So after the big disappointment around month #4, MFP had the bright idea of calling to make an appointment with Dr. Special (the infertility specialist we started seeing for recurrent miscarriages). I was like, isn't this a bit jumping the gun, since we said we'd wait till after month #6 ended in defeat to talk about infertility? He had some questions about sex, specifically, what to do about those months when the flashing smiley face on the Ovulation Predictor Kit lasts for days and days before we get to the solid smiley face, meaning, it's O-time. MFP was worried that what has at times ended up being 8 day sex marathons might mean that *his* fertility had declined by the time mine was at its peak. And I had ridiculous worries like, could it be possible that the progesterone Dr. Special prescribed could be hampering my ability to get pregnant, potentially? I also thought, okay, maybe we are looking at post-recurrent miscarriage secondary infertility. If so, it would be nice to know that there's not just some cliff we get pushed off of at the end of 6 months of this latest regime of trying, and instead, get a sense of what the next steps would be. And even though these questions could really be answered with a phone call, as you know, doctors don't really work like that; you have to ask a nurse who asks the doctor and then calls you back and then leaves a message and then you call back and then they say the nurse will call you back and hopefully phone tag ends. And I didn't feel so comfortable calling a nurse and talking to her about last month's 8 day sex marathon and admitting our total ignorance about how sperm work. But I also didn't feel comfortable about asking Dr. Special that in person, and I had this fear that I would go to the doctor and be told I was really over-reacting, we should just sit tight and call her when 6 months are up, and "why did you make this appointment again? Everything's fine! Just relax! I'm sure if you stop thinking about it you'll get pregnant right away!" As though Dr. Special would respond like 99% of other women I encounter instead of, you know, as a doctor. [One of the reasons I worried about being seen as being *too* pro-active is because last year, I was getting worried about infertility post-miscarriage #1 and made an appointment with Dr. Keep Trying for an infertility consultation and possibly a referral. Then I got sort-of pregnant. And was poo-pooed the whole time when I worried about all the spotting until, yep, that's a miscarriage, and oops, looks like it might be ectopic. Afterward, when Dr. Keep Trying ordered some blood tests to do a workup for any possible causes of the 2 miscarriages, she was like, you don't need to see a specialist about recurrent miscarriages/infertility yet, not till after 3 miscarriages, but then I went and did so anyway and I'm so glad I did. A friend told me about her experience having a D&C post-miscarriage when working with Dr. Special's office and it was sooooo much better than mine, at a huge hospital. I just thought, a) I want to know the latest research about things like progesterone and folic acid and if there's anything I can do to prevent another loss and b) if I have another miscarriage, I'd much rather go through it in a doctor's office than surrounded by a lecture hall full of students and residents I've never met before. Grrr bad memory. Anyway.]
So I called and made the appointment, and the nurse was like, what's this for? Questions? Okay I'll schedule you for a consultation. And I worried that we'd lose a whole morning driving out to the far reaches of town only to be greeted by nonplussed people wondering why we were there. And who also would be pretty disdainful of how little I know about sex. I'm happy to report that I was wrong and MFP was so right. I see how I assume that asking for help leaves me vulnerable to having really unpleasant judgments and reactions from people--to being told that I was doing wrong; to leave feeling ashamed. This makes a lot of sense given my traumatic upbringing. Yet MFP made an assumption about what would happen with Dr. Special based on--get this--our prior interactions with her, all of which have left us feeling good, hopeful, glad we reached out. And today was no different. Now I feel like if I get my period after cycle #6, that day I have something concrete to do: call her office, and initiate The Plan. We have next steps to take, we have a plan B (though at this point, it feels like a plan D, given all of our prior efforts). I also got a peek at this outlook--that I doubt I'll be able to hold on to most of the time, but it's a welcome reprieve--that this is an ongoing project. We've been doing some housework lately and that's an idea I find comforting there as well, when I get overwhelmed that there's always more to do--that a house is an ongoing project, not something that's ever "finished" and static. And we are in the game of parenting. It's just something we're working on. That helps get me out of the view of thinking in terms of success and failure; like last year we had two big failures and now it feels like every month is its own mini-failure. That's also why I don't like hearing from others, "it will happen," because that's just talking about the end-game, and that end-game could just as easily be "it won't happen"--who knows. We bought a house. It's an ongoing project. We are working on becoming parents. It's an ongoing project. As though I can think of my charting, my OPKing, my lack of caffeine-ing, my grieving for miscarriages, as some kind of crafting. Like I'm sewing a quilt or something in my spare time. And I like thinking about parenting as an ongoing effort, rather than an achievement anyway. This game (though perhaps not this blog) isn't going to end for me once I get a positive pregnancy test, or when I hit 12 weeks healthy gestation, or 20 weeks, or viability (especially not after getting to know the baby loss mothers from the pregnancy loss group), or even when I take home a healthy human child. Not even when that baby leaves me an empty nester; I'll always be its mother, if I should be so lucky to have a safe and healthy child who gets to grow up. I'll always have to be growing and changing and facing heartbreaking challenges and frustrating, repetitive annoyances. And a baby isn't an achievement in any way in terms of making my life meaningful, or being a real or better woman. MFP and I talk about this as, we're in the game. We're proud of that. We started off on this adventure. That was brave of us. It took a lot of commitment. It's put our hearts on the line--god knows that's true. It can be a brutal, heart wrenching game. We're going to stay in the game. And a lot of it is out of our control. Whether we get pregnant again; whether we carry that baby to term; whether our baby is healthy and gets a chance to grow up safely; who that child becomes. Just both of us choosing to go on this adventure is an achievement I hope I'll always be proud of--I put my heart on the line. I took a risk for a meaningful experience I really wanted to have in my "one wild and precious life." We're seeing what happens.
