We’re doing this. We really are. We may even be on the same page. May 19, 2013

H and I spent the afternoon discussing what to do, now? Were we both sure we wanted to do IVF? This summer? Starting next cycle, if possible?

Sample dialogue:

May: YES PLEASE RIGHT NOW THANK YOU! NO MORE PERIODS THAN STRICTLY NECESSARY FOR MAY, WHO IS GETTING PTSD ABOUT THEM!
H: Well, yes, of course, let me get my calendar, how will this work with dates, umm, so let me see, we’d be doing egg-retrieval when exactly?
May: WHO THE FUCK CARES YES PLEASE RIGHT NOW THANK YOU!
H: And you need to sort out your smear test (Pap test to you transAtlanteans), and an AMH test – wait, the Riverside will do that… oh, it says here you need a chlamydia test, can you get that at the GP’s? And if there’s a delay in getting results, how will that affect the start of the cycle?
May: WHO THE FUCK CARES IF WE START IN JUNE OR JULY THIS SUMMER PLEASE RIGHT NOW THANK YOU.
H: Well, if egg-collection is too close to the August Bank-Holiday we won’t be able to do CGH as recommended by Dr George as the lab will be shut for a week…
May: WHO THE FUCK CARES no, wait, arse.
H: Hmm.
May: I’ve been playing telephone tennis with the GP practice nurse about this smear for a week. What if I can’t get it done this week? Then it’s my period and it’ll have to wait for a fortnight and then the results take two weeks, or, in not-NHS-speak, four weeks.
H: So, wait, if we start cycling in July… How long did Dr George say you’d need to be on GnRH agonists?
May: How about we ask Riverside?
H: Let me count on my fingers.
May: HOW ABOUT WE ASK RIVERSIDE?
H: September’s not a good time to cycle for you, is it, what with it being busy at work?
May: WHO THE FUCK CARES HOW ABOUT WE ASK RIVERSIDE?
H: I’m not sure September is good for me, either.
May: WHO THE FUCK CARES WE’LL MAKE IT WORK WILL YOU PLEASE LEAVE THE CALENDAR ALONE WE HAVE NO IDEA HOW I’LL RESPOND TO THE DRUGS ANYWAY IT COULD TAKE SIX WEEKS OR TWELVE OR WHATEVER.
H: October might be better than September, though.
May: I DO NOT WANT TO HAVE ANOTHER PERIOD IF I CAN POSSIBLY HELP IT OH MY GOD H.

And so on.

So, I shall spend every free second tomorrow dialling and re-dialling this practice nurse until she jolly well answers and speaks to me and if I can’t get a smear this week I’ll cry and use emotional blackmail also must ask about Rubella immunity and chlamydia, and meanwhile, H has written Riverside a very coherent and polite email setting out all of the above plus a delicate reminder to Dr George that ‘May’s Quality Of Life’™ is Not Very Good™, so can we not be ridiculous sticklers about things the NHS is responsible for please? Or something. (The phrase ‘ridiculous sticklers’ was not used (I mean, I’ve had a course of the antibiotics used to treat potential chlamydia recently anyway, and H and I are faithful to each other (well, I am (have we all watched House?)) and I had a Rubella vaccination when I was twelve (do they wear off?))).

[Pause, while I recount the parentheses to check they all match up].

As for LIT, which we were planning to do in June, well, Dr Fourth Opinion’s clinic has still, still, not got back to us about when exactly we’ll be doing that, which fact alone is MAJORLY GETTING ON MY TITS.

And, Dr George is not very pro-LIT. He doesn’t think there’s any evidence for it working, and if it did, there should be by now.

I was all, ‘Huh. OK,’ about that, as I wasn’t particularly pro in the first place, but was prepared to do it as side-effects are minimal and H found the hypothesis interesting and possibly even convincing. H, who found the hypothesis interesting and possibly convincing, was a little more, I think, gobsmacked? by this, but I can’t get a clear answer out of him about it. He agrees, however, we needn’t do it this cycle, and revisit it if this cycle tanks abysmally or ends in miscarriage. This decision may well have been brought on by Dr Fourth Opinion’s clinic’s non-communicativeness as much as anything. Dear clinics we are throwing our life-savings at, as a general rule, do not be difficult about communication. Thank you.

So, what Dr George recommended, was Intralipids, progesterone support (this, by the way, is a fucking ranty post for another day, involving The Professor. Remind me to get back to you on that), and steroids (prednisone, I presume), alongside a long down-regulation cycle to suppress the endometriosis a bit, using either Synarel or Buserelin (I can’t remember which) rather than the Pill, because I get migraines.

Huh. I used to get migraines about once every three years when I was on the Pill. And now I get them once every two months or so, on my own natural home-grown hormones. Yo no comprendo.

I must now eat salad and take Metformin (and that’s another post. SORRY).

Stirring dull roots with spring rain May 14, 2013

So we went to the Riverside Clinic, for the Great Big Consultation To End All Consultations (please God).

I am having trouble processing it all.

Obviously, you, my Gentle Readers, would like to know what went down, and all I can say is, I don’t freakin’ know.

Item – Our consultant reminded me insistently of George Clooney at his most winsome. There is a goodly chance this man will have seen my vagina by Rosh Hashanah. Halp.

Item – The friendly chat with Dr George lasted well over an hour. I have never, ever, in my born days, ever had a consultant, NHS or private, who was happy to sit there for over an hour, going over things carefully and thoroughly, making all the ‘yes, I’ve read your notes and remember stuff’ noises. Never. For this alone, even H has a little crush on the man (me, I think he looks like George Clooney, remember? (H disagrees. H thinks he looks like Jon Stewart. Me, I am now having severe hormonal difficulty with the concept of the awesomeness of a Clooney/Stewart mashup. Seeing me naked)).

Item – The Riverside Clinic does this thing where they have you turn up for the initial consultation an hour early, for paperwork, and also so the male partner can retire to a private room and ‘provide a sample’. And then the results of the sample turn up mid-consultation (oh, good Lord, is this what money gets you?) So H was removed by a smiling friendly wee nurse leaving me in charge of the paperwork. I of course dropped the sodding lot all over the floor of the office, and while I was at it I dropped H’s music folder, and the nice lady helping me with it scrambled to pick sheaves of paper up for me. And handed me, poker-faced, the sheet-music for this*.

Item – It took me ten minutes sitting in the waiting-room, shoulders shaking, scarlet face in hands, to recover my composure. I’m quite sure the other couples thought I must have had NEWS OF EXCEEDING DOOM. Oopsie.

Item – H informs me the Riverside Wankatorium is devoid of Worrying Pictures Of My Parental Homes. It is also devoid of select images for the discerning gentleman’s gentleman (boo!) and the images presented for H’s delectation, while, he admits, were acceptable (real boobies!), they weren’t massively inspiring either. And he could hear people tramping up and down the corridor asking each other for files. Poor lamb. Nevertheless, his sample was magnificent, full to bursting with healthy handsome single-headed sperm swimming in nice straight lines. Dr George was pleased. I was pleased. H tried not to look smug.

Item – As for me, my AMH results from three years ago were so bloody spiffing, Dr George is quite sure my ovary is in tip-top condition, and likely to do rather well if encouraged. We’ll be retesting the AMH, but his optimism on the subject was bewilderingly lovely.

Item – The adenomyosis should not be a problem. I am the only person in the world concerned that I might give birth to Flat Stanley. And pregnancy would be good for the adenomyosis. Oh. OK. Oh. I… OK. *weeps with relief*

Item – My weight is not a factor. It’s not an issue. It was not worth even mentioning to me. We could cycle as soon as my period starts if I like. WHAT THE HOLY FUCK?

Item – Apparently, we have a pretty decent chance of getting a take-home baby with IVF. That’s hope right there, that is. I don’t do hope. I have not done hope for so long that it feels very much like it does when you’ve been kneeling awkwardly for hours and your foot has gone completely to sleep. You stand up and said numb foot is suddenly an agonising mass of tingles and throbs, and you can’t put any weight on it because it is not accepting neural feedback and feels like it’s made of jelly and wet sponges. Hope is decidedly unpleasant. Ow. Ow ow ow *hop hop* owie I think I might sit down again.

Item – And then we walked half-way across town in the rain. Because sometimes you just need to walk in the rain for a while.

Item – I’m having Drambuie on the rocks now. You?

*Providing link rather than naming the song, because not many choirs are singing it this summer, and we don’t want a massive H-TMI-reveal to his adoring fans, now, do we? No, we don’t. But the story was too good not to share. Shhh.

On it not being Mothers’ Day May 12, 2013

Five years ago, pretty exactly, we were here. And it was such a beautiful place to be.

Whereas we spent this afternoon going through all the paperwork from all our medical tests and procedures, making sure we had a full set of all the relevant results for H to sneak into work and photocopy tomorrow, for the benefit of the Riverside Clinic. And this is not a beautiful place to be. Not at all. Five years, and all we have to show for it is an inch-thick stack of doctors’ letters.

I have friends who can talk of nothing else but whether or not their four-year-olds did or did not get into their primary school of choice, and how silly and expensive the uniforms are. And I am not able to join in. And I should, I really really should, be joining in.

And then, of course, there’s the Trial-By-Drive-By-Mother’s-Day. It is not Mother’s Day in the UK. We did that in March. I’m not sure I need all my favourite social media to be plastered with variations of ‘honk if you love motherhood!’. Nevertheless, I am clearly wrong and making a private gesture of affection to, well, your own mother, is inadequate and the only way to prove you love her and love being a mother (hurrah for you) is to post passive-aggressive self-aggrandising horse-wallops about it on all the internets. Because if you just send the poor woman flowers, who’s gonna know. And if you accidentally grind broken glass into the hearts of everyone who has lost their mother, or never had a mother, or was abused by their mother, or who can’t be a mother, so what, eh? Serves them right for not being normative.

(No, really, there are people on the internet who think that if you’re not a mother, you’re not even a woman, and nothing you are doing could possibly be as worth-while as raising children, and you know nothing about love and self-sacrifice, you selfish selfish party-hopping waster. I think they might have a hard time selling that one to Mother Theresa or Susan B. Anthony or Emily Dickinson or Queen Elizabeth I or Dr. Elizabeth Blackwell or Amelia Earhart or… you get my point, I hope. *Flail-hands*)

Anyway. This post is brought to you by Bitter McTwisted The Angry Infertile and Not Enough Tequila.

So, H and I sorted through the letters, and I had a panic attack (whyever not?) and H had a moment of ‘not listening! Am made of teflon!’ which neatly derailed the panic attack because I had to stop and shout at him, and then we had a prolonged and weepy conversation about how fucked up my family was for a change, and then my mother rang to offer me moral support and millions of pounds to do this possible IVF also three nights in a health spa if I liked or possibly craniosacral therapy because that is the new acupuncture, and I felt like an idiot. And then we went through the letters properly and with tears in our eyes because, actually, this recurrent miscarriage business is really, really, really fucking horrible.

And, possibly in self-defence, I find I keep losing track of how many miscarriages I’ve actually had, and when. Things I was so sure I’d never do. Surely each and every one was burnt into my brain forever. Surely. And now I must go back through my blog and my diary and my inch-thick stack of letters, and count them all.

Now set the teeth May 8, 2013

I am spending a lot of the time at the moment trying to calmly, composedly, stare the whole ‘No Kids Not Now Not Ever’ thing in the face.

I have spent some choice moments during the past few years alternately squinting into its actinic glare, running past it with my eyes shut, throwing open the closet door and shrieking ‘AