Dreams and False Alarms

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, and sorry I could not travel both

When I was in my early 20's, I married a man 10 years older than myself, and equally as lost. We married quickly, and within a year had moved all the way across the country from where we started. I began college and within weeks and knew that there were whole worlds of people and ideas and lives that I could be living.  The marriage dissolved by the beginning of the spring semester, and by the middle of May, I was off to start that new life I'd glimpsed only 9 months before.

The next fall, I was driving up the expressway, and as I drove past my old exit I had the strongest sense that I could take that exit, and drive up to our old apartment, and walk back into that old life, and that old self. I kept on driving, to the self I was getting to know, and the life I was choosing, but it was such a powerful feeling that it has stayed with me all these years.

--

The day after my mother found out she was pregnant with me, my next oldest brother died in a car crash. He and I lived intertwined, yet separate lives.  The first year of my life was the first year of their grief, and so on. He was always there, a shadow, a painfully shared memory, and every so often, someone would say "Joe would have loved having a little sister like you." And yet, until I was 15, I didn't know the full circumstances surrounding his death, and I had never seen or touched anything belonging to him. Aside from one solitary, final, school portrait that sat on my parents bureau, he was virtually erased from the family.  When my parents sold our childhood home, my mother began cleaning out closets , she brought out 3 boxes of his belongings, a jacket, and letters he'd written and received.  I went through these boxes and wept.  Both for his loss, and for my own.  I wrote him a letter and told him all about myself, and our brother and sister, and parents. For a month or so, I was deeply immersed in the fantasy of who I would have been had he lived, and how our relationship would had shaped me. It wasn't so much about what would my life have been like had it not been macerated in grief, but more about who we would have shaped each other to be.  At some point, maybe few years later even, I came to know in at a very deep level that the person I am, beyond my temperament, is utterly shaped by the cataclysm of my birth and his death, and it was impossible to untangle the threads and be a different self. 

--

When I imagine telling our children about their origins, I imagine that there will be years when it makes only passing sense to them, and then a period when it concretely makes more sense to them, and then finally when they have their own time in the wood, when they realize we have chosen the road for them, all of us, Husband, myself and the donors. We have all chosen that this is their path, and they will wrestle with it mightily.  I don't have any illusion that just because I carried them in my body that they will bypass the identity crisis that is the mark of any good adolescence.  What I do hope is that we can stand with them, and withstand their rage and their grief, and perhaps even periods of rejection, with grace, open hearts, open minds and when they are ready to rejoin us, open arms.  

--

When I contemplate the pain that our children may experience because of their origins, I find myself wishing that I didn't need to do all of this to have these children. It is an odd juxtaposition: these particular children couldn't have come together except through the choices of my husband and myself and the donors, and I only want these particular children, yet I want to shield them from the any pain that will follow, so I wish it wasn't true. It is different that wishing that I didn't have to use donor gametes, but it has the same flavor--wishing that this joyous experience of carrying and loving these two babies never had to be interrupted by anything hard.  

So as I drove down another road yesterday, one with no exits that offered a glimpse into the past, I found little tendrils of sadness creeping in, and I stopped myself and said "This is the motherhood I can have. The other motherhoods are gone, lost to time, lost to money and lost to the mystery of why some things work and some things don't."  I felt a tremendous surge of certainty that these are my children, the only children for me. We will have tremendous joy, and deep love, and silly family stories and adventures, and yes we will have this piece to live in all it's various iterations, but my job, our job is to love each other fiercely and to be present; to be parents.

--
When I awoke this morning this poem was in my mind. Only the first line was there, but as I read through, the last line really hit me : I took the  road less traveled by, and that has made all the difference. Yes it has babies, yes it has. Without taking the road less traveled, there would be no "you". Thank you for making a home in my body. We will do our best to make you a magnificent home in the world.

The Road Not Taken

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,

And sorry I could not travel both

And be one traveler, long I stood

And looked down one as far as I could

To where it bent in the undergrowth,

Then took the other just as fair, 

And perhaps having the better claim, 

Because it was grassy and wanted wear, 

Though as for that the passing there

Had worn them really about the same, 

And both that morning equally lay

In leaves no step had trodden black,

Oh, I kept the first for another day!