The content of the visit consisted of Dr. Special letting us know that these OPKs that have the flashing smiley for "High Fertility" are basically bogus. All you need is the regular ones that show up the smiley face when I'm ovulating (they're cheaper too--wish I'd known this earlier), and then have sex for three days. What a relief. Some months, like this month, the "High Fertility" days never show up and it goes straight to the solid smiley, ovulation; but other months, I get like 4 or 5 days of flashing smiley faces. And MFP and I get burnt out on sex under pressure for a consecutive week or so. It's a feast-or-famine sex life, because before and afterwards, we feel like we need to rest up in case the next month's marathon is a long one again. Knowing that really, I just need to worry about three days makes it seem more plausible that the rest of the month we can actually have sex however and whenever the hell we feel like it, instead of always being grieving post-miscarriage non-parents desperate to have a baby, and organizing every last intimate bit of our lives around it.
And we made a post-cycle #6 plan. I'll call on day one and go on Clomid and start getting monitored. MFP might do a sperm analysis, and depending on the results of that, we might go straight for IUI--intra-uterine-insemination, or else just get some in-office monitoring of when I ovulate and do it the old-fashioned way. She said that I'll also get monitoring to see if Clomid is working for me or if I need to try a different infertility drug (I didn't even know there were different drugs!). Dr. Special said that 85% of women get pregnant within 3 months of using the drug, which was also a relief, because at least there's a time frame for knowing if this round of attempts worked; I don't just get sent on some infinite quest. From there there's other options I guess, like IVF, and of course, MFP and I are open to adoption too. But the point is, the ongoing project continues; it has a map of potential roads to go down. I can imagine that day--the day I officially have diagnosed infertility post-miscarriages, and how sad and angry I'll feel. I'm glad to know that I'll at least have something I can *do* that day, some action I can take. There's so little that's in our control in this process; it's nice to feel that something at least is in my control.
Lastly, and kind of off-the-cuff, Dr. Special shared that what we're going through had happened to her too: she'd had two miscarriages, and then had infertility. She said, "I hadn't told you that?" She'd mentioned she had had a miscarriage once but I didn't know about multiple ones, or the infertility. I nearly cried, seriously. I don't know--it just meant that much to me, that this person with all this power and expertise was sharing this with me, that she'd been where I was sitting. She said she was in her late 30s and she was like, "come on!"--as we were, after we'd at first thought we were fertility gods, considering pregnancy #1 happened fast--and she had had to try more than one fertility drug, but then she did IUI and it worked. I'm so glad she shared that. It gave me hope. I hear a lot of stories from people, usually horrifying ones ("so and so had a billion miscarriages! And now she has a kid after 1300 rounds of IVF and it's all great!"), but this one was in the first person, it came from my *doctor,* and it really gave me hope. She shared that she understood how we are feeling. That like with every miscarriage, you get so close and then you use all these months. And then you get older in the meantime, as if to rub salt in the wound. That post-recurrent-miscarriage feels like a double-whammy. I remember when I called Dr. Keep Trying's office this year to hear she was on maternity leave--which means she was very pregnant under that white coat when all the fucked up shit went down with my D&C (not her fault; she was ill unexpectedly, and now I know likely why--something pregnancy-related). And she already had kids, plural, so this was kid #3! I actually really like her, she's been helpful to me, but how I wished I could have kids so seemingly easily like her. The gulf between us widened: helper, helped; knowledgeable one, passive recipient; woman holding the probe, woman being probed; and now childless and mother of at least 3. Like I said, I'm not saying I won't go back to Dr. Keep Trying; I am just saying it felt really good to hear Dr. Special's personal story, in a brief, but really meaningful way. I'm really vulnerable in there, getting prodded and probed and pumped full of hormones and talking about my sex life and my most painful recent losses, and I feel lucky that my doctor not only is caring, but also has had a window into what this feels like. I see how I see her--a smart, kind, empowered women who had some shit luck and faced it, and and then found some better luck--and I can start to see myself that way more often too, instead of, well, worse than that.
So yeah, MFP showed me something about myself today, about the way I assume that asking for help will feel bad, when actually, it can feel really good. I have a lot better attitude about the whole endeavor. Last thing to share: last year I got kind of fascinated by the Jewish superstition against having baby showers. I was thinking about it today when a fellow infertility friend and I talked about how intolerable it can be to be around pregnant women, especially ones we know have gotten pregnant easily, while we suffer through disappointments and despair and shots and emotion-intensifying drugs. Jewish superstition holds that baby showers and other preparations for a baby's birth can invite the "evil eye" of others that can then somehow mar the pregnancy's outcome. Shit, I realized, I totally have the evil eye, and so does my friend with infertility. I turn away, either tearful or scowling to hide the tears. I don't believe this affects anyone negatively, but I do kind of like the idea of not counting your chickens before they're hatched. Of at least acknowledging how frequent pregnancy loss and stillbirth is. Of how lucky, really, it is, to bring home and raise a healthy child; that misfortune in this arena doesn't only happen to "other" people. I read that instead of saying "Mazel tov" or "Congratulations" to people expecting a baby, it's customary to say "B'sha'ah tovah," or "In good time." YES, exactly. If I am lucky enough to get pregnant again, that's what I want to hear. In good time. Not a moment sooner. Grow and develop in good time, don't come out too soon, don't die before you've had a chance to live. And let us all be patient during that time. May it all be in good time. Maybe, if I can figure out how to pronounce it, I can practice saying to myself, "B'sha'ah tovah" to others who playing the part of the game of parenting I desperately want to play in, instead of scowling with resentment, or (only) crying "I-would-have-had-a-seven-month-old-or-newborn-by-now" tears. Small goals: maybe not every time, but I'll try it once, how's that?
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