I promise, I will not make a habit out of this, I just registered my own url is all.
Please Change your URL to http://ourfamilybeginnings.com
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I am relaunching this site…since I’m a geek like that. It’ll be full of actual posts!
That I met the most amazing women. I know I’ve been a crap friend and a crappier blogger. Thanks to all of you, I don’t think I’d have gotten this far without you. Also - if any of my girls want to come with me to see Ingrid Michaelson up in Towson tonight, lemme know. I have an extra ticket.
Endometrial Biopsy scheduled for 2pm on Wednesday, and no, I haven’t ovulated yet. Thanks body - you suck.
Great. I started a post, and then wordpress went offline before I could start it.
I woke up in a decent mood today. The landscaping we’ve done is going to be finished by Wednesday, or Thursday at the latest. It’ll be hotter than hell out but it’s sunny and not winter, so I love it. Of course, it’s Monday, so why would life stay that bright and shiny. I have a lot of pent up rants in me, so this will either be a very long or a very short post. Bear with me.
So like I said, I was in an okay mood. Then I went to the doctor to check my progesterone levels. They need to see when I ovulated, and if I even ovulated, so that they can do an endometrial biopsy for this stupid immunological fishing expedition testing. The test needs to be done around days 23-26 or so. If I had a normal cycle, I’d be on 22 today, but we all know that Lindsay does not have normal cycles. This is the last piece of the testing, since I had 26(!!!!) vials of blood drawn last week for all this hocus pocus. That was fine enough, but then…
Mom called. She’s a nice lady, she really is. But right now? Talking to her? Not so much of the fun for me. What I really want to talk about is how I need to be miserable and at the same time I need to stop being miserable. She’s terribly sweet, but manages to say the wrong thing every time, and I can’t handle the possibility that talking to her will make it worse. So I literally talked to her for about 3 minutes before saying I needed to login for work. It’s too hard, I can’t deal with her.
Which leads me to the pushing. I have at least 3 of you who, over the last moth, have offered to go out to lunch, and I owe you all emails and calls. So to Karen, In and Out of Luck, Jendeis, I think of all of you all the time and I know you get it. I both want to see you and don’t want to see people, so it’s hard. I’m the girl who pushes her boyfriend away because she thinks he’ll leave first. I know that if I just work a little harder at this, I’ll have our family, but it’s just all consuming. I am out of energy. Sitting around the house for work is ceasing to be a good idea. I can’t fix the place up and I can’t fix me. I’m kind of a mess. (No shit, Lindsay, really? We couldn’t tell.)
Next on the list. Work. I should be smart about this and password protect, but I just don’t want to. I’m fishing for compliments today, I need my ego stroked. I don’t care if you have kids, are about to burst from pregnancy, whatever. I need you gals. I work from home. It was great. I took this job and I am way overqualified. I get paid decently to not have to tax myself. Sounds great right? When you need to take time to go get bloodwork done and monitoring and IVF, yeah, it is! Now that I am not doing any of that? Notsomuch. I hate it. I am lonely and bored and just entirely unfulfilled. But I’m now spoiled by sitting in sweats every day and not leaving the house very much. Some of that is great, I mean, I wouldn’t want to go be in an office every day, and certainly not dressed up, but…maybe the reason I feel that way is because I am in such a maelstrom of suck.
I just am fighting my mental state so hard because I have this awful indignancy that my life should be something other than what it is right now, and all my energy is going towards that. Like if I got off my fucking ass, I’d miss out on baby stuff. It’s freaky.
This is why I am glad to still be in therapy. Sigh.
Why do fantasies exist? Are they manifestations of inner desires? Would we really want our fantasies to come true? In these last few months, I have had time, not writing to have all these fantasies floating about my head. Some weeks I have been downright miserable, and at some times I am totally fine.
I ask this question after having seen the Sex and the City movie this weekend. I went with a bunch of girls, and be warned, there are spoilers to follow here. Not saying anything you couldn’t already predict, but still.
It was a fun movie, but anyone who has dealt with IF will know where I am taking this post. Charlotte and her husband have a 3 year old, Lily, that they adopted from China a few years ago. Now, thanks to…and I shit you not here…taking a vacation, relaxing, and adopting, Charlotte is pregnant. She even freaks out about giving up running because she is worried that something bad will happen to her.
Sigh.