Yet knowing how way leads onto way,

I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh

Somewhere ages and ages hence,

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, and I--

I took the one less traveled by, 

And it has made all the difference.

--Robert Frost, Mountain Interval, 1920.

It pays to be 23

First update on the donor:

After 5 days of stimming, they measured 19 follicles.

As an IVF vet, I know that the first number doesn't translate to your retrieved number, but starting out with a nice high number like 19, is VERY reassuring.

Fhew.

The news on my progress is a little less reassuring, but not bad. On Monday my E2 level was 476. They like to see it nearer to 600, so they bumped up my estrogen injection dose--I hope it does the trick. My vow to myself is to not push it. If the E2 number doesn't climb, and the lining isn't good, we aren't going to go forward with the transfer. Unlike in other cycles, I am not going to play any mind games with myself. I'm just going to deal with what is. Hopefully, I'll respond to the increased estrogen, if not, we'll deal with that.

This is what my doctor sarcastically calls my 'positive mindset'. Holy crap. If only she knew how bitter and pessimistic I could really be, she'd think that was me being Polly Positivity! 

***************

I'm sorry I haven't been updating. I'm in a weird place. In someways I feel so worn out from all of this (4 years of trying to get pregnant), that I don't feel like I've got a pithy thing left in me.  I suppose also, that after this many cycles, and this many disappointments, I don't have a lot of pep and vim left in me. I am feeling my Missouri roots: show me (the good lining, the good estrogen, the good fert rate, the good blast, the positive test, and on and on), and then i'll get excited.

One thing I have to come to realize about myself recently is that I am a far more closed and cautious person than would appear. I want to be excited, and hopeful and well, just not so damned cautious, but somehow, that last miscarriage took the starch right out of me. Too good to be true, was too good to be true.

What's worse is that I seem to have really lost the capacity to reach out to people, even you all, the most sympathetic group imaginable. I just feel so fucking traumatized.  Of course, it makes sense. When you are getting to the end of a journey is when you start to feel the pain of blisters and the broken shoes and the unrelenting grit on your skin.  I have this image of myself, 4 years ago, by no means innocent, scared, but so hopeful. Now I am a battle scarred warrior, wearing a mismatched uniform, wondering who the heck to take my orders from, and what the hell I'm fighting for. I have a dim memory of a flag, or shall I say a baby blanket, but it's pretty ripped up too.

I think I'll probably slog through, numb and cautious, hopefully with a huge wave of jubilation washing over me at some point. Pretty please?

Stay tuned. Donor girl and I have our next check on Friday. Here's hoping she's cooking at least 15 good ones!

Verklempt is the only word for it, Mike Myers be dammed

Verklempt, though popularized by Mike Myers, is actually a GREAT word for how I'm feeling right now: all choked up with emotion.

I was off the grid, and didn't read my dear friend Eva's post yesterday; she might be meeting her son today!

She is definitely going to meet the birth mom, and I think the baby, but there's always a few more steps, and nothing is certain until it is, but it is SO EXCITING!  Anyhow, I got an email and a picture from her this morning and I just about lost it. The baby is so alert and gorgeous. He has that 'newborn-as-prizefighter' puff, but even in that, you can see what a handsome and smart little guy he is.  You know how babies eyes can be unfocused and sort of blurry looking? Not him. Chrystal clear and looking right at the camera.  

If you are the praying sort, pray that if this is a match, that it goes off with out a hitch. Eva dear needs a little 'easy'  for once!

***

In 2 hours I'm having my baseline sono.  I'm a wreck. I've been holding myself in check, doing my usual not-quite-chicken-little best to manage my anxiety about what today will hold, and after seeing that baby, self is no longer in check.  

I have no illusions left. This doesn't have to work. It should work. It may work. But there are no guarantees. 

Inasmuch as I am coming off as sounding negative, there is a huge part of me that can't imagine that this WON'T work. All of the donors other recipients have gotten pregnant, both of my losses were chromosomal, so my ute is likely to be good (provided it bounces back from the lupron suppression), and yet, it is a risk.

My therapist reminded me yesterday that this is the anniversary of the cycle where I got pregnant with Sparky.  And not much after that is the anniversary of when we lost him.  In addition, it's only 2 weeks until the anniversary of losing Zoe, our sweet kitty. So to say this time of year is a bit fraught, is an understatement.

I'll do my level best to be positive. I'll update as soon as humanly possible.

Something must be shifting

Yesterday my husband and I discussed the crib that is disassembled in our guest room closet.  Way back before IVF# 1, I was driving home, and there was a blond wood crib on the sidewalk in front of a neighbors house. It's sat mutely in our guest room closet, only slightly distending the extra coats and boxes we have stacked there.  My husband is the master decorator in our house--much more of an artist than I am, and willing to take risks, so he often is much more sure of what he wants. When I brought home the crib, lo those many years ago, there was talk to painting it a darker color and how he dislikes light colored wood.  Fast forward 2 years, and it turns out, he could care less what color it is.  The room itself is at the back of the house (good in summer, bad in winter), and could use whatever lightening effects we can muster. I poked around on Craigslist and found a multitude of serviceable changing tables and dressers in a similar finish.  If we play it right, we could have our nursery furniture for under $200 (and that is if we are picky).  We will be getting an organic mattress, so that will push things up a bit, but not as much as a new crib or changing table would cost.  

Then this morning I looked at a parents list-serve I'm on, and found that their marketplace section is even better than CL!  

It looks like I'm starting to feel hopeful, invested, believing in the future like a regular person.

Here's hoping it works!

******************

My doctor called on Thursday to confirm that I have antithyroid antibodies, which means my thyroid gland is getting attacked by my autoimmune system. Whoo hoo. Yet another auto immune syndrome. I do feel lucky that this we caught so early, when I'm still within the range of normal (not optimal for a pregnant lady,but good otherwise). My mom had very severe thyroiditis (Hashimtotos and graves disease, with alternating hypo and hypothyroidism; yikes!) and it took 8 months for her to get diagnosed. I'm going to try to get in to see an endocrinologist, and get the scoop on iodine and the like, and make sure I'm doing everything I can to manage this.

Lupron--eesh ***updated

I've never done a cycle with Lupron. They were way to worried about over suppressing me, so I didn't even use birth control pills. I did use microdose Lupron for all of my IVF's (after the ill fated BCP cycle).  So last night was my first ever lupron injection. The injection itself wasn't a problem (just like riding a bike, eh), but about an hour and half after the shot, I felt dizzy, and then that passed and I thought "ok, that wasn't too bad", but then I got an odd full body flush. It wasn't really a hot flash. I didn't get hot, but I got very oddly tingly. It felt like when I took niacin way back in the 90's.  It took about an hour for that to fully dissipate, but the backs of my hands and the tops of my feet stayed sort of...buzzy? Yeah, buzzy.  Needless to say, I'm not looking forward to this new chapter in my ART life.

Also, my TSH is slight elevated (last year at this time it was 2.047 and it was 3.620 at the end of April).  We talked to Dr Calm yesterday and she said that it isn't elevated for a woman who isn't trying to get pregnant, but for women trying to get pregnant, they like to have it in the 2.0 range because the fetus may have brain damage or neurological damage if your thyroid is too low. She's putting me on a very low dose, and she says it's probably over medicating, but she'd rather not take any chances.  I'll be taking .25 mcg, which she says is practically a sugar pill. My mom has had thyroid disease and takes .125 mcg's, so I can see what she means about the low dose.  Nonetheless, I'm feeling a bit worried about it...I just don't want any other worries. I'm full up.  I can choose not to worry about it, and for the most part I'm not, but between the effects of the lupron, and the potential effects of the thyroid supp, I hope I don't end up feeling really weird.

Oddly enough, my feet are still 'flushing'. Weird. Good thing I live somewhere that I can wear sandals!

I feel whiny, cranky and in need of a vacation.  My husband is having MAJOR oral surgery on the 25th, so it is going to be sort of nuts around here during the cycle. Luckily, he should be feeling normal enough by the time we have the transfer, so that is good. 

 I have two new mystery novels that i'm saving for my two days of bed rest, and honestly, it can't come fast enough.

What is wrong with me that when our doctor assures me that our donor is 'sweet' I find myself wishing she would say "smart as a whip!"  I am not the kind of person who likes being characterized as sweet. I think that is part of it. I am a very compassionate person, but I'm also pretty damn edgy, and I think it just keeps coming back to not feeling identified enough with this donor for my own comfort.  The rational part of me knows that my preoccupation with the donor is just a transitory phase as I wait to have a real live baby in my body, so I'm trying to keep it in perspective.

***The doc says I can try taking a benadryl a half hour before my lupron shot, and that might help with the flushing. Here's hoping/1

So much to say, where to start?

Hello my dears.

I'm sorry I've been MIA. I have been struggling with switching to a new donor, and honestly didn't want to put much down for posterity. I always think about what my children will think when they read my blog years later, and I've been so confused and sad that I couldn't really say anything worth writing.  

Remember when I wrote this post  and this post?  These were my wrestling with the idea of the illusion of the donor, and my connections to her, no matter how slim, that were comforting to me. And then I got down right attached, and excited. And then she was disqualified. Next came the lightning round of donor choosing, and here we are, one week from starting lupron. Zowie.

I think one of the hardest things for me to remember is that no matter how I feel about the donor (ecstatic, horrified or indifferent [none of which I feel]) that hopefully there will be a real live human [baby] in 10 or so months who will displace all who came before her (or him) in my mind and in my affections. In the midst of all this identity crisis, and limbo, it's so hard to feel like the future will hold anything other than what is right here, right now.  And yet, it does. Just to look back one year and see where we were, that also seemed impossible to live beyond. 

So I'm here in the train station again. My companions have departed. The tote board says that my train arrives soon, but for now, it's just me. Officials wandering through, wind blowing debris around the tracks, but still here waiting.

******

The way my clinic organizes things is the IVF nurses handle the IP's and the donor coordinators handle the donors. So my same old favorite nurse, who never ever tires of my endless questions, and always laughs at my jokes, will be my contact person. She said she'll call me after each of the donor's appointments, and let me know how things are going.

I feel absurdly confident that her part will go well.  I'm preparing myself that all of this suppressing and then reanimating my cycle might not go well, and if my lining isn't stellar, we won't go ahead with a fresh transfer. If I haven't learned anything else from this IVF business, putting your head in the sand and hoping for the best is NOT the best strategy. So, hopefully we'll have a transfer during the 2nd week of June, but if not, I'm counting on frozen embryos. If two 25 year olds can't make a few frozen embryo's, what is this world coming to?

You'll be hearing a lot more from me soon!

Both sides now; or maybe soon.

When the going gets tough, this girl goes for Joni Mitchell.

Over the last week I've been thinking a lot about illusions. How important they are to us, our fantasies, our illusions about what is, what can be, what we contain within ourselves, what it means to retire an illusion, how vital we feel when our illusions are met with reality, and how crushing it feels to have an illusion disintegrate right before your eyes.

We've really been struggling with pulling the trigger on the donor. Hmm, I almost changed that, but really, it has felt like 'pulling the trigger' on ourselves.  We have both been wrestling the end of illusion that there is genetic child in our future, and it's a tough one for each of us to let loose of.  I wonder how different this process would be if were only incorporating one donor.  I know that before we knew about the translocation, in my wrestling with the move to donor eggs, I felt both jealous of, and comforted by, the illusion that my relationship to our child would be strengthened by his or her genetic tie to my husband. And when we thought that donor sperm might be our path, there was the illusion that because we would both have my genetic tie, and our tie to each other to cushion the rough spots.

There have been moments when I feel the desire to keen at the loss of my own fertility. I am reminded of how women describe the moment when they realize they are in menopause, and it is the end of the illusion of childbearing, and how for so many the sadness catches them by surprise.  I feel that now. At my saline sono, I was so bitter when the NP said "here is your follicle for this month." Instead of letting it pass I said "fat lot of good that will do me." Ugly bitter moment.

