and I just don’t have the time. But I was still pretty sure that I was going to have to go through them at some point. After all, it took some time for me to get him to even look at the donor lists.

So I’m sitting on the couch, drinking my “gypsy cold care” tea and watching the Bachelorette (how can Jilly not see that Wes is such a slimeball?), when J walks in and pauses my program.

“I’m done,” he announces.

“Done?” I repeat, wondering what the hell he’s talking about. I take a stab in the dark, “You mean you found our guy?”

“Found him,” he confirms smugly. “Come on, take a look. I bought his baby picture.”

And on my computer screen is this blonde, bland-ish, adorable, blue-eyed toddler staring out at me. “Wow,” I said. “Is this one of the new guys I flagged for you?”

“Yup. The doctor. His medicals are clean. And check out is profile.” And then he starts running down the highlights: kick-ass SATs, MCATs, grades. Practicing physician. All-star athletics for both high school and college.

“And look at his facial features.” J was practically bouncing on his toes. “The only one that doesn’t match me is that he doesn’t have freckles.” (I still get a little misty-eyed at this—it wasn’t until we were deep into profiles that I realized J really wanted to find someone with features similar to his.)

“Is this the guy with two kids?” I ask.

“Uh-huh,” J responded smugly. “He’s perfect.”

Then we looked to see if he was available. No ICI (which is what our RE recommended), but under IUI it said “call.” Earlier in the week J had called the cryobank to see what that meant, and had been told they list “call” (rather than ordering online) when there were fewer than 20 samples left of that donor.

We looked at each other for a moment, then both started talking at the same time:

“I’m going to e-mail [our RE] and see if IUI is okay,” I said.

“I’m going to call the cryobank,” he said.

So I sent my e-mail and then paced around impatiently while he talked to the cryobank.

“Mmm-hmm. Uh-huh. Okay. Can you do that for us?,” he said, looking across the hall at me as I sat on the bed watching him. Finally, after what seemed like a really long time, he put down the phone.

“Our guy’s pretty popular,” he said, “there was only one sample left.”

Pause.

“And they’re holding it for us.”

Yesterday J bought the sample. It’s ours. This little piece of our perfect guy is ours.

I’m so happy about how this turned out. Every time I think about it I smile. I thought this was going to be hard. I thought we would get our short list and agonize over what we found. I had envisioned a pro/con list, or a chart where we compared medicals with personality or facial features with physical abilities. I thought I would have to put hours into reviewing medical files.

And I thought that I would have to push J to make the decision.

I really wanted this to be J’s choice—I wanted him to feel like he still was providing the sperm (albeit from a vendor), that it was his contribution to our child. I should have known he’d be up to the task once he put his mind to it. He’s always been a good shopper—he just goes in and gets it done, just like that. (Which is why we don’t shop together. I drive him crazy looking at everything 10 times and he makes me feel rushed so I make bad decisions.)

And the fact that we got the last sample just makes it all that much sweeter. After all, if everyone else wants a piece of this guy we must be onto something, right?

So now I’m thinking the cryobank needs to add a new column to the search feature: the ability to sort donors by “most popular.” After all, if it works for Amazon and Zappos and Art.com, why not for sperm donors?

“Seeking Healthy White Male for Baby-Making Threesome—No Smokers, No Slackers, No Fatties!”

2009-07-01T12:40:00.001-07:00

I’ve dealt with a lot of strange, unnatural shit in four years of baby chasing, like fist-sized ovaries, daily embryo-status reports, and keepsake embryo photos from transfer-day. IVF is bizarre; an unholy alienation of nature from conception.

But nothing compares to the strangeness of sitting in front of a computer with your husband, trying to pick a sperm donor.

It must be kind of like putting out an ad for the guest star in a threesome: “Seeking anonymous healthy white male to fulfill lifetime fantasy of loving couple to conceive child. Must be handsome, fit, tall, healthy, smart, but not so sexy as to threaten manliness of husband. Will be compensated accordingly.”

We started out with a pretty short list. J and I decided to go with a local cryobank, one of two favorites identified by both my RE and my Favorite Nurse. We figured that if we’re looking for someone “like us,” then why not pick an East Coast guy? Then other criteria narrowed things further. We decided to pay extra for guys that are either in grad school or have a post-graduate degree.

And we only wanted white guys. We’re not looking for an exact J-match, but we want our kid to have enough physical “cover” that he/she won’t have to explain him/herself to friends, neighbors, etc. We’re not going to lie to the kid, and most of our friends already know, but we figured our kid should at least have a shot at privacy.

And then I got pickier—only guys 5’10” or taller need apply. After all, short is okay if you’re a girl, but why saddle a boy with that if you don’t have to? Sure, I know lots of short guys, but I bet most of them would love to be taller.

And while it wasn’t a dealbreaker, I really wanted to find a guy with blue eyes. Why? Because the physical feature I always hoped my kids would inherit from J was his blue, blue, blue eyes. I’m brown-eyed, but my mom is blue-eyed so there were even odds our kids would inherit this triat. Call me sentimental, but if I can have that 50-50 shot, even though they aren’t J’s blue eyes, I’ll take it.

And how do we decide on body type, anyway? J is pretty heavyset (nay, overweight), and I like the idea of having a kid who isn’t super-skinny. My little bro is thin as a rail and he hates it. But if it’s a girl, wouldn’t it be better to have her be naturally thin? After all, I constantly envy the women I know who don’t have to fight off weight gain all the time.

See how weird this is? Mind you, if a pregnant girl on the street asked me if I wanted to adopt her baby I would JUMP at the chance. I wouldn’t question her about the father’s height or her grandmother’s diabetes or her post-graduate education. But we have to choose someone, so we might as well choose the best. Right?

Shopping online for a donor is a lot like shopping for shoes at Zappos. First you sort by style, then by color, then you narrow things down by selecting only low-heeled shoes. Oh, and they have to be available in wide sizes. All of a sudden you’re down to three pages and you pick from those.

Eye color aside, our must-have criteria left us with about 35 guys to choose from. So on Sunday we started slogging through them, sorting about half of them into our “favorites” (see, just like Zappos!) and adding a few to a short list of superfaves. The free information is pretty sparse—there’s rudimentary medical info, a brief essay, and a couple of paragraphs of “staff impressions.” The essay consists of answers to six or seven questions about childhood memories, family member the guy is closest to, funniest story, where they want to travel, what they want to pass on to a child, and so on.

About halfway through J started to complain: “They’re all starting to blur together,” he said. “If I have to look at one more do-gooder who values integrity, admires his father, and wants to travel to Africa I’m going to shoot myself.”

Some of the essays really stood out. There’s the guy that put his overheating laptop in the freezer, then forgot about it until the following morning (and successfully revived it by putting it in the oven). The guy who’s strongest childhood memory involved selling the family farm, and who wrote a half-page on almost every question. The guy who won a car by living in it with four other people for a week. The guy who loves cats. The guy who grew up in communist Poland. And then there’s the guy who tried too hard to impress us with his knowledge of history/philosophy that we finally wrote him off as too pretentious.

At some point we stopped being able to talk about them, so the guys on our short list got nicknames: “car guy,” “laptop guy,” “hottie doctor guy.”

And then we started spending money. We bought a “complete profile” on three guys—for $70 a pop. J spent several hours yesterday going through the medicals, as well as seeing what’s in the “personal profile” information, and looking at the baby photos.

What’s there, you ask? A LOT of information. I haven’t even looked at the medical, but the personal profile includes favorites: favorite move, favorite band, favorite animal, favorite car. It includes hobbies and academics: SATs, ACTs, LSATs, GREs, as well as GPAs and honors for all of school. It includes a detailed identi-kit type description of every facial feature: size and shape of eyes, eyebrows, nose, cheekbones, lips, teeth, chin. And not-quite-so-detailed descriptions of physical features of parents, children, siblings, aunts and uncles.

Faced with this wealth of information last night I got completely freaked out. I had been so content with our short list, but now I wasn’t sure any were good enough. Three days ago I didn’t really care about looks; we were focused on brains and personality. But one look at the ugly-ass baby picture from my favorite guy and suddenly I wasn’t so into him. I looked back at the staff impressions of him. Did they say anything about his looks? Nope. Great bod, it said, and nice personality.

“Maybe your good looks will prevail,” J said, “but then again, maybe not.”

So last night I found myself going through the favorites again, pulling up guys where the staff had said they were good-looking. I bought five more personal profiles (we decided to go cheaper at $20 each and spend more when we narrowed it down), and found a few guys I was glad to add to our short list.

We also found ourselves leaning toward the guys with “average” features. We just want his face to be a blank slate—nothing too dominant that will overwhelm the features I have to offer. (How are my HS genetics lessons holding up?) And I pulled up a website that listed dominant and recessive gene traits for J to look at as he went through more medicals today.

I’m such a cliché. My favorite guy right now is a doctor, tall, built, blue-eyed, with killer academic credentials. “Good on paper,” as Carrie Bradshaw would say.

Other stuff we found mattered to us more than we would have thought:

1. Personal tastes. The guy who put down “Transformers” as his all-time favorite movies fell right off my list.

2. Religion. Not that we care if they are religious, but I really was happy to find a guy who was agnostic.

3. Children. I found myself much more into the guys who already have kids. I don’t know why, but it seems like they’re more likely to be doing the donor thing for the right reason, or at least with full recognition of the consequences. And I like a guy like that.

The bottom line is this. On the one hand, all of these guys are fine. They’re healthy, smart enough to make it out of undergrad, with kick-ass sperm.

But on the other hand, it seems so random to be making such a huge decision—choosing the biological father of our child—in such an arbitrary way. We’re just shopping in the closest store for what’s available this week. Just like buying new boots at Zappos. It’s surreal.

The thing is, we just couldn’t figure out any other way to do it. How much agonizing can you do? At some point you just have to point and say, “I’ll take that guy.”

Every night I ask J if he’s all right. Every night I ask him to tell me how he’s feeling. (He says he’s fine, blah, blah, blah). I tell him how strange, almost creepy, this is for me. I even told him once that I thought it would be even creepier if we were doing IUI (after all, at least all that will be going inside me are my own embryos, not some stranger’s sperm).

I haven’t told him that sometimes I feel like I’m betraying him. He doesn’t need to think of it that way.

The Rat-Bastard HMO Giveth; the Rat-Bastard HMO Taketh Away

2009-06-29T15:02:00.000-07:00

You know how there’s never a bank error in your favor? Not so for the HMOs! On Friday, J informed me that he had spent $240 out of my account, and that it was going to make me very happy. Couldn’t really imagine what he had bought me (with my money, not that matters, but you know what I mean). He kept asking me to guess. I hate that game.

And then he told me.

$240 just bought my ENTIRE DRUG PURCHASE for this cycle. A drug purchase that was supposed to cost almost $2,400.

Let’s savor this moment, shall we?

My asshole, shitbag, rat-bastard HMO—the same HMO that refused to cover J’s health-threatening hormone deficiency just because we’re trying to get pregnant and I’ve used up my IVF coverage, the same HMO that denied me coverage for a water sono to follow up on my fibroid surgery just because I’ve used up my IVF coverage, the same HMO that guarantees a three-day turnaround on preauths but always requests “additional information” several times until I am forced to pay out of pocket or cancel a cycle—just accidentally covered my hideously expensive drug purchase.

HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA!

We all know that one of the reasons the HMOs suck so hard is that they have no incentive to be competent. Incompetence makes them money, because you eventually get so insane with it that you agree to pay out of pocket just to avoid one more hour-long phone call where you’re told exactly the opposite of the phone call before.

But I guess incompetence occasionally cuts the wrong way. Heh heh heh.

I feel so smug. I feel so vindicated. I feel so frustrated that I didn’t order twice as much.

I’ve been waiting to post this until the drugs are in our hot little hands.

This Just Sucks

2009-06-24T13:59:00.001-07:00

I’ve had a strange week, and every time I think I’m ready to write about it something new happens and I don’t know where to start. The bottom line is that I’m definitely NOT in control of my life right now. As much as I thought I could handle whatever was thrown at me this time, I was wrong.

Friday was horrible. Since Monday I had been handling the hormone rush of the pill and the oncoming unknown of a new IVF cycle with considerable grace—I was focused on my work, cheerful, and feeling at peace.

So when Friday came along I thought I had it in the bag. I had packed up my work the night before so I could work from home, and was all set to breeze through my sounding and water sono (SHG) that afternoon. Shit, man, I’d done this all before. Uncomfortable? Yes, but not anything to get worked up over.

The sounding was a piece of cake. Barely felt the catheter. One more procedure down and I was free to go. I emptied my bladder and hopped back up on the table, cheerful and chatty.

Twenty minutes later I was sweating, literally. Turned out that we were doing this a little late in the cycle for someone who ovulates early like me. Turned out that my cervix was bent into a curvy shape, and that damn catheter just wouldn’t go through. Turned out that my a-little-bit-uncomfortable procedure was about to get a lot worse.

Ever hear of a tinaculin? No idea how you spell it, no idea what it looks like (in my nightmares it’s a 3-foot wide clamp with big teeth). A tinaculin is a clamp that goes ON your cervix—it allows the doctor to yank your cervix (an organ not designed to be yanked) all around. Which fucking HURTS. Remember the worst pap you ever had? The kind that made your cervix cramp up and made you want to roll up into a fetal position? Now multiply that sensation by five, and make it last for ten minutes. I’m just saying, it fucking sucked.

And it didn’t work. At the end of the day, we just had to give up. My cervix wasn’t letting the catheter in (never mind that it had just gladly allowed the sounding catheter through) and that was that. My RE said we could schedule an HSG on Monday. Which I knew I would have to pay for, because it’s in the radiology office and my shithole HMO won’t cover anything any more. (They have me flagged now. I swear to god, I could go in with a broken ankle and my HMO would deny my coverage as “IVF-related.”) To the tune of another $800.

At my suggestion, my RE said the before we take that step we could retry the already-paid-for SHG on Monday, this time with a full bladder. If that didn’t work we’d do the HSG on Tuesday.

My nurse and RE left the room, and I started to cry. I think it was a reaction to what I had just been through, and how unexpected it was. It definitely was the most invasive procedure I’ve ever been conscious for. And seeing all the blood when I cleaned myself up didn’t help. I didn’t begrudge myself—I thought a few tears were warranted.

But I didn’t stop. I got out to my car and I was still crying. Five minutes later I was on the beltway and I was still crying. And then I hit this massive traffic jam and I knew there must have been an accident in front of me. So I figured I’d get off in Bethesda and take the back way home, which I’d done one before with my husband’s guidance. But when I got to Bethesda (still sobbing, BTW) I got all turned around. We spend a lot of time there, but J is always driving and I didn’t know which way to go. Everything was familiar, but I was just driving around it in circles. And I couldn’t stop crying. I emptied out my multiple-pill bottle and realized that I’d never reloaded another xanax, so there was nothing I could take to calm me down.

I finally pulled over and called J. Thank god he got service in the theatre he was in that day. I tried to ask him for directions but I couldn’t stop crying long enough to talk. I told him what had happened, and he gave me directions the best he could. I got home more than an hour after I left the doctor’s office. I was still crying. I took a xanax when I got home, and eventually fell asleep.

Here’s the weird thing. I had a bad experience, but it wasn’t like it was bad news or anything. And I think if the water sono had worked, I would have been quick to bounce back. I think what upset me more than anything was the complete loss of control over my life. With no warning, I suddenly had to make arrangements to work from home again on Monday, knowing that I might have to do that on Tuesday or Wednesday too. It’s just so frustrating. Here I have a job where people rely on me and it’s important to my own feelings of self-worth to be professional and reliable, but I’m constantly having to ask for special favors and making excuses. I hate it.

On Monday I went back prepared—I had taken a couple of alleve before I left, as well as a half a xanax. We did the water sono with a full bladder, and it went fine. It definitely hurt more than it would have if we hadn’t mangled my cervix on Friday, but it was manageable. All clear, not a fibroid in sight. I was so emotionally drained when I got home that I took the rest of the day off. J and I went to see Star Trek again.

Crap. I have to go, so I’m going to post this raw. (I usually edit a bit.) Sorry.

A Funny Moment

2009-06-15T19:32:00.000-07:00

A Funny Moment

Last night, J and I were watching the finale of the second-to-the-last season Star Trek Deep Space Nine (the crème de la crème of all Star Treks).

So Dax (a Trill) and Worf (a Klingon) are trying to have a baby, but interspecies fertility is tricky, and they’re having no luck. Worf is about to go off to battle, and Dax tells him that the doctor has found a way to make it possible.

“We’re going to have to get to work on it as soon as you get back,” she teases.

In the stilted manner that amounts to Klingon flirting, Warf replies, “I do not consider that . . . work.”

J busts out laughing. “You will,” he yells at the TV, raising his glass in a toast, “oh, you will.”

Is romance dead when your husband cracks wise about your fucked up sex life, and all it does is make you laugh harder? I love that man.

IVF Cycle #5, Freakout #1

2009-06-12T12:25:00.000-07:00

I’m exactly 24 hours into IVF Cycle #5, and already have jumped headfirst into Freakout #1. Not a promising sign for things to come.

My RE wants me to do a long suppression cycle using Lupron. I sent her an e-mail asking if it really was necessary—I’ve gotten by just fine with a short (2-3 week) suppression cycle on the pill before, haven’t I? (Though I guess it depends on your definition of success, given that I’m still not preggers.) She wrote back and told me that we definitely could discuss this, but that she’d given it a lot of thought and decided to try the Lupron because in my last cycle I had one ovary develop faster than the other, so ended up with only 8 eggs.

I hate this idea for so many reasons:

1. What if this screws up my cycle completely? It seems like introducing a new drug when I’ve produced enough eggs without it is a bad idea. What if my body reacts badly? I don’t know how many more cycles I’ve got in me. Even with shared risk, they cost a fucking fortune. And I don’t know if I can take it physically or emotionally any more.

2. What if this screws me up completely? Lupron scares the crap out of me. Frankly, I have enough trouble with the pill for a few weeks. It makes me depressed and weepy and tired all the time. I’ve heard Lupron can make you bat-shit crazy. I have a pretty high-stress job that lately has been getting harder every week . I know what’s involved in the drug regimen I’ve already taken. This is entirely new. I don’t want new. I want the comfort (can I call any IVF cycle comfortable?) routine I know.

3. What if this ends up costing a lot more? I know I’m going to have to pay for the Lupron, but I don’t know how expensive it is. But what if I also end up needing more stims to counteract the suppression of Lupron? Stims are brutally expensive.

4. And finally: Oh my fucking god, do I really have to increase the total length of my cycle by another MONTH? I’ve been steeling myself for this cycle with the mantra that it’s only about 40-45 days, start to finish. But now I’m looking at being on drugs all summer, just for one cycle.

I really don’t want to do this cycle. I wish I could just knock myself out for the next three months. Wake me up when it’s all over—just tell me the results and I’ll go from there. Because this is all just too fucking much.

Goodbye, Spermies.

2009-06-09T14:53:00.000-07:00

Today we said a sad farewell to J’s sperm. We knew that was how today would go. We woke up at 6 this morning to a truly epic thunderstorm, the kind of storm where, after your house stops shaking, you ask, “is that the loudest thunder you’ve ever heard?” The kind of storm that leads you to reminisce about a night more than 10 years ago—when the big fear was not finding a job and infertility was something that happened to other people—where we sat under the large awning of a deserted dorm in Fredricksburg, watching lightning dance across the sky so often we couldn’t tell one thunderclap from another. The kind of thunderstorm that reminds you that you used to cuddle in bed and talk for hours. So we cuddled, and talked a little, and listened to the thunder roll around our little house. And we didn’t talk about the appointment we were about to go to. No need. We’re all talked out.

J’s sperm count is still below 1 mil. Almost uncountable. His hormone levels are fine now, but the sperm just aren’t developing. Dr. World-Renowned can’t explain it, but he’s done all he can.

So on we go to donor sperm. I slipped out of the doc’s office a few minutes before J was done to get things lined up with my nurses. When I told them what the plan was, she asked how I felt about it.

“I’m really sad,” I told her, feeling the tears well up behind my eyes. “But it’s going to feel so good to do something different this time. Maybe now, if I get a positive beta, I won’t find myself just counting days until the inevitable loss.”

She nodded. “You’ve been carrying this burden for a long time,” she said.

And that’s how I feel. Today I’m sad. And I’m sure I’ll be sad again. But goddammit, I’m ready to MOVE ON.

Last Saturday we babysat our best friends’ 16-month-old boy. And guess what? I still want one. (It didn’t hurt that he was an angel for us the entire evening; he fell asleep in my arms while we watched John Lester take a no-hitter into the 7^th—what could be better?)

But the most wonderful thing was watching J with that little boy. Playing with him in the park; feeding him his yogurt that night; holding him on his lap while we watched the game. So yeah, I’m giving up J’s genes. But I’m not giving up watching him be a daddy. And it’s about fucking time that we made that happen.

A Strange, Uncomfortable Place

2009-06-01T14:36:00.001-07:00

The past few weeks have been strange and uncomfortable. It’s not like I’m in the Pit of Despair—it’s more like I’m standing at the rim of the Pit, thinking how much it’s going to suck when I start the fall.

I’m moody; I’m tense; I’m emotional.

I’m a girl about to go into her 5th IVF cycle.

I’m an analogy girl, so try this one on: it’s like I’ve spent the past 8 months sitting on the edge of a rushing river. I’ve known that, when my time was up, I was going to have to cross that river. It was going to be cold, and scary, and god only knew what I was going to find on the other side, if I ever got there. You see, I’ve been in that river before, and each time I go in I get swept away, only to wash up months later, battered and waterlogged, somewhere downstream on the same side I stared on. I used to be eager to jump in again, get it over with. But this time I was forced to sit on my side of the shore and dry out in the sun and heal my bruises, have a snack. It’s nice on my side of the shore, really.

But when my last period started I knew the break was over. Next period = next IVF cycle. Which means it’s time to start getting ready.

Just thinking about it made me feel panicky, like I couldn’t quite catch my breath. J’s been just as bad. Last week I forced the issue—made him dip his feet in the water, if you will. I told J we had to start looking for a donor. So we spent some time on the website of the cryobank we’d like to use. And it was kind of fun, actually. We made fun of the donors’ stupid cliché answers to certain essay questions. (Most of these guys, when asked where they would “most like to travel,” want to go “everywhere,” because they’re interested in “diverse cultures.” Blech! J and I flagged the guy that said he wanted to travel to the moon. We thought he was awesome.) But when we stopped, I found myself getting really sad. Goddammit, it just isn’t fucking fair. I’ve been willing to accept that I’m going to have to go through a lot more heartache to get a child than other women do. I’ve given up four years to the cause, watching my friends and family raise their children while I stand on the sidelines and try not to grind my teeth down to tiny nubs. I’ve accepted that my dream of having two kids is a fantasy, that I’m probably not going to be able to afford to send the one I do end up with to the college of his/her choice. I’ve given up a LOT. But to give up on having a piece of my husband growing inside of me. To give up on seeing his steady calm take root in a child. To give up on passing on to a child the very traits I fell in love with. And to have it all be about me, about my genes.

But now at least we’ve broken the ice. Oops, mixed metaphor. We’ve waded a bit into the shallows of the stream, felt the cold rocks on our bare feet, numbed our hearts a little bit to what’s to come.

But as our cycle is drawing closer, I am more and more overwhelmed by the rushing waters in front of me. I try to take deep breaths, resolving to handle this cycle better, to stay calm, to not freak over the little stuff, to not let it GET to me the way it always does.

And then I called my RE’s office to get instructions on the next cycle, and suddenly all my resolutions seem like a silly fantasy. Here is what she told me:

1. It sounds like my RE is changing my regimen, adding a Lupron cycle where none was before. I am not happy about this. My cycles have been pretty successful before (except for the outcome, of course), and I can’t imagine why we would add a totally new drug this late in the game. What if it totally fucks up my cycle? J and I are at the end of our rope—if we go straight to donor sperm this cycle (almost certainly, but not yet determined), we’re probably only going to do two more. Because at some point we have got to get OFF this horrible ride. And it adds something like another 3-4 weeks to my cycle! ARRGGHH! Anyway, this is not set in stone. My Favorite Nurse is going to ask my RE about it and we’ll see if she really meant for me to change up. But even thinking about it makes me fret.

2. I need to do another water sonogram (SHG?) and another sounding. I guess because it’s been so long since my last cycle. And neither of these are covered by my shared risk program. Which means I have to get preauthorization from my fucking horrid godawful evil ratshit insurance company. Which means I’m going to have to make sure the request is coded right, because if anyone so much as breathes the word “IVF” in the presence of the preauthorization request, United Healthcare will know and will reject my request. ARRGHHGHH! I THOUGHT I WAS DONE WITH THIS BULLSHIT!!! The one good thing about going into shared risk was NOT having to seek preauthorization from the Evil Overseers. The only good thing about running out of coverage was not having to deal with getting coverage.

I swear to god, when I got into this conversation with Favorite Nurse I started to hear roaring in my ears. And when I hung up the phone and rested my hot forehead on my desk, I felt the water sweep my feet out from under me and wash me away, down into the cold, tense, bitter, angry maelstrom. (That’s right, I just used “maelstrom” in a metaphor. So suck it.)

All I can think is how much I don’t want to do this. I can live with the bloodwork, the sonos, the early mornings. I can take the shots and the heavy swollen ovaries. But the rest of it—the contract with the sperm bank and the preauthorizations and the ordering of the drugs and the timing of the acupuncture with the doctor visits (and don’t forget the chiropractor visits) and having to tell my boss I’m going to be out a lot—but I can’t tell you when—(and oh my god I’m SO scary-busy at work). And then the results. Those fucking results.

Oh, and have I mentioned that I’m pretty freaked out about the end result even if it’s “positive”? I’m finally healing my back, after 10+ years of weakness and pain. What would a pregnancy do to it? What would having to take care of a baby do to it? How will I survive the crying, the sleeplessness, the constant feeling that I’m not doing enough?

Well, I’ve managed to totally depress myself. Cheers, all.

What Reality Show Do You Dream About?

2009-05-06T09:09:00.001-07:00

Okay, I admit it. I watch a lot of reality TV. Not an insane amount, and not the crappy “Fear Factor” type shows, but I do have the dubious honor of having watched every season of Survivor (and I’m STILL loving it). I watch Project Runway religiously, I love American Idol, and I stuck with The Amazing Race through at least six seasons and The Apprentice for at least three. I also have had the occasional fling with cooking shows (I watched Finding the Next Iron Chef), hair cutting shows (Shear Genius, which sucked), and the Bachelorette (but never the Bachelor). Let’s face it—I’m a competitive girl, and reality TV puts me in my happy place.

One of the few advantages of being a light sleeper (the only other one I can think of being the ability to wake quickly in a fire) is that I remember my dreams. Most of them, at least, and some of them quite vividly. And it turns out I have a surprising number of dreams in which I am a contestant on a reality TV show.

So what reality TV show do I dream I’m on? Is it Project Runway, where my creative-but-unskilled tendencies are transformed into high-fashion? No. Is it Survivor, where I can be a somewhat-older-but-badass chick who outschemes them all? No. Is it The Amazing Race, where a cool head can sometimes overcome the brash speed of youth and athleticism? No.

The reality show I dream I’m on—the one reality show I ever dream I’m on—is America’s Next Top Model.

What the fuck? I will confess that Top Model is one of my absolute favorite TV shows. It never fails to make me happy (although the first few episodes of every season—when all the girls scream every time they see Tyra—are always annoying). It feeds my girly-girl needs, which generally are starved by my frugal lifestyle, married status, and inability to wear pretty shoes.

But why is Top Model the one show that keeps appearing in my dreams? I can’t think of anything I would be worse at. I mean, okay, my health isn’t good enough for me to be in any of the others, but I could at least pretend that if I had a strong back and normal blood sugar I could compete on some of them. But Top Model? First, it goes without saying that I don’t have the looks to be a model. I’m not tall enough, I am 14 sizes too big, and I’m am pretty ordinary-looking (though I do clean up nice!). But more importantly than that, I am the LEAST photogenic person I know. I’m not making this up—EVERY photo of me comes out ugly. The most comforting thing I can hear when people look at pictures of me is that this is NOT what I actually look like. (Note: blurry picture up top of my blog is one of the best ever taken of me, and the out-of-focus-ness of it is a big part of that.)

And it’s not like, in my Top Model dreams, I’m a different (a.k.a. more model-esque) person. I guess I’m a bit thinner (I would have to be, right?), but I still am over-model-weight and I struggle with my skin and hair and I still take TERRIBLE photos. Which means that these dreams are stressful, not blissful. All I can do each time is pray that there’s someone else on the show who’s worse than I am, so I can survive another week. (I did onetime dream I was on a hybrid Top Model/Survivor show, once, too. Though I don’t think I was losing any weight.)

Anyway, as a hippie-feminist Vassar girl, I think it is both amusing and ironic that when I go to sleep at night, I dream of being a contestant on America’s Next Top Model.

Feeling Shy About Blogging

2009-04-27T12:42:00.000-07:00

You know how if you go too long without having sex it starts to feel like a big deal doing it again? And you get all shy and awkward about it and come up with excuses not to do it that night, or the next night, or the night after that, because it just seems like it’s been too long and you don’t know how to break the ice again?

That’s how I feel about my blog. I’ve been on a forced TTC break since August, waiting and waiting and waiting to get back on the babymaking train, and drifting further and further away from my blog, my blog readers, and so many of my close online friends. I feel guilty, because I know many of you are in the heart of darkness right now, and while I’ve been gone you’ve been moving on with your plans, cycling, succeeding, failing, grieving. And it seems strange to pick up where I left off, to check in with your blog and try to reconnect while so much has happened.

So I feel shy. But, like ending a sex-drought (god, I hope I’m not the only one that experiences the sex-drought!), the only way to fix it is just plunge back in and do the deed. Because I need you all too much, and care too much about you, to let you go. So here I go.

Here’s my update (because, after all, the best thing about having a blog is that it’s all about me):

Our efforts to improve J’s sperm have been a total bust. Because of the insurance fuckup (see previous post), we have two more months of the very spendy hormone to give to J. But our RE says that most guys who respond to this do so almost instantly. So it’s now a long long long long shot that we’re going to see any improvement.

The most frustrating thing about this is that no one knows why this happened. When we first went to the RE, lo those many years ago, J’s sperm count was a bit low, but totally usable. They actually thought we had a great shot at getting pregnant with IUI. Then his numbers plunged, and then plunged again. Now there’s pretty much nothing. The hormones J is taking have his testosterone up, but his sperm production just isn’t there.

This means that we have to start looking at donor sperm, and I am completely overwhelmed by this. Not so much the fact of it—we’ve been gearing up for this for a long time. But the process of selecting a donor and figuring out how many vials to purchase and how many to keep in storage for (dare I think it?) a second child and whether we want an open-i.d. donor and what characteristics we want . . . it’s really daunting! So—on my return to blogland—I ask for help: does anyone have advice on how to do this? A checklist? A good book? I’m not going to lie, I’m freaked.

Of course, our last meeting with J’s RE (who looks exactly like Dick Cheney but is sweet and kindly) was also upsetting because he told us that he still thinks there’s only a 50% chance that the problem is J’s sperm. It still could be my eggs, he tells us. This is because almost all of my eggs fertilize (with ICSI) every cycle. Then the embryos die. Every time. (He even thinks that there was something wrong with the embryo that was ectopic—he thinks quality embryos don’t go into the tubes as often, but notes that it happens a lot with IVF.) Now, I assumed that since we know J’s sperm are pretty sucky, odds were much higher that the problem was his sperm. Right? But Dr. Sweet-and-Kindly Cheney says that eggs are so often the problem, he still lays even odds on my eggs being bad.

This doesn’t change our approach, of course. The only way to know which is failing, egg or sperm, is to replace one of them. And we can’t afford donor eggs, not if we want to have money left over for adoption. So the obvious choice is to go donor sperm. But now I’m less hopeful that even this will work. So fucking frustrating. I’m so tired of this shit. I so want this to be over. (Did I mention that we’re one month away from our we’ve-been-trying-for-FOUR-FUCKING-YEARS anniversary? Do you think they make a card for that?)

J showed his first signs of IF insanity after our meeting with Dr. Nice Cheney. In the meeting we decided to keep J on the bravelle for another month and a half, when we’ll have our final testing and meeting with the doc to make a decision on whose sperm to use. As we were heading out to the car, J told me that he wanted us to start getting ready to use donor sperm right away, and that he wanted me to already be halfway through my next IVF cycle when we got the final results. “I just don’t want to lose any more time,” he said, “I want to be doing something.”

Now, we all know that this is a little crazy, and luckily my cycle isn’t timed right to allow us to do it. The last thing I need is to have my body acting as a ticking time-bomb while we try to figure out our final steps of picking a donor and arranging for delivery. But I was kind of charmed by J’s little freak-out, even if it was delivered in his matter-of-fact, non-crazy tone. Because it’s just the kind of thing I would have said, were I in that place at the moment.

Okay, must work. (By the way, work is one BIG reason I haven’t been blogging as much—we’ve had an insanely busy late winter and spring.) I have lots more to say about lots of things: my crazy mom’s reappearance in my life (fuck!), my experience hiring day laborers to finish landscaping my back yard (yippee!), the possibility of losing my job due to recession (panic attack!), and my fabulous new tattoos (double yippee!).

But for now I’m going to post this, and see if I still have any friends/readers out there.

(Like that last bit? I threw in a bit of a guilt trip for y’all. Nice to know I still have that special touch, eh?)

The Insurance Company Giveth, the Insurance Company Taketh Away

2009-03-23T14:05:00.000-07:00

As you know, being in ART-limbo has been driving me steadily insane. Last week, J and I decided to buy a little piece of sanity—we are going start paying out-of-pocket for at least some of the drugs that might (emphasis *might*) kick-start J’s sperm production. We figure that even if insurance eventually denies us coverage, we would probably pay for a couple of months of treatment, just to see if it was going to do any good. So we decided to pay for a few weeks while we waited to hear back on our most recent appeal.

Last Wednesday I faxed in J’s prescriptions to Schraft’s (the cheapest specialty pharmacy out there), along with a note saying that he would call to work out ordering and delivery. The next morning, I got a call from Schraft’s with a question for the doctor (they assumed that I was the nurse). Once I gave them the doctor information, I also gave them J’s information—phone numbers, e-mail, date of birth, etc. When she asked about insurance I told her not to worry about it. “We’re in a protracted battle with the insurance company right now, so we don’t have any coverage,” I explained. She suggested that I give her the information anyway, just so his files would be complete.

That night, J picked me up at the train station with “good news.” His prescriptions were covered! “Not possible,” I said. Our most recent appeal—the previous one having been rejected by the asshole HMO because we had the wrong pre-auth number on it—was only a day old.

“That’s what I told them,” he said, “but they told me it had gone through and I owed a $50 copay.”

“So you filled the whole thing? All three months?” I asked, incredulous.

“Yup.” He grinned. “They actually called back to tell me it was going to be a $50 copay per month. I was like, ‘okay!’”

“I don’t believe it,” I said, “They’re gonna call back and say it was a mistake. Tonight.”

“Probably,” he agreed.

We went into the house and I went back into the bedroom to change my clothes. The phone rang. Our caller ID—which we’ve never been able to take off of “audio”—announced “Call from . . . Schrafts.” We looked at each other. “Well, it was a nice 15 minutes,” I offered.

From what J was saying on the phone, it was obvious what was happening. “Not covered? . . . We’ve reached our ‘cap’? . . . What exactly does that mean?” After a minute, he pulled out his credit card and ordered a three-week supply. We both knew that there was no “cap” to our coverage; we just weren’t covered. But whatever.

And in a normal world, that would be that. But this was no normal world. Because 15 minutes later the phone rang again. “Call from . . . Schrafts,” announced our caller ID in its creepy computer monotone.

“What the fuck?” I muttered, handing the phone off to him.

A minute later, he was off the phone again, total confusion on his face. “That was the pharmacist. She was calling to tell me that the person who called earlier was wrong and we haven’t exceeded our cap.”

“So we’re covered?”

“That’s what they say.”

“And you filled the entire thing?”

“Yup.”

We waited all evening for the call that never came. The next day the drugs were delivered to our RE. Today J picked them up.

I don’t think Schraft’s come after us for this when our HMO realizes its mistake, can they? We were totally up front with them about this.

Score one for the little guy. (Not that J’s little, or anything.)

The Deer Ate My Crocus!

2009-03-19T06:41:00.000-07:00

Not a metaphor. Last night, as I pulled into my driveway, I was struck by my favorite sight of the spring: the berm in front of my house covered with giant crocus (crocuses? croci?). Mostly purple and white, with a smattering of yellow, the bold colors—surrounded by the brilliant green of new growth on top of the dark mulch I laid last fall—seemed to glow in the gold, early-evening sunlight (god, I love daylight savings time).

This morning, the purple and white and yellow were gone, vanished. Standing on my porch, I thought the blooms had just closed up for the night, but it seemed too drastic a change from the evening before. When I got closer the truth became clear—some son-of-a-bitch, rat-bastard, greedy-ass deer ate my flowers! My first flowers of spring! The flowers that made me so happy last night are gone.

Again, not a metaphor. No greedy monster came in the night and ate my chances at being a mom. And it could be worse. A few years ago the deer came by and ate every bud off of my prize daylilies—on the same berm—killing my chances of getting any blooms that entire late summer and fall. The crocus would have been fading out in a couple of weeks anyway.

But it doesn’t have to be a metaphor to piss me off. It’s been a long, dark, cold, hard, painful winter for me. The coming of spring has been keeping me sane the past few weeks. And for me, spring is all about the bulbs blooming. Now the berm isn’t going to really be pretty until May (my giant daffodils have always been a disappointment), when my tulips bloom (provided, of course, that the deer don’t get to them). And yes, I will be spraying tonight. Fucking deer. They even nibbled on my new daylily foliage just breaking through. Must have been a tough winter for them, too, but I refuse to feel sorry for them.

Oh, oh, of course it’s a metaphor! (You had to know I’d get there eventually.) Because what I was really looking forward to this spring, what I’ve been waiting for since last August, was finally moving on with IVF, and getting an answer once and for all about whether I am going to bear a child. And that hope has been snatched away, pushed back into later in the year, as we battle the insurance company for coverage for super-expensive hormone treatment for J.

Or maybe it isn’t a metaphor, but just a piling on of disappointment and delay. At the end of last year, whenever I looked forward toward March, there were two bright spots on the horizon: finishing my chiropractic treatment in time for spring gardening, and starting IVF again. By the end of January, I knew that the chiropractic treatment was going to take much longer (and that any gardening would have to take place in the heat, humidity, and mosquito-terror of summer in the swamp), but I still thought we would soon be starting IVF. When we saw the doc in mid-February and learned that J’s sperm count had dropped to zero, and that it would be months before we even knew whether we could use his sperm, the only thing I had left to look forward to was my spring flowers. And now they, too, have been gobbled up.

Fucking deer. Assholes.

Crappy News

2009-02-24T12:38:00.000-08:00

J’s sperm count, as of yesterday, was 0.01. This from a guy who, three years ago, had enough sperm to get me pregnant unassisted. It’s been dropping since then, but we’ve never seen anything like this.

For the past four months, J’s been giving himself HCG shots. The idea (assuming I’m getting all of this right—biochem isn’t my best subject) it to stimulate the pituitary into producing more male hormone, which will in turn kick-start the testes into doing their job. But after four months there’s been only moderate increase in the male hormone and the testes seem to have given up. Our RE (who is one of the best in the country) assures us that the HSG cannot be responsible for this—it’s probably just the end game for where his sperm count’s been heading all along.

The RE is going to add FSH into the mix, which might help. It also might not. And we won’t know anything for several more months.

I’m so disappointed. I’m not sure how much of the disappointment is due to the ever-increasing likelihood that J is not going to be the biological parent of my child (of course, I might not be either—we’re just not there yet) and how much of it is due to the fact that we have made no progress with our treatment, meaning that it is unlikely we’re going to be doing another cycle anytime soon. Every year, I tell myself THIS is going to be the year that we finally learn whether we’re going to have a child. I just want to KNOW!!!

I wonder if I really am prepared for the news that J’s spermy days are truly over. I think it’s easy to be blasé about it when it’s just out on the horizon and you don’t actually have to make any decisions. But the truth is, part of me just wants to give up and start donor sperm now. Sigh. If ever anything has taught me patience, it’s infertility.

Of course, I’m also upset because J’s hormone imbalance is a health problem as well. It can lead to poor muscle tone, low bone density, etc. I want him to be fixed, dammit (not in the kitty-cat way, but in the burly manly way). I want him healthy.

And we’re having a huge fight with insurance over this. At first they denied coverage altogether, claiming that the hormone treatment was for “IVF support” and our IVF coverage has been exhausted. We appealed, and then they gave us half-coverage, labeling it “fertility,” but not necessarily IVF. We had decided to let it go. The HSG is pretty cheap, and we figured we’d fight that battle after I was either pregnant or we’d given up on that. (After all, when you’re not trying to get pregnant it’s hard to claim your treatment is “fertility” related.)

But now that J has to take FSG, we’re looking at a huge expense if we don’t get covered. So we’re going to have to file yet another appeal with our insurance company. And they’re going to take another five weeks to get back to us.

Christ. This is so fucking frustrating.

Where Are You on the Infertility Age Spectrum?

2009-02-19T14:07:00.001-08:00

I have two friends entering the IF rollercoaster, both of whom I referred to my RE’s office (J’s snarky comment: “Oh yeah, because they’ve done such a great job getting us pregnant!”). One friend is 43; the other is 32. And I just turned 37, so I’m right in the middle. The differences between our reactions to the IF are stark and I find them interesting.

My 43-year-old friend, T, just got married two years ago. The way she sees it, she came late to the party and now has a chance to try for a child, but she knows she has to work with what she’s got. When she came to me for information on IVF, she seemed totally at peace with it. It’s not that being a mother is less important to her, or that she’s calm about the process itself (shots and hormones and surgery, etc.). But she has known for years that time was running out. For her, infertility is not a disease—it’s a hurdle she faces because of the way her life has played out. She understands that the odds of IVF working are long, and that she might have to use donor eggs. But she’s decided to take her shot at it, and if it doesn’t work she’ll do what she can to adopt.

I don’t mean to make light of her problems. I’m sure she’s scared and hurting. But I almost envy her lack of trauma over the idea of infertility itself. I think of my first year of infertility as a “lost year” in my life, which I can barely see through the haze of shock and desperation I was going through at the time. And it wasn’t like it happened all at once, either. For most of us, it takes a lot of treatment before you know how bad your infertility is, before you realize that you could actually reach the end of the road without a baby.

I know that’s how I was. I didn’t consider us “infertile” when we first went to an RE to check things out. After all, we’d conceived once on our own, so surely all we needed was a little nudge. And our tests came back fairly positive, so we assumed that the trip to the RE was just a little glitch in the parenting road.

Even then, when I thought that going through IUI was just a hiccup in the rhythm of our lives (I’m metaphor-happy today), it was traumatic. I can remember sobbing in the RE’s office when I first was told we would need IUI. I can remember freaking out over the expense ($1,000). And then one BFN after another, and the shock at learning we would have to go to IVF (again, the expense even with insurance seemed so daunting). And then learning about the fibroids, and then the miscarriages, one after another. The decision to have surgery, and the decision to take out the second mortgage and do the shared risk plan. The feelings of betrayal when our RE finally decided—two years too late—to try to treat J’s hormone deficiencies. And the struggle to accept the likelihood of donor sperm as our only option.

So I look at T, who seemed to skip all these steps, and there’s just a little bit of jealousy on my part. She knew going into this that it was a long shot; she knows she might have to use donor gametes. She has a simple plan that will never drag on for years and years.

Of course, I prefer my odds over hers. And yet I wonder what that kind of peace would have been like.

My 32-year-old friend, D, is on the opposite side of the spectrum. (I know, a 22-year-old would be closer to the true other side of the spectrum, but most of the women I know tend to wait until their 30’s to start trying to conceive.) She and her husband have been TTC for over a year, and she’s been charting (TCOYF) for more than half of that. We’ve spent a lot of time talking about what steps she should take. She seems inclined to go to her gynecologist for advice, while I have been urging her to just skip all that and go straight to the RE. (I know that my RE would repeat all the tests anyway.) I can’t tell whether she’s in denial or if I just assume the worst.

But while we talk about the facts, we have yet to discuss how she’s feeling about all of this. And I don’t know how to broach it. I don’t want to say “I’m sorry,” because that’s assuming infertility (and the need for real treatment), and I know she’s hoping that a simple does of clomid might do the trick. And it might, and I really hope it does. Mostly I think she’s not ready to talk about her feelings until she has some answers.

Right now, she’s where I was 3 years ago. And it’s hard to watch that and want to help, but to fear overwhelming her with my own advice. On the one hand, I wish I knew 3 years ago what I know now. I wish I’d known how hard it could be, how long it could take, and even how much strength I would find in myself and my marriage. On the other hand, she already knows some of this—she’s been watching me go through this, after all. And I don’t want to scare her.

So where are you on the spectrum, and how has it affected your perspective?

Hiding Out

2009-02-11T11:43:00.000-08:00

It's 150 degrees in my office (a common occurance on unseasonably warm winter days), yet I'm sitting in here behind a closed door because I'm hiding from an office baby shower. I'm afraid if I even peek outside my door someone will "remind" me that they're all meeting in the library to celebrate.

This so sucks.

Oh, and today I refused to give my second fan to another pregnant lady in my office. (Pregnant lady of previous fame, posted here.) I can't decide if that's passive aggressive or just plain aggressive, but I'm at peace with my decision. I need both fans, and fuck her.

Chronic Pain: or One Reason Why I’ve Been Such a Bad Blogger

2009-02-10T13:19:00.001-08:00

Let’s face it: I’ve become a bad blogger. Not just have I stopped posting very often myself, but I’ve abandoned my friends as well, checking their blogs only once a week, discovering important events too late, offering lame advice after the critical moment has passed.

The truth is, I’m exhausted and depressed and trying to escape myself, my life. And while part of this funk is due to my perpetually childless state, a lot of it is due to my chronic pain. So far, I’ve avoided writing about it, because for some reason it embarrasses me. I feel like I’m supposed to be this interesting, vibrant person, full of energy and vitality and activity. For some reason, talking about my “bad back” (is there really no better phrase for it?) makes me feel like a hypochondriac whiner who can’t get off her ass and get her shit together. It makes me feel old, unsexy, unlikeable.

Anyway, here’s the scoop: My lower back hurts. Pretty much all the time. It’s been hurting on and off for most of my life. When I was younger (high school, college, even law school) the pain wasn’t constant. I would occasionally throw out my back and be stuck flat on a heating pad for a week. As I got older, the pain became more frequent. During phases when I was feeling better, I would try to build up my strength by exercising, doing yoga, lifting weights, stretching, whatever seemed smartest. This would work for a little while, but then one day something would go wrong, and I would overdo it, and there I would be, flat on my back on a heating pad again, planning how much more careful I would be with my exercise next time. It was a desperate cycle, and in retrospect, a really sad lifestyle.

A few years ago I saw a chiropractor—someone partially covered by my HMO. He told me the problem was my feet (I pronate) and he prescribed me soft orthotics. I’ll be honest with you: I cried when he told me that I would never wear heels again. I had to replace all my shoes, because none of them fit with the orthotics. Soon I found that I could only wear running shoes. So I would wear running shoes to work every day, and leave them on all day unless I was seeing clients or going to court.

But soon the soft orthotics stopped working and I had to go for rigid ones. So I switched to a podiatrist, then replaced all my shoes again because the rigid orthotics fit differently. Again, the orthotics helped for awhile, then stopped working. Over and over again, I found myself just starting to get into shape when I would hurt myself again, and have to completely stop, sometimes for months at a time.

This November, I finally went to see the chiropractor my podiatrist recommended. He seemed really good, but wasn’t covered by my HMO. Then again, the guy covered by my HMO had sucked, and I was desperate. This guy, the infamous Dr. K of my previous post, thinks he can actually fix the structure of my spine. He showed me an x-ray of my neck; I’ve almost lost the curve of my spine there. This means my head is being held several inches too far in front of my body, which is putting strain on my whole spine. He thinks this structural problem (called “anterior head syndrome”) is the source of my lower back pain as well as my shoulder pain.

So I shelled out more than two thousand dollars for a flat-rate plan to fix the structure of my spine. The idea is to do traction 3 times a week for 3 ½ months, reshaping my cervical spine so that my spine isn’t getting pulled out by my enormous, heavy head (that’s how it feels once I’m aware of it). But less than a month into this treatment my lower back completely freaked out. I guess I was too aggressive with the traction, and my body is just so damn sensitive about everything. I remember a day about a month ago where I couldn’t even put my own socks on. That really did me in.

Since then we’ve been trying to get my body back to the point where I can start the traction again. I have a DDS Belt, which is essentially a lower-back traction device. I wrap it around my waist really tight, then I pump it full of air and it expands vertically, separating my discs. So now not only can I wear no pretty shoes, I am having to try to hide this belt under my clothes, even though it squeezes my fat out above and below it. As long as I wear bunchy clothes or sweaters, you can’t really see it, but I feel like a circus freak. I wear the belt at least half a day every day. I thought it was only going to be for a few days, but my recovery has been ridiculously slow.

And that leads to the depression/escapist angle. Because my recovery has been so slow, and I’m so desperate to feel good again. I’ll feel a little bit better for a day or two (as long as I use the DDS belt), tender and sore but not in serious pain, but then I’ll slide back into joint-throbbing pain where I have to take percocet and lay on an ice pack and just pray that it gets better soon.

Dr. K has been a godsend. He’s basically extending my treatment plan so that when we start doing traction again (which we have to do sometime) I can still finish the plan without paying more. He also basically gave me the DDS belt, which is expensive. And he still believes that I can be healed. I wonder whether we’re both delusional.

I’m exhausted and discouraged and after awhile the pain has just worn me down. I’ve been seeing a doctor three nights a week for three months, and I haven’t even really started my structural treatment program. I feel like this never is going to end.

The strange thing is that this has so neatly replaced my IF treatment. Here I am, spending a lot of money, seeing a doctor so often I’m on a first-name basis with him and his entire staff. I’m in a lot of pain, and all I can do is hope that in the end I’m going to get something worthwhile out of it.

And like my IF treatment, I still have hope. Maybe I won’t be crippled or addicted to painkillers (or both) before I’m 40. Maybe I really will be healthy enough to do my own housework, garden, and have sex. (That’s right, I can’t even have sex.) Maybe I really will be able to handle a pregnancy and a baby someday.

Also like IF, I have fear. Because maybe not. And the thought of what I might become is terrifying.

Paranoid, Insecure, and Socially Inept

2009-01-27T08:56:00.000-08:00

I have had the strangest week. Ever since the inauguration last week I’ve been a mess, swinging wildly from anger to frustration to paranoia. As often happens when depression rears its ugly head, I also feel socially insecure. This doesn’t mean that I become shy or anything (perish the thought!). What happens is almost worse—I find myself constantly replaying conversations with friends and colleagues, wincing at my words, my tone, wondering whether I was being fun and witty or awkward and perhaps rude. This leaves me feeling constantly unsettled, paranoid even.

Let’s add to this that I’ve totally blown ICLW week (which is kind of like “ATM machine” or “PIN number,” both pet peeves of mine). When I signed up I thought I’d be cycling again, ready to write and read and give support. Instead I just bitterly wait. I can almost feel my eggs aging as I sit here.

I hate being moody. My husband is the proverbial rock; his moods consist of teasing (good mood) or quiet (which could mean stressed, frustrated, sad, tired, or just mellow). But I spend a lot of my time fighting my Inner Crazy. I also have to remain ever-vigilant against my Inner Truly Crazy, the surface of which I have grazed only a couple of times, but which I know lurks in my genetic makeup. (I used to worry I was going to end up crazy like my mom. I can remember having conversations with J about this early in our relationship, wondering if he really wanted a long-term commitment with someone who had that possible future. But if there’s one thing the past few years have taught me, it’s that I’m a lot stronger that my mom—and both of her parents. I’m grounded enough to handle a lot more than she can, and I now know I’m not going to end up like her. Thanks, IF, for teaching me how much I can take.)

I had an odd conversation about my IF treatment plans last week. My chiropractor, Dr. K, and I have become pretty chummy during the past two months. He’s only a year older than me, and he’s a nice guy who has really gone out of his way to help me. Last week, he mentioned that he thought my chiropractic treatment would help me get pregnant.

“It would help more if our problems weren’t primarily male-factor,” I said.

Dr. K started telling me about a doctor he knows in New York who’s had luck improving sperm count with some new treatment. I cut him off. “We’re mostly done with all that,” I told him. “If J’s hormone treatment doesn’t work, we’re going to go with donor sperm, and if that doesn’t work in a couple of cycles we’re going to stop.”

“It sounds like you’ve already given up,” he said, sounding upset.

I should have been mad. Instead I just felt tired. “It’s been three and a half years,” was all I said. “At some point we just have to stop.”

The strangest thing about this conversation was its stark contrast to ones I’ve had with my friends and my sister, several of whom were pushing for me to give up and start the adoption process more than a year ago (solicited advice). I couldn’t stop wondering why Dr. K was in such a different place than my friends. Then I realized that it was just about being there. Dr. K has only known me for a couple of months, months that I haven’t been cycling. The years I’ve suffered with IF are just an abstraction to him—the time isn’t real. For him, it’s measured in terms of his life, time which raced by while his kids grow older, learn to read, to ride a bike. Time that flew past while he built his practice. Time in which he lived his life.

For me, time has stopped. I don’t see time in seasons and years anymore. Instead I see it as daily frustration, constant anger, a persistent underlying dread and fear, empty weekends with nothing to do in my cold, quiet house. I see my life through the hours spent watching TV and movies, reading books, not quite finding the escape I’m seeking. I see my life through the four vacations I’ve taken, each one thought to be the “last chance” at a break before we had to give our time to a pregnancy and a new baby. I see it through the meaningless holidays, the baby showers I’ve skipped. I see my life through the growth of my nephew.

My close friends have been with me, day by day. They’ve seen the hope for each new cycle, for each new type of treatment. They’ve read my one-word, end-of-cycle e-mails: “negative,” or “miscarriage.” One of my best friends told me that she has had to harden her heart (just like I try to) every time I go into a new cycle, just so she won’t get so upset when it doesn’t work out. Unlike Dr. K, my friends understand that what I’m doing is insane—beating my head against the wall again and again, refusing to stop because there’s always a new treatment, a new approach. Anyone who’s been with me for the past three years would never suggest: (a) that I’ve given up, or (b) that it would be a bad thing if I did.

And that’s why I couldn’t be mad at Dr. K. He just didn’t get it. He doesn’t know.

Inauguration Day 2009

2009-01-23T12:54:00.000-08:00

I was there. It was a pain in the ass, physically brutal, and not entirely fun, but I was there. When the tide turned, when America took that great leap forward, when we once again became a model for other countries to follow, rather than a subject of derision and disgust. I was there.

They say that two million people were on the mall yesterday. I don’t think I ever contemplated how big a number that was until I saw it firsthand. It was exciting, and overwhelming, and a bit scary. It was Historic.

The Trip

I got up at 5:30 Tuesday morning, but I had been awake since 3:00. I was sure I was getting a stomach flu, but in retrospect I think it was just been nerves. I had been planning on a more leisurely morning, but as soon as I turned on the news I started freaking out. “Holy shit,” was how I greeted J when he stumbled out of bed at 6:00 (having driven home from Philly the night before), “we’ve got to get the fuck out of here.” The crowds bobbing in the dark on the TV screen were eerie, and I was babbling with nervous excitement. We had a big breakfast, piled on the layers, and headed out.

The train was surprisingly uncrowded when we got on, but by the time we got downtown there was barely room to breathe.

Around the corner of my office building is the onramp to I-395, which runs under Pennsylvania Avenue (about 1 block in front of the Capitol). As Pennsylvania Ave is the parade route, the only way to get to the Mall from the Red Line was either to walk around the Capitol (probably a mile or more) or take the 3rd Street Tunnel.

This was the entrance to the tunnel. To the far right is the line to get into one of the ticketed areas. The crowd to the middle and left are all heading down to the interstate, which was shut down to all vehicular traffic.

By the time we got to the tunnel entrance the crowd was even thicker behind us.

I took a lot of photos of the tunnel. I thought it was awesome, and apparently I wasn’t alone in this sentiment. Hundreds of people were taking pictures, and there were random moments when everyone in the tunnel would just start cheering, or chanting “Obama.”

Once we got out of the tunnel we walked. And walked. And walked some more. Mind you, it wasn’t that far to the Mall from the other side, but the crowd kept getting shuttled further down, so we were walking parallel to the Mall. every time we wanted to turn toward the Mall we were told that area was closed. “It’s too full,” they would tell us.

In some places, we would hit a complete bottleneck. But the mood was celebratory, not scary at all. Everyone was pumped.

The Mall

Finally, we broke away from most of the crowd and turned toward the mall. (It was strange to ignore the cops, but what were they going to do?) The Mall was surrounded by Jersey barriers, followed by a chest-high fence; the only way we could get on the Mall was to go over. I climbed on top of a barrier and paused, stunned by the sight before me. Here is what I saw:

When I dropped to the ground on the other side of the fence, I felt a surge of energy. We had made it. We were on the Mall.

We didn’t go far from there—there wasn’t anywhere to go. I thought I was going to amuse myself for a few hours on the mall by taking a million photos. But although the sight was amazing, there weren’t many pictures to take. There was only a neverending, neverchanging sea of people, all facing the same direction, standing quietly, patiently, freezing, waiting.

I could see the “jumbo”-tron from where I stood, if I leaned a certain way or stood on my tiptoes.

We stood there for two hours. We didn’t move. I’d brought food and water, but I didn’t dare eat or drink. My bladder had been complaining since long before we hit the Mall, and I knew there was no chance I’d make it to one of the five thousand port-a-potties lining the mall. It wasn’t even the question of how long the line-to-pee was; I couldn’t imagine even getting to the line, or distinguishing the line from the rest of the crowd once I got there.

At first there was some movement where we were standing. One person would try to pass in front of us, then everyone “with” that person would squeeze through, followed by an endless stream of people, all muttering “excuse me” and trying to squeeze in front of us. It was annoying as hell, because there was nowhere for them to go. So finally, after everything had settled down and this 20-something guy behind me nudged his shoulder in between me and J with an “excuse me,” I simply said “no.”

He was pissed. He stood there behind me, radiating rage, then said loudly, “Americans are such assholes.” I couldn’t help it. I cracked up. I mean, where did this guy think he was? And why was he here? He added, “If this were Europe it would be handled so much better.” Right, I thought silently, like Europe’s ever seen anything like this.”

Eventually J let him pass, commenting to me that he “didn’t need any of his negative energy.” The funny thing was, that was the only nasty moment I had with anyone the entire day.

A big guy standing right behind us then declared our area “closed”: “I don’t care where you think you’re going, or who you’re trying to meet. You’re not gonna find your friends, and you’re not getting through.” We were all in agreement.

The crowd was mostly quiet. Did I mention it was cold? You’d think that having that many people around you would keep you warm, but the wind was blowing hard and after awhile it wore us down. I had planned entertainment. I was going to take pictures, but after taking about 5 shots of the monument crowd I was done. Besides, taking pictures meant taking off my gloves. I was going to make phone calls, but there was no cell service. We had brought i-pod entertainment, but it seemed odd and kind of rude (and maybe unsafe) to tune out the world with so many people pressed so close around us.

They kept the road in front of the monument open for the parade buses. Every 15 minutes or so a caravan of 20 buses would come by, filled with high school or college kids in their band uniforms or cheerleading outfits, openly gawking at us. Thousands of us would wave at the bus while they took pictures.

The Ceremony

It’s hard to find the right words to describe the ceremony. Like much of that day, it was surreal. There on the big screen was this formal event, full of pomp and protocol. It was an event that was about “Washington,” but the masses were watching from “the District.” It’s a good metaphor for DC. Washington politics largely ignore the city in which they’re housed, even going to far as to deny its citizens a vote in Congress. But this was a vivid reminder of the disconnect between the federal government and the general population. Two million of us were out there on the Mall, freezing our asses off, wishing our feet would give up and go blessedly numb, wondering if we would ever get to pee again, worrying about how we were going to make it home. At the same time, on a big screen in front of us was this fancy procession of dignitaries—most of whom we’ve never heard of—playing politics to this small audience of well-rested, ticketed, seated visitors. It was just … strange.

When familiar faces started to show up on the Jumbotron, the crowd started to stir. There was a healthy chorus of boos when George H.W. appeared on the scene, a cheer for Jimmy Carter, and a wild frenzy for Beloved Bill. The crowd started buzzing, waiting for the moment Obama would arrive.

Then we saw George W. I wonder what it’s like to be booed so loudly by two million people? Has that ever happened before in the course of human history? Did we set a new world record? All around us the crowd erupted with a spontaneous song: “Na na na na, na na na na, hey hey hey, goodbye.” (Apparently this was happening all over the Mall, according to friends who watched from other areas.) One guy waved his shoe in his air, much to our delight.

(By the way, NBC censored the booing. They cut the crowd mikes for both the introduction of HW and W. Is that acceptable journalism?)

And then they introduced the man we all came to see. And the crowd went wild. There wasn’t much flag-waving where we were standing (I felt like it would be rude to pull out the flags I brought and wave them around, because we were standing so tight and I didn’t want to cut out anyone’s view), but the noise was awesome.

Most of the pre-swearing-in part of the ceremony was just a matter of endurance. Our feet hurt, our faces were frozen, and even Aretha and Yo Yo Ma weren’t going to help. There was only one thing we had come to see.

I thought I would cry when Obama was sworn in, like I did the night they called the election. But my reaction—and the reaction of the crowd—was much more subtle than that. I had thought we were coming out to the Mall to celebrate, to welcome Obama, to revel in our jubilation. And yes, that was a part of it. But when the ceremony started I realized that our real purpose was deeper, more profound: we were there to stand as witnesses to the moment.

The crowd cheered like crazy when Obama became President (though some would argue that technically occurred while Yo Yo Ma was playing). And then they fell silent again. Two million people stood still and sober while Obama addressed the world. It wasn’t a rally speech with soaring rhetoric, but a serious message about what we are facing and what we must do to survive. I think much of the crowd would have liked to cheer at some points in the speech, and there were some sporadic moments like that, but there seemed to be a silent agreement among the crowd that it was more important to hear the speech than to make our own noise.

And then the speech was over, and I turned with the crowd to start the long trek home. But before I had gone two feet J spun me around and kissed me, hard. We kissed for a long time, and that’s when I cried, just a little. Surrounded by thousands of strangers, and sitting in the lap of history itself, there was a moment where it was just the two of us. Live hasn’t given us everything we’ve wanted, and god knows we’ve had it hard the last few years. But we are a unit, a team. And like everything important in life, this was something we witnessed together. As I told him in a very cheesy e-mail the next day (he had to drive back to Philly Tuesday night), I’ll remember that kiss till the day I die.

Getting Home

Getting out of the Mall was a nightmare. Those Jersey barriers (and the fence lining them on the inside) were blocking everyone’s way out. By the time we got to the fences there had to be a hundred thousand people pushing from behind. All along the wall stronger guys were hauling kids and older people over.

We headed for L’Enfant Plaza, the only Metro station on that side of the Mall. And that’s where things got hairy. We got caught up in the worst human gridlock I have ever seen. At one point as we were squeezing our way past an FBI agent, I heard him say that L’Enfant was closed down entirely, due to the crowd. Which doesn’t make much sense to me.

So we decided to head back to the 3rd Street tunnel, the way we came in. But we couldn’t get out of the crowd, no matter which way we tried to go. We just couldn’t move. It took us a half hour to cross a street—that’s how bad it was. At one point the entire crowd just stopped moving, stopped pushing, stopped talking. We just stood there, for at least a minute, doing nothing. No one knew what to do. And there wasn’t a cop in sight. All we needed was someone with authority to stand on a car with a bullhorn and tell us what to do. I knew objectively that it was scary while it was happening, but it wasn’t until later that I acknowledged to myself how dangerous it really was.

Eventually we got free of the crowd and hiked back to my office building, where the security guard (forever an angel in my mind) let us come in and pee. Then we headed back out to fight our way onto a train.

But there was no fighting, no crowd on the Red Line. It wasn’t even as busy as rush hour. Basically, the entire crowd got stuck on the other side of the Mall, and we got off easy.

It’s a terrible way to end the story, isn’t it? It’s like the story just drops off a cliff; it’s a total let-down. Oddly, that’s how it felt at the time, too. We were all geared up for battle. Bladders freshly emptied, we were prepared to act like the city-dwellers and experienced Metro-riders we are, fighting and clawing our way onto a train after hours of effort, victorious in our arrival home after a long struggle. Instead, we walked out of my building, hopped on a train, and were at the McDonalds drive-through near our house less than 20 minutes later. It was like the ending of No Country for Old Men, where you find yourself sitting in a half-lit theatre with the credits rolling saying “What? It’s over? That’s it?”

Teaser

2009-01-21T18:53:00.001-08:00

I started writing a post about I-day, but the post has gotten really long and I'm not going to finish it tonight. So here's a teaser.

Searching for a Metaphor

2009-01-18T19:50:00.000-08:00

I’m sitting here, searching for a metaphor to describe my ongoing effort to chase down a child. Do I go with a sports metaphor, like how the goalposts keep moving? Do I try to liken it to catching an accelerating car (maybe, if I want to be whimsical, an ice cream truck), where the faster I run the further it gets away? Or maybe I call up Forrest Gump, and say it’s like catching a feather swept away by the wind.

Don’t worry, I’m not going to bury the lead, and I’m firmly anti-tortured-metaphor. So here’s the skinny: J and I are now extending our “break” until April (making it the longest break we’ve been on since we started TTC three and a half years ago, and that’s including the break for my surgery).

He’s had some indicators that his hormone therapy will improve his sperm count, but it still needs a lot of time. I suppose this is good news, but we still don’t know much.

And I’m not ready either. I’ve been in intensive chiropractic treatment (three times a week) for three months now, and it looks like it’s going to be a few more months before I get better. Apparently, I’m one of those super-rare people who respond to treatment by getting incredibly sore (described by my doc as a nerve “flare-up”). Just like I was one of those super-rare people who don’t get “cured” by acutane (the acne came back after 6 months). And one of those super-rare people who aren’t eventually cured by allergy shots after 7 years (I’ve been on them 15 years and counting). And one of those super-rare people that, despite being able to conceive a baby once on her own (with help of man, of course), can’t seem to make it happen via IVF. You’d think I’d stop being surprised when my body disappoints me. Actually, I wasn’t surprised. I was just mad.

You know what? I don’t even want to write about my back—it’s just too upsetting. And I do think it’s going to get better. I even think I might come out of this a lot healthier. Maybe. But it’s taking a lot of patience and faith. And it might not work. And it’s not covered by insurance. Sound familiar?

I started blogging to find other women out there like me. I didn’t start blogging during my IUI, because I was sure it would work. And I didn’t start blogging during my first two IVF cycles, because I was sure my sadness was just a temporary thing, soon to be cured by a nice, fat, uncomfortable pregnancy. I started blogging when it seemed I might really end up without a baby. I started blogging because I wanted an online support group.

What I didn’t count on was feeling like, even among my support group, I’m getting left in the dusk. Is that a horrible thing to say? I’m feeling really bitter right now. But I just realized that I’m going to have to re-organize my blogroll into segments, because half of the people on there now have babies (or are very close to it). And I’m going to have to make some new blog friends because almost everyone out there that I’ve gotten close to is already pregnant or matched or parenting even now. And they’re all so happy. I feel like a real shit for being upset about that. It’s not that I begrudge anyone their joy. I just feel so left out. Like I’m the only one left who just can’t seem to get this thing figured out.

Wow. I had no idea I was going to get so upset tonight. Sometimes I just sit down and write and see what comes out, and I guess what’re coming out are hot, angry tears.

