Tests

June 8, 2017 / lovescienceandnat20s / Leave a comment

Infertility and testing go together like peanut butter and jelly (or peanut butter and marshmallow fluff, depending on where you’re from). The tests start roughly around the one year mark, when you bring up to your doctor that, hey, we’ve been trying to fulfill our biological imperative and propagate the species for about a year now, but no dice. What gives?

These tests fall into one of two basic categories: giving someone else your bodily fluids or having things shoved delicately inside of you to take a peek around. The latter is usually the less pleasant option, if only because it takes a lot longer, but the former can be an adventure, too.

In terms of giving someone else your bodily fluids, the ovary-haver usually only needs to offer two types of fluid: blood and urine, like this is some sort of terrible German porno. The blood work has to happen about once a year, and it’s a LOT of blood–my most recent testing required a grand total of ten vials, and six of them were for fasting bloodwork (in other words, I was going in there with no food or drink in my body). The urine–I’m not really sure what they test when you pee in a cup, to be honest, but once you’re pregnant, the cup peeing becomes a monthly and then weekly and then daily thing, so if nothing else, I figure it’s just to get you used to it and help you develop your technique.

(tip: aim better than this)

The sperm donor has to contribute blood as well, but he also needs to have his semen analyzed. This particular facet of testing is ripe for comedy because there is no way to make wanking for the spank bank not funny. In the best of times, a fellow can make his contribution in a pleasantly lit room at the infertility clinic. This room is, inexplicably, soundproof. The best clinics have rooms with sterile furniture; the worst clinics have wicker, of all things. They all have magazines with the covers torn off and DVDs of questionable content.

I won’t go into detail about the worst of times.

When we first started testing, way back four years ago, the clinic actually refused to give us the results of Kyle’s test because he didn’t yet have a primary care physician in Massachusetts (long story short, we had very bad insurance back then). He had to go through the whole process a second time (this clinic did not have a room, so he had to bring his donation with him, tucked under his arm to keep it at body temperature), and we still didn’t know the results until we reached this IVF adventure.

(his results: A+ quantity, but very poor motility and morphology–a.k.a., the guys are drunken mutants, the wrong shape to fertilize a single egg, if they could even find it)

But fortunately, that’s where the testing ends for the sperm donor. For the ovary-haver, the testing has just begun; because, you see, sperm donors don’t need to have anything delicately shoved up their danger clam. Ovary-havers? We do.

There are three basic “things inside you” tests (in order from least horrible to “WHY WOULD YOU DO THIS TO ME?”): the sonohysterogram, the hysteroscopy, and the hysterosalpingogram.

The sonohysterogram is entry level invasive junk testing. In this test, a tech fills your uterus with a saline solution in order to check your uterine lining for abnormalities that wouldn’t otherwise be seen on an ultrasound. The test takes a grand total of five minutes and is less unpleasant than it is just very wet. At my last one, the tech told me to think of it as a spa treatment, maybe like yoni steaming or something like that. I’ve never desired to try yoni steaming, and the combination of that metaphor with the weird “seashore” sound effects she played during the procedure just made me uncomfortable.

(if you’ve never heard of yoni steaming, it’s basically perching with your lady bits over boiling hot water for like. Gwyneth Paltrow reasons or something)

But as the tests go, the sonohysterogram is easy as pie. You get in, you get splashed, you get out. Boom, boom, boom.

The hysteroscopy is a little more involved, because it requires a camera. With a hysteroscopy, your doctor inserts a light and camera to have a look around the inside of your uterus. This is never not weird. It’s a relatively painless procedure; maybe there’s some cramping because there’s a camera in your uterus, but all in all, it’s not bad. At my last hysteroscopy, my doctor even let me watch the monitor that showed the inside of my uterus (I told her, I wanted to look my uterus in the eye after all it had put me through). Truth be told, it was less red than I expected. It looked more like a pale piece of undercooked chicken, which is apparently normal. And I suppose that makes sense, but after twenty-something years of periods, I expected more carnage.

(more Carrie, less Food Network, really)

But the hysteroscopy and the sonohysterogram pale in comparison to the worst of them all: the hysterosalpingogram.

On paper, it sounds simple. They squirt dye into your cervix and uterus, it travels up your fallopian tubes, and then they take an X-ray of the whole system to make sure nothing is blocked or broken. The dye then leaks into the rest of your abdomen, where it presumably makes your internal organs look really funky. Easy, right?

No, no, no. This procedure is terrible. It starts the morning of, when you take a huge antibiotic pill–one of those ones that kills e v e r y t h i n g–and that makes you sick to your stomach. Shortly before the procedure, they give you hospital grade Tylenol to dull the pain, but this does exactly nothing except make you mildly loopy (if you’re me, at least, and get loopy at the suggestion of medication).

You go into a weird sort of OR for this, and I say weird because it’s a radiology lab, so it’s very different from the pleasant OB/GYN offices you’ve been visiting all along. Everything seems normal, though: you put on a johnny and lie down on a cold metal table. You put your legs in stirrups, and someone explains what’s going to happen. The doctor tells you, “Whatever happens, don’t move,” and that sounds easy enough.

Then comes the speculum and the iodine to clean your cervix, and so far, everything seems normal. Even the dye tube seems normal at first, but then they squirt the dye in, and I will tell you that this ranks third in worst pains of my life (first was gallstones, second was when my epidural didn’t work when I was giving birth to Sam). It would have ranked higher, except it doesn’t last very long. It’s a fiery, cramping sensation, not entirely unlike menstrual cramps, but much more sudden and much more severe (and for those who’ve never experienced this level of menstrual cramping, imagine the cramps you feel when you’ve got severe diarrhea, and then multiply by about ten).

And you’re not supposed to move. Every instinct in your body tells you to curl up and fight this pain, but you cannot move. At all. They take an X-ray of your abdomen, and then it’s over, but the pain lingers in the back of your mind, to the point where you can’t help but say, “I’m so sorry,” if anyone ever mentions a hysterosalpingogram in your presence.

That’s one of the silver linings of IVF, too: it doesn’t matter if your fallopian tubes are blocked. You don’t need to have a hysterosalpingogram. You can just go on with the sonohysterograms and the hysteroscopies and be happy about your life because your life does not involve hysterosalpingograms anymore.

Anyway. Today is a testing day. Kyle did his testing this morning, and I’m heading in for a hysteroscopy after lunch. Fingers crossed it’ll show that we’re free and clear to keep moving forward.

Family “Planning”

May 30, 2017 / lovescienceandnat20s / Leave a comment

Last week, I had a vague idea of what the next ten months to a year would look like. Shoot, I had a vague idea of what the next four years would look like.

After getting a positive beta on Thursday, I’d have gone in for an early ultrasound somewhere around June 23. It would be a weird time, because I have a business trip scheduled around then, and Kyle’s birthday is June 22, but we’d have worked in the ultrasound around then. We would’ve seen a heartbeat, and I probably would’ve cried like a total asshole, and then we’d have gone home to start planning an announcement.

We were going to announce to my family on the Fourth of July, at the cookout my uncle always hosts. I was going to put Sam in a shirt that said something about him being a big brother or a brother at all (sidenote: I’ve always thought it would be funny to dress Sam in a shirt that said, “I’m the Little Brother!” and watch people get confused) and wait for people to catch on. Then we’d have made a Facebook announcement. I’ve been brainstorming ideas, and I’m sure we would’ve come up with something fun and catchy. Everyone would’ve known anyway, because I’ve been writing about things so much in here, but still. Announcing is fun.

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(I mean we can’t go with this, but it’s still one of my favorites)

Going with Sam’s belief that this embryo was a girl, we’d have learned that for certain either around 10 weeks (if I could convince my OB that a blood test was a good idea, considering our history of chromosomally-based miscarriages) or around 20 weeks. Gender is, of course, a social construct, but I still would’ve announced that I was going to be investing in a lot of frills and pink and purple with some silly song and dance type thing, like maybe some balloons or a cake. Cakes are good. Everyone should have cake always.

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(adulthood really begins when you realize that “because” is a totally acceptable reason to eat cake)

Kyle and I were preemptively planning our investments over the course of the next year. We’d need to get a van of some sort, new car seats (because Sam can’t switch to a booster until next May, so we couldn’t just give the new baby hand-me-downs), and a new stroller because ours has turned the bend from “this is a fine piece of equipment” to “why do we still own this?” We’d have cleaned out the green room, which used to be Sam’s, and maybe painted in there (though the pale green on the walls is a nice color; still, I’d like a more neutral dove grey, because that’s more versatile). There’d be a new bassinet and our minifridge brought upstairs for late-night feedings. Maybe we’d have bought a TV for our bedroom and a second Roku, so that those late nights could involve binge-watching the shows we’ve been saving up on for that exact moment.

Her name was going to be Carolyn Jeanette.

And I saw the next couple of years in a vague sense. Sam would go to preschool, real preschool, a year from September, and I’d stay home with the baby to save on daycare expenses. I’d dive back into parenthood, like I never had the energy to when Sam was a baby (but this time would be different because antidepressants). I’d exercise. I’d do Things. In five years, we’d go back to Disney World like we did this past December, only this time, we’d have an eight-year-old and a five-year-old. Everything would be new and different.

But then the beta was negative and the next year was a blank slate again.

I think this may be the weirdest part about IVF and trying to conceive… you can’t plan more than a month or so in advance. You’d like to say, “Oh yeah, we’ll definitely go on a vacation in October” or something like that, but then things change and October is the month you’ll have to do your transfer or have a bunch of ultrasounds or something like that. Your boss asks you for a five year career plan and you make one up, but really, you’re shrugging internally because you don’t know if you’re going to vanish at some point in the next five years because there’s suddenly an infant.

You think, “You know, we should get a puppy,” but then you don’t know if you’re going to have a puppy and a baby at the same time, which just seems ill-advised.

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(adorable, but ill-advised)

You decide you’re going to get your hair done, REALLY done, but you don’t know if you’ll be pregnant enough for the chemicals to make you feel sick when it’s happening (though the hydrogen peroxide gives me a headache anyway, baby or no).

You look at company holiday parties and you don’t know if you’ll need to buy something from the maternity section or if you’ll be able to wear something from your favorite store.

When your college buddies talk about planning a meet-up in a couple of months, you don’t know how to respond because you have no idea where you’ll be at that point. Will you be pregnant and glowing? Will you have to abstain from alcohol? Will you have to cancel a dinner because you have a last-minute appointment? WHO KNOWS?

tenor2

I like planning. As much as I still believe things will work out as they’re supposed to, that I’ll adapt, that we’ll find ways to make life work, I like to be able to plan. I like to be able to look at my life calendar and say, “Okay, a week from now, this is happening. A month from now, this is happening. A year from now, this is happening.” I know that nobody can do that with certainty, that being able to look forward is often a privilege rather than a stated fact.

But man, does it get frustrating to think you’ve got the next year or so all figured out and then have the rug pulled out from under you, and to have that happen multiple times. Since we started this journey, I’ve had that rug pulled out half a dozen times, and it’s exhausting. It’s taken over my life, more than parenting by itself ever has, and I’m so tired of it.

I just want to reach a point where I know with complete certainty that hey, in 10 months, a new baby will be here. And after that new baby gets here, I’m not going through this again. My brain and emotions just cannot take it anymore.

How Money

May 26, 2017 / lovescienceandnat20s / Leave a comment

Yesterday was a pretty bad day in terms of trying to conceive. Not the worst day–no miscarriages here–but my blood test came back negative for HCG, the pregnancy hormone. That’s the one that makes a second line or a plus sign appear on pregnancy tests after you pee on them. A negative blood test means that you’re not pregnant.

In other words, the latest transfer failed completely. That blastocyst, with a little heart on it, just got out of dodge, didn’t even stop to say hi and implant even a little. We’ll have no way of ever knowing why it didn’t implant, what went wrong on the chromosomal level (because everything else was textbook). It’s just gone, and we’re back to square one.

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(side note: this show was awesome)

Well. Not really square one, because we know certain things now. We know how much IVF medication is enough for me and how much is too much. We know that I need to have a 38 hour trigger instead of 36 for optimal results. We know that I can easily become overstimulated, and that I would prefer not to do that because it’s not fun or healthy or good.

And we know that if we want to succeed now, we’re going to have to do preimplantation genetic screening, or PGS.

That’s not entirely true. We don’t have to do that. There’s still a chance that we’ll get lucky with the odd blastocyst that’s somehow magically good. But I’m tired of wasting my time and wrecking my body with no results. When Kyle and I were in Texas this weekend, I told him that my biggest fear in this process is that we’ll exhaust all our options and come up empty handed. That I’ll have wrecked my body–because the IVF process has definitely wreaked havoc on my health–for nothing. I don’t mind if I’m a mess but we’ve got a kid at the end; it’ll be worth it.

But to be a physical disaster and have no kid as a result?

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So PGS. We’ve talked about it with our doctor before but always deferred because it’s not covered by our insurance. PGS costs about $2500-3500 at our office; in some offices, that number skyrockets to the $8000 range (at which point, I’d just say, “You know, we’ll just keep taking our chances or maybe rob a bank.”). And, well. We’re financially comfortable–we don’t have to choose between mortgage payments and food or electricity payments and daycare–but we’re not that financially comfortable. We don’t generally have that much money lying around for a rainy day. This isn’t because of poor spending habits on our part (on the contrary, we’re all pretty content to not spend money unless it’s necessary, like a $600 car repair or something), just because we’re not rich. Having $2500-3500 to throw at something is a tax bracket or two above us.

And even now, when PGS is our primary hope, I’ve been pretty sure that we didn’t have $2500-3500 to throw at it. I knew we had some extra money in our account–Kyle got a nice bonus this year, and our tax return was higher than it’s ever been–but I figured it was more in the $1000 range of “we don’t know how to spend money, so we’re not” rather than the $3500 range of “we’re rich.”

ja4z7
(if we were rich, we could do this. We wouldn’t, because that isn’t how physics works, but we could)

I mean. $1000 that we can throw at anything is a much better place than we were in five years ago. It’s a much better place than most folks we know, but it’s still a far cry from $2500-3500, especially when you consider that by the time we’re done buying groceries and paying bills, we’re also desperately trying to lay track to get to payday. That money would take a while to save up, even with a nice starting base of $1000. I figured that if we really pinched our pennies, we could do it in about ten months, or by next February-March.

(if we gave up food and gas for the cars, we could manage in five months, but while we’re all trying to exercise and eat healthier, that particular plan didn’t seem prudent)

And, well. That’s a wait. Next March would mark three years on this particular venture, and I’d be approaching the dreaded 35. Medically speaking, 35 is the age when your egg health swan dives off a cliff, leaving you with just wrinkly dusty things that may or may not be healthy. Your risk of chromosomal abnormalities–not just survivable ones like Trisomy 21 (Down Syndrome), but the ones that destroy viability like Trisomy 16 and other aneuploidies–skyrockets.

That’s not to say that it’s impossible to conceive a healthy child after 35, just that it gets a lot rarer and more difficult.

magegraph_chrom
(here’s a graph)

So I was brainstorming ideas to come up with the extra money quickly. I thought about doing a GoFundMe, but that felt icky to me. I’ve helped a lot of friends through GoFundMe, but it’s been for situations that really warranted help, like “our house burnt down” or “this person has cancer” or “someone has died” or sometimes all three at once (I gave a lot of money on that one because holy hell, universe, calm down). Crowdsourcing something that I could save myself over time seemed… wrong. Petty. Like taking money away from people who really need it.

I thought about selling a kidney or other body part through the black market, but that seemed counterintuitive to my attempts at a healthy pregnancy (I thought about selling Kyle’s kidney without him knowing, but our bathtub just isn’t big enough for the amount of ice we’d need).

tenor1
(Kyle doesn’t believe in Candy Mountain anyway)

I thought about robbing a bank, but that’s just impractical. You generally can’t get more than a cool thousand robbing a bank, and anyway, I’m not very stealthy. I’d probably get caught, and that would ruin the whole thing (though it would make for hilarious novel fodder and would maybe get me a Netflix series–maybe a knockoff of Orange is the New Black. I’d call it Dumb Baby Jail, because I would be dumb and would have gone to jail trying to get money to have a baby).

I thought about taking out a loan, but we have a lot of those already–student loans (ell oh ell), car loans, mortgage, credit cards. Our credit scores are kind of ugly right now, thanks to a nasty combination of all of the above plus Kyle’s identity being stolen a couple of years ago around tax time (it’s a lot harder to use your tax information to fix your finances when your finances are consistently monitored, not because you did a Bad, but because the powers that be worry that you’re an impostor you). I don’t know that we’d even get approved for a loan, even if taking one out was a good idea (it’s not).

So waiting, obnoxious waiting. I whined about it to Kyle when we went to bed last night, how I know we’re really lucky to even be having this conversation, but that I’m so tired of waiting. I’m having baby fever something fierce; I want another kid. I love our kid, our beautiful Sam (who is such a miracle I can’t even tell you), but I want another kid. And then, once everyone’s a little older, I want to adopt, maybe from foster care, and that will complete our family.