I know everyone thinks their situation is different, but indulge me for a moment. Ours is different. We are a heterosexual couple, choosing to make our family through donor gametes. We could adopt, we have chosen not to. Probably because of another illusion: if we choose the donors, we will have some sense of who the child might be. Of course, that is the biggest illusion of all. Even if we were to make love today and I got pregnant with our mutually genetic child, we could assign characteristics to that child based on our wish to see the links between us and them, but those are fantasies and illusions as well. We are all both the sum of our genetic makeup, and totally unique. 

It feels as if we are struggling with post modern realities in our very bodies.  And no matter what my mind can do with ideas, my body is less than modern, it is prehistoric (Husband may not see things this way, so I'm not speaking for him in this case.). There are moments when I cannot imagine how I can take this alien into my body. This little creature made from the genetic material of two strangers, who I/we have chosen because of our fantasy that they are enough like us to allow us enough of an illusion of sameness to facilitate the connection.  And then, I hold my friends babies, and kiss their sweet little heads, and field their sticky fingers on my face and neck, and I say "Yes, yes, I can do this. I can love any baby. I can love. Period."

I am scared. I am scared of being pregnant. I am scared to being a mother. I am scared of so much. I am scared of getting my hopes up again.  I'm scared that each little disconnection between me and our child will fuel my illusion that I wouldn't feel this way if this was our (even partially) genetic child.

I think this fear haunts me because I felt so different from my mother, and so insecure in our connection to each other. Even though we are good friends at this point, I still rarely allow myself to 'want my mother'.  Clearly, the illusion that a genetic child guarantees a connection is bull.  It is opening myself, to a genetic child or not, that creates that (healthy) illusion of connection between mother and child. 

Many of my friends who are mothers by more conventional means tell me that my fears of not being able to connect to my baby are not unusual. Indulge me in a bit of philosophizing here:

One of DW Winnicott's most important ideas is of the transitional object.  It is a concrete placeholder for the developmental transition between the "me" and "not me" that allows an illusion of connection to the mother when she is gone (the blanket, the binky, the stuffed animal etc). I wonder if, for all mothers and fathers, the genetic connection (mostly unconscious for the vast majority of those who conceive) serves as this transitional object to smooth the transition between being a non parent to being a parent; between the "me" and the "not me" of this totally separate human being. For example, my fears of being a mother and parent, and the way it will transform and disrupt my life, are normal. If we were to conceive a mutually genetic child, my illusion of sameness, or my fantasy that I will recognize myself or my husband in the child (the 'me' in Winnicott's theory), would serve as a transitional experience/object to soothe me as I make this developmental shift. In my case, the fact that it is a much more conscious illusion leaves me scrabbling and scratching to hold onto some illusion of sameness with the donor, be it in appearance, or outlook, and it is difficult to sustain.  This is all to say that perhaps my fears are less about the real baby, and more about myself and my fear that if I don't have the transitional mental space of an illusion of sameness, that I will fail to connect to the child.

So how do I create enough of a transitional object to transport me from this place to that one?  Well, nothing like good old awareness, eh?

What I want is to get to that place of being able to feel and hold 'both sides'. The side where I have my real losses, and grief and trauma, and the other side where I accept that my losses, grief and trauma are part of my package, and I don't fear that it will affect my mothering, and my greatest wish of all to be a  mother who fiercely loves her children, and whose children feel deeply loved.

On Friday I was remembering a girl I knew in high school who loved the story of her adoption: her parents and brothers went to the home for unwed mothers, and of all the babies there, they picked her. She exuded a sense of being loved and wanted and special--sort of like what it is like to find the love of your life. It seems impossible to be in a relationship with anyone else.  I know that there are more factors that went into her experience than just her family's attitude, but at the same time, that story always spoke so strongly to me of the power of being wanted and cherished.  That was something sorely lacking from my own entrance into my family.  I understand why (brother died, marriage already in disarray, mother depressed etc), but it has been my mission in life to welcome my child(ren) into the world wholeheartedly, even if only to assuage my own wounds.

So here we are, with our illusions in disrepair, our dreams a bit unscripted, and our hearts mired in confusion, searching for a guarantee of connection in the smallest of elements.

