Baby Showers

It's officially baby season. The pregnancy announcements, baby showers, and births are raining down. And I am faced again with the difficulties that baby shower invitations present.

As a general rule, I don't go to baby showers. At first I felt like this was selfish, like I should be able to celebrate someone else's good fortune and sit through 2-3 hours of babyfesting without it being a problem. But, like Mother's Day, I decided that baby showers had to leave my list of go-to social obligations. It doesn't mean that I don't celebrate moms-to-be--if I am given an invitation to a baby shower (which honestly, I really appreciate the invite even if I don't go), I will get a card, get a gift, get a selection of picture/board books, and either shower the person privately or send the presents along with someone else. That way I can celebrate in my own way without being the sad sap in the corner, weeping into her mimosa and wallowing in self-pity because for me, a baby shower seems so terribly far away. And nobody wants a weepy-weeper at a joyful event.

Baby showers are torturous for me as a woman battling infertility. The entire event is centered on pregnancy and babies. People bring their fresh babies to these events. Everything is about oohing and aaahhhing over all the tiny little things, sharing birth and delivery stories, tips on what to buy and what not to buy, holding up tiny onesies and handmade baby blankets, and the room is just filled with anticipation and joy for this new life (or lives) to come. This is an awesome place to be if you are a) pregnant, b) a parent, c) a friend/family member who is not actively trying to have a baby. It's a place of hope and fun. Unless you have been trying to get pregnant and just keep failing at it. Then it is a reminder of everything not only that you don't have, but that tends to come so much easier to the rest of the world. Then the onesies and the rocking seats and the towels with hoods and ears are sharp stabs directly into your heart and/or empty uterus. I don't have a great analogy for this one. I would say it would be like being perennially single and having to go to a bridal shower, where everyone is paired and you are not, but usually there isn't a medical reason why a person is single. It is something largely out of your control--it is really hard to find that right person and it does seem very easy for a lot of people and very hard for others. So maybe it's a better analogy than I thought. But still, I come back to the medical aspect. I can't have a baby shower and sit there, hugely pregnant and surrounded by doting family and friends with arms full of tiny presents, because of an insidious medical condition that so far has rendered that impossible despite massive medical interventions. It is incredibly frustrating. And so I typically don't go to these events. Also, because on top of all the baby-in-your-face, if you don't know everyone, the inevitable "Do you have kids?" or "When are you going to have one of these?" comments tend to come up and I just don't have socially acceptable responses for those anymore.

I have gone to one baby shower since this process began, and that was for a friend who conceived twins through IVF. I really wanted to be there, but at the same time I really didn't want to be there. I felt so left behind, but I wanted so badly to be there for my friend who was a survivor of this process, who made it through to the other side. So I went. The great thing about going to a baby shower for someone who's been in your shoes is that she totally understands. She gets it if it's too much and you have to leave early (I didn't). She gets it if you disappear into the bathroom for a while during presents because it's just too much to take and you have to wipe your silent tears away in private (I did). She asks you the day before if you're sure you're up for it. And she really appreciates that you came, because she knows how very hard it was to sit through, and how much you must want to celebrate that hard-won success in order to soldier through it all. Going to that baby shower was incredibly difficult, and I cried in my car on the way home, but I was so glad that I did it.

Recently we were invited to another baby shower. This is a toughie. It's a friend's daughter, and we are closer in age to the grandmother-to-be than the expectant mom. The people going are going to be so young, and I'm pretty sure there will be several fresh babies in attendance. Everything about this shower screams "DON'T GO! THIS WILL BE MAJOR SAD SAP TERRITORY!!!" But we love these friends, and it's a co-ed shower so Bryce will be there, and there will likely be liquor served. We struggled with how to respond. I decided we should just be totally honest. And so yesterday, when we RSVP'd, I just said that we will go, but we have no idea how long we will stay, and it will be very hard, but we'd like to be there at least for a little while. And the weirdest thing happened. Our friend looked a little sad, and she told us that she totally forgot that this would be hard for us and she felt bad. And it was...refreshing! Someone who actually knows so much about our babymaking troubles totally FORGOT that we were sad sap infertiles! And she totally understood, and felt a little bad, but our first response was... WOOHOO! Someone forgot and then just..got it. She wasn't pissy that we couldn't make the happy event all the way through. She wasn't irritated that our difficulties with those types of events affected her event (which, unfortunately, is often what happens--people are very understanding until the infertility affects their event, and then there are issues...which is just human, I guess). She just accepted it and that was it. Done.

So we will go to this baby shower, for as long as I can take it. We don't have anything coming up that will be bad-news-bearing before the shower. (The last baby shower we were verbally invited to was the weekend we received test news for our latest fresh IVF cycle...so that was an unequivocal no, no, NO.) We are gearing up for doing our frozen cycle sometime this summer, and so we are back into hopeful mode as opposed to total mourning and bewilderment that we just can't make this work. All of these things together make it possible, for now, to attempt going to a baby shower that's not for a survivor; that's going to be full of highly fertile people in their early 20s. With the caveat that I may end up downing cocktails in the back and/or outside, saving my tipsy sad-sap-ness far away from the squealing over tiny little outfits.

Unfamiliar Boobies

Have I mentioned that May has not exactly been an awesome month? I had my 36th birthday (with no children), Mother's Day (again, not for me), and I had my follow up appointment with my doctor after my fourth failed fresh IVF (fifth failed cycle including the FET, I'm really not sure how to count those in...it's a transfer, so it's in vitro, but it doesn't include stimming or egg retrieval, so it's kind of a bonus round). There are so many things about the follow up that had me feeling not so great and wondering how the hell we got to this particular point in our journey. All of which I will write about later. The topic for today is how my follow up appointment and Bryce's concern about what this process is doing to my body led me to a referral I was really hoping to avoid until I was 40.