So let me back off from my self-pity and tell you about my amazing weekend, and my amazing mood. DC is going Obama-mad right now; it’s so exciting to be here and be a part of it. I’ve spent the bulk of the weekend getting ready for our wild adventure downtown on Tuesday, a journey which we’re determined to make in spite of everyone saying we shouldn’t. So I’ve been out buying wool socks and hand warmers and warm gloves and stuff like that. (It doesn’t really get that cold that long here, so we tend not to have as many warm clothes around as we did when we lived in Boston.) I wanted to buy J some long underwear (I already have some), but apparently the entire state has sold out of long underwear, at least in the cheaper stores. (I’m not making this up. Today I checked Target, Marshall’s, and Ross, and all I found were empty racks marked “long underwear.”) And everywhere I shop, everyone’s talking about the concert today, and the inauguration, and the parade, and the balls. And every five minutes or so I’ll see something (such as the concert today) that will make me well up with tears. I’m such a sap.

This town has been drowning in Obama-swag-crap for a month, and the crap-pile is just getting deeper. And I have been very good about not buying any of it. It’s not a collector’s item, I tell myself as I walk by the tables and racks and carts, it’s a cheap piece of crap.

So with two days to go and my no-Obama-crap streak running strong, I stop off at the grocery store to get supplies for the upcoming trek downtown. And what do I see? A rack of t-shirts, with “Obama 44” on them, the word and number laid out like a basketball jersey or something. Just too damn adorable. I’m a total sucker, so I grab a shirt. (And then, of course, I buy us some little American flags to take down to the mall with us. And then I buy J some Obama socks, because I can’t leave him out, can I?)

The kid at the cash register rings me up, and I’m all chatty, talking about the end of my swag-less streak. I couldn’t understand a lot of what he was saying (heavy accent), but I did get that this was the first time he had voted.

“That’s awesome,” I said, adding, “the first president I voted for was Bill Clinton.”

He paused and stared at me. Then stared deeper, seemingly perplexed. Finally, he said, “But, but that was, like, in the 90’s, right?”

Did I mention I just got my hair cut and colored yesterday? Oh yeah, that cut-and-color just paid for itself.

For those of you who stuck around to the very end, congratulations on witnessing yet another Babychaser mood swing. Unfortunately, I’m not cycling or pregnant, so there’s not much I can blame it on. This is just me.

You Can't Be Too Careful

2009-01-17T07:27:00.001-08:00

While I was bending over the sink this morning to wash my face, I saw this warning on the back of my PRENATAL VITAMINS:

WARNING: IF YOU ARE PREGNANT OR LACTATING, CONSULT YOUR HEALTH CARE PRACTITIONER BEFORE USING THIS PRODUCT.

Scare Tactics

2009-01-14T17:39:00.000-08:00

I just heard a media announcement that had me laughing my ass off. (And since my IVF break is now extended until April—obviously a topic for another post—I have nothing IFey to write about.)

The media, the Federal government, and the District of Columbia are all involved in a calculated effort to convince everyone that, if they even think about attending the inauguration, they will die.* Not that they’ve been so obvious about it (yet), but every day the Washington Post has a new article about why no one in the DC area should even set foot outside the house on I-Day, let alone try to come downtown.

So today, I was not surprised to hear the most recent public service announcement (on both NPR and music radio). This one warned that people should seriously think about whether they are healthy enough to handle the physical rigors of attending inauguration. It said that “those who attend should be prepared to walk as much as two miles and below-zero temperatures.”

Below zero temperatures? Really? I’m not saying DC has never seen below-zero temperatures in the middle of the day, but it would be serious news around here. And, you know, they do have this amazing ability to predict the weather nowadays––at least with some accuracy––even more than a week in advance. (It’s going to be in the mid-30s and partly sunny, BTW.)

I loved the transparency of this. I don't know why, but it tickles me. I like the idea of some advance team sitting in a conference room trying to figure out what to put in the next press release. What would be the most believable, but still effectively subdue those DC natives and pushy MD and VA types from coming? Terrorist attack? Sorry, that tune's been played. Epidemic? Mmm, it might cause a wave of hypochondria in the emergency rooms. Snowstorm? Definitely not--local networks start freaking out if there's even a hint of snow. No one would ever believe it.

But the threat of sub-zero temperatures? It's brilliant. So simple. So pure. And it has been really cold the last couple of days.

And yeah, it will scare the locals.

(By the way, while I was writing this, Fox came on with its nightly news teaser. Guess what? No one will be able to get into the District on the Metro on Inauguration Day! Not a single person! Shocking.)

* Honestly, I think these scare tactics are probably a good idea.

Optimism, or Just a Really Big Cup of Coffee?

2009-01-08T06:44:00.000-08:00

I thought I’d grab a moment (when I really should be prepping for oral argument) to write a quick post, because I’m feeling good this morning. Don't panic. There is nothing wrong with your computer and you have not been re-routed to a different “Babychaser” blog. It's really me. God only knows how long it will last, but the Babychaser you know and (hopefully) adore beyond reason actually is feeling okay about herself, okay about her age, and okay about life.

Maybe it’s because my back isn’t hurting as bad today, and I finally think I’m on the right track with a chiropractor and PT for an actual, honest-to-god cure that will allow me to once again be the agile, active, strong person I thought I was supposed to be.

Maybe it’s because the holidays are over and I’m back at my job and at least my job is one place where I’m really talented and can feel good about myself.

Maybe it’s because the sun is finally shining again on DC, after days of dreary cold rain.

Maybe it’s because I took a percocet and a xanax last night for a massive period-induced headache.

Or maybe it’s just because I had a huge cup of coffee this morning.

Whatever. Who cares? It just feels good to feel okay, even if for a brief moment.

Scared to Death of 2009

2008-12-29T15:20:00.000-08:00

I just finished reading my first real blog entry, posted almost a year ago, on January 2, 2008. It made me cry. The theme of the post was how my life was on hold, how sickened I was by the sameness of everything.

I wrote that post in a desperate attempt to reach out into the blogosphere, to find some solace and comfort among others. But in my heart I knew it was just a temporary fix, something to see me through until my luck finally changed. I almost didn’t start blogging at all; despite years of disappointment, I still believed that my childlessness was just a fleeting, transient condition. Why bother seeking out an online community when I could be pregnant (ergo, happy) in a matter of months? Why go to all the trouble of joining a support group when I’d just have to drop out?

At the end of 2006 I celebrated like mad. What a shithole of a year! In 2006, I had suffered my first miscarriage and learned that we were infertile. In 2006 I was stripped of my precious naivete.

I welcomed 2007 wholeheartedly, for 2007 was going to bring us IVF and—with our “excellent” chances of it working—salvation.

At the end of 2007 I celebrated my guts out. What a rat-bastard asshole of a year that was! Two more miscarriages and lessons best not learned, like that your beta can double while you’re having a full-on period, like that an IVF cycle—which totally skips the fallopian tubes—can still result in an ectopic pregnancy. In 2007 I learned I had pregnancy-threatening fibroids. In 2007, I tried to turn to adoption. In 2007, I turned away from adoption and instead opted for major surgery. Oh, and in 2007 my amazing, kick-ass, 12-year-old kitty (my first pet) died.

So I welcomed 2008 with open arms. I just knew that in 2008 my life would change. Maybe IVF wasn’t going to work, but surely by the end of 2008 we would either be pregnant or actively working on adoption. No doubt about it 2008 would bring an end to the endless sameness, the dullness that marked my life, my marriage, my family.

It’s the end of 2008, and I’m not so sure I can celebrate. No doubt about it, I am eager to see the last of this scum-sucking, douchebag, ho-bitch of a year. But can I really welcome 2009 with such blind devotion? For more than four months I’ve been looking forward to this new year. Because with 2009 comes the end of my forced break. 2009 brings us a new IVF cycle with what we hope to be J’s new-and-improved sperm. Or maybe it will bring IVF with donor sperm, a whole new kind of opportunity. And I’ve been swearing to myself, and anyone else who will listen, that by the end of 2009, god-fucking-damnit, I will know where my baby’s coming from. By the end of 2009, my life will finally change.

But now that the new year is upon us, I’m finding myself unwilling to embrace the hope it might bring. I am weary and depressed. I’m tired of welcoming the new year, each with its sexy, slick persona and delicious promises. I’m sick of getting burned.

Last week, when we were taking our mini-break in Virginia, I told J that I can’t even imagine us with a child anymore. I still know that it is what we want, and it is still the direction we’re heading toward. In my brain I still believe that we will end up parents someday. But I’m no longer sure I believe it in my heart. The possibility of actually having a child in our lives just seems so foreign to me. I’ve become alienated from the fruits of my labor (thank you, liberal arts education!). J just nodded. He didn’t even have to say anything; he’s right there with me.

I’m scared to death of 2009. I’m not feeling strong or determined, and I can no longer see the finish line. 2008 sucked, but at least I knew where I stood.

* * * * * * * *

Of course I can’t leave it at that, because at the same time as 2008 has proven to be the darkest year of my life, and in many ways the darkest year for our country, it also has brought me one of the most amazing nights of my life, and with it one of the proudest moments of our nation’s history.

In 2009, we, the United States of Generally-Loud-Obnoxious-Asshole-Ignorant Americans, will swear in the first black president in our country’s history. And I’m gonna be there (on the mall, at least). Me and about 3 million other freezing, cheering, weeping Americans. And how ironic is it that, at a time when I am myself bereft of hope, I will stand with a crowd gathered to honor the man that most embodies that word?

Fuck Santa, Fuck Rudolph, and Fuck the Fucking Christmas Tree

2008-12-11T09:32:00.000-08:00

This year I’m telling the holidays to fuck off. Usually I just think such blasphemous thoughts, makes some wry comments about how I hate the holidays, and then do all the present-buying and cooking and planning and fake-merriment and shit like that.

Let me preface this post with some background: I have always had problems with the holidays. Christmas is supposed to be about family, and my family (at least on my side) is royally fucked up. Christmas tends to be when my narcissistic bi-polar mother gets depressed and paranoid. Sometimes there is hate mail. Merry fucking Christmas. Oh, and did I mention my birthday is the day after Christmas? Crappy birthday, made even crappier by constant reminder of ticking clock.

As the years leak by without any luck on bringing a baby home, Christmas is progressively sadder. I’d love to be all melodramatic and say that this is because my first baby was due Christmas-week two years ago, but the truth is it isn’t really about that. (Oh wait, writing that just made me get misty, so maybe it’s sort of about that.) But it’s much more than a miscarriage. I don’t want to suggest that everyone else should feel the way I do, but I really think that if I’d had a child anytime in the last three years I wouldn’t really mourn my lost pregnancies. None of them seem like real babies to me, any more than my embryos seem like babies. I never heard a heartbeat, never saw them in a sono, never even got morning sickness. The most pregnant I ever felt was when I was losing it. To me, my miscarriages (4 in total, if you count chemical pregnancies––I do––2 if you don’t) aren’t so much lost children but lost chances. I feel sad for them the way I feel sad for my embryos that don’t survive (okay, a lot sadder, because they were farther along, but the same idea). But what I really feel is sad for me, sad that my first miscarriage was more than two years ago and I still don’t have a toddler, sad that my most promising pregnancy (ended in ectopic) was well over a year ago and I still don’t have an infant, sad that after three and a half years of struggling, Jason and I still don’t have a child to love, to nurture, to grow. Sad that my fantasy of having two kids is virtually gone, and that my fantasy of having a 100% biological kid is hanging by a thread, that my fantasy of having even a 50% biological infant is fading.

So I don’t think Christmas would be any better even if it wasn’t a miscarriage milestone. What matter is that the holidays are all about family, and I can’t get mine off the ground.

Last year it all became Too Much. Probably because in addition to the other crap, J and I had to give up drinking (him out of necessity, me out of solidarity). So now we can’t even muster merriment from a bottle. And we’ve been having the same Christmas, with the same four grownups (J, me, his mom, his aunt) for the last 10 years. The tradition was nice for awhile, but the sameness of it all is killing us. The same foods (J’s mom and his aunt have certain favorite dishes and won’t let me cook anything else); the same conversations—verbatim; the same stupid pretend jokes about who’s got the biggest stocking and who’s trying to steal whose presents.

And don’t even get me started on the presents. For some reason, Christmas at J’s house requires so many presents that we literally, literally spend all day opening them. All Fucking Day. It’s unbearable. All that money spent on all that crap, which isn’t even crap that we want (or, in the case of gifts to them, crap that they want). And all I can think is what I really want no one can give me. Every year, as everyone whines about how we’re never going to get through all of the presents, I loudly suggest that we should buy less next year, that perhaps we could focus on one really great present for each person, something like that. And each year I am told that I don’t really mean it, and that if we cut down on presents I would be the first one to complain, and then it’s the same old jokes about who’s stocking is bigger and who’s getting the most presents, and who is trying to filch things from whose pile of loot. And remember, last year all this was with no booze (at least for me and J—his mom and aunt were as lit as the Christmas tree).

This rant (an oft-repeated rant, I’m ashamed to say) came bursting out of me on New Years Eve last year, and I made a solemn promise to myself: I swore that this year, if I wasn’t safely pregnant or on an adoption list, we weren’t going back to J’s mom’s for Christmas. Now to many of you, this might seem like no biggie, but my MIL spends her entire year thinking about, planning for, and bitching about Christmas. But considering the fact that Christmas was less than a week over and I already was having a panic attack about the next one, I put my foot down.

I got my most recent BFN in August, my last chance at being pregnant before Christmas. That same day I started making plans. I booked a cabin in the mountains of VA for four nights, and a couple of weeks later J and I had The Talk with his mom, where we broke it to her that, for the first time in her life, she was going to have Christmas without anyone but her sister.