But anyway. I whined about money, and Kyle asked how we were doing in that regard, because we have a couple of bills due this week (specifically the ones he takes care of, which are two: his car payments and daycare. I take care of the rest). I looked at our bank account, expecting us to have enough for the car payment and daycare, plus that extra thousand, but not much else.

Instead, my bank account reminded me that oh, by the way, you never spent your tax return because you never thought to, so you actually have an extra more than $2000 sitting around, which is ridiculous considering that we were completely broke not five years ago.

(for context: five years ago, Kyle and I moved up to Massachusetts from Texas to keep from completely depleting our savings after I lost my job, which was our sole source of income at the time. My parents offered us their in-law apartment, rent-free, so we were able to just keep paying minimal bills while we looked for work. Kyle managed to get a great job in web UI development around August of that year, and now we’re here)

So. The point of this long story, in which I sound ridiculously privileged (don’t get me wrong–I have gallons of privilege, and I’m hyper aware of that fact) is that we don’t have to save up as much as I thought we would in order to accomplish the simple task of getting pregnant, which most people can do for free, uterus, I don’t know what your damage is. And that makes me feel better, even though I’m not currently pregnant.

giphy3
(that and moscato)

A Clump of Cells

May 16, 2017 / lovescienceandnat20s / 1 Comment

We all began as a clump of cells.

Or, really, just one cell, made from two. A sperm cell and an egg cell, each giving 50% of themselves to create a cell with a unique makeup… maybe not unique in all of history and prehistory, but unique in the here and now. The cell splits into two, then four, then eight, and so on. After five days, the cells with their own unique DNA number in the hundreds, divided into an inner cell mass and an outer layer. The inner cell mass will, assuming everything goes right, eventually become a human being with fingers and toes and lungs and a heart and a brain, and in the brain, a personality and memories and the ability to learn and think and grow.

And all just from a clump of cells.

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This is my clump of cells. We’re calling it Peanut.

Back in October, I did a round of IVF that went somewhat horribly awry. My RE decided, for reasons that I still haven’t figured out, to put me on really high doses of medication. It overstimulated my ovaries to the point that they were swollen to the size of apples rather than their usual almond size. I was in amazing pain; my organs had moved and shifted to make room for my giant ovaries, and in moving, they pressed up against my diaphragm and made it hard for me to take a deep breath. I looked like I was six months pregnant, when really, I hadn’t even conceived.

FullSizeRender (13) (I’m fat, but not like this; this is me right before I got the period that made this ridiculous bloat go away)

At the end of that cycle, I was supposed to take a final shot, a trigger shot, to push the eggs that had been developing in my ridiculous ovaries into maturity so that they could be harvested and fertilized to create embryos.

The trouble was that in the days leading up to that trigger, I had to take another medication to prevent my ovaries from releasing the eggs too early and making the whole month a waste. That medication did its job too well, and when I took the trigger shot, it did nothing. I went under general anesthesia and woke up just a few minutes later to my doctor apologizing and saying we’d try again the next day, after I took a stronger trigger. That trigger worked, but we only retrieved a handful of eggs out of the 40+ follicles my ovaries had created. And of that handful, only two fertilized.

Two clumps of cells, that’s all. Transferring one at that point would’ve put me in a bad place, physically, so we froze them to transfer later. My family and I went to Disney World, we celebrated Christmas and the New Year. And then, in January, I started the process for a transfer cycle.

Comparatively, it was an easy process. Instead of taking shots every day, I took pills–just seven tiny pills daily, plus a pessary (that’s a suppository in the front!). The side effects were negligible: sore boobs, wonky emotions, minor cramping. After 20 days, I went to the clinic and sat around with my pants off for a while before going into a procedure room. They transferred one of the embryos, one with a perfect score of 4AA. Everything was “perfect.”

But then it wasn’t. The embryo stuck, but then one Thursday morning, I went to the bathroom and saw blood gushing out. A lot of blood. I called into work, called the doctor, and then went to lie down for a couple of hours. When I got up, I sat down on the toilet and heard a splash as a clot of blood and flesh the size of a lemon fell out of me. Tests the next day showed what I already knew: I’d miscarried my perfect embryo.

Ultimately, it was nothing I did or didn’t do. My doctor assured me of that much. My hormone levels were fine, and everything looked good. That particular clump of cells, that hope for a person, had something irreparably damaged about it. It wasn’t viable. And it was gone.

But we decided to try again, and that’s what happened today. Kyle and I left the house around 7 to get to our appointment at 8:45 (we had to drive through awful I-95 traffic, which anyone in Massachusetts can tell you is pure hell). I had a bunch of talismans for luck:

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Lucky nails with Carrie Fisher-style “fuck you” fingers (see how they sparkle).

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Lucky socks with Princess Leia on them.

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A lucky bottle of ranch dressing, an inside joke with some friends also on TTC journeys.

They didn’t make me sit around with my pants off this time; I just changed in a little bathroom and scooted out, awkwardly trying to maintain some dignity while wrapping an oversized paper towel around my midsection. I sat down on the edge of the bed and put my legs up in a pair of stirrups. The nurse squirted some jelly on my lower abdomen and pressed down, showing me and Kyle where my bladder and uterus were. The doctor cranked open the speculum and inserted a catheter to guide the thawed embryo (technically, a blastocyst) up into my uterine lining to implant.

Kyle was excited because he could actually pick out the catheter and embryo on the ultrasound this time, a white line and a bright flash, traveling along the line and into the uterus. Less than a minute later, it was done. I cleaned myself off and tried to exit the room with dignity, but managed to crash into a cart full of instruments on my way. And then we went home, and I took it easy, on doctor’s orders. I slept a lot, then quietly entertained myself until Kyle and Kat and Sam took me out for a belated Mother’s Day dinner.

I don’t know what the clump of cells is doing right now; with any luck, it’s hatching out of its protective casing and burrowing into the uterine lining. With any more luck, I’ll find out that I’m pregnant ten days from now (probably sooner; I’ll definitely be peeing on a stick before then). With the best luck of all, this pregnancy will actually stick, and I’ll be able to write about that journey here, too.

For now, though, I’m PUPO–pregnant until proven otherwise, and all thanks to a clump of cells.

Made of Love, Part 1

May 10, 2017 / lovescienceandnat20s / Leave a comment

I am more than just the two of them. Everything they care about is what I am. I am their fury. I am their patience. I am a conversation. I am made of love.

This is the story of Sammy.

I went to see my primary care doctor in March of 2013, at which point Kyle and I had been trying to get pregnant for roughly a year with no success. She’s a fantastic woman, round and soft and more like an aunt than a doctor. If you ever raise a concern, she’ll look into it; if she doesn’t know the answer, she’ll search until she finds it. She looks under unturned stones and around unexplored corners to make sure that she gives you the best possible treatment. As doctors go, she’s one in a million.

(she’s not quite Four, but she’s pretty fantastic. Four for you, Dr. Dilley, you go, Dr. Dilley)

When she found out that I’d been trying to get pregnant without any luck, she immediately set up a referral to another doctor, a doctor whom I later found out was more interested in urology than in obstetrics. This doctor was not very good. She forgot things that I’d told her in the past and snapped at me when I corrected her. Under her guidance, the lab lost Kyle’s test results. She took one look at me, and without even testing me for anything, without having Kyle’s test results, she told me, “You need to lose weight or else you’ll never get pregnant. Lose 30 pounds and you’ll see results.”

The joke was on her, really. I’d just lost 30 pounds. I was primed to lose 30 more, but her words were a slap in the face. Without ever considering anything else about my health, she just decided that I couldn’t get pregnant because I had 30 extra pounds. It remained a constant thread throughout the next several months. No matter the test result, no matter the regularity of my ovulation, I couldn’t get pregnant because I was fat. That’s all there was to it.

(I didn’t like her)

Eventually, her nurse stepped in. I call her Giselle the Fantastic, because she is. I was near tears when I called her to try and schedule another appointment, and she looked over my charts. I could almost hear her frowning. “Let me see if I can get her to write you a prescription for clomid. That’s the first step we always take, and if that doesn’t work, I’ll get her to give you a referral to a reproductive endocrinologist.”

I was still near tears, but now they were tears of relief. Giselle went over the possible side effects of clomid (mostly “you may have twins”), and I started my first month after my next period. I was monitored, and I ovulated that month, but no dice. I geared up for another month, prepared myself to be wracked with wild mood swings and acne and bloating and so many other symptoms. I tracked my ovulation as religiously as I had been for months, tackled Kyle when things seemed to be hopping, and prayed for the best.

A week after it seemed I’d ovulated, I noticed I was spotting. My heart sank, but then Giselle the Fantastic called again. “Why don’t we schedule that consult with a reproductive endocrinologist?” she said and mailed me an envelope of information. I received it a day later and enjoyed poring through it. I didn’t know what the future had in store for us, but even though I was sure I was about to get my period, I felt hopeful. Maybe we could finally have answers, finally have a child.

The next day, I bought a bottle of moscato, my favorite wine. Drinks had become a tradition over the last year, my primary solace in the roller coaster of trying to conceive. I’d get my period, feel sad, but then Kyle would take me out for dinner, and I’d get a drink of my choice. The blood orange martini at Uno’s was a favorite, as was the pink punk cosmopolitan at Friday’s. Failing all of those, or if we were in a tight spot, I’d buy a bottle of moscato and enjoy it until it ran dry. I’d placed this month’s bottle in the fridge, ready to crack into it as soon as my period started in earnest.

The next day was Sunday, and Kyle and I were going to meet my parents for lunch, as we always did. I rolled out of bed around 9, early for me in those days of not having kids and not working, and staggered to the bathroom. It was nine days after I’d ovulated. I saw, as I went to sit down, a pregnancy test still sitting around from a month before. On a whim, I opened it, used it, barely expected anything.

And then promptly lost my shit when I saw two pink lines.

From Kyle’s perspective, it was a slow, sleepy Sunday morning. He was making coffee. He heard me get up, heard some crinkling, and then heard a scream and what sounded like a dozen elephants as I charged towards where he stood in the kitchen, pee stick held aloft like the One Ring of Sauron. “I’m pregnant,” I said breathlessly.

The chemical pregnancy I’d had early in our journey had me wary. I spent the week peeing on more tests. The test line got progressively darker; by the end of the week, the tests were disgusting but the lines were beautifully dark pink. Kyle made me throw them away after the first ultrasound. He understood my need for reassurance, but his tolerance for things that have been peed on has limits.

The first ultrasound came after my first appointment with my obstetrician, Dr. Solano (whom I highly recommend for anyone in the central Massachusetts area). He was smiling and friendly, but he also was straightforward. He didn’t beat around the bush or sugarcoat anything, but at the same time, he was very reassuring. Over the next sevenish months, he kept me from losing my mind with terror over every little twinge and shiver.

And he scheduled the first ultrasound when I was nine weeks along. We’d been disappointed so many times that I half expected to see nothing there, not even an empty gestational sac, but delightfully, the opposite was true. Bouncing on the monitor was a definite fetus, with little limbs we could recognize and a big ol’ head. We thought it looked like the chickenhawk from Looney Tunes. It bounced and bounced, alive and with a heartbeat of 179 bpm. It was healthy, a healthy baby, one that we wouldn’t lose.

As pregnancies go, mine was mostly uneventful. My tests all came back fine, and the only thing that went wrong happened at the very end of the pregnancy, when everything connected to my liver decided that it was time to rebel. I had a total of three ultrasounds–the initial, dating ultrasound; a nuchal translucency scan at 12 weeks; and the complete anatomy scan at 21 weeks. I relished in feeling Sam moving inside of me, even when I felt like an alien.

(if you’ve never experienced this before, let me assure you that it feels exactly as weird as it looks like it feels)

He stayed put for a good long while, though, and showed no signs of wanting to leave by his due date of May 9. On May 12, I went in for a nonstress test to make sure he was still moving around healthily, along with a routine exam. Dr. Solano was performing an emergency C-section, so I spoke with another doctor, Dr. Nabizdeh (who was also wonderful, but has since moved away). She told me that between my elevated liver enzyme levels, my elevated blood pressure, and my concerns about Sam’s movement, they’d induce me either that day or the next. A couple of hours later, Dr. Solano made the final call and asked me to come in that night for an induction. It was finally time to meet my Sam.

Glitter

May 4, 2017 / lovescienceandnat20s / Leave a comment

Today is Star Wars Day, celebrated in the tradition of the date: May the Fourth, as in May the Fourth (Force) be with you. I’ve been telling Sam about this for roughly a week, and he’s not a fan of the pun, mostly because he’s not quite at a point where he understands that it’s funny when one word sounds like another. Still, he’s come around somewhat–this morning, he did say “May the Fourth be with you and may the Force be with you!” so he’s not a total lost cause when it comes to our great family tradition of punning.

This Star Wars Day is special, in that a lot of people are wearing glitter today, in memory of Carrie Fisher, who played Princess Leia. Carrie spent most of her life struggling with mental illness, specifically with bipolar disorder. There’s a great video of her explaining what that entails here; it basically boils down to her brain chemistry either pushing her into “really fast and impulsive” or “really sad and slow.” (“Or both. Those are fun days.”) Outside of Star Wars, her most enduring and fantastic legacy has been as an advocate for mental health. She did so much to normalize mental illness, to remove the stigma and say hey, just because your brain is a little off kilter doesn’t mean that you’re broken as a person or a bad person in any sense of the word. I only really became aware of her advocacy in the last couple of years, and I’m kind of bummed that I didn’t spend more time loving her for it.

Anyway, glitter. In one of her memoirs, Carrie talked about how her therapist always knew if she was having a bad day because she’d be wearing copious amounts of glitter. Glitter was her way of adding brightness to the world when she found it to be dark and difficult. She was notorious for glitter bombing people at conventions, and it was her way of trying to cheer people up if they seemed to be having a bad day (and I will tell you, having Carrie glitter bomb me would absolutely make any day 6000% better). You can find all sorts of pictures and anecdotes about this across the internet.

SO. Today I am wearing glitter for Carrie, to memorialize her and to bring awareness to mental illness. In particular, I’m going to talk today about postpartum depression and anxiety, my own two personal shoulder demons.

Depression and anxiety have been companions of mine for a long time. When I was really young, seven or eight or nine years old, I’d spend sleepless nights praying for God to forgive me of anything I couldn’t think of because I was terrified that I’d done something bad and would end up possessed by demons or sent to hell. When I was eleven, just as puberty was starting to hit, I entered one of the more hellish years of my life, overfull with bullying, bad grades, and lost friends. In any given week, I’d spend nights curled up on the bathroom floor because I felt like I was going to throw up from all of it together. One time, riding in the backseat of our family minivan, I heard a woman on the radio talk about how she’d been sick for so long that she couldn’t remember what it felt like not to be sick; I could relate.

I don’t think I had my first bout with depression until college, and that particular downswing was a long one. It started in bits and pieces during my freshman year; I started sequestering myself in my room, not eating meals with my friends but instead microwaving whatever I could find. Sophomore year it got worse, and then, the summer after sophomore year, I was in an emotionally manipulative relationship with a guy I met at work. He used to keep me on the phone late at night–on our house line, mind–trying to get me to talk him out of killing himself. It was exhausting. It dragged me down.

In a desperate bid to come back to myself, I spent a semester abroad in England (after, thankfully, dumping the boyfriend), and that helped, but when I came home, I was still in that place.

The imagery we use when we talk about depression is so dark, and that’s not what depression is like for me at all. Really, it’s more like a foggy day where you can’t see more than a couple of feet around you. You know there’s something on the other side of the fog, but you can’t see it and you can’t get there. If you’re stuck there long enough, you just want everything to stop because what’s the point? There’s no tomorrow that you can see. There’s nothing but the monotony of right now, and tomorrow will be like it, and the next day, and so on. You don’t want to die, not necessarily, but you want to stop, and what way is there to stop but to die?

(this is a kitten and a deer and they’re friends)

I don’t remember how I pulled out of that particular downswing, but I did. I finished school, I graduated, I flailed around looking for work for a while, lowkey depressed all the while. I wasn’t quite in the same place I’d been, but I was low. I didn’t really have anything to look forward to, and I always felt like I was on that precipice, like I was verging on another downswing.

Something that helped was Kyle; he gave me something out of the ordinary to look forward to. Traveling to see him, having him travel to see me–they broke up the monotony. I had someone telling me that, hey, on the other side of the fog is someone who loves you, and you get to see him.

(coming later: me analyzing this entire movie and the amazing way these two played this scene)

It helped. It helped a lot. And for a long time, I was out of that downswing. I finished my master’s degree, I started working, I got married, I started trying to get pregnant.

I don’t know if infertility increases the risk of postpartum depression, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it does, particularly because you’re afraid of losing what you’ve got, and that quickly turns into anxiety.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. My pregnancy with Sam was great, up until about the last four weeks. My body was SO done with being pregnant. My liver was the most frustrated with the situation and just sort of lost its fool mind. I ballooned up with excess fluid; my calves were so swollen that Kat and I spent many afternoons drawing pictures in my legs by just pressing down on the skin. I was physically miserable, and when I finally gave birth, I was relieved. So relieved. Within a day, I lost 30 pounds of water weight. Boom, gone.