Every time we do a cycle and my body is pumped full of various injectible hormone drugs, Bryce worries. He sees what it does to my body (bloating! weight gain! ginormous ovaries! estrogen levels through the roof as evidenced by crying/screaming/turning into a complete wackadoo!) and he doesn't particularly like it. Not just because I am difficult to live with when medicated, but because he worries about the wear and tear on my system. I have also been nervous about the impact these drugs have on my body, namely the increased risks of certain cancers (breast and ovarian). If you read the medical inserts for the drugs, which is good practice for being informed but when you actually read it you immediately think you are going to die in various horrible ways if you take these medications, the risk is mentioned. Anecdotally I have heard all kinds of things about the connections between IVF and breast and/or ovarian cancer. And I freak out. I am as terrified of dying an untimely death due to cancer related to my treatment as I was of ectopic pregnancy--both are rare but I managed one so I am slightly more nervous about the cancer thing than I used to be. But Bryce is probably more nervous. So, in our follow-up he mentioned that he was uneasy about the effect of the drugs on me, and my doctor gave me a referral for a mammogram. Because apparently when they do the bloodwork they look for weird white blood cell counts, and ovarian cancer would be found presumably on an ultrasound of my ovaries, and my ovaries are very well photographed. So off I went, three days after my 36th birthday, to get my boobies squished.

I was really, really upset about it, to tell the truth. I was worried that they were going to find something, of course, because I have terrible luck and really think that there is some angry spirit residing in my house, avenging itself by keeping the babies away. But I was kind of pissed that it was "Happy birthday to me, please smash my boobies flat!"  What a nice present. And plus, you are supposed to get a mammogram when you're 40. And you're a mommy. And your boobs have already been used for nutritional purposes. I really, really thought that I would experience childbirth before I would be waiting in a room with 50 year old women, wearing a lovely front-tie pink gown, getting ready to have (very nice) strangers totally abuse my poor boobles. So I was scared, but also resentful.

The mammogram itself really wasn't so terribly bad. They manhandle your boobs, one at a time, into this machine that has a plastic tray on a lever that comes down and squashes your breast as flat as it will get. This is where I was actually quite grateful for my huge boobies, because when they are bigger they apparently hurt less to be squashed. You can get them in there no problem. It was painful when they did the top-down squish, because it felt like the tissue was being ripped from my collarbone area. The diagonal squish wasn't bad at all, even though that one is supposed to be the most uncomfortable since it gets your pectoral muscle in there, too. The machine was really kind of cool--the nurse adjusts the height to make it effective and comfortable(ish) and then lowers the tray thingie down. After the pictures are taken, which is about 12 seconds, the tray thingie literally pops back up and your breast reconstitutes to its un-squashed glory.

After the messed-up photo shoot, they tell you that if all is fine and normal you will get a letter in 7-10 business days (but that most people get it in 3). If a repeat scan is needed you will get a call. Then they tell you NOT TO FREAK OUT when they call you, because especially with first-time mammograms it's hard to tell what's what since there's nothing to compare it to. Your boobs are unfamilar territory. So a lot of first-time people get called back. Most of the time it's nothing.

My mammogram was on a Tuesday. Wednesday came and went, and I didn't get a call. YES! Finally, something normal relating to my reproductively-related parts. I was so happy. I really was excited to be getting that "you're totally normal" letter. And then Thursday came and I got a call. What the hell? They couldn't call me Wednesday? I had to be lulled into a false sense of normal-ness before being smacked in the face with "We need some more pictures?" I tried my best, but it was really, really hard not to freak out. So I called my friend, who is married to my best friend, who just happens to be a radiologist. And he just happens to read mammograms all the time. I needed to know if I should be freaking out or if I would be ok. I basically wanted to make sure that the lovely people at the Breast Health place weren't just being nice to me and lying through their teeth that I shouldn't be worried.

The good news is that my radiologist friend told me that that there is no room for "probably benign" anymore due to the litigiousness associated with breast cancer diagnoses. The number one cause for malpractice suits against doctors is apparently delaying a diagnosis of breast cancer, and so radiologists have ridiculously high malpractice insurance (as do OB/GYNs, because when something goes wrong with your baby, apparently you sue like the dickens). So, unless they can say "This is 100% benign," you get a rescan. And maybe an ultrasound. Or even a biopsy. This was really scary to me, because I didn't want a biopsy, but apparently this is incredibly common because mammograms are super detailed now but not any better at telling what's cancer and what's just funky boobieness.  So, since I don't have a family history and I didn't have an obvious lump and this was preventive "hey, you've been pumping your body full of really high levels of lady hormones, four times in two years, and you're 36, so we should really check out your boobs just in case," I tried to not be worried, because it was probably just a case of unfamiliar boobies. Even though that angry spirit and/or some kind of scary neurotoxin lurks in my house, rendering us infertile and killing my cat like a mine canary. I am not paranoid at all.

The next Tuesday (this past Tuesday) was my re-scan. And, an ultrasound--which would have really freaked me out had my radiologist friend not warned me that they might do an ultrasound on the same day (thank you, radiologist friend!). When they take extra pictures of your suspicious boob, they do new and exciting angles that are not comfortable at all. And they use a smaller tray, which seems like it would be more humane but actually squashes localized tissue even more, and so it's definitely not cozy. I had bets with myself that the offending breast would be my right one, since that one is the bigger one. Most women have asymmetrical boobs, but my right one is up to a whole half cup bigger than the left. I really like my left, because it is perky for a DD. I wish my right one was more like my left. Now you know way too much about my boobs, but that's what this whole post is about so I don't feel too bad about it. I was right--it was my stupid floppy right boob, probably because it has more tissue and is harder to see (not that I actually know anything about this, medically).