And yet, just in writing this, I feel clearer. Clearer about why I am struggling so hard to stay in my fantasies that don't serve my reality, and  reality feeling a little less daunting

.

Wingeing my way through

Thanks for all the support on Tuesday. My smart therapist pointed out that 'losing' a donor is yet another miscarriage. That helped me so much. I was actually not too much of a wreck Wed through Friday. Husband and I had a good talk, and then I decided to start 'looking around'.  The big outside donor sources didn't really have any donors I was drawn to, so I looked at a smaller, sort of 'corner store' agency, and found that they are less expensive, and I found a donor who looks a bit like me, is 23, has done a previous cycle, and the cycle resulted in a pregnancy. The not so good thing was that she had 15 follicles, but only 4 mature eggs, all of which became embryos (two transferred, two frozen, day three).  The woman from the agency said that the doctor said he would use a different protocol next time.  She also said another donor had a similar cycle with that doctor, and then went to a, and I quote "better" doctor, and had much better cycles. So, the agency has sent the records they have, and the donor is going to request her actual records from the other clinic and our doctor will review them. I hope hope hope that we don't have the same effect on this donor of focusing our attention on her and then Blamo! someone else is willing to move faster, and were ass-out again.

I have tried and tried to want to use the one donor at our clinic who is left. But when I look at her, I just don't feel drawn to her. Of course, using an outside donor is more expensive, so yesterday I went and asked my father for money. He has it to lend, and understands why we need it, and in the grand scheme of things, it is a small amount of money. But to me, it felt like a defeat. I can't even get pregnant without my parents help. Yes rationally this is silly, but I am one of those people who feel things on a very symbolic level. It feels like a failure of generativity.  And yes, I know it is just money, and this is what family's do for each other, but still. To at least be able to pay for making your own child seems like not much to ask for. I have accepted that I will not make love to my husband and get pregnant, I have accepted that I will not get pregnant using IVF, I have accepted (sort of, more in a minute) that I need donor eggs to get pregnant. But to need money from them feels like a failure of this private act of making a child. It is odd, I have been able to handle having all these doctors and nurses and various other medical people in this experience with me, but somehow, involving my parents feels like a loss of autonomy.  I feel humiliated.  Utterly humiliated. To be clear, my father was nothing by kind and generous. But for me, it was a ding this piece of adulthood.

A friend a year younger than me posted an elliptical message on Facebook and asked people to guess, I guessed engaged, and someone else guessed pregnant. Turns out both are true. I didn't guess pregnant for a lot of obvious reasons, but also because she has always been ambivalent abut having children, I guess that's shifted.  I'm feeling a new wave of disbelief that this is what is real, this is what is happening. I am not going to use my eggs ever again.  It makes absolute sense in every direction to go to donor eggs, and frankly we can't afford to take any more time with my eggs, but it just seems impossible. Impossible that my eggs are this bad. I just can't figure out why I can't accept it. There is a loud screamy part of me that says "NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! They are fine, this is crazy!" And then the part of me that can look at the evidence and say "Its time to move on"  Sort of like a relationship that is bad, but not awful, and you think "I could stay, I could go, is it better out there? Worse?"

I think that borrowing money from my parents also makes this seem final. This is it; it has to work. If it doesn't work, it will take time to gather up the resources to do the next thing, and we are getting older and older. My husband will be 40 in June and I'll be 40 in October.  How the fuck did that happen? How did we end up here with no money left , and no baby and looking down the barrel into this gun? It's sort of like when something bad happens, and there is a part of your brain that just wants to rewind and start over, and make it so that everything that just happened, never happened. For the most part I can stay in the present (not the moment, just 2010), but other times I feel like I'm reeling back 4 years and trying to find that juncture that would have taken us on a different path.

And then, I feel selfish and awful. My beautiful, smart, wonderful unique husband doesn't get to play this game the way I do. Sure, maybe someone else could have gotten pregnant with his translocation, maybe my eggs are just too fucked up, and someone else's would have done it, but no matter what, the likelihood that he would have had genetic offspring is low. And here I am wingeing because I don't get any more chances.

