Generalissimo Francisco Franco is still dead...
...and we're still not pregnant. Putting back our existing frozen embryos was a no-brainer; even people who think that infertility treatment is "selfish" are apt to understand our feeling that those existing blastocysts deserved their chance to become babies. When we learned that they did not take, we all were very sad (even our four-year-old, who is looking forward to being a big brother some day). So one way or another, we're determined to be a bigger family. Stay tuned.
Posted at 12:02PM Sep 22, 2004 by AceOfSpuds in Infertility | Comments[1]
Enough miracles to go around?
Irony of ironies, for an infertile couple: my wife is a natural childbirth instructor!
So last night, when we were happily buying ice cream at Cold Stone in order to help
"save seventh period" for the local high school, we were intrigued to see two women on
the bench nearby--clearly friends--one of whom was wearing a t-shirt with a large stork and the words "Surrogate Mothers - We Deliver Miracles." So I struck up a conversation, and we learned a lot. Let me tell you, I can't imagine anybody who knows more about being an IVF patient than a gestational surrogate; the two women we talked to had been through it over and over and over. Somehow, talking to them made our own process more real and less scary.
By strange coincidence, while we were having the aforementioned conversation, getupgrrl was posting her latest and saddest news. The optimism I was feeling last night has evaporated in the face of this reminder about how truely cruel life can be.
I'll let you in on something that very few people really understand. Having a baby is every infertile couple's dream come true, no question. But the baby doesn't make the infertility go away. Infertility and childlessness are not the same thing, and it's really the infertility--not the childlessness--which causes most of the grieving. Which is one reason that "You could just adopt..." is a really insensitive response. An infertile couple with one child is cruelly reminded whenever they start thinking about what a great big brother/sister s/he would be. And even if that one child is exactly the right number for your family, you still will never forget the pain of the struggle. Even when you gaze every night at that angelic, sleeping face, you are still an infertile couple. Even when you're awakened every morning by that little bouncy creature snuggling up in your bed and telling you he loves you, you are still an infertile couple. Even when you are unequivocally welcomed into the fraternity of parenthood by playgroups, schools and other rites of passage, you are still an infertile couple. All of the joys of parenthood cannot completely make the years of infertility recede into blessed forgetfulness.
That's not altogether a bad thing. Sometimes the memory can be a wise counselor, reminding you how empty your life felt before, and how much you love and want the child whose behavior is currently driving you up a tree. Sometimes it can bring up indignation: at parents who mistreat their children, or the rash of dead-baby abandonments here in California. And sometimes the grief all comes flooding back. For me it usually happens when, like today, I hear another infertile couple's bad news: I am transported to the cold, gray day in December 1998, when our doctor showed us the ultrasound pictures that indicated our latest treatment had failed...and I hear my wife's plaintive "I thought since it was Chanukah, maybe I could have a miracle, too."
Our go/no go ultrasound for this cycle is on Tuesday. Dear God please help me regain my optimism by then.
Posted at 05:01PM Jul 21, 2004 by AceOfSpuds in Infertility | Comments[4]
Here we go again
We're just heading into another IVF cycle. This involves giving
my wife a series of medications to shut off her (ab-)normal
hormones and substitute a carefully mediated set of artificial
ones which are designed to produce a textbook menstrual cycle.
Unfortunately, as you probably know, messing with a woman's
hormones has nasty side-effects; sleep disruption and mood
swings are now the norm at our house, for example. (As if the
stress of infertility itself weren't enough to handle.) So when
wife calls the IVF coordinator at 9 AM Monday, and gets a voice
mail reply at 4:57 that evening; calls 8:30 the next morning and
gets voice mail at 4:45 (which she returns by 4:55 but no answer);
and calls 3 times between 8:00 and 8:40 the next morning, to no
avail -- well, to me, at least, the emotional distress this would
cause a patient is obvious.
I'm sure this is only going to get more interesting as we start
adding additional hormones to the mix. Can't wait for those
twice-a-day progesterone shots....
Posted at 11:45AM Jul 14, 2004 by AceOfSpuds in Infertility |
Have you no shame?
I was reading my wife's copy of Brain, Child and hit a reference to a fabulous blogger (who is going on my blogroll as soon as I finish this). Her pet subject is infertility--something I unfortunately know about firsthand--and that reminded me that I've been meaning to speak up about it in this space.
We need to do something about the shame that surrounds infertility. We need to do something about the lack of medical coverage for it in this country, too, but that's not going to happen until we upgrade the inability to conceive from an embarrassment to a disability. Heart attack and cancer survivors wear their scars proudly, and we with fertility issues ought to be doing the same, dammit.
When my wife and I struggled with infertility, we agreed not to make things even worse by the act of keeping it to ourselves; as the saying goes, "You're only as sick as your secrets." We were determined to be well. We spoke freely about it. In response many people privately confided to us that they, too, had fertility issues. The "privately" part is proof of the stigma surrounding it, I think. At one point I discovered, astonishingly, that within my project group of less than ten people, three of us had test-tube babies. About a dozen couples that I know personally have revealed fertility issues to me; I imagine there are more who have not.
Babies have come to my extended family in all kinds of ways: clomid, insemination, IVF, surrogacy, adoption. There is that one oddball sister who concieved the "old fashioned" way (and even indentifies the date of our niece's conception as the weekend of our wedding) but so far she's the exception rather than the rule. We've tried not to hold that against her; but I have to confess, when you're doing daily injections, ultrasounds, several blood draws a week, 5 AM visits to the surgical suite--all the time hemorrhaging cash--well, it's hard not to be jealous of people who only need privacy and a bottle of wine!
More later...I have a rehearsal for javaone in just a few hours so I need some 'Zs.
Posted at 11:58PM Jun 26, 2004 by AceOfSpuds in Infertility | Comments[1]