(late pregnancy in a nutshell)

Early motherhood didn’t come particularly easy for me. Some parts of it did; Sam was a delightful baby overall, a unicorn, really. He only fussed or cried if he was hungry or needed a diaper. He slept easily. He loved being held and was so curious about the world. He learned to smile at six weeks on the dot, and he learned to laugh about two weeks after that.

But other things were more difficult. Breastfeeding was hard. For the uninitiated, it involves so many more moving parts than you realize, and if your kid is not interested in latching, you’re up the crick without a padoodle, as my history teacher used to say when warning us to study for tests. And Sam? Sam did not want to latch. He didn’t want to breastfeed. He had no interest. He wanted to eat, that much was true, but he didn’t want to breastfeed at all. We ended up switching over to formula when he was two months old, and thank God we did.

And even with an easy unicorn baby, the transition from no baby to baby is difficult. You go from having moments to breathe, think, be yourself to having none. You go from understanding your body to inhabiting a monstrous form. Hell, you go from knowing when you need to use the toilet to peeing your pants because you didn’t know that you needed to use the toilet.

And all the while, your body is having this enormous hormone crash. Everything that went into sustaining a human life for the last 40 weeks suddenly drops off, and your body flails in confusion, like what am I doing with myself anymore?

Your entire identity changes. You promise yourself beforehand that you won’t be one of those people who’s wholly consumed by motherhood and loses yourself, but in the first couple of months, you can’t do otherwise–unless you want to pass your baby off to a nanny or wetnurse and have done with it. The person you were before is gone, and if she does come back, it won’t be for a while.

So with all of that going on, it’s no wonder that postpartum depression and anxiety are huge things. It’s no wonder that, when you have a prior history of depression and anxiety, your doctor gives you pamphlets of things to look out for. The real wonder is that PPD/PPA numbers aren’t higher, and sometimes, I wonder if people just underreport.

The tipping point for me, the point where I decided to get help and end the fog and nausea, came about a week after my gallbladder surgery. I was at about 80%, health-wise, but I was still off-kilter and very high key anxious about everything. I was having panic attacks every night, lying in our queen-size bed by myself while Kyle slept in the living room with the baby so that I could rest and heal. My usual coping mechanisms weren’t working at all, and I didn’t know what to do.

It was a Sunday, and Kyle wanted to go to my parents’ house to do laundry, like we always did. I wasn’t going to join, because I still wasn’t feeling well, and Kyle wanted to leave the baby with me so that he could have some alone time for the first time that week (my parents were out of town). The idea of being left alone with the baby sent me into a panic. I didn’t know what to do. What would happen if a sudden complication from surgery came up and I got sick? What if I panicked and hurt the baby? What if I couldn’t do it? What if I took one of the vicodin they’d given me and it made me too tired to take care of the baby? What if? What if? What if?

I was shaking and crying, and Kyle said to me, “Look. I’ll take Sam with me, but you have to promise me that first thing tomorrow morning, you’ll call your doctor and use the words, ‘I think I have postpartum depression.’ Do you promise that you’ll do that?”

He had me backed into a corner in more ways than one. I promised.

And I got help. My doctor took one look at me and put me on one of the stronger antidepressants out there, venlafaxine (or Effexor). When the first dosage didn’t seem enough, she bumped me up and referred me to a therapist. I found things to look forward to, like moving into a new house, celebrating Sam’s birthday. I got a job so that the daily monotony could be broken up. I started to feel better.

I’m not out of the woods, honestly speaking. I still have days where I feel that fog coming back, and there are still things I need to work through. Lately, though, if I have one of those days, I’ve been drowning myself in Wet N’ Wild glitter and taking moments to think of what I have to look forward to: Sam’s birthday, trips to Texas, the hypothetical next child, etc. It’s a short term solution (and I do need to find myself a new therapist, though blogging helps a lot), but it works to break up the fog on all but the very worst days.

So here are my takeaways.

First, if you’re feeling that fog or that nausea, if you don’t think you have anything to look forward to or if you’re constantly afraid, you don’t have to feel that way. Talk to someone–call a doctor, find an online resource if you can’t speak with a doctor, talk to a friend or family member. Ask them to help you find something that shines through the fog so that you can keep going. Ask them to help you find your center again. Douse yourselves in glitter, and remember that depression and anxiety lie. Good things will happen again. Not everything in your future is bad, and you’re strong enough to withstand any bad that does come.

And second, if you know and love someone who’s dealing with that fog or nausea, help them. Talk to them. Give them something to look forward to. Sit with them when they panic. Help them find the strength to keep going. Step in and help them. Be the glitter for them.

More than a Handmaid

April 27, 2017 / lovescienceandnat20s / Leave a comment

Last night, after putting Sam to bed and catching up with Kyle and Kat about how their days went, I settled in to watch The Handmaid’s Tale on Hulu. The Handmaid’s Tale is one of my alltime favorite books, not just from a feminist perspective (which is hugely important, and I’ll get to that in a bit), but because Margaret Atwood is a fantastic writer, the kind I dream of being. She has such a remarkable command of the English language, and her prose is rich and engrossing. The Handmaid’s Tale is one of those books that, even when you just read a chapter or two, makes you wonder what day it is when you finally put it down; you’re that pulled into the world.

The story, for the uninitiated, features a dystopian world in which the abuse of religion in a political setting has led to severe oppression of women, who are seen as nothing more than various appliances, their function delineated by their societal caste, and their caste determined by their age and whether or not they have functioning ovaries.

In other words: their worth is 100% determined by whether or not they can have children.

A lot of other factors go into how women are treated in this society, but it all revolves around their fertility and behavior. If you’re infertile (as many women in this society are; the society doesn’t allow for the possibility of male factor infertility, which is a contributing factor in roughly a third of all infertility cases), your behavior is everything. “Good” women might get to be Wives; “bad” women are designated as Unwomen and sent to the Colonies to clean up radioactive waste until they wither away and die.

(I’m sorry, this isn’t funny at all, I’m a terrible person)

That said, a “bad” woman with functioning ovaries has a special role in this society, that of a Handmaid. The Handmaid’s only purpose in life is to conceive and bear children for Gilead’s high-powered men. She undergoes testing to monitor her menstrual cycle and, once a month, participates in a Ceremony, in which she lies on the Wife’s lap while her– well, let’s be honest. Her owner rapes her in the interest of conceiving a child. If she can’t conceive and deliver a living child over the course of two years, she’s assigned to another house. If she fails to conceive over the course of three separate assignments, she’s considered an Unwoman and goes where Unwomen go–to the Colonies, to die a slow, agonizing death.

It’s such a rich world, and I could honestly spend hours on end writing analyses of it, discussing it in its overall societal and historical context, marveling in horror that nothing that happens in the book hasn’t happened somewhere in our world at some point in history… but that’s been done. I wanted to talk about fertility and infertility and struggling to grieve my infertility as a feminist.

(yes, a super light topic for your Thursday; tune in next week when we discuss the nuances and nature of the soul and theories surrounding the nature of man based on readings from Plato and Aristotle that I will assign after class)

Part of the truth that The Handmaid’s Tale is set to remind us of is that women are not their ability to conceive and carry children. Throughout the course of history, in various settings (see: Henry VIII and his six wives, a desperate bid for a male heir that saw his rotation of partners not as individuals but as potential brood mares), the lie that women are only as good as their ability to procreate has been told again and again and again. We are not our ability to conceive and carry children.

We’re not even our desire or lack thereof to conceive and carry children. I have a bunch of friends who are childfree by choice, including Kat the Fantastic. They don’t want to have kids now or ever; they’d have the whole system removed, if they could (admittedly, so would I, if that wouldn’t make it… yanno, impossible to have biological kids). Some of them talk about maybe eventually mentoring or adopting older children and teenagers about to age out of the system, but most of them are perfectly content to live their lives without ever raising a child, and that’s awesome.

So I believe all of that, wholeheartedly. I am not my ability to reproduce or my desire to reproduce or just the person who reproduced (though I’m happy to be that person). I’m so much more (writer with a wry sense of humor, imaginative gamer, traveler who wishes that traveling didn’t cost dollars, eventual collector of many cats, wife and friend). I’m aware of all that. I’m aware that I’m good at my job, and I’m aware of how frustrated I am by how much it defines me. I’m aware that I really love food, and I’m aware that I really love food way too much. I’m aware that I make things awkward in my house when I start singing along with Hamilton while wearing headphones and forgetting half the lyrics.

(we get past about this point and I’m like “I can’t hear that fast.”)

I know who I am, and it’s so much more than a pair of ovaries that don’t know what they’re doing, than a uterus that’s an absolute asshole (how’s that for an anatomical conundrum), than wanting to give Sam a sibling or having wanted Sam in the first place. I know all of that.

But it doesn’t make it hurt any less.

I’ve been talking with Kat a lot lately about infertility. She’s childfree by choice, as I’ve mentioned before, and she doesn’t get the desire to have kids. I’ve ended up describing it a lot in terms of a good metaphor I’ve found: climbing Mount Everest.

Look, climbing Mount Everest is 100% not for everyone. For the life of me, I cannot imagine wanting to climb it instead of just reaching out of a helicopter and booping the peak during a fly-by. Training to climb the tallest peak in the world is beyond physically demanding, and even if you’re in peak physical health, the climb is dangerous and stressful. People die on that journey so regularly that the various corpses along the trail have become landmarks (if you have a strong stomach for that sort of thing, google “Green Boots”). I look at it, and I’m utterly grateful that climbing Mount Everest is not mandatory, because I will be A-okay my entire life without doing it.

(pictured: not me)

But some people really want to climb Mount Everest, I mean really want to. They don’t just wake up one morning and say, “What-ho, I think I shall climb this mountain and be done in time for lunch.” They train for years, scaling the most dangerous peaks in the world to prepare for the climb. If and when they eventually get to Everest, they do everything they’ve trained to do, everything they’ve learned over years and years, sometimes even decades of practice.

And sometimes, they still don’t make it.

Sometimes, the weather is just too bad to attempt the climb. Sometimes, travel plans fall through and they can’t get to Nepal at all. Sometimes, they make it partway up the mountain but have to turn back. Worst case scenario, they become another body for future climbers to use as a landmark on their journey to the peak (but let’s hope that doesn’t happen). And holy crap, that must suck! These people put so much time, money, energy, and health into preparing to climb Mount Everest, and then something happens that prevents it from taking place.

(can you see where I’m going with this metaphor? Because if not, I don’t know how to help you, I’m sorry)

So in this context, it’d probably be something of a jerk move to tell someone who’s really wanted to climb Mount Everest and tried so hard and invested so much, “It’s alright, you don’t have to climb Mount Everest” or “you’re more than your mountain climbing.” Like yes, this is true, I get it and agree with it, but as the metaphorical climber, I really want to climb Mount Everest and I am extremely bummed that I can’t do it.

(I should emphasize again that you couldn’t get me to actually climb Mount Everest if you dragged me up there like some sort of freaky human backpack)

(pictured: freaky human backpack)

It boils down to another one of those things that’s hard to navigate about infertility, especially looking at it from a feminist perspective. I’m 100% aware and understanding that even though a lot of my life is currently orbiting fertility treatments (largely by necessity), my ability to reproduce and my desire to reproduce are not the only things about me. I’m also aware that I can and do live a full and happy life without having another child; that if we go through all six cycles of IVF and every single frozen embryo we transfer is a dud and somehow we can’t adopt in the (sort of distant because adoption costs more dollars than we have) future, I’ll be okay. I’ll recenter myself and be alright.

But in the moment, I’m sad and frustrated and disappointed, and it honestly boils down to exactly that: having a child (another one) is something that I really want to do. I like being a mom; I like it a lot. It’s not all of who I am, but it’s something that I thoroughly enjoy, like I enjoy being a wife and a friend and a daughter and a sister and myself as not defined by any other human being. I don’t feel like my inability to conceive and carry a child means that I’m worth less as a person or worthless as a person; I know that it doesn’t.

It’s still frustrating, though. The whole world gives you messages of “you can do anything you set your mind to,” and “don’t let your dreams be dreams” and the truth of the matter ends up being that, no, you can’t necessarily do everything you want to, even if it’s something that doesn’t hurt anyone, even if it’s something that everyone should be able to do.

Getting back to The Handmaid’s Tale, and deviating slightly. It was interesting to me how viscerally the show portrayed the emotional toll of the infertility crisis that’s part of the background of the story (tl;dr – pollution and disease have resulted in plummeting birth rates, something that an Aunt–one of the women in charge of training Handmaids–blames on “sluts”). People can’t get pregnant or stay pregnant, and if they manage both of those things, the babies they have end up having such severe birth defects that they don’t survive. In one scene, the main character–Offred, then called June–has just given birth to her daughter. She makes her way to the nursery with her daughter and her daughter’s nurse and finds it empty, where it was full the night before. “Where are the other babies?” she asks, and the nurse sadly remarks, “Two are in the ICU, and the others are with God.”

Later, a woman–I like to think she was the mom of one of the babies that were with God–tries to steal June’s baby, killing the nurse and absconding with June’s daughter in her arms. The scene is fraught with screaming, June and her husband Luke screaming to get their child back; the baby screaming for her mother; the police screaming at the woman to get her under control; the woman screaming for her lost child.

As June goes into the hospital to give birth, protesters stand around the doorways, screaming and praying and doing general protest things. They’re all desperate to have children.

When June finds out that she’s pregnant, she speaks of it in hushed tones with her best friend Moira. Moira is thrilled for her, but June is having a hard time being excited because her chances of miscarrying or giving birth to a baby that eventually dies are so high.

Once the world goes to hell, June is renamed Offred and serves Commander Fred Waterford and his wife, Serena Joy. The show hasn’t quite gone there yet, but in the book, Serena is desperate to have a child, so desperate that she breaks the rules entirely and allows Offred to sleep with their driver and Guardian, Nick. Most of what we’ve seen so far in the show is subtler (and I haven’t seen the third episode yet–I started watching too late last night to finish all three, so I may miss the mark here); Serena doesn’t do anything yet that’s so desperate or insidious. But she’s still brokenhearted at the violation of her own life going on during the Ceremony, and she’s still feigning happiness when another Handmaid–Ofwarren, formerly known as Janine–gives birth.

And you know, I really appreciate all of those portrayals. No, that’s not a strong enough word. I love the way the show is treating this. If there’s any show in the world that could be called blatantly feminist, it’s The Handmaid’s Tale, and if there’s one single thing that anyone could take from the show (please, if you watch it, take more than one single thing from it), it’s that women are more than their ability to reproduce. But the show takes things a step further; it doesn’t just leave this idea of you are not your ovaries and uterus. It shows us that even when you know that, you can still feel pain at being unable to conceive and give birth and raise a child; and conversely, that just because you really want to have a kid doesn’t mean that you’re nothing but reproductive organs and a body that houses them.

(and because I love it, Tor.com has a really excellent review of the first three episodes here; be forewarned that this stuff is pretty brutal)

Here I Go Again

April 25, 2017 / lovescienceandnat20s / Leave a comment

tumblr_o18augephu1uewx7xo1_400

This is my second FET cycle and my fifth overall ART cycle. (that’s frozen embryo transfer and assisted reproductive technology, for the uninitiated)

I got the go-ahead to start medications yesterday, so I’m currently on 1mg twice daily of estrogen and 81mg once daily of baby aspirin to keep me from getting blood clots (a serious risk when you start pumping your body full of estrogen). On May 1, I’ll be switching over to 2mg twice daily of estrogen (still just 81mg once daily of aspirin), and then on May 5, I’ll start taking 2mg three times daily of estrogen… and 81mg once daily of aspirin. On May 9, I go in for bloodwork and an ultrasound to make sure that my uterine lining is thickening the way it should be and that my body has enough hormones hanging out in it, and the next day, May 10, I start with my progesterone.

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(the progesterone is not a pill)

In theory, this all means that the embryo transfer will be on May 15, which is both earlier and later than I’d hoped. Thankfully, I’ll be insanely busy during that particular two week wait, since Kyle and I are taking Sam down to Texas for a long weekend between May 18 and 22, and travel always gets me running around like a chicken with my head cut off. I’m already anticipating the chaos of the week leading up to that trip: finishing last minute things at work, trying to make sure I’ve got enough cute and summery clothes for a weekend in Texas in May (which is like a weekend in Massachusetts in July, really), packing ALL the things, etc.

I’m trying not to get my hopes up, like I’d said before. It’s entirely possible, in fact based on all the available evidence, it’s likely that this transfer will end in a failure or a miscarriage or both at the same time. I’m trying not to get my hopes up, but I still keep finding myself imagining the good ending, the one where this pregnancy actually ends with a baby.

I imagine finally getting to announce a pregnancy to my family and friends, having no trouble keeping it hidden until whatever date Kyle and I agree on as an arbitrary “hey guess what, we’re finally knocked up” date. I imagine what our announcement will look like… maybe something simple like Sam reading a book about “how to be a big brother” or just wearing a T-shirt that says “big brother” on it. Maybe something like last time, something that employs Kyle and my design knowledge.

old
(actual announcement when we were expecting Sam)

I imagine feeling movement for the first time, recognizing it as such before I recognized it with Sam. I imagine seeing a viable heartbeat fluttering away on the first ultrasound, the nuchal translucency scan, the anatomy scan. I imagine watching another baby kicking and arching and moving and alive, beautifully alive.

I imagine losing my feet, waddling about in absolute agony with a baby settled between my hips and not moving anywhere for the life of me or itself. I imagine being swollen like a sausage and being able to draw smiley faces in my swollen legs as I countdown the minutes to giving birth. I imagine making excuses for myself throughout the summer as morning sickness keeps me from enjoying company breakfasts and barbecues and much beyond a summer treat. I imagine how incredibly tired I’ll be for the first three months and the last three, how warm I’ll feel, how Kyle will inch away from me while we’re sleeping because I’ll be a little oven of a person.

I imagine the celebratory things that I usually think are way too twee for me but that I really want to embrace this time. I imagine having a wonderful maternity shoot with my friend Melanie (who took our wedding pictures and my maternity pictures with Sam AND Sam’s newborn pictures… what can I say, when you find the best photographer ever, you stick with her), and I imagine somehow managing to score a photoshoot at Boston’s Museum of Science. I’m pretty sure this can’t happen unless you pay them a hefty fee, but I still like the idea of a baby conceived through science being celebrated surrounded by science (ideal shots: me next to an oversized model of a pregnant mom, me among the planets in the solar system, me next to the giant model of a black widow spider looking sufficiently freaked out).

blackwidowspider
(literally this but the size of a small dog)

I imagine, too, that I’ll give the whole thing a rainbow theme. In miscarriage and infant loss circles, a “rainbow baby” is any baby conceived and born after a loss–the rainbow after the storm. Kat thinks this whole idea is, frankly, silly, but I love it, maybe because it’s silly. I don’t want to do anything really elaborate–no flying with rainbows or running around naked surrounded by rainbows of tulle or anything like that. Maybe just a rainbow of paint or a rainbow in my hands. Something simple.

In the vein of twee things, I imagine doing a gender reveal. I know, I know, gender is a social construct and the genitalia of a fetus does not necessarily determine how said child will identify later in life and does not take into account intersex children and furthers the gender binary and so on. I still want to do it. I still want to go and get some balloons for Sam to discover in pink or blue. I still really hope for pink because my god, do I want to have a little girl. I’m still a little nervous about blue because I have no idea what I’d name another boy or if I could handle two little boys.

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(it is my understanding that the more boys you have, the more your life starts to resemble Malcolm in the Middle, and I’m just not cool enough to manage that)

I imagine celebrating in one more twee way: I want to have shirts for me and this imaginary baby that say something along the lines of “made with love and science.” I really want to honor that, the impact science has had on the creation and expansion of this family. It’s something to be celebrated, I feel; without science, there wouldn’t even be a me and Kyle, let alone a me and Kyle and Kat and Sam and maybe one more.

I imagine exhausting late pregnancy appointments, ignoring the number on the scale whenever I step on it, going and going and maybe having another induction or maybe needing a C-section or maybe delivering completely without intervention (except an epidural, I want like ten of those). And then I imagine actually holding this child that I’ve been trying SO HARD to conceive for the past two years and knowing that it’s all been worth it.

That’s what I imagine. And then I remind myself that it hasn’t happened and that the odds are not in my favor, so I should probably get back to work and planning Sam’s birthday and getting ready to head to Texas and things like that.

Other People’s Pregnancies

April 14, 2017 / lovescienceandnat20s / Leave a comment

As a rule of thumb, I’ve become immune to the overall distress that comes with infertility, at least when pertaining to other pregnant women.

I don’t think this makes me special in any way, but it does create some distance when I’m talking with other infertile women. A common sentiment in infertility communities is this sort of bitterness or frustration with seeing other people in your life get pregnant while you try and try and don’t succeed. And… yeah, I get that. I was there when we were trying so hard to get pregnant with Sam, only it was rarely with people I knew. Instead, it was with random strangers I’d pass in the mall or wherever, waddling along with their round bellies in front of them, daring to look happy. I wasn’t mad at them, not really. I only thought, “Why not me?”

This second time around has been pretty different for me, emotionally speaking. I think part of it is because I’ve been through pregnancy, so I’m not looking at them and thinking, “Why not me?” but rather, “Oh man, I hope you get a chance to put your feet up later today.” Pregnancy isn’t easy, and I think a pet peeve arises for me when people act as if you shouldn’t complain about being pregnant, either because some people can’t get pregnant or because you should be happy that you’re having a baby. Look: if I ever get pregnant again, I will be over the moon with joy about that fact. That said, I will also complain about morning sickness, the aches, the pains, the fact that my body will suddenly be the same temperature as the sun, all the swelling, the exhaustion, the Braxton Hicks contractions, the need to pee every 30 seconds, the inexplicable magnetism of a pregnant belly as it acts upon complete strangers, and so on.

In other words: I don’t think your happiness and gratitude about being pregnant in any way precludes you being able to complain about being pregnant.

When I was pregnant with Sam, my body basically decided it was done being pregnant the second we hit the 40 week mark. The trouble was, it didn’t make this decision by going into labor. Instead, I swelled up like a balloon, gaining 30 pounds of water weight in a week. I couldn’t exist comfortably. Every position possible was miserable for me. My hips and lower back felt permanently misaligned. I couldn’t eat. I couldn’t sleep. I itched (this, I would later learn, was likely intrahepatic cholestasis of pregnancy… either that or a symptom of my gallbladder quitting). I was miserable, but that in no way meant that I wasn’t grateful for Sam’s impending arrival or happy that he was on his way.

I think the difference ends up being that for me, pregnancy is just a means of getting to the place I want to be, that place being motherhood. I didn’t get pregnant to be pregnant; I got pregnant to have a child. I wasn’t happy about being pregnant; I was happy to be having a child.

And now he’s here, and I’m still happy about it.

With that in mind, it doesn’t faze me in the least when people complain about being pregnant. Being pregnant is hard! It’s one of the most stressful positive things you can put your body through (and I don’t say that to make any martyr statements; training for a marathon is pretty stressful and positive, too. So is climbing Mount Everest and like. Six bajillion other things that I’m like “hey, I’d never do that, but you do you” about). And I don’t really relate to the idea that people shouldn’t complain about the physical stress of being pregnant because “hey! At least you’re pregnant!” Yeah, you’re pregnant. And that means you’re physically uncomfortable. A lot physically uncomfortable. I feel you.

And on the flip side, it doesn’t faze me when people are really happy about being pregnant, either. Dude, it’s awesome! There’s the physical discomfort, sure, but there are also so many cool things you experience, like those first little shivery flutters that turn into movement. And man, everyone spoils you rotten when you’re pregnant. They stop the second the baby is born, but as long as you’ve got that belly, people will open doors for you and help you carry things and ask if you need anything and be overall far more generous than usual. And absolutely best of all, you’re getting a human at the end of it. An actual, real live human that you get to raise. That’s pretty sweet!

I remember the first times I felt Sam move, when I didn’t even realize that’s what I was feeling. It was that sensation of butterflies in your stomach, that light and fluttery shivery feeling. The bigger he got, the more I felt him. The first time I really felt him was, hilariously enough, when we were watching the first Hobbit movie with my family and someone started speaking the Black Speech. Thump, thump, thump went Sam as the infamous script on the One Ring was read: “Ash nazg durbatulûk, ash nazg gimbatul, ash nazg thrakatulûk agh burzum-ishi krimpatul.” It was hilarious!

And gosh, but I love my little human. He and I are baking a cake later today, and he’s been excited about it all week. He keeps running to our supplies and asking if it’s time yet. Every time I go into the kitchen, even just to get a drink, he runs in with me and pulls his baking chair over to the counter so that we can bake together. And I kind of dissolve into a little puddle of momma goo, like, Kiddo, you could literally ask me for anything right now and I’d be like, “Absolutely.”

So joy over pregnancy? That doesn’t faze me. I get it. And I’m happy for you.

The things that do faze me, the things that make me angry and say, “Why not me?” are usually when I see objectively bad parents continuing to have children. I don’t mean parents who don’t give their kids organic food or who are crunchier than I could ever dream of being or parents who are struggling to get it right and mess up sometimes.

I mean abusive parents. Parents who beat their children or sexually molest them. Parents who say such terrible things to their children–that they wish their kids had never been born, that their kids are worthless, that their kids don’t deserve nice things. Parents who see their children as objects to be used and discarded at their whim, abused if they don’t behave “correctly” or otherwise don’t live up to impossible expectations. Parents who let other people harm their children, who don’t listen when their kids come to them for protection, who make things worse. Parents who refuse to get their children medical help because it goes against their personal beliefs, and so they let their children die of easily treatable things.