The funny thing is that she took it really well. Like a grown-up. I tend to forget (in light of the aforementioned batshit-crazy mother) that parents can actually act like adults. She’s disappointed, of course, but she was also really cool. We told her it was just too sad, and that we didn’t want to pretend to be happy, and that it would just be for this one year. I thought it was odd that she needed us to tell her why it was so sad, but once we explained it she didn’t argue with us.

So here’s the plan: 4 days in a cabin in the mountains: hot tub on the deck overlooking the valley (J will probably not be allowed in, given sperm count issues, but I’m the one that lives for the hot tub, so it’s not that big of a deal); wood-burning fireplace (J and I are both certifiable firebugs); DVD’s and good music; great cooking (and I can try out NEW recipes); a visit to Luray Caverns; and maybe an afternoon massage.

Then, the week after Christmas, J’s mom and aunt come down for dinner and present-exchange. And here’s the beauty of this: I have to work the next day, so we can’t do a late-night thing. This leaves one hour, maybe two, for opening presents. If they decide to go present-crazy, so be it. After 10:00 I’m kicking them out and whatever isn’t opened doesn’t get opened while they are there.

And due to this, I am totally blowing off the rest of the holiday obligations: super easy (if not original) presents for extended family, very few (and very nice) presents for J’s mom and aunt, and nothing else. I’m not cooking for any parties, I’m not getting a tree (though we did do outdoor lights at J’s request, which make me happy), I’m not going to any dress-up events.

I wish we were in the type of family where we could completely boycott Christmas. But we’re not, and it would cause more trouble that it would be worth. That being said, I think I’ve come as close as I can to a true fuck-off to the holiday.

Anyone else telling Santa to fuck off this year? We got enough troubles, fat man, without you adding to them.

Back in the Closet with Facebook

2008-11-30T14:49:00.001-08:00

So I just joined Facebook, along with what appears like a tidal wave of people my age. It’s been fun—touching base with people I haven’t talked to in years, checking out their photos and friends.

And of course, checking out their kids. Because pretty much every one of the people I knew in high school and college now has kids.

I could be all mopey and say that it’s really hurting me, but right now it isn’t. I guess I’m past the point where I surprised to be the last one of my peers to have children. And I really have come closer to the “acceptance” point with regard to my infertility. So seeing pictures of people I used to know playing in the snow with their adorable pink-cheeked toddlers doesn’t hurt all that much.

But it is awkward. Because while I’m pretty much out of the infertility closet with my close friends, it isn’t really something you chat about in an open forum with used-to-be-friends. My infertility is a big part about why I haven’t reached out to old friends in the past few years. I mean, what is there to say? They tell me about their kids, their new career path, etc., and then they ask, “so what’s going on with you?” And the truth is, the only thing that is going on with me is my fertility treatment. It is in my mind all the time, it’s what drives me, it’s this huge part of who I am. But it’s a conversation killer, a true dud. Nothing stops a conversation like: “What’s up with me? Oh, nothing really. Spent the last three and a half years trying to get knocked up. Had a few miscarriages, major surgery, and took out a second mortgage. We’re considering using someone else’s sperm. So what kind of investment banking did you say you were getting into?”

I actually tested this theory with my oldest friend, my BFF from high school. She found me via e-mail a few months ago. After a few nice e-mails, I came right out and told her about what we’d been through. I didn’t lay it on too thick or anything, and I prefaced it with an explanation that, based on our long history, it felt weird not to tell her. I didn’t hear anything for a few days. Then I got an e-mail saying she hadn’t forgotten me, but didn’t have time to write a meaningful response. Then nothing. I’m sure she feels awkward now that it’s been so long. (And I really do need to write to her again and let her off the hook, tell her that no one ever knows what to say about this shit.) But this certainly told me that what I suspected all along is true: infertility is a crap topic of conversation.

So while I’m enjoying Facebook, I’m back in the closet. And it sucks. I want to be who I am, and I feel kind of pathetic. I mean, if I’m still childless after 12 years of marriage, I should at least live some kind of awesome, jet-setter lifestyle, right? Or be some big hot-shot in my career? Instead I just feel lame.

And I’m developing an annoying habit of self-narrating my life in my head. “[Babychaser] is drinking her coffee while she checks her blog.” “[Babychaser] is putting up Christmas lights.” “[Babychaser] is doing her laundry.” “[Babychaser] is driving herself nuts thinking of herself in the third person.”

But what I want to write is “[Babychaser] is still infertile.” “[Babychaser] is wondering if she’ll ever have a pink-cheeked toddler to romp in the snow with.” “[Babychaser] is taking a nap, because she doesn’t have anything more urgent to do on a Sunday afternoon, because unlike you fertile assholes, she has no children.”

And I’m already fantasizing, rolling the words over and over again in my head like a mantra, what I really want to write: “[Babychaser] is pregnant.”

Freaking Out: Will the Economy and the World Leave Me Childless?

2008-11-19T07:20:00.000-08:00

A few days ago, after yet another economist went on TV holding the proverbial The-End-Is-Near sign, I confessed to J (and to myself) that the state of the economy is really starting to freak me out. (I actually heard an economist on NPR talking about the problems the

would face even “if” we came through this crisis. “If!?,” I hollered at my radio, “did you just say ‘if’?!?”)

J and I are in such a tenuous position right now. We had to take out a second mortgage to pay for our shared-risk IVF plan, and we still have to come up with about $5,000 a cycle in incidentals (more, obviously, if we switch to donor sperm).

Even scarier, what if IVF doesn’t work? Our next step is to adopt, and I was counting on our ability to borrow more (and not go bankrupt) if needed. If only I safely had a child in my home, I could live with having to do some penny-pinching, belt-tightening, etc; you pick the metaphor, I can handle it. But for the economy to crash while I’m in the most expensive phase of my life, trying desperately to just get my hands on a baby, any baby—it’s terrifying.

J did nothing to assuage my fears, instead reminding me that he has virtually no work lined up for the next year. Mid-sized theatres are closing their doors all over the country, and those that are staying open are likely to pay even less for their designers. My job, as a government defense attorney, is about as secure as a job can be, but J’s job––risky in the best of times––rises and falls with the goodwill of theatre sponsors.

Sometimes I feel like the world is plotting against me. Why now? Why couldn’t the economy fail a year or two from now, when we’re more settled? Or years ago, when we had nothing to lose? What if, at the end of years and years of searching and trying for a child, I discover the world’s final answer is “no”?

To make matters worse, J e-mailed me an article yesterday that had us both freaked out. For the last two years, we have soothed our souls with the knowledge that, if all else fails, we will adopt a baby from Ethiopia. Ethiopia is (relatively) fast, (relatively) affordable, and you can get a (relatively) young child. No other countries work for us. (For those of you who’ve researched international adoption, you know what I’m talking about. Out of hundreds of countries in the world, adoption is available in maybe 8 of them.) We don’t want to adopt a toddler (goodbye Russia, Ukraine, and half of Latin America); we can’t afford to go live in the country for three months (goodbye Columbia); we don’t qualify for the Asian countries due to various limitations on mental health (goodbye China) and weight (goodbye Korea); and we don’t want to wait 4+ years after we are on the list (goodbye anyone else, not that anyone else was left at that point). And domestic adoption is out of the question for us. We can’t take the idea of competing with others for a baby, especially given that most birth mothers probably would reject us due to our atheism. And J, open minded about most things, can’t cope with open adoption or the risks associated with having a birth parent try to reclaim the child.

So Ethiopia it is. At first, we were freaked out about the hostility we might encounter adopting a black baby (there is a fading-but-not-gone notion in the black community, at least around DC, that it’s wrong for whites to adopt blacks), but we’ve come to terms with that, even gotten excited about such a future.

Then J e-mails me this, an article describing the state of international adoption right now, as compared to just a year ago. International adoption is WAAAY down, and not due to a lack of people wanting to adopt. The top three countries are all shutting down: China and Korea are now taking 4-5 years to process, and Guatemala is virtually closed. As a result, Ethiopia has become the new hot spot to go for a baby. A year ago, I felt like Ethiopia was our own best-kept secret, our safe haven in the storm whirling around us. Now I’m completely freaked out. If the trends from other countries are repeated, by the time we get to Ethiopia (and we’re at least 8 months from starting the adoption process) it will be much harder to adopt from there. It probably will be even more expensive, almost certainly will take longer, and almost certainly will mean adopting an older baby.

None of this is surprising to me. When the US finally passed its Hague Convention protocols last year, I knew Guatemala was going to close. That alone was likely to send desperate couples running to Ethiopia.

It was a year ago, almost exactly, that we went to our first meeting on international adoption, and it was a year ago that we decided that, despite the risk that Ethiopia might become more popular, we weren’t ready to give up trying for a bio-kid. So I had the surgery, and we pressed on. But now I wonder if we made the right choice. Had we jumped into adoption a year ago, we might be making travel plans right now—our baby would already have been born, just be waiting for us to bring him/her home. Yet here we are, waiting and hoping, while Ethiopia becomes more and more popular, and likely less and less appealing as a result.

Can a country run out of babies? Because that’s what I feel is going to happen. Is it possible that I could end up childless, after all my promises to myself that I would never let that happen?

What happens now?

No Escape from Childlessness

2008-11-13T13:32:00.000-08:00

Last night I had a dream. Of course, any story that starts like that is bound to be disturbing or lame or both. And I’m particularly bad about talking about my dreams because I can never remember how they start. Talking about my dream is like watching an old Dali movie, where the picture just fades into an eerie tableau that makes no sense. So that’s where I’ll begin:

I’m sitting on one of several hard plastic chairs lined up along the wall of large grey room, about the size of a small gymnasium. Other people are with me, waiting for their turn to try out the new “flying” equipment––a series of cables strung from the wall and ceiling. (Is it exercise equipment, performance art, some sort of therapy? Who can say?) The person hooked into the equipment right now is doing some pretty cool stuff; as the instructor urges him on, he is letting go of his fears, flipping around and over and zipping about.

Then it’s my turn, and I’m both nervous and excited. I think back fondly of when I was younger––I was stronger then and a bit of a daredevil. But after a couple of minutes I’m loosening up and making some pretty awesome moves of my own. While not like the “flying” I’ve experienced in other dreams, where I’m truly free, it’s really fun and I feel healthy and giddy and full of joy.

I finally lower myself to the floor, laughing and exhausted, and the instructor comes up to me and says in amazement, kind of sympathetically:

“Wow. You still think you’re going to have a baby girl someday.”

I woke up a moment later, but not before the dream-me sank down into a chair––stunned that the flying device had somehow let this nice man peer into my soul––and started to sob. Even after I pulled myself awake, my chest continued to ache.

Seriously, what the fuck? I can’t even have a simple, stupid, fun little dream without being smacked down by reality? It isn’t hard enough to be hurting when I’m awake, now I have to hurt while I’m asleep?

Truthfully, I wasn’t that surprised. If there is anything I’ve learned in the last few months it is that there is no escape from the pain of childlessness. I had hoped that my forced vacation from cycling, while frustrating, would be a bit of a relief. But in some ways it’s much, much worse. I am consumed by jealousy, not so much of people with little babies, but of people with actual honest-to-god kids, people with families. I babysat my 6-year-old nephew last weekend, and it was lovely, but after I had put him to bed I just wanted to scream and yell it isn’t fair! He was 2 ½ years old when I started TTC. I had thought he would play with my kids (note the bitterly ironic use of the plural), not babysit them!

(By the way, he informed me that he would “think about” liking my child, but only after it was four years old. I love that kid.)

I think that being “on a break” is making cycling seem so distant and foreign that I can’t believe I’m going to be back in it next year. I told someone recently about how long I’ve been trying, and about what I’ve done so far, and it sounded seriously deranged. This was what I saw in my dream—a stranger’s pity at my continued belief that I might actually have a baby someday. Am I crazy to think this still might happen?

When I woke up from that dream, I realized that the thing that had bothered me the most was the invasion of my privacy. It wasn’t that this guy saw my desire to have a child, it was his knowing that I always pictured myself having a girl. Of course, now that I’m awake it seems odd to be mad at my subconscious for knowing what I think about. It’s hard to be mad at yourself for violating your own privacy. But none of this makes sense, anyway.

Love,

Your Bad Bloggy Friend, the Babychaser

Beautiful World, Beautiful Day

2008-11-05T09:00:00.001-08:00

I have a deadline looming right now, so I don’t have time to say all the things I want to say. Which is probably a good thing, as I am struggling to find the words that capture the mix of thoughts and emotions swirling around.

So I’ll leave it at this: Last night was a beautiful moment in history, and the sun came up this morning on a shiny new America. It’s a beautiful day, and I feel lucky and excited, and a little awed, to be a part of it.

Love you all,

Babychaser

"Vote"

2008-11-02T06:38:00.001-08:00

You know how the campy opening credits for the Colbert Report include a string of words––adjectives, I guess––running down the side of the screen while the camera swoops around Colbert’s condescending pose? The words run by fast, and you can’t usually make them all out, but the last one stays on for a good second or two. This last word has changed over the years; some of my favorites have been “Truthiness” and “Lincolnish” and “Gutly”. This last week, though, the final word has been “Vote.” And maybe it’s the big, sappy, idealistic dork in me, but the first time I saw it I got goosebumps.

“Vote.” Such a simple little word. But every four years it takes on a whole new meaning (every two years if you’re politics junkies like me and J). The word represents a civic right, it truly is “power to the people.” And in the context used by Colbert (this election) and Eminem (in his “Mosh” video last election) and countless others, it’s a noun and a verb and a sentence all in its own. “Vote.” The word is more than an idea––it’s a directive, a mandate.