As a fan of the film, and I did love it, I get it. The movie is a fairytale. Carrie gets the unlisted penthouse apartment with Big AND the great shoes to boot. Samantha gets as much dick as she wants. Miranda finds a way to reconcile with Steve. Everyone gets the happy ending they want. So, therefore, OF COURSE she gets pregnant.
Now, as an infertile, it’s a slap in the face. It’s perpetuating the myth that it is all our fault, that we are just too tense. And making it Charlotte, who has always been the most uptight of the bunch - even worse. It’s a stereotype, and a crappy one at that. So, do I look past it, as I do Carrie’s endless acceptance of Big? Or do I bitch and moan and not get the joke. I don’t know, but me and Lea Bee sure had fun that night flipping the bird at the screen.
So it’s not an update on me, but hey, I exist! Even though I am not yet a mother, I am a part of Mother Talk, and am on the book tour. Find out more here.
Nothing strikes fear into the heart of an infertile like fertility books. Everyone has their own way of telling you to relax or to try some special concoction of some herbal thing plus boxers equals baby. I tried to get into the mindset of just beginning, and thought about how I would have thought about this book.
It certainly is pretty, as you can see by the cover shot on the left, but can we judge this book by its cover? Actually, for a beginner, I think so.
The book has 12 months covered in the first section, with room for notes on the cycle day and temperature, and other thoughts. In the sidebar there are helpful hints about tests and preparing your body for pregnancy. At the beginning of each month are some questions to get you thinking about life with a child. It even addresses male issues as well.
When I first tried to get pregnant, I would have LOVED this book. Something I could carry around without feeling weird. One thing missing though is a graph that you can use to chart your basal body temp. and see it rise and fall over time. I would have put that in the appendix or something, as that was very interesting to see from the get go.
I was impressed that the book actually gave a voice to a section on fertility treatments. However, I found that while the journal aspect was useful, and I may even use it myself when I get back there, the answers given were too simplistic. For example, it suggests Clomid for a first start, which is a very stock answer. Knowing what I know now though, it really is not helpful if there are larger issues at play. I know very few women who have gotten pregnant from Clomid. More often, women involved with ART feel it was a waste of time.
Overall, I love that the book isn’t all about a woman’s issues with conception, and makes it more about the couple. I’d like the ART section, however to be its own separate journal. Nothing depresses you about fertility treatments like the time wasted or the time still to wait, and seeing it pile up along with the first year would drive me nuts. Definitely, however, a great book for the research-oriented TTC’er at who I believe this is aimed!
I was actually impressed that miscarriage was addressed before it even gets you to the first of the 12 months in section 1.
First off, Congrats to Leah on the birth of her son!!
But, it’s all about me here, so I am gonna whine away.
We met with the RE on Friday to go over the results and plan our next steps. She’s not convinced that we need to do donor yet, and also understands our general feeling that we’d go to adoption and skip donor entirely.
Her thoughts:
The endometrial biopsy is tricky for me, because you are supposed to do it at a certain point in the cycle, but my cycles are clearly not normal. Tomorrow will mark 7 weeks since my last period, and before you get excited, they did bloodwork, and I am not pregnant. I am just fucking sick and tired of no one having any clue why I don’t cycle, and I don’t know who I see to fix it. So the doctor will have to figure out a way to manipulate my cycle to mimic a real cycle without affecting my “natural” cycle. Fucking A.
The immunology is another weird one. It’s apparently not been around long, and so the lab they use is over in California. I am sure there are real tests to be run here, but it’s still a little weird. Go see their site, here. Of course this and the genetic stuff take months to do, and I am just so tired of it all. I am sick of being a human lab rat. I just want a family, and I don’t want to keep waiting. But, wait we must. And the immuno-stuff, most likely thousands of $$ and not covered. Good times.
It’s getting harder too. I live my life with this overhanging cloud that it isn’t the life I was supposed to be leading now. I should be the one with a baby, trying to figure out how to balance it all. Everything reminds me of it. Going out with friends for example. If we had a kid, we wouldn’t go out the same way we do now. And I can feel my hostility being taken out on people around me, and that’s not fair to them or me.
There’s no satisfying escape for me right now, you know? And we still know no more than we did at the start of all this. Nothing’s ruled in or out really. I’m just angry all the time, and I don’t want to be. It makes me want to not see or talk to people, cause with you ladies, you get it. And my friends are wonderful, but I don’t want to wear out my welcome, cause this is literally the only thing I can think about right now. Sigh.
From Jezebel.com:
Yesterday on CNN.com, Anna Jane Grossman tackles the very heart and soul of personal blogs. Grossman says some may question why people share their deepest thoughts and feelings with strangers online, but the better question is: Why not? Grossman writes, “Overeating, alcoholism, depression — name the problem and you’ll find someone’s personal blog on the subject.” Grossman spoke to Stacey Kim, whose husband died of pancreatic cancer. “Kim curled up next to her husband and held him as he succumbed to a long battle with pancreatic cancer,” Grossman explains. “The next morning, she went online to post about the experience.” Stacey’s emotional blogging helped her cope. “Right after he died, people kept asking if I was in therapy,” she says.”I’d say, ‘No, but I have a blog.’”
Grossman notes:
Writing long has been considered a therapeutic outlet for people facing problems. A 2003 British Psychological Society study of 36 people suggested that writing about emotions could even speed the healing of physical wounds: Researchers found that small wounds healed more quickly in those who wrote about traumatic personal events than in those who wrote about mundane activities. But it’s the public nature of blogs that creates the sense of support.
There’s something about communication. The transfer of emotional information. When you’re burdened with heavy thoughts, sadness, confusion, despair, depression and internal turmoil, does anything compare to unloading it all through writing or talking? There’s a release that comes from the simple act of expression, of crafting intangible feelings into words and sentences. It’s therapeutic, liberating, healing. And, according to a study called “Effects of Age and Gender on Blogging,” women are more likely to blog about their private lives.
We got an email from a reader yesterday. She claims that Jezebel has been her therapy. “This is what I dreamed of in high school and after, a space of kindred spirits and friends,” she wrote. She continued:
My husband cheated, with my best friend, thank you very much. The Jezebel editors AND especially the commenters were there. Giving out advice, support, and snark. In real life, where people where choosing sides and making bland, passive aggressive statements to my plight, the sheer volume of outpouring and sincerity of I got was both heart-warming and bolstering. EVERY SINGLE DAY, there were words of support, so many of the commenters, there are waaaay too many to name. And it helped, more than I can articulate in words. On Monday, I received a hand-written note from my landlord telling me my children and I have to be out by Monday the 12 (end of lease). There’s a whole story behind that, but its still the same story. The Jezebelles mobilized into action! People looking up links, offering advice…
Can a blog replace SSRIs and visits to the shrink? Maybe not. But when was the last time your pills or psychiatrist helped you find a new apartment? There was a time in our collective pre-historic evolution in which a woman could actually rely on her “community;” the other people in the cave or around the campfire. Could it be that the internet has helped us come full circle? Your Blog Can Be Group Therapy [CNN]
Well, here we are. The equilateral triangle of suck. Mr. Badger and I met with the male fertility specialist who ran countless reports for us. Here’s a rundown:
So basically, ICSI can answer the issues that Mr. Badger is having, and there is no determined reasons for where he’s slightly below normal. While he cannot rule it out entirely, the doctor is convinced it is not likely a sperm issue that we are having. There are no other tests that he could imagine running at this point.
What came next fucked with our heads. We asked point blank if he’d continue with IVF/ICSI - he said that with the amount we have transferred, he wouldn’t. He recommended shaking up the gametes to see what the issue could be. However, even if we do this, we won’t know if things were better by chance or have anything to treat even if we isolate if it is an egg or sperm issue. Our options, as he laid out are:
We are going to meet with our RE on Friday to go over things, but we’re not really interested in donor options. It just isn’t for us. Perhaps donor egg, but even that is just tough to swallow. So we’re gonna try IVF with our own material again but really start moving with adoption. How does one even decide what to do? I mean, we literally are at the edge of what medicine can tell us, and all they can tell us is literally - we don’t know what’s wrong. Clearly there’s an issue if I am now 2 weeks late for AF (which I didn’t expect on time, don’t get excited people) and really don’t ovulate on my own, and Mr. B’s swimmers have some issues. All our problems SHOULD be answered by IVF/ICSI, but clearly no one knows what the causes of those issues are.
It sucks. We should not have to choose how we make our child, unless it’s who’s on top. It’s terribly distressing. We could follow one path, and get to another dead end, and be right back where we are. Adoption is the only relatively safe bet. It may take a while, but in the end it’s better odds than IVF or Donor.
Thanks to you who are still reading. I know I’ve been a crap friend in replying to emails and calls and stuff. I’m traveling for work, and just…talking is hard right now. The comments mean so much to me though, so soothe my ego a little and say hi. Just knowing you are there is the best thing for me.