After the localized right-boob squishing, I got to hang out in the sub-waiting room until they called me in for my ultrasound. I have to say it was really nice to have an ultrasound that didn't involve being pantsless and in stirrups. However, I am used to having the screen tilted my way so I can concentrate on the picture show of my enlarged and follicle-filled ovaries instead of focusing on the giant wand probing my nether regions. They don't do that for a breast ultrasound and so my neck hurt a little from straining to see what a boob on ultrasound looks like. It looks weird, like one of those meditative sand art things you see on people's desks, with the sand and the water squished between two panes of glass and it makes wave patterns when you flip it over. But then there was a dark spot, and I freaked out a little again. The dark spot looked kind of like a follicle. So I told the technician that I was used to looking at ovaries (and she asked if that's what I do, so I told her no, it's what I see as a fertility patient), and this was totally different. But the dark spot looked an awful lot like a follicle and so I said, "Hey, that looks like a follicle! Is it mature? Is it ready to be retrieved?" I'm so glad she had a sense of humor and laughed (even if it was just out of politeness). She even measured it like a follicle. I just hoped it was in the "Definitely Benign" category.

She left to see the radiologist and then came back--it was normal! It was a "complicated cyst" which apparently is just a cyst with weird attributes but they name it something scary just to make you worried again. They come and go and it probably would have been felt on my OB/GYN breast exam (which I have been postponing because I hate going in every year and having to update with more horribleness and no pregnancy), but it will probably be gone on its own shortly. So it just came to visit at an already stressful time to mess with my mind. How nice. But, the upsides are multiple: a) I don't have cancer and so the angry spirit is apparently appeased for the time being, and b) I don't have to have another mammogram until I am 40. And hopefully am finally a mommy. And hopefully am the owner of boobs that have been/are being used for nutritional purposes. And hopefully can just get a nice, "You are normal" letter in the mail and avoid all this worry. (I do have to add that as stressful as this one-week episode was, I was grateful to be checked out--because if I did have breast cancer I would rather worry and then be diagnosed early than not have the stress of worrying and then find out later than is optimal that something nefarious has been hiding out in my boob. So I am totally for mammograms starting at 40!)

Bryce is glad now that I've been checked out and declared normal. He's probably also glad because I've stopped making dark jokes about having breast cancer that aren't really funny but helped me not be a total basketcase. I'm glad that I'm normal and healthy in the boobular area. And we're both glad that now we can move forward, get ready for our frozen cycle sometime this summer, and keep on moving towards that elusive but not impossible pregnancy.

Happy Mother's Day?

Here it is. One more year, one more Mother's Day, and no card/brunch/potted flowering plant for me. Oh, Mother's Day, how you stick that knife in and twist it.

I have been employing my Mother's Day Survival Guide this year, outlined in last year's Mother's Day post (go here to read that one). I've been pretty successful--since we don't have cable I am not barraged by a variety of ads on the rare occasions when I watch TV. Although the Roku box has been displaying "HAPPY MOTHER'S DAY!" on the home screen all weekend, but I can get past that pretty quickly. I avoid the mall as much as possible (if I need to go in for any reason, I avoid department stores and go in the entrance closest to the store I need). I will not be going out to breakfast today, even though that's our Sunday routine and I really, really want those super good homefries. But breakfast on Mother's Day is like a parade of bitterness for me--so many families, so many young families, so many mothers being honored for something I can't seem to accomplish. I can ignore the occasional baby, but out-and-out celebration of all the moms on a day I thought for sure I'd at least be an expectant mom is just too much to handle over scrambled eggs and perfectly crispy home fries. I went for a really nice walk with Bryce yesterday, because today will be a strollerfest and there will be houses with tons of cars and people hugging each other and grandchildren galore and I can't quite perfect my tunnelvision enough not to see all that.

I have good coping skills, which is fortunate since if I hadn't developed those by now I'd probably be living under a comforter in a closet, crying all the time, eating gluten free brownies, and eventually needing to be taken out of the house by forklift. But every year gets harder. Especially since Mother's Day seems to fall right after my birthday (I guess it always has, but since now my birthday and Mother's Day are fairly equal in their ability to cause me pain, it's more apparent to me). Especially since the little voice in my head keeps whispering that I should really get over it and celebrate the moms in my life on their special day, and shove my own difficulties with this holiday to the back burner. But that little voice just needs to shut the F up. I have every right to choose to celebrate moms on another day, on my post-Mother's Day brunch next weekend. I have every right to send cards and call for this day, but not actually have to submit myself to the torture that is pretending that I can be ok on this day that makes it even more apparent than other days that I have failed so far in my quest to join the special club of Mothers. It is more important than ever to be "selfish" on this day, to take care of myself and know that people who have the tiniest bone of empathy in their bodies can understand why I duck out of Mother's Day on the actual day. It is not selfish to still celebrate moms in your life but to do it at another time, especially when your society and culture is stuffing how awesome and amazing it is to be a mother down your throat. Like all the things you see that are "For all you moms out there" or "There is no love like a mother's love" or "You will never truly understand love until you are a mother." Stop for a minute and think what that might make a body feel if they desperately want to be a mother, have moved heaven and earth to try to make that happen multiple times, and still haven't made it. Is my love less important because I don't have a baby? Am I less of a woman, less part of the womanly culture, because I'm not a mother? It's kind of how it feels at this time of year. Logically I know that's crap and that plenty of women who are not mothers have, in fact, experienced very special love and have huge hearts and lots to give others. I am special even though I am not in the Mommy club.

So, today I stay inside (maybe weed outside until the Stroller Brigade starts rolling through), I clean the house, I read my books, I have a cocktail or two. Bryce and I were actually thinking about going to see Dark Sha.dows today, because as far as I can tell there's no pregnancy or fertility subplot and the likelihood that that godawful trailer for What to Expec.t When You're Ex.pecting isn't likely to shove birth humor in my face. We'll see how we do on this one. I typically don't like to leave the house on Mother's Day, but a gothic yet funny vampire movie might take my mind of the holiday barfing all over the stores and restaurants surrounding the theater. Today I also celebrate the fact that I am an expectant mother, in a philosophical way. I have been trying to get pregnant for 2 years and 9 months, with massive medical intervention and limited success. I am the mother to 16 embryos--13 that haven't made it and 3 little nuggets of hope, sitting in the freezer, waiting to hopefully make me a physically expectant mother. I hope that next year, Mother's Day 2013, is the year that I can get tipsy on mimosas while out to brunch with the rest of the celebrating world, and not tipsy on salty cocktails in my house, tinged with the taste of disappointment and loss. Of course I will only be getting tipsy if I've managed to birth my miracle child before Mother's Day, not if I am actually carrying said miracle child. Wow, I am lucky to have Bryce for an editor--this would have totally negated the "I am going to be an awesome mom because of this experience" theory and given me children with fetal alchohol syndrome and visits from CPS instead...

Happy Mother's Day--to my mom, mother-in-law, sister, and grandmas. Happy Mother's Day to my friends who will celebrate with their new babies, young children, older children, and little babies-to-be tucked in their tummies. But a very, very, Happy Mother's Day to my infertile friends--may today be the last tear-filled Mother's Day, may today you celebrate your sheer determination to be a mother, may today you celebrate the amazing mother you WILL be, when all of this is over.

Don't Ignore That Infertility Alters Your Dreams

Lying in my bed this morning, I had an idea for another post for RESOLVE's National Infertility Awareness Week challenge, "don't ignore." I realize that my last post was about changing needs. But it really stuck with me that not only do your needs change as you continue to pursue parenthood despite tremendous obstacles, your dreams change, too. Infertility is actually all about change. Change in mindset, change in treatment, change in coping mechanisms, and change in what you dreamt your journey to parenthood would look like.

When I was younger, I had a specific trajectory in my head of how my life was going to go. A "life plan." I was too young and naive to know that life plans are ill-advised because they assume that you have the ability to control the chaos around you, that you can actually make career, marriage, and family occur when you want (apparently you know some things at 35 that aren't obvious at 20). To some extent, though, you can control those life events--if you are mostly focused on the timeline and aren't thinking about the quality of what you seek. I wanted to be married at 24, establish my career, and have two babies by the time I was 30 (for two reasons: I had read somewhere that having babies and breastfeeding before 30 lessened your chances of breast cancer, and babies in your mid-to-late 20s seemed ideal in terms of young-but-not-too-young parenting). I cared more about those things I deemed important life events than what they actually looked like. I'm not saying that I didn't love my ex-husband, of course I did. I'm just saying that when bad things happened (all the freaking time) I would overlook them because if I broke up with my boyfriend at 22, how the hell was I supposed to get married at 24? It was scary. I was rigid. I spent a lot of time in my 20s trying to make my reality fit the white picket fence dream I had set up for myself that wasn't working because it wasn't right. I established a career in a marketing facet of children's publishing, an area that I was proud of and enjoyed immensely. But on the marriage front my ex-husband wanted to move away from the NYC area and up to the Rochester area, where a cluster of friends were. I was hesitant (um, there's no children's publishing in Rochester, helloooo....), but also couldn't ignore that the Life Plan Believer in me thought, oooooh, if we move to Rochester then we can buy a house sooner, and it will be cheaper to live, and we can start a family in a very family-friendly area, and maybe we can even afford for me to be a stay-at-home mom for a little while. Even though it meant moving away from my family and my best friend and my work, I flipped the switch and made the change and found a job in Rochester. Because I thought it might get me closer to that life plan. Because I was 25, and the time to have two babies by 30 was starting to close in. Over the next few years I had several jobs, all editorial in some way but varying in focus (curriculum coordination! yellow pages advertising! human resources specialist (my favorite of the three)!), as I figured out that I definitely wanted to go back to school to be a teacher. This was the first blip of my life plan, the first time that I actively sought to change something. I was 27 and we hadn't started trying to have a family yet. I had brought it up, but there was always an excuse, always a reason, until there was no reason and my ex-husband said "I just don't know if I want kids right now." Wow. Dealbreaker. Suckerpunch. NOT what I wanted to hear. (Turns out he didn't want to have kids because he was too busy having multi-year relationships with other women during our marriage, and I was an unwitting sister wife of sorts, but whatever.) So I changed the plan. For the first time, I changed my vision of the future. I tossed out an ultimatum: either we try to have a baby, or I go back to school to get my Master's in Education. I had zero support for either option, but luckily (I thank my lucky stars EVERY DAY that I had planned and that I stuck by education over baby with Voldemort) I had socked away enough money freelancing as a writer and an editor to pay for my whole first year of graduate school in cash. Can't really argue with that. Although someone, a passive-aggressive individual who shall not be named, left the message congratulating me on my acceptance into the program on the answering machine for days without telling me and then said, "Well, we haven't decided you can go yet." So, so many reasons to change that life plan and find a partner in life who was supportive and not a total asshole, but again, I was scared of the big open space of no plan. Even though I had already changed my expectations, and moved the babymaking a little past 30 (I would graduate halfway through my 30th year), it wasn't dawning on me that I wanted to procreate with someone who didn't want to commit to a happy healthy life with me, and me alone. If I got a divorce in my late 20s then who knew when the babymaking could happen? Too scary. Better to stay put. At least until the lid blew off the extracurricular nonsense, the Christmas I was 29, and suddenly my plan was shattered. My ultimately self-destructive plan that had whispered (loudly) in my ear that I needed these set milestones but not quality of life within them, that I was undeserving of true happiness and a household free of yelling and pushing and projectile objects (and gross sex in my marital bed with other people).

Wow, that was a very long tangent, but I promise it is related. My mind wants a life plan. It is very hard for me to be flexible, as the saga of my 20s has illustrated. But, when push came to shove, I was capable of throwing that plan away. I got a divorce at 30 while student teaching and broke and starting completely over. And then I met my husband, the one I was meant to have, the one I had to walk through Hell to get to. And I started a new career, that I love and that I truly feel is what I was meant to do, as hard as it is. And I had to try to squash that voice in my head that kept formulating a new plan. I can't stop trying to control my life. I had timelines in my head of when Bryce and I should move in together, when we should get married, when we could start trying to have children. But this time I relegated those thoughts to the far back recesses of my mind, to let things be more organic. To account for changes, such as when, a month and a half into dating this mystery man that I met through Match.com purely by chance but who turned out to be the perfect husband for me, we sat around a firepit in his backyard and he let me know that he'd had difficulty with fertility in his previous marriage and couldn't have children. A little overly dramatic, there's a difference between male factor infertility and complete sterility, but still, it was a bit of a shock to my system. I waited for The Plan alarms to go off. Instead, I realized that I wanted what was now, that I wanted this amazing man in my life, that I was falling in love with him and children were somewhere in the future but what was most important to me was this man, now. We could figure that other part out later. I wasn't going to base my decisions on The Plan anymore.

But now, after discovering that on top of male factor infertility we are faced with female factor infertility (thank you, PCOS), we seem to be up against a dash of unexplained infertility, too. Because both of our challenges are overcome by the process of IVF, and we end up with embryos, pretty embryos, and then no one can figure out why they never stay in my apparently beautiful uterus and make a baby. Very frustrating to the planner in me. I can't control it. And, to get back to the title of this post, this whole process of infertility has altered my dreams. I did not ever envision myself at 36 (my birthday is a week from today, hip. hip. hooray.) with no baby, no pregnancy, and no good reason for why that is. While my 30s have been a Figuring Out Time (figuring out what I want and deserve in a relationship, what my career should be, what our plan for overcoming infertility is), I can't figure out how to make sense of how we got to this particular point: five IVF transfers, thirteen embryos come and gone, one destructive, life-threatening and short-lived pregnancy, a few brief years before we hit our forties, and no idea where to go from here.

Infertility has altered my vision of what the path to parenthood would look like in countless ways. It prompts us to make hard decisions. We have many options and weigh them, constantly. We research everything. But it doesn't change the fact that we have had to take our (my) plan and throw it out the window. As we adjust and readjust and realize that there can be no life plan surrounding this experience, we have to decide or at least mull over different very hard questions, questions that a lot of people on this journey have to consider:

• At what point, if there is still no answer other than poor gambling skills, do we move on to something else? It's so hard to even think about moving on when we have no idea if the next time is THE time, if the stars will all align and they mystery will be solved. We can't give that up quite yet, not when we don't have data telling us it's not going to happen for us.
• What is most important to us? Is it genetic material, the experience of pregnancy, having a baby, or having a child? (I am attached to my uterus until someone can prove it's truly malicious and defunct. I am not nearly as attached to my eggs.)
• Do we need to get a second opinion? (We love our medical team. We love, love, love our doctor. But, if our sixth transfer doesn't work out, if we have transferred 16 embryos without success, would we be stupid to not seek the opinion of other doctors, even if they are not in our local area? We are super loyal people so this is a hard one to ponder.)
• How long do we keep at medical intervention? Even if we are excellent (although not feeling the excellence so much anymore) candidates for this process, if we wait too long will we no longer be able to put emotional and financial wherewithal behind the adoption process if we choose that route? Will we still be eligible? Or will we be too exhausted to enter into another process? With our current situation undefined and unresolved, we just can't enter into the hard realities of adoption yet.
• Do I need to come to grips with the fact that at this point, my only chance at two children is to conceive twins? That if we succeed and have a baby, that I will have to embrace my role as a mother of an only child? That was not my plan, I wanted siblings running around my house, but has infertility made that out of our reach if it's taking so much just to try to get viably pregnant once? I would be thrilled, THRILLED to be the mother of one child if it meant that I could be a mother at all. But it's an adjustment.
• Do I need to accept, that in my push to try to give us the best chances ever, that I could go the other way and become a mother of triplets? Unlikely, given that thirteen embryos have cycled through, often three at a time, with no more than one waylaid implantation taking place, but it's an increasing risk the older I get and with the number of embryos I push for, but is taking this risk for the chance at ONE fetus worth the risk of having three? (Yes. The answer is yes, for me.)
• When this is all over, because I do truly believe (although it gets harder each time to sustain this belief) that we will be successful, will we have the financial stability left to parent the way we envisioned? Will I be able to take full advantage of my maternity leave benefits, or will our bank accounts be too depleted to justify living on one income for any period of time? Will our love be enough to make up for the lack of sleepaway camps and expensive family vacations and all the techno-gadgets that I desperately do not want in my house but fear we won't be able to avoid? I think so. Looking back at my own childhood, I had a lot of love and quality (often free) experiences, and not a lot of expensive "stuff." I think that was highly valuable. I think expensive doesn't equal happy. But I don't know what the world will look like by the time we can bring a baby into it--I don't know what opportunities I will have to turn down for my child because we simply can't afford it after everything we've been through to conceive.
• Did we ever truly know how much we wanted to be parents when we entered this process? I had no idea that we would have this level of strength, of resilience, of motivation to make this work. I always, always wanted to be a mom but now I know how very badly I want it and just how far I am willing to go to have that experience. How we do it may change over time and with new information on our situation, but I had no idea going into this how far we'd be willing to go to fight for our right to reproduce. To see what a little Bryce and Jess combined together would look like. To add to our already happy household, our relationship that has stood the tests of this cruel and grueling process. 