I love voting. I love going to the little church in my neighborhood and standing in line with people I don’t know and seeing the pollworker check my name off a list. I love standing at the machine (though not nearly as much as I loved the honest-to-god booths we used to have in Massachusetts, with the old-fashioned voting machines where you pushed down the levers and pulled the bar across the bottom to finish your vote) and knowing that I am a tiny little piece of history, that I am playing my part in a process created by men (no women, unfortunately) who probably had never imagined an automobile, let alone a i-phone. What can I say? I’m a dreamer, and voting never fails to make me happy.

So it was with mixed feelings this year when I decided to let go of my sweet little fantasy of going to the polls first thing in the morning with J (our little tradition), waiting in a long line with other excited Obama supporters (I live in a blue blue blue state) and making my (sadly, electronic) mark for the first black man to make a bona fide run for the oval office. Instead, last week I took a deep breath and voted absentee, so that I could spend E-day in Virginia as a vote protector. (My consolation: even thought I don’t get to actually go to my polls, at least I got to cast a paper ballot! Have I mentioned how much I hate electronic voting machines?)

You know those news stories about the “army” of lawyers going to battleground states to defend voting rights? I’m one of them. (Note: as far as I can tell from my training last week, this army of “lawyers” is about 80% law students. Not that it makes a difference for what we’re doing––which definitely isn’t practicing law––but let’s be fair about the facts.)

I’m a little freaked out about this, because I have no idea what to expect. When I signed up I had some romanticized view about sitting alongside poll workers in the polling place, going toe-to-toe with election officials, fighting for the disenfranchised. The reality is that, because I’m not a VA voter, I’m going to be stuck outside, 40 feet from the entrance to the polls, trying my best to spot problems before they happen or get people to try again if they’ve been turned away. If my poll workers are strict about the rules, I won’t even get near them to talk to them if there are problems. I’ve been assigned to a precinct in a heavily Republican district outside of Richmond. I’ve been told that the poll workers could be pretty hostile, and we might have trouble making any kind of an impact. Thirteen hours outside (god, I hope it’s not raining!), presumably trying to get people to stay in line and not give up. And I guess it’s also important to be there so we can call in to the “boiler room” if there are serious problems. Not glamorous, and maybe seriously boring, but at least I’ll know I tried. And I don’t mean to sound self-righteous by telling you all about this, but this is where my heart is right now, and part of the reason I’ve been so absent from blog-world.

It’s two days to E-day. The stakes couldn’t be higher. So, at the risk of being preachy and heavy-handed, I have one word for you, for your friends, for everyone you see on the streets. It’s a noun; it’s a verb. It’s a right, and it’s a mandate. And as we learned in grade school, it’s your civic duty: VOTE.

Day to Day

2008-10-07T14:11:00.000-07:00

This is one of the longest breaks I’ve ever taken from blogging, but it’s not for lack of things to say. But by the time I figure out how I am doing my mood has shifted. I’ve moved on, and my earlier thoughts seem irrelevant and out-of-touch, or worse, forced and ringing false. I’ve started two other posts, only to abandon them the next day. It’s not that I’m on the DL or out for the season. It’s more that I’m day-to-day, with no idea what tomorrow will bring.

What’s more surreal than spending two years in fertility treatment? Stopping. You would think that the daily hormone changes of an IVF cycle or the thrice-weekly, ass-crack-of-dawn visits to the RE would make life seem other-worldly, and they certainly do. But it’s even stranger––once you get used to having such a single-minded focus in life––to go back to “normal.”

Part of what makes this normalcy seem so odd is that I never expected it. Even though I think of IF as a temporary phase in my life, it is supposed to “end” with the biggest disruption of all: the introduction of a child into our home. (Sort of like when I got bogged down in law school and all I was thinking about with desperation was finally graduating, then realizing that oh shit, oh shit oh shit, then I’ll have to actually be a lawyer! Out of the frying pan, or so the saying goes.) When I started TTC, I figured that life as I knew it was over. Even more so when I started treatment. My life plan was clear: for an undefined period of time I would be in treatment, then I would either be pregnant or in the adoption process, both of which also involve major life changes. Then, of course, I would have a child, the most insane life change of all. It’s just so strange to get all geared up for big changes in your life and then not end with any change at all.

I remember when I was in my early 20s and used to run for exercise (a short-lived period in my life), that I once was running on a trail, and going pretty fast, when I tripped over a tree root and fell. I was a little scraped up and not badly hurt, but I remember the moment with startling clarity. It wasn’t the fall that stunned me, but the abrupt stillness in the instant afterward. In the 20 minutes or so I had been running I had gotten hypnotized by the forward motion––the ground moving under my feet and the scenery rushing by and the vibration rocking through my body with every footfall. But in an instant I was lying on the ground, listening to my heart pound in my ears, while the world stood perfectly still. It wasn’t upsetting. Just disorienting.

So I guess that’s how I feel right now. For 3 ½ years I’ve been pounding my way toward an ever-moving target (I am not a light runner) with what can only be described as grim determination. Even when I haven’t been in a cycle (and I do almost always take a cycle off between treatment cycles), I’ve been planning out the next one, making arrangements for drug deliveries, working out insurance or, later (when the insurance ran out), rewriting contracts with the doctors, or having surgery and focusing on healing so we can go forward, press forward, move, move, move toward that ultimate goal. Then someone ripped the ground out from under me. The world is standing still, and I don’t really know what to make of it anymore, or where I fit in.

The weirdest thing is that this analogy makes no sense. I haven’t even been on that long of a break. I am exactly one and a half cycles out of my last IVF cycle. And our forward movement is far from stalled; we’re taking a break so that J can take hormone shots (which he’s already started) to see if we can jump-start our sperm production. But, if history is any lesson, my feelings often have little to do with the reality of the situation.

I’ve been rocketing between what looks and feels like clinical depression and a fairly upbeat outlook on life. Mix into that desperate escapism into any TV show, movie, or book that has sex or romance, anything that will give me that burning-in-the-gut sensation that makes me feel like I’m actually still alive. Add in the anxiety and obsession with the upcoming election. Oh, and don’t forget that at the same time I’m finally standing still the entire planet seems to be spinning out of control. It’s all just so fucking surreal. Sometimes I feel like I’m hanging on by a thread. And I want to blog—I don’t want to lose touch with the people in cyberspace. But I don’t know who I am or what’s going on in my life or what to say about this crazy world we seem to be living in.

So I’m just going day to day.

My Sad Sad Day

2008-09-23T08:16:00.000-07:00

I had such a bad day yesterday. Last week, one of my cases just completely exploded on me. This doesn’t happen often in appellate work, but when it does it can be a nightmare. Turns out that my perfectly good appeal with a brilliant (if I do say so myself) argument had to be settled in a matter of days for political reasons. So I had to spend several days scrambling to settle a case I hadn’t even wanted to settle in the first place. And not only am I bitter about the outcome, I’m disappointed; I was really looking forward to writing that brief.

And on top of that, the one thing I’ve been looking forward to the most, my friend N’s return from maternity leave, has just sucked. I missed her desperately while she was gone, and have been counting down the days until she gets back. So yesterday I spent the morning setting up a 10:00 meeting on my exploding case, then at 9:40 went over to see N, figuring that would give me 20 minutes before my meeting. She was just getting in (first day back is tricky) and her supervisor had just gotten to her office at the same time. So I spent 20 minutes standing there like an idiot while she and her boss talked about their new babies. She kept talking about how hard it is and how paranoid she’s become, and how grateful she is that her husband gets to stay home with the baby for another year, because she couldn’t imagine leaving him with strangers. (I thought bitterly about how, due to the leave I keep burning with IVF, my baby will be in the hands of day-care at 3 months old). Her boss kept talking about how much easier it will be when N has her second baby. (I took deep breaths and tried not to think about how I'm not going to get to even have a second baby.) We looked at baby pictures. They discussed the merits of the exersaucer. I had NOTHING to add to this. It was just awful. And then N starting telling her boss about how hard it is to be alone with the baby all day, and how if she didn’t have backup walking through the door at 6 pm every night there’s just no way she could have handled it. So now I’m standing there like an idiot trying not to cry, because even if I do manage to have ONE child, I know that J will often be gone in the evening (or be completely out of town) for weeks at a time and I will have no backup, and I'm completely freaked out about this.

Finally, I tell her I have to go to a meeting and I’ll come back later. Her boss is still there. I’ve said less than two sentences the whole time. Then I go to my meeting, which actually makes me feel a little bit better because at least it isn’t about BABIES, it's about being a lawyer, which I'm at least good at. So I go back to her office after the meeting to try again. And C is camped out in there. That's right, newly pregnant "I'm having my tubes tied" C of my previous post. They insist that I come in and I panic and can't think of an exit strategy so I go in an sit down. I bailed out a couple of minutes later, but not before C starting gossiping about what a bitch another friend of mine is for bringing her baby in to the office, because he has pinkeye, and how C is pregnant and has a 2-year-old so she has to be really careful. And all I can think of is that C works part-time and has a nanny, while the friend that’s she’s bitching about has two kids and works insane hours to stay afloat. And I really like this other friend, and I'm really anti-C at the moment, so obviously I’m on my other friend’s side.

I have yet to have a moment alone with N since she got back, and the two times I’ve been in her office I’ve just been this wooden dummy. You know the feeling, where your facial muscles freeze and you can't really manage an expression and you're sure you look like you've had a lobotomy? That was me. And mind you, none of this is N’s fault. She was the best pregnant friend an infertile girl could have, and we've had great phone conversations since she's been gone. But I felt so disappointed and deflated nonetheless.

So yet again, yesterday afternoon, I found myself sitting in my office trying not to cry. Part of it is that I'm so hormonal. And part of it is that we just learned that they're going to try a new hormone therapy on J, which is somewhat promising, but means we're not going to do another cycle until JANUARY at the earliest. (Sorry, that’s a story for another post.) So I’m nowhere near having an actual child to ease my pain. And then there's all that frustration that no one suggested we try this treatment for Jason a YEAR ago! (Again, something I’m trying not to get into right now.) But mostly it's knowing I have to wait while everyone else gets to be in this special club and have this amazing life experience and I'm stuck on the fringes with nothing to say and I feel totally left out.

And of course my rampant PMS isn’t helping. And J left yesterday morning for Alabama and he won’t be back until Sunday. And then I had to spend the entire afternoon getting patronized by smug opposing counsel in a case that we WON, because they knew we had no choice but to settle, and they were holding all the cards.
Blech blech blech! What an awful day.

I keep thinking at some point I’m going to run out of sadness, that there has to be a time where this stops hurting me so badly. But there is no rock bottom, and my pain seems infinitely renewable. How many times can I write that I’m so fucking tired of crying before my heart gets the message?

"Wow."

2008-09-15T11:01:00.000-07:00

I can’t believe what just happened. I was just subjected to the most offensive two minutes I’ve ever experienced, from someone who pretends (or maybe even thinks) she is my friend.

A little background: My co-worker C and I were kind of close a few years ago. Not super-tight, but I’d been to her house with other girl friends a few times, and she and I talked about personal stuff. In June 2005, I told her that J and I had been trying to get pregnant. Unbeknownst to me at the time, she also had just started TTC. Five months later, she told me that she was three months pregnant. “I thought it NEVER was going to happen!” she confided in me.

Since then, on one or two occasions, when I’ve let me guard down, she and I have had conversations about my infertility. On both occasions I have been stunned by her insensitivity to my plight.

But all that is important is this: C has a 2-year-old kid, even though she started TTC a month after me. She knows this. She knows that I have been doing IVF for at least a year. And I’m almost positive that she knows at least about my first miscarriage, if not more.

Cue the curtains:

My good friend L (not a big fan of C) and I are hanging out in my office, right before lunch. C walks into my office and flops down into one of my chairs.

“Oh my god, I’ve been meaning to talk to you!” She always talks like this, high drama with great big exclamation points. “I am SOOO PREGNANT!”

I glance at her belly, and indeed, she does appear to be pregnant. These things tend to show when you’re a size 2.

“Congratulations,” L and I duly reply, without much enthusiasm. I desperately want to look over at L to see what she thinks of this display, but to catch her eye would have involved too obvious a head turn, so I keep looking at C.

“After this baby, I’m SO getting my TUBES TIED!” she exclaims. “I don’t care if I’m divorced, I’m still getting my TUBES TIED. This is it for me!”

I’m try to keep my mouth from hanging open. I’m pretty sure that, in some societies, whining to your infertile friend that you must seek surgical intervention to halt your rampant fertility is considered somewhat impolite.

She goes on, undaunted by the stunned silence coming from both me and L. “I’ve been SO SICK for the last three months! I mean, my FIRST PREGNANCY was horrible. And this one has been even WORSE!”

Of course, I am not to be spared any detail. “I even had some BLEEDING,” she announces, “I had to go to the EMERGENCY ROOM when I was in New Jersey because I was BLEEDING!”

My heart is pounding, but more from astonishment than true anger. I guess it’s hard to be hurt by something so ridiculously rude.

“And you know,” she adds, “the whole pregnancy thing is so much WORSE when you’re OVER THIRTY-FIVE!” Oh yes, I think sagely, thirty-five is definitely way too old to be trying to have a baby. “I’ve had to go through genetic screening, and these AWFUL TESTS!” Awful tests? Really? Can’t imagine what that must be like.

But she saves the best for last. “But at least with this baby, I’m finally going to have a FAMILY!”

Take a minute to let that gem sink in. I’ll wait.

Now, perhaps it’s arguable that, with just me and J and the cats, I don’t really have a “family.” Not that I would ever say that to anyone else in my situation, but that’s pretty much the way I feel about it. But to suggest that it’s not a real family until you’ve had TWO kids? To someone who if lucky will end up with one? Can anyone out there join me in a rousing what the fuck?!

And then she was gone. She just popped in for a little, two-minute, fertility-flaunting chat, and then she was done, blissfully unaware that she was leaving only shocked silence in her wake.

After a minute, L closed the door to my office softly.

“Wow,” was all I could manage.

“Wow,” she agreed.