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In other news, I'm thinking of taking on a work project that will probably help me make some more money, but will also be a bit of a commute, and if I do get pregnant, I might not be in the best shape to do it, but for 3 years I've done as little as possible because I might be pregnant next month, and that has gotten me a whole lotta nowhere in my career.  In Sept I took on another project and have made wonderful connection that will probably serve my personal life and my career very well for years to come. And I did that because I was tired of sitting on the sidelines waiting to be pregnant. 

My back is getting a bit better, but it's still quite a mess. I've been taking a lot of Motrin, and it is helping with the inflammation.  I'm hoping I can go to a Pilates Reformer class next week. It's within our finical constraints (unlike working one on one with a trainer), and it is the only exercise I feel safe doing, and it works for my back and my looks. I haven't had a bad fibromyalgia flare up like this in a few years, and good lord, I had forgotten how exhausting it is to be in constant pain. The Motrin is really helping with the inflammation, as is using my pelvic floor muscles to stabilize my spine when I turn over in bed. Yup, I have to wake up slightly to turn over or I'll hurt myself. No matter what else happens, I can get a steroid injection in my spine if needed. I did one 8 years ago and it changed my life. It's my escape valve thought, and safe to do when you are pregnant.

I wish I could chalk it up to PMS

Oh wait, I can, but it doesn't usually hit this early.

I am a grumpy, angry mess.

My back, which went out, was in, and then went out in nearly the same way on Sunday, and is still out, and pretty painful. Because of my schedule, and some non negotiable items on it, I can't see my osteopath until Thursday.

I was curt with a friend of my mother's who offered me condolences on my miscarriage. I just couldn't be gracious. I just couldn't. I was probably more gracious than I know, but  I felt like losing my shit, and then she offered me some weird remedy. I just cut her off, I don't need any more helpful suggestions about how to get my body to do something it is just not going to do.

And I'm feeling jealous. Really jealous. You know you've been at the IF game for a long time when you are jealous of other people, whose numbers look WAY worse than yours, continuing to do cycles, or saying their not going stop or whatever. I don't know if it's really jealousy, I guess it's just being sort of nuts. Of course everyone get's to do what they want to do, and just because I've stepped off that particular train, doesn't mean jack.  If we had more time or money, I could probably do a lot more IUI's, and one might work. Or it might not. Or might, and it might turn out badly.  So yes, this is our choice, and it makes sense, but I think getting ready to cross this bridge is bringing up all the last bits of yuck around this issue.

I think also, not being able to move directly into a cycle has disoriented me. This whole process of trying to get pregnant, by any means necessary, brings up such powerful issues of powerlessness.  And in the DE process, we're coming up against that again. We have decided to put a hold on the donor we wanted, so pending the results from the cycle she's going to do in Feb or March (recipient may need to do a mock cycle, which will push it back), if she is still our number 1, and is medically cleared to cycle, she'll be our gal.  We are also still thinking about other clinics and outside donors, but that all depends on asking others for help, which may or may not be available.  So just more powerlessness, and having to rely on others for what many do with some or no thought at all.  Yes, yes, I know, I'm feeling bitter,and being bitchy, but that is what I have today. Bitter and bitchy.

Also, one of our cats is quite ill. She's got toxoplasmosis, and maybe something else. She's only 7 months old! WTF! and it seems like one of our other cats is developing the same illness, which may or may not be toxoplasmosis. Husband and I are getting tested as well, oy. I'm pretty sure if she dies from this, I'm going to lose my mind. I know, she's a cat, and cats die and blah blah blah, but REALLY! REALLY! A translocation? Miscarriages? 3 1/2 years of  fucking futility. One cat dying when were on vacation,and another dying the morning we were going to take her to the vet (after they sent us home from the all night vet saying there wasn't too much wrong!!!!!!!!!).  Husband and I are just frazzled trying to stay on top of her condition, and worrying about the next one to succumb. I can't go to sleep because I'm scared she'll die in the night.

I'm not an angry person, and I'm not a person who is comfortable being angry, so this is really uncomfortable for me.

I think when the coordinator told us that someone else had signed the donor we wanted, I just started to crumble.  Whatever it was that was holding me together, crumbled.  I know that bad things happen to good people, and all that, but at the moment, I'm feeling overwhelmed, and persecuted, and just exhausted. Oh, and no chance of a vacation to recharge, nope. Need to save all those ducats for our cycles. GRRR.

The somewhat big-ish meeting with Dr Calm

The big news is, there is no big news just yet. Dr Calm doesn't have the pathology report yet, so she wasn't able to tell us WTF happened with Fishy (that is what we named this one, after the fact).  We did tell her that we didn't want to know the sex, and she made a note of that. Unless it is clear that it was related to Husband's translocation, we'll be looking at ye olde eggs as the culprit.

Also, my darling doctor friend looked up my harebrained Vitamin K theory and said this:

"Vitamin K is a cofactor which allows your liver to make certain blood clotting factors (actually factors that allow you to make blood clots AND ALSO factors that dissolve clot - keeping you in balance). There is no scientific data that I could find that suggests that having too much Vitamin K makes you hypercoaguable (while having too little Vitamin K definitely puts you at risk for bleeding as your body can not make its normal clotting proteins). The amount of clotting factors is highly regulated and no matter how many times over the recommended dose of Vitamin K you take, your liver won't make more clotting factors than you need.

Love again,

Your friendly neighborhood M.D."

And yet another omnipotent "I'm the cause of all bad things" theory bites the dust. It's ok. I wanted less reasons to blame myself.

So back to the visit: I was wanded, and my uterus is clear of clots (unlike last time, when there was one that was allegedly going to come out with my next period, but instead got me a hysteroscopy after an evening of hemorrhaging).  Also, all's quiet on the ovarian front, so I'm thinking we may not see a period until about 6 weeks from the D&C which was on 12/16, somewhere near the end of January.

I have to wait two cycles before I can do anything uterine related, so that is clearly March-ish.

Also, we decided to not go back on the DHEA. She isn't impressed, and I don't need another pill to take.

We talked about Donors in their program, and things of that ilk.

Basically, no matter what the pathology report says, the decision we make will be based on what we think we can bear. 

-If it was Husband's translocation, and my FSH is below 10, can we bear to do 3 more IUI's?

-If it was my egg, can be we bear to say "Well, at 39, the miscarriage rate is 20%, so let's roll the dice?"

-Or do we go to the bank, write the big check and say "Donor Eggs better work or were SOL on the pregnancy front."

We won't be able to put it all together for a few weeks, and in some ways, we'll just need to let it stew. Nothing like time to make things clearer, eh?

As anyone whose been reading this blog for any time knows, I like to stay one step ahead of the current situation.  My preparation for the meeting was to spend a an hour and half absorbing an adoption agency site that a friend directed me to (email me for the name, if you want it). I read over the letters to birth mothers, looked at the pictures, and found myself edging towards a funk.  We are not athletic. We don't come from cookie cutter happy families, we are not Christians, we don't live in a suburb, and we are not obsessed with cleaning products. Ok, the last one was from a profile that sort of freaked me out, the woman asks for cleaning supplies as gifts! I'm at least a little more approachable than that!

Anyhow, I started composing a letter to a birth mother in my head. At first, had more in common with David Sederis's Christmas Letter from the Pierce's, but as I went along, I realized, we are pretty awesome, and if I were a birth mother with a sense of humor, and a wish for an honest couple who loves, respects and LIKES one another, we'd be a shoe in. Try it. Try writing a letter to a birthmother, and you might just find out how awesome you are. 

So, it seems one must say something about 2009.

So here goes:

2009 was truly one of the absolute worst years of my life. It was the year I faced and worked through what it meant to lose this life long dream of easy motherhood, of being genetically related to our children, and the loss of my husband's genetic relationship to our children.  It was one of the Dark Nights of my Soul. And yet...and yet, it has strengthened me in ways I would never have allowed myself to imagine as I was in that cold hellish place. Also, I have made some amazing friends, and I have allowed others to see me at my most vulnerable, not so easy for me.

So, yes, 2009, don't let the door hit you in the ass on the way out. So long and thanks for all the growth. I hope 2010 is less personally...challenging, yes that is the word.