Our dreams may have altered thanks to infertility, but at the same time they have been strengthened by the hurdles thrown in our way. We are running a gauntlet of setbacks but that central dream, the dream of parenthood, has not changed. What's altered is the vision of the pathway, not the end.

Below are links from RESOLVE to help further the understanding of infertility and awareness:

• For more information on the disease of infertility, please click here.
• For more information on National Infertility Awareness Week (NIAW), please click here. 

Don't Ignore That What You Need May Change

The theme of this year's National Infertility Awareness Week Blog Challenge, sponsored by RESOLVE, is "Don't Ignore." I decided focus on the importance of recognizing that as your journey to parenthood evolves, your needs evolve too. It's so important not to ignore what you need in order to cope with infertility.

I used to be a support group junkie. Going to support groups used to make me feel better, less alone. It was awesome to meet other women who were also going through this evil process and could offer suggestions on how to deal with anything from medications to nosy people to well-meaning but not-so-helpful suggestions from others. I enjoyed helping people by sharing the information and resource that I had collected in my arsenal against infertility. I met amazing women through support groups and developed relationships outside that circle of sharing. I think that support is a wonderful thing.

But, over time, I started to struggle with it. Groups of women would come and go--trains of positive pregnancy tests and "graduations" from the group. This started out to be a good thing, a hopeful thing--proof that pregnancy was possible and that even the most difficult cases could end in dreams come true. But then, as time went by and I was still in the group, waving success on while I stayed rooted in place, it got harder to see the hope. It got harder to keep saying goodbye while keeping my spot on the couch. As people came into their journeys and added support to their arsenal, they would come in with so much hope and positivity. And it's not like I've totally lost that myself, but I definitely find it harder to believe that it's DEFINITELY my time any given cycle and that I'M DUE or OWED for a positive pregnancy test and that I can somehow THINK IT TRUE. All things I myself have said earlier in my journey, before realizing that if the power of positive thinking could get you pregnant all on its own, I would have a full house right now. It's hard not to feel like you're squashing other people's need to stay in that place of sunshine and rainbows when an evil leprechaun has just shat on your pee stick again and you are feeling pretty squirrelly about the whole thing.

I need to realize that as my journey has changed, so have my needs. And what worked for me in the past does not necessarily work for me now. It's not that I'm isolating myself. It's not that I don't believe that support is helpful and useful. I am benefiting immensely from individual counseling. It's that group support has become more painful than helpful to me most of the time. I leave feeling worse about my situation, not uplifted. In a room full of people I feel horribly alone. That can't be good for my well-being. And it's totally me--it's not that people are mean to me or cross themselves against my bad luck when they come sit on that couch. I need to accept that my needs have changed, and while it is hard to duck out of a community that has been so helpful in so many ways, I think that at this point in my fertility journey I need to not surround myself with experiences that serve to remind me of just how infertile and unsuccesful I am at the moment.

Finding what works for you in this process is so important to coping with the considerable emotional stress that this process hands out like candy. Realizing that you are an individual and what works for others may not be the best option for you at your particular phase of infertility can be painful and hard. Ultimately, though, that realization can really make a difference in how you can handle all the crap that can be piled on when cycles are unsuccessful or not viable (and all the times in between). In the beginning of my process, I read tons of books on infertility. The ones I still reference are books that account for different choices and needs, and are based in research. The ones I got rid of recommend very specific things for all people. Fertility diet books in particular. Some suggestions I took and continue with because they are simply good health decisions--less chemicals in my home, more organic produce and meat, eating lots of fruits and vegetables, microwaving less, replacing all my plastic food containers with glass or aluminum. These are useful and universally sound pieces of advice, whether you are trying to get pregnant or just trying to live a healthier lifestyle in a world full of chemicals and poisons. It is really scary to think of how many scary chemicals are in our daily lives now. I just threw out a big buttery box of microwave popcorn because I read in multiple sources that there's some compound in the bag lining that when heated in the microwave is a known carcinogen, or something along those lines that was equally ominous. Convenient popcorn is just not worth it.

Some books and people can make you feel like you're not doing enough, like the problem is actually you. You didn't eat the right things. You didn't take the right supplements. You didn't deprive yourself of enough joyful experiences to deserve getting pregnant. All of these things are done in a well-meaning way, but it is awfully hard for me to do something like eliminate dairy and think that my dairy-eating ways are responsible for my lack of motherhood when a) there are many studies that show that full fat dairy is actually helpful to fertility and b) I have freaking celiac disease, which means that I can't eat any gluten (read: wheat, barley, rye, including malt, which is in EVERYTHING DELICIOUS) and so my diet is already limited. I live for my dairy. Take cheese away and you have a very, very unhappy Jess. Now, as it's been suggested indirectly to me in the past, do I want my cheese more than I want a baby? OF COURSE NOT. But is cheese really the missing link in my infertility? I highly doubt it.

I have to realize that I am an individual, and what works for others may not work for me. Like the dairy. And all the candle burning and smudging and pineapple and sticky buns on transfer days and orange underwear and elephant feng shui and my fertility earrings. NONE of those things have ultimately done the trick. And by doing these things, while at the time they were helpful, after a while they became...heavy. A responsibility rather than a lightening of the burden. Something that I could screw up somehow and then subsequently cement my childlessness. Because my uterus knows if I snuffed a candle rather than blowing it out and so rejects or embraces embryos as a result. Uh-huh. The reverse is true too--what works (someday) for me may not work out for others, and in the group setting I have to be careful not to fall into this trap myself. If I jump up and down 6 times while eating papaya and listening to Bob Mar.ley and then subsequently get pregnant, I'm thinking it may just be coincidence that I got pregnant when doing those things. Just a thought.

I have to realize that my needs on this journey have changed, and they may continue to change. My thoughts on treatment and alternatives may change. My thoughts on whether or not we need a break from things may change. I may want to keep going nonstop or I may want to take a significant break. I don't know. All that I know is that I have come to peace with what I need right now. And that is a powerful realization--I have taken power back to decide when I want to seek support or change my diet or lifestyle. It's based on my needs, on my journey. I am only 10 days past the loss of my most recent opportunity for motherhood, and I am still trying to figure out what that means to me. What we need to do together to make this journey work for us. I am preparing for another followup and the hard questions that I have to ask. But I can remind myself that I have at least a little smidgen of control in this vastly unfair, vastly uncontrollable chaos that is infertility. I can decide what does and does not work for me and then implement my own plan for personal sanity and well-being. I can accept and embrace the fact that I am not the same person I was when this process was started in September 2009. It's not ideal that we're still toiling away, but it's ok. We will keep fighting, and maybe we will change the terms of our fight at some point. But we won't stop until we are parents. And, by adjusting what we need to survive this fight, we will win with all our marbles. Most of them, anyway.

Below are links from RESOLVE to help further the understanding of infertility and awareness:

• For more information on the disease of infertility, please click here.
• For more information on National Infertility Awareness Week (NIAW), please click here.

Positives and Negatives

The fifth time is not the charm.  At this point 13 embryos have been inside my purportedly superhealthy uterus (I have pictures of inside and out to prove just how rosy and healthy that organ is) and not one of them has stayed. I have that one short-lived positive pee stick from an embryo that implanted but NOT in my super healthy super inviting uterus. I am starting to believe that my uterus is a faker. I am starting to believe that it is like some kind of insidious predatory creature that lures embryos in and fools everyone into thinking it's great, but then it rejects those embryos at the crucial timing. My conspiracy theories are running high because this JUST DOESN'T MAKE ANY KIND OF SENSE. It is getting harder and harder to believe that there is nothing wrong and we are just super unlucky. How could we possibly be this freaking unlucky so many times?

In an effort to not lose my mind, I came up with a list of positives and a list of negatives of our current situation. Actually, a list of negatives and a list of positives. Ever the freaking optimist I like to end on a high note, even though I certainly don't feel much in the way of positivity right now. I kind of feel like all the "positive thinking" crap can take a flying leap at the moment, but that's because I am raw and on the verge of tears and slightly hungover from my experience yesterday of "Screw you body, you're going to fuck me over? Well take this! Five Guys burgers and fries, a martini, several cans of champagne (yes! they make champagne in a can with a little bendy sippy straw! Where was this when I was in college???), some wine and some port!" (Of course responsibly spread over a 10 hour period.) Sometimes it does make you feel better to punish that uncooperative body and add to the numbness. But sometimes you just end up sitting around a firepit, listening to the 80's Genre Station on Pandora with your husband and sobbing uncontrollably because a) life is not fair and b) holy cow we are getting OLD and we are STILL not parents yet. Thank you, nostalgic music from my long-ago youth.

Here are the negatives:

• No baby in 2012. We are definitely looking at 2013 if we are lucky someday in the near future.
• No baby on the Christmas card. You can look forward to more self-indulgent pictures of us, alone, or possibly pictures that don't include us because it is getting very sad to have a collection of just-us pictures where I am chubbier and chubbier thanks to all these drugs. And our eyes are crinklier and crinklier. I promise, though--no cats dressed up in baby clothes. For now.
• I get to celebrate my 36th birthday NOT pregnant. Another year where I get older and have not managed to reproduce. We march towards 40, unsuccessful in the family department. Not depressing at all.
• Oh boy oh boy oh boy! ANOTHER Mother's Day that I am not even remotely a mother, expectant or otherwise. Unless I bring out the pictures of all 13 of our embryos that we've created and eat cake while admiring them. Which is creepy and sad, so instead I will hide in the house and probably enjoy some champagne cocktails while watching movies that have nothing to do with motherhood and/or dancing poorly to Britney Spears.
• Countless congratulations to other people whose life trajectories continue to move as Bryce and I are stuck, yet again stationary while everyone else whizzes past.
• Realizing that the older we get, the more likely it is that our friends' kids will be our kids' babysitters, not their playmates. (This may be slightly dramatic but I think I'm allowed that right now.)
• Having to have conversations with people who are very well-meaning but who will ask us if we have considered alternatives at this point, because what kind of people beat a seemingly dead horse for this long? The inevitable donor material/surrogacy/adoption conversations, some of which have already taken place. We understand where these thoughts are coming from. And actually we have had all of these very personal conversations and researched all kinds of alternatives. We just don't have a reason yet to call it quits on this front. We have hope. We have evidence that we are better off for now continuing to pursue our current pathway, as hopeless and probably futile-seeming as it may look from outside viewpoints.  We appreciate when people have thoughts on what we could do differently. But quite frankly, we have already thought of, discussed, and/or tried so many things that there's not much left to consider short of choosing another pathway. And that is not our choice given our variables, which are not always apparent to those not in our specific painful shoes. But this is what happens when you are totally open about your journey--you invite input to some extent. We just have to politely manage that input or decide to close the door on our journey to others.
• We are still stuck. Still can't make any long-term plans, still have to weigh any decisions involving money (home improvement! vacations! visiting out of town family!) against how much money we need to have for future treatment or alternatives. Because everything is more expensive in the alternatives category, and our current path, however it may be tweaked to try to increase our chances, is not exactly cheap either. We are in Infertility Purgatory. Seemingly forever. We are Prometheus, getting our uterus pecked out by an eagle every day only to wake up and have it grow back for a fresh pecking. And I'm not sure what we've done to deserve it. (Nothing. The answer is nothing.)

Ok, that's enough of the negatives for now. I am getting depressed just reviewing the list. Let's move on to the positives, because there are some although they are pretty paltry in comparison.

• We slept in today. Because we can. Because I no longer have to get up at around the same early time to receive a giant 1.5 inch intramuscular needle injection in my ass anymore. There is no pregnancy to sustain with progesterone in oil, so I am so lucky to be able to sleep in.
• I don't have to have a 1.5 inch needle violate my tender tissue anymore. That is actually quite nice.
• I can have a drink. My Screw You Stupid Body bender is over, so now I can once again responsibly enjoy the pleasures of a nice bottle of wine with my husband.
• I can have caffeine again. I am not a huge coffee drinker, but it is nice to drink a hot morning beverage that does not taste like wet cardboard. I hate decaf.
• I can take a nice hot soaky bath again without fear of parboiling my potential progeny.
• I can exercise again and try to fit a little better into my pants so that I can stay in the pants I have had for years now because I refuse to buy new clothes until my clothes are falling apart in some way because I want to save my wardrobe money for supercute maternity clothes. Crap, that's a negative, no supercute maternity clothes.
• But, I don't have to buy a maternity bathing suit. I just have to buy a retro one-piece number, but I won't have to spend money on a pregnant person bathing suit. Which is sort of a positive.
• We are free to continue going out to dinner and doing fun couple things unfettered by small humans that need babysitters.
• Now for a real, not-even-remotely-sarcastic positive. We are still a happy couple. We are unhappy about our situation and our apparent inability at the moment to conceive and sustain a pregnancy, but we are happy with each other. We are lucky. We have a great relationship that is standing the test of this hideous hurdle. We are on the same page. We are supportive of each other. We still have fun even though there is this massive dark shadow casting dinge on our lives. We pick ourselves up and manage to piece our hope and strength back together and keep trying to extend our family past the two of us. We can find things to laugh about. We can cry together. We have such a great foundation for this elusive family we seek to expand. Infertility has not broken us (just roughed us up a bit).

So there it is. Some negatives and positives regarding this shitty situation we have found ourselves in, again. Inexplicably. Some day I am confident that we will receive good news. I really thought this was it--we both thought we had finally made it to the other side this time. But it wasn't our time and that sucks. However, it's not NO. It's NOT YET. The fat lady isn't singing, and hopefully she's not warming up. As hard at it is to keep doing this over and over again, I do truly believe that we are not delusional and that this is a WHEN, not IF. We just have to keep on swimming, even if we are exhausted and infuriated. We will become parents. We still believe.

Anniversary of a Date That Never Was

Today is April 13th. Friday the 13th. A day that has historically been a good day for me. Good things usually happened on this supposedly bad-luck date (going back to high school, when my girlfriends and I would always run into the boys we had crushes on when trolling the mall on Friday the 13th. I think it's safe to let that one out of the bag nearly 20 years later!). But today is kind of a sad day, too. Some 9 months ago I thought that maybe Friday the 13th in April was going to be the ultimate awesome day--it was my due date from the pregnancy that turned out to be ectopic.

Anniversaries in the IF world are hard. There's the anniversary of your time in treatment (September 1st, 2009). There's anniversaries of failed IVFs, which I never really think about. And then there's anniversaries of losses, which I had never had before and now I do. I thought it wouldn't be a big deal, but I am in a little bit of a funk today.

Even though I was only pregnant for a short time, I really lived every pregnant day to its fullest. I milked that ill-fated pregnancy for every joyous moment I could, including my first ever (and only to date) positive pee stick. Which I did once my numbers got high enough that I was sure it would be positive. My loss was an odd one, because it was a pregnancy that was never going to be viable. Once we knew for sure it was ectopic, I called it my "baby-shaped tumor" instead of a pregnancy because it was a little easier to deal with. It was also an odd loss because I lost it surgically. One moment I was pregnant, and then I passed through the haze of anesthesia and awoke on the other side...not. It was surreal. It was such a short blip in time when you think about it, just two and a half weeks of expectant motherhood, but I think the way I held on to the possibility that my weird little pregnancy could be a miracle made time stand still. For a little while.

And so, today is the day that I would have been 40 weeks, had that little embryo not gotten so horribly lost. Today is a day to be a little sad, but also to be grateful. Because of that little lost embryo, I know that I can get pregnant. It is possible. It just hasn't happened yet (despite a ridiculous amount of medical intervention), but it doesn't mean that it won't happen at some point, hopefully sooner than later. Because of that little lost embryo we have hope that we can have our happy ending. I have a picture of a positive pee stick to prove it. Thank you, little lost embryo that would have been due today but never got the chance to grow properly. We honor your short little existence, we mourn the loss of the opportunity to parent you, and we hope for the future because you paved the way for other little embryos to succeed, minus that defective tube. May your friends have a better sense of direction.