(that’s a depressing thought, so here’s a kitten hugging a puppy)

I see stories, so many stories, about parents who’ve done these things and have so many kids. And that’s when I think, “Why them and not me?”

I know I’m not a perfect mom. It’s impossible to be a perfect mom. I’ve probably already given Sam’s future tell-all book at least three chapters of material. But my god, I love that kid, so very much. I couldn’t ever intentionally hurt him, not more than the pain that comes with not letting him get his way 24/7 or holding him in place so that he can get a vaccination. The idea of someone hurting him simultaneously breaks my heart and fills me with such preemptive rage that I feel myself hulking out.

(DON’T. HURT. MY. KID.)

I remember when he had to get his first vaccines, at two months old. I am SUPER pro-vaccination; I think vaccinations may be the greatest invention of the last three hundred years. The diseases prevented by the two month vaccines are so terrifying to me, and understandably so: whooping cough, diptheria, polio, tetanus, pneumococcal disease. The idea of watching my baby with any of those was horrifying to me, and I was intellectually super ready to get him vaccinated.

But emotionally, I was not ready. For every moment of his existence to that point, he was able to wholly trust me to keep him from feeling any pain. Whenever he cried from hunger or discomfort, I was there to feed him or rearrange him or do whatever he needed. I kept him warm and fed, safe, and free from pain. And even though I was intellectually all about getting him vaccinated (because duh, Abby, the pain from tetanus is MUCH worse than the pinprick of a needle), knowing that I was allowing him to experience pain kind of broke my heart into a million tiny pieces.

The nurse noticed me tearing up as she got ready to give him the shots. “It’s alright. You’re normal,” she said with a wry smile. “Trust me, this is much more upsetting to you than it is to him. He won’t even remember this.”

And she was right. Sam still trusts me wholly. Kyle is usually the one he calls out for when he’s afraid (because Kyle is 6’4” tall and built like a bear), but I’m his go-to when he’s an emotional wreck.

But either way. It was hard enough for me to let someone cause him pain when I knew it would have a long term benefit. Letting someone hurt him just because? Hurting him myself just because? Seeing him as anything less than the fantastic human being he is?

FUCK no.

(just no)

That’s when infertility feels keenly unfair to me. It’s when I see someone who hurts their children going on to have more and more and more children. It’s when I see someone who’s willing to let their children be harmed, physically or sexually or emotionally, walking around with a baby bump. It’s when I see someone who’s an objectively horrible parent having so many kids and I, who try so hard to put everything into bringing up my child to be the best possible person, can’t manage to stay pregnant for more than a couple of weeks at a time.

That is when it hurts.

The Wait

April 12, 2017 / lovescienceandnat20s / Leave a comment

Anyone who’s ever been involved in reproduction will tell you that the process involves a lot–A LOT–of waiting.

Even in an unassisted cycle, you do a lot of waiting. There’s the Two Week Wait–the week between when you hopefully ovulated and when most pregnancy tests would be able to detect HCG in your system. There’s the wait for the first doctor’s visit, the wait for the first ultrasound, the wait to hear the heartbeat, the wait for the anatomy scan, the wait during gestational diabetes testing, the wait for breakfast after GD testing, the wait for your body to go into labor on its own, the wait for your doctor to recognize that your body isn’t going into labor on its own, the hours and hours of waiting that we call “labor.” You hurry up. You wait. It’s the month before Christmas times a thousand.

(Linda Belcher understands me)

When you bring assisted reproductive technology (ART) into the picture, there’s even more waiting. You wait to get results back from the battery of tests (blood work, semenalysis, hysterosalpingogram, hysteroscopy, sonohysterogram, karyotype screening, etc.). You wait for the doctor to determine which line of treatment works best for you. You wait for insurance approval. If you don’t get insurance approval, you wait to have enough money. You wait to get your blood drawn again and again and again. You wait for an ultrasound and another and another. You wait with IVs in your arm to be taken back for your egg retrieval. And then you do the normal pregnancy waiting, only this time, with less optimism and more medication.

(everyone around you is getting pregnant and you’re just like :|)

Kyle and I are moving into our next FET cycle straight after the most recent one ended in a miscarriage. I was, frankly, tired of waiting. So much of infertility is putting your life on hold because you’re actively doing all of this stuff and putting all of this effort into getting knocked up but you never know if it’s going to work. Should you go on that vacation? Should you dive into an intense fitness plan? Should you work towards that promotion? Should you buy that car? Who knows?

At this point, I’ve been putting a lot of my life on hold for two years in the interest of getting pregnant. I’ve been hesitant to really jump in at work because I don’t know if I’ll need to leave for maternity. I’ve been holding back on trying to really lose weight because I don’t know if I’m going to be pregnant sooner rather than later. I’ve been planning everything for the short term because I don’t know if I’m going to have to plan for a baby in the long term.

And, I mean, nobody does, but I think it feels different when you’re putting this much time, money, and effort into the process. You want to make sure that you’re going to be available, and you don’t want to overextend yourself to the detriment of your body and your potential baby’s health.

So you wait. I wait.

This time around, I was waiting for my period to start, and it did yesterday. I think the entire neighborhood heard me yesterday morning when I exclaimed, “Finally! Thank GOD!” right next to the open window in my master bathroom (I have a master bathroom, I’m super posh, it’s in desperate need of a good cleaning). I figured that aspect of waiting was over, but I still went for the testing I had scheduled for yesterday morning, just to make sure nothing was super chaotic.

And nothing was. The nurse called me right before the lunchtime meeting I had scheduled for one of about half a dozen projects I have coming up in the next several weeks. She started to give me my calendar (basically, with a FET cycle, you have to switch your medication dosages on specific days; when the nurse tells you what days you’ll be switching things, it’s called “giving you your calendar”) but then noticed that the system wasn’t showing that we had insurance approval yet.

A bit of insurance backstory. When Kyle and I were trying to get pregnant with Sam, Kyle worked through a staffing agency that didn’t offer insurance benefits (this was before the ACA passed and such things were mandatory). We live in Massachusetts, so we were able to purchase coverage through MassHealth, and it was ridiculously expensive–half the reason we were so broke for that year he worked through the staffing company was because of the insurance payments we had to make.

(exactly like this)

The insurance we got was bare bones, too. We could go to the doctor again, and that was nice. We could pay for medication without going broke, though our copays were much higher than those of many people we knew. We could not get an ambulance if we needed it (during the first month of my pregnancy with Sam, I had to take an ambulance to the hospital because I fainted at a Renaissance Faire–long story–and we ended up paying for it for the two years). We could not get any infertility medication unless we were willing to pay out of pocket (clomid, the medication I was on, costs about $6 a pill, making me very happy you only get five pills at a time).

When Kyle started his current job, they gave him fantastic insurance, some of the best I’ve ever seen. I love this insurance; it’s covered all but probably a tenth of the cost of our IVF cycles. It doesn’t cover PGS, but not many carriers do. Ambulance rides and medications are all taken care of, and I am ridiculously grateful.

But. In order to start a fertility treatment cycle, you need insurance approval. They want to make sure you’re not gaming the system, which is fair. Usually, our insurance carrier approves treatment cycles within about 24 hours; we’ll go in for a meeting with our RE, we’ll settle on a treatment plan, and then they’ll call our insurance carrier and get us approved.

Apparently, though, this speedy approval process has vanished into the ether. Lately, our insurance carrier has been taking three weeks to process approvals rather than 24 hours.

I don’t want to sound ungrateful; I’m not. I know that a lot of insurance carriers don’t cover infertility treatments at all (I was on one of them for a while). I know that we’re lucky to have insurance that isn’t causing us to go completely broke on a monthly basis. I know that we’re lucky to have insurance at all.

But the wait.

We went in to figure out this cycle on March 30. If I’m counting correctly, three weeks for insurance approval should take us to about April 20, another week from today. It’s not the end of the world, not by a long shot.

But it’s another wait in the process that, while objectively a short amount of time, feels like an eternity.

I’m trying to pass the time as best I can. I have a lot of distractions. Work has picked back up after a month or so of being slow as molasses (the nature of the field I’m in is such that you’re either drowning in projects or spending every work hour reorganizing your desk to make yourself look busy). Sam has a doctor’s appointment next Wednesday, and Easter is this weekend. I’m going to bake a cake (a butter cake, from scratch, and I’m going to fill it with candy).

And I wait.

Love, Science & Nat 20s

The family life of a bunch of nerds.

infertility