Paper shuffle

Thankfully this weekend went well, better than last weekend. It wasn't difficult to find an improvement over the grueling, bitter winds of last weekend. Last weekend was a horrible one with a plunge so low that I will actually attest that I saw nothing but thick blackness suspended like a cloud of mist all around me. I rarely get depressed and so it made it even worse to see where I actually had brought myself, or maybe better said where circumstances had brought me. Where was I? How did I get here? Will I get out? I felt like I was clawing at the walls for answers. I think it was the hormones. In fact I'm sure of it because the headaches had arrived too and those are sure signs that something just isn't natural. A sign that we are not in the realm of what is normal.

Seb was grumpy all that weekend too and we flew into each others face a little too often for even our own tastes. All we hoped for was that it would get better in a few days; that life would look sunnier in a few days time and we wouldn't have to live in this mire for very much longer. Since I was in the middle of the treatment and Seb was in the middle of his job changes, there didn't seem to be much hope for immediate changes and so we waded through until Monday and braved out the week as it crept by day by disgusting day. When this Saturday rolled around we did the transfer for the IUI and just like that everything returned to a temporary semblance of normalcy. How convenient this pattern was becoming. Each month we build and build to this bright spot where for two weeks there is hope and happiness, only to have it dump us brusquely once again at the bottom of that pit on day 23 or 31, depending on the generosity of our lunar mentors.

I told Seb over that horrible weekend that I thought I wanted to stop the treatment after this cycle. My head was so full I couldn't hold another thought inside it and I told him that if I continued like this I feared there wouldn't be much of me left to give to him and Baby S. I explained it to him that in my mind I had slowly laid out the mental paperwork necessary for accepting our not having this second child and it was really just a matter of looking over the documents and reading them through... and then of course the final step would be signing them. He'd have to look at them too. He'd have to sign them. Could he do that? He said he really didn't know if he could but he understood what this was doing to us and especially to me and he saw the need to maybe have a sort of break from all of this. I explained to him that a break would mean nothing and that what I needed was closure. After closure I could start living a normal life and start enjoying my son and our life much more. We discussed adoption and I explained to him that adoption was just another form of what we were doing now. Other worries, other stresses but very much the same in many ways. The same type of problems but with different faces and all revolving around the unattainable.

It was a very difficult weekend. This weekend was much better, but the papers are still there in my head floating around in a sort of wind storm. I'm not sure what to do with them for now. Maybe they can be shelved for just a little while longer but I'm not so sure if that's even going to be possible.

Saturday is a fine day

The good doctor has agreed to delay me to Saturday and I'm pleased. I'm not pleased that all of this putting off and putting off has made me have three appointments this week and three blood draws. Well after tomorrow it will be three in all. Land sakes my arm is full of holes! This shall be dubbed as the cycle where I was jabbed a zillion times.

Seb is pleased that he doesn't have to take a day off of work. He's probably the most pleased with the timing, although it does mean another very early morning drive to the clinic where we'll do the whole ordeal. He just went there last Saturday at the crack of dawn because he needed to provide them with a fresh sperm sample. At least this week he has company, the bitchy hormonal wife and the grumpy 'morning hating' baby.*

So there we are. I mean here we are. What is this, January? Yes, nearly January's end. And what I wonder does February have in store? Does it have better things than December had? Hmmm, maybe it does. Does it have what late November had, oh dear I hope not shudder, or maybe, just maybe it has what October had big smile.

You just never know what to expect do you?

*Baby S would sleep until afternoon if we let him. We usually let him sleep until at least nine or ten am to avoid the wrath of the grumps.

Little egg stay put!

It seems that this little egg is not ready to make her appearance on the big stage yet. She's a slow one, a 12mm little putz.

So everything is on hold. I have another appointment on Thursday morning. We'll even be trying to slow things down to hold out for a Saturday transfer if that's even remotely possible. Is it? Seb is so buried in work and meetings on Friday that it may be next to near impossible for him if it falls on Friday. Of course he told me this two weeks ago and of course it ends up falling on Friday. Could have been any other day? Why no, of course not.

