Incoherent whimpering on an off-day July 2, 2008

Bad day today. I had to leave work early yesterday with a threatening migraine – the whole partial loss of field of vision, sparkly stars, nausea, increasing pressure in head, eye swelling shut thing. I got home in time to take the horse-pills before the headache proper kicked in, and thought I’d get away with a mild version, and in fact was OK by evening, but the headache came back in the night and I was feeling horrible this morning. So I took the day off work. The headache started to ease again by lunch-time. I feel very spaced out, and I still can’t see properly out of my left eye, which is incredibly annoying as H and I had planned to go to the cinema this evening and cinema is quite hard to do when you can’t focus on the screen.

I have had more migraines this past year than I think I’ve had in the rest of my life put together. Stressed? Moi? Oy.

Sitting about at home alone, with a cold wet flannel over my eyes and the radio electing to be insufferably tedious and unengaging, gave me entirely too much time to think.

If you google ‘Pain Olympics’ you get rather a lot of terrifying shite about men stapling their knackers to a plank. If you google ‘pain olympics infertility’, however, you get rather a lot of very good blog-posts about the competitive ‘my suffering is worse than everyone else’s’ thing that stray corners of blogland have or have not or have refused to indulge in. This one in particular, about pain points, struck a chord – not a chord I’m proud of, mind you. I found myself cogitating thusly:

1. Add points for having half my reproductive equipment hacked out after years of pain and wonky cycles at the age of eighteen.
2. Add and/or remove points for being diagnosed with PCOS in my early twenties – some people would say always knowing that reproducing would be tricky was an advantage, as I wasn’t suddenly walloped upside the head with the fact while merrily wandering the Primrose Path to motherhood. Some would say I got an extra eight to ten years to worry about it.
3. Remove quite a lot of points for having a lovely husband and a good marriage.
4. Add a few more points back in for having a sociopathic family.
5. Add a given amount of points per year trying – in my case, about two-and-a-half years.
6. Add another point or two for having to wait for H to get on board and start trying properly, when I was already getting eager to burst out of the starting gates.
7. Add points – I should say many many points, but I worry about looking self-pitying – for the Bleedening.
8. Also, for the endless ultrasounds and the HSG.
9. Add more points for the surgery last summer.
10. Remove quite a few points for developing some vague approximation of cycling on my own after that.
11. Add some points back in for very painful periods.
12. Remove points for responding so well to a small dose of Clomid.
13. Remove scads and scads of points for getting pregnant on the second Clomid cycle.
14. Add scads and scads of points back on again for miscarrying.
15. And more points for developing the infection and for the whole miscarrying thing being so very prolonged and painful and bad for my health.
16. Note I have failed entirely to garner points for doing IUIs, IVF proper, and for multiple failed cycles. Refuse to speculate pointage for second trimester loss, stillbirth, and other automatic Gold Medal activities.
17. Realise I still haven’t even got so far as a bronze medal, go home with nothing but the official tracksuit and a ‘thank you for trying’ certificate.
18. Decide this is silly.

Meanwhile, Satsuma has gone on strike, and I am back in the hormonal bouncy-castle of will I ovulate? Did I ovulate? Can I ovulate? as my cervix and temperatures all hurtle up and down mysteriously. I do have a packet of progesterone pills, so I can call a halt to the whole silly riot at any point I care to, and I also have one course of Clomid left. I can start cycling whensoever I chose. I can wait for another two or three weeks to see if Satsuma gets a grip and does anything, or I can stamp on her.

I don’t know which I want to do. It’s four weeks since the ERPC. I don’t really know how long normal ovaries take to reset after a miscarriage, so I don’t know if we’re looking at poor dear Satsuma doing her best, or sulky bitch Satsuma screwing with me. I peed on a stick last week, out of morbid curiosity (and stayed silent about it because even to me it seemed a daft and, indeed, did I mention morbid? thing to do) so I know I am no longer riddled with HCG, and my temperatures are fairly low, so progesterone levels are also down. I don’t want to wallop Satsuma with anything else if she’s busy. But I don’t want to wait for her if she’s gone back to lolling on a satin cushion, eating chocolate truffles and reading Marie Claire.

I do know that I am getting absolutely frantic to be pregnant again, or at least, to be trying to get pregnant again. But am not in the TTC club just at present. The packet of condoms beside the bed have joined forced with the Pee-Sticks of Doom and I cannot escape the sound of their squeaky cackling. And now that I have used the phrase ’squeaky cackling’ in conjunction with condoms, I assume that I’ll not be getting any for quite some weeks. Oops.

And then I was drinking coffee and wandering through my favourite sites and fora (none of which have anything to do with infertility) in my post-headache pre-coherent-thought phase, when I came across a pregnant friend complaining that she’d had to give up coffee while breastfeeding her first and now she’s had to give it up AGAIN – and I had to physically drag myself away from the keyboard before I let loose with a psychotic out-burst about just how many eye-teeth I’d give to be in the position of not being allowed to drink my beloved coffee and how much, oh God how much, I was longing… and then I had to go and tip the rest of my own coffee down the sink. Gah. Stupid stupid stupid. Nothing was stopping me from joining in with my own pregnant ‘and I took one swig of coffee and I threw up in my mouth’ experience. But mine ended so badly it would have torpedoed the perfectly pleasant conversation a dozen people were having about nothing much in particular.