I hope she holds out until Friday. Stay put you little beast. We aren't ready for you just yet.

Here we go again

Tomorrow I think we'll trigger and if so that means 24 hours later I'm off to the clinic for another chance at greatness. I only hope we do a better job this time than we did last time. As far as IUI's go I just seem to be a total fuck up.

"Now is the winter of our dis..dis..."

"CUT! Try it again Misschrisc. Take SEVEN" *clack*"

"NOW is the WINTER of their...uh, our...Oh dear, sorry everyone."

"CUT! MAKEUP! Take it from the top please...God she's an idiot! TAKE 45 PLEASE" *clack*

"Now is the summer...oh er, WINTER yes...sorry I meant to say Winter, uh."

*clack* *clack* *clack!!*

So yeah, uh tomorrow.

Blasé

After an exhausting night with teething baby I climbed into bed at midnight, only to roll over and curse, "crap I forgot my damn injection."

I climbed out of bed barefoot, grabbed my stash, jabbed and clicked and tossed it all back in the fridge.

"you're done already,...wow."
"shh, let's sleep."

Shwew

Made it through the torture of the DEATH NEEDLE! What a big joke that was ha ha! Actually the truth is--wanna know the real truth? Okay well I'll tell you that it doesn't hurt a bit, not one bit. Wimpy me, it took me all of five seconds to jab myself so you can imagine a real sadist in action. I kind of liked doing it actually. Now I know why Seb gets all excited about giving me my injections. He just likes playing doctor.

Well, not any more buddy. Back down mister because there's a new nurse in town and she just stole your job.

Game two

I had my état de lieu *this morning and all is clear for game two. I was in a terrible mood and poor Dr. Stonehenge, nervous, fidgety Dr. Stonehenge got the full brunt of all of my sarcasm. "Okay doc one down only three to go!" He looked at me nervously and said "aww no don't say that, you have to be positive, c'mon now Madame Misschris." I gave him a perfect "look-I'm-a-ripely-aged-veteran-here,-not-some-28-year-old-little-Clomid-hussy. Cut-the-positive-thinking-crap-and-give-me-my-scrips" look. He stopped the banter, shook my hand and we parted ways agreeing to meet up the middle of next week.

Now the stinker. Seb isn't here and he always does my injections for me. What am I going to do? Baby S is terrible with needles and so the only one left is ME. Okay I can do this I guess but it's probably going to take me an hour to psyche myself up. Oh god I hope I don't end up injecting the whole pen full of Gonal-F! I can just see myself doing that too.

*état de lieu is French for that apartment/home inspection you have before you move out of or into a new place. It's not really what they call it at my RE's office but it's how I described the procedure to my French MIL and she completely understood that they were looking for "nail holes" and "carpet splotches" in my uterus.

It's like a board game

Where you have to go back to the beginning of the board and you lose a turn and you don't get to pass GO. It's completely unfair and I'm very tired of playing this stupid game.

Tomorrow I'll be going through my monotonous Monday list of stuff to do and over half of it is fucking fertility related...call doctor, call clinics, call lab, order meds. This is all so tiring.

I'm feeling very beat up. I'm really getting to the point where I'm ready to give up. I really, really am. My god I've already been here. I've done all this before for over five freakin' years of my life and I really don't think I have the energy to do it for very much longer. I'm just drained. The worst part is that I no longer feel like me at all. I feel like someone who goes through the motions of being me until she can have a positive pregnancy test. The me person pops up occasionally but she's squashed by this pathetic THING. It's completely taken over my life and I hate it. I just want to step away and let somebody else deal with it while I go on trying to enjoy my life a little ...

BUT IT WON'T LET ME!!

Underwear Patrol

I haven't been thinking so much about the IUI lately as not thinking about it. I think that by 10 days past ovulation I'm pretty much waiting for my own personal doomsday to arrive. This isn't negative thinking so much as an act of self preservation at this point. I'm pretty sure everyone does this. Any shred of hope is cast carelessly aside and there is a precise mental list of "next steps:" -- order new meds, call doctor, update labs, all necessary steps for moving on to the next IUI and the next and the next.

I have started having cramps, and where I used to call these early cramps implantation!!, I now stoically remark that they are probably the beginning of d-day. I'm on full alert, but here is the old lower backache, the dreaded bloatedness and the general and absolute beginning of fatigue. The only thing left is the splat of confirmation telling me that it's definitely time to put the dusty old hope villain away for another time. I no longer am bothered to wipe off the fingerprint smudges before stashing him in his well worn little cardboard box. Hope is funny like that, you're much more careless with it when it hasn't gracefully seen you through all of your difficult moments. Somehow, maybe out of pure unadulterated habit, you keep bringing it along each time for the ride.

My temps have been a little all over the place. It's been a little difficult in the new place to take a proper temperature. Seb gets up at ungodly hours for his training, baby S is awake at the crack of dawn one day and then sleeping until 10:30 the next. I'm up and down a few times a night. I've tried to adjust the temps accordingly but It's still kind of unclear what's going on. One good thing I suppose is that I haven't had a drop below coverline...yet.

I definitely miss my chart. I really miss our home.

Wherein the diary gets written in an archaic and unnatural way

Well, we're off to Lyon next week to live in a temporary house for the next few months, only returning here on the weekends. It's a bit scary. I've had a lot of sleepless nights over this move and the many sudden changes it will bring in both the short and long term. As crazy as it sounds the thought of my loss of internet access and the loss of my very dear diary I've been keeping here has been one of the thing which has upset me the most. The writing I do here really helps me keep a clear head and lets me see a reflection of who I am in all this clunkety-junk mess of ups and downs I seem to be getting myself into lately. I guess I need to write to see who I am and what I feel. Maybe this is because I have no idea who I am and holding this mirror up sometimes lets me say "hey there's that woman, the one who's a little frightened, a lot stronger than she thinks and who seems to be a pretty good mother. I think I remember her." I often don't recognize this person until I see her a few months later while reading through old diary entries.

Anyway, after much refection and worrying it finally did occur to me that I was being silly. Many, many years ago people actually wrote in diaries and didn't publish them on a screen for all the world to see and analyze didn't they? They didn't get clever responses to each entry like, "Such a delight to hear that you and Mr. Chapman are eager to have a second child. Mrs. Beckman the elder will be so pleased to hear that," or "You and Jonathon should not have been holding hands in the garden while the Chancellor was not in the city, shame on you ... but do tell more!" And they didn't get to compare their stories to others' who'd had similar experiences not unlike their own in many ways, so they could obsess over the details of these stories and find deeper meaning and delightful irony in the similarity of their own circumstances. And thus I think their lives must have been much less rich and colorful and probably very, very unfulfilled. Plus just think how they couldn't google something every time they had say "nervous illnesses," "female complaints" or "the shivers" and find diagnosis or a cure in a matter of minutes and perhaps save their or their husband's life just like that.

It must have been very difficult.

So, anyway my conclusion is that I've decided to keep writing my diary anyway, and then I think simply dump the entries into the computer on the weekend when we return home from Lyon to hammer the walls or whatever it is we'll be doing when we come back to our house. I know what I'll be doing at least. I'll be playing catch up and driving Seb mad screaming, "my god woman will you stop it with that damn computer! There are more important things in life." And I will contine to peek at the screen each time he runs downstairs to fetch a screw or drill bit, and then pretend I'm just tidying up near the computer table just as he walks in again catching me gasping "OH GOD...she's having twins!"

Computer and those within you, you will be sorely missed! *sob* Sunday is our last day together for a while *sniff* I hope our time apart is short. *sniff* *sniff*

Obsessing after all

I know I said that this was like any other two week wait but I lied. Holy crap I'm already thinking two weeks ahead wondering lots of things:

shouldn't I be taking progesterone because I'm not and I've had a miscarriage already that we don't know the reason for...

how will Seb get another day off from his new job to repeat his sperm test that will be outdated before the next iui and then get another day off if we have to do another iui...

how on earth will we squeeze in three iui's over the next three months without my body being completely exhausted by Spring...

will an eventual IVF be a failure because we squeezed in all these lame procedures and manipulated my cycle way too many times...

And of course I could go on and on and on.

Nerves shot...transfer over

We did the transfer yesterday and we're now in the two week wait (only one week and six days after today but hey who's counting). It all went well in the end despite the mess Dr. Stonehenge's office made of things. The clinic who washed the sperm couldn't have been nicer and more patient with us and blamed the doctor for not offering us the proper proctocol. They went out of their way to help us and made me want to reach over and hug them and gush "Oh my god thank you so much you guys are AMAZING!" But I kept my reserve and just said thank you about 100 times.

Among the many things Dr. Stonehenge should have done but didn't was of course ordering the bloodwork on both of us. He did simply assume that we had our bloodwork updated and yet we didn't. My flying to the local lab with a very old prescription the other day to quickly do mine saved us because they were able to look up the results using some kind of global browser that allows you to find results as soon as they're ready.* Seb had to do his bloodwork there on the spot and we had to wait until 4pm for the results. There was also lots of missing paperwork and the lab staff just shook their heads and said, "you don't just stimulate a poor client and send them off with the wrong papers hoping for the best..." This is exactly what I was trying to tell the SUCKretary at Henge's office and I was glad that they thought his his staff was incompetent too and it wasn't just me.

We retrieved the sperm at four o'clock and rushed back to Dr. Stonehenge's office for a rather late transfer. I think we missed it in all honesty. We triggered the egg at 8:30am on Monday and couldn't do the transfer until 5:30pm on Tuesday because of all the missing papers. I think that's late in the game. Also I had lots of EWCM Moday and Tuesday morning as I'd had for days, but right before the transfer it had pretty much stopped. This morning it's completely gone and temps are starting to rise.

We bd'd the night before the IUI because I was pretty sure that everything wouldn't go as planned. I was happy that we'd done that in spite of the fact that it might mess up Seb's results the next day. Ironically he had really good results so it didn't mess anything up. So there is a very good argument for bd'ing every day leading up to ovulation instead of every other day like some doctors suggest.

Here we are in a two week wait again. I don't feel more optimistic than a usual two week wait. I feel normal. I feel eager to get past all this IUI crap and get on with the real deal; the IVF. I feel like the bad little girl who has to eat all of her vegetables before getting dessert.

I'm pouting.

*Strangely the lab told me that there is a woman in the system with my exact same name who lives in my town and is using the local lab I use. She was born the same year as me but with a birthdate 11 days before mine. Now tell me isn't that weird? I've always wondered why they make me repeat my name and address over and over.

The wonderful thing about triggers is triggers are wonderful things

I triggered this morning after eyeing two lovely follicules, one a whopping 19mm beauty and then the ugly stepsister, a 10mm straggler. I'd evidently been told to bring my trigger shot with me to the appointment, but I really don't remember Dr. Stonehenge mentioning this at all. In other words he didn't. No problem, I sprinted the 2 miles home, downhill and then sprinted back up, uphill to his office, pushing an overloaded baby carriage with a very disgruntled baby bundled inside. Since Dr. Stonehenge was long gone to the hospital for his rounds by then, his colleague Dr. Abnormally Friendly gave me the shot. I reminded him that he was the person who had seen me for my miscarriage at the hospital a few months ago. He looked at me very kindly and said, "Oh that was a difficult time...I hope you're feeling better now." I told him I was and that we had some hope for this cycle.

There were a few snags ... naturally. On the way out I got the telephone number of the clinic from Dr. Stonehenge's secretary for tomorrow's sperm washing. Dr. Stonehenge had suggested I call the clinic right away to make an appointment for our coming in tomorrow and I wanted to follow his advice and call from my cell phone right away. But, when I called the clinic it was closed for the holidays and it had been closed since December 21st! Well, pardon my french but welcome to fucking France. They reopen tomorrow. So I went back to the secretary hoping to get the phone number of another clinic or a worst case scenario and so I opened my mouth and said "look, the clinic is closed and I was supposed to make an app..." but she interrupted me and said in a very annoyed tone "WHAT?...I don't understand anything you're saying to me." At which point I said in a sarcastically polite tone "umm yes, maybe because I haven't finished my sentence." It all went downhill from there and she said after rebuking me for not making my appointment with the clinic two weeks ago* that I should just go to the clinic tomorrow and see if they'll take us. Well, seeing as they've been closed since uh, what the first day of Hanukkha, I'm sure we'll have no problems being walk-in patients tomorrow morning. Why, we probably won't have to wait very long at all! In other words, have your husband take a day off from his new job** so he can drive three hours from Lyon and then drive one hour to the middle of nowhere to a wanking station that might or might not let him wank while your egg sits there waiting patiently or not. Oh go on, what have you got to lose!

Asshole.

The second snag was the blood draw. As I left the secretary said, "as long as your husband has his blood draws on file..." or something like that (I swear she spoke one quarter swahili because half of what she said sounded like jibberish to me) and I said "what?" and she sighed really loudly and said "he has to have the blood draws on file in the clinic. You know the ones he did when he did his sperm culture. He does right?" And I sighed knowing full well that he didn't get them. He was never told to. And so I left shaking my head and when I got out in the street the tears starting flowing and they wouldn't stop. I tucked myself and baby S into a shop alcove and pretended to be shoe shopping until they stopped flowing but they didn't stop and so I just kept walking. I cried because I realized that I should have done a series of blood draws too and no one had reminded us. Dr. Stonehenge in all of the chaos of us switching from IVF to IUI had probably figured that we knew we had to have them for ALL procedures. We didn't know and he hadn't reminded us by giving us a prescription for a lab visit.

I went home again and called the secretary back, "Umm these blood draws can you explain the..." she cut me off again "you'll have to ask the clinic when your husband does his sperm sample." "Yes, I know but what I want to know is about me? Do I have to get blood draws too and what exactly are they agan?" And we went around for a few minutes because I could not for the life of me get it through her head that I was looking for information about ME not my husband. Finally she said "ooh lala c'est pas vrai..." which in French means "are you stupid or what?" or something along those lines. And so I said, "can't we just page Dr. Stonehenge at the hospital and ask him to call me?" and she practically screamed "MADAME I SAID THE CLINIC WILL TELL YOU WHAT YOU NEED AND IF THERE'S A PROBLEM THERE'S ALWAYS NEXT MONTH!" And I realized then that there are two sets of people in this world; those that are loving and kind and then this slimy fucking ho.

I considered going to the hospital to ask Dr. Stonehenge in person but I decided to take matters in my own hands. I found a prescription for the blood draws in my old IVF papers and went back uphill 2 miles with the baby carriage in tow to the lab to do them. The results won't be ready for three days though which probably means that the clinic will turn us away tomorrow morning. I'm just so frustrated that I wasn't given the blood lab prescriptions from Dr. Stonehenge when we started the IUI. I know I should have remembered them, lord knows I've done enough of them, but it doesn't seem very efficient that they don't have a better system with all of the papers given to the patient in advance. I have to rely on him and he's always in such a hurry to get me out the door and get on to the next patient that he forgets half of what he's supposed to tell me.***

So that's where we are. And hey if it doesn't work there's always "NEXT MONTH" right.****

*The girl is sadly misinformed if she thinks you can make an appointment for a sperm meeting an egg two weeks in advance, either that or she knows something I don't which could explain LOTS of thing!

**Seb started his new job and we're temporarily living apart because of it. Fertility treatment, new job, moving...hey what stress? No stress here.

***like the time he forgot to tell me that I'd failed my glucose tolerance test for gestational diabetes. He told me one month later when he looked at my file on the computer and said "so how's the diet going?" And I said, "Umm, what diet?"

****I won't tell you what I said to her when she said this to me because frankly I can't even remember half of it. Suffice to say you should never doublecross a woman hopped up on hormones or you will definitely get an earful. She deserved it and lots more. For the first time I have to say I'm happy about my Gonal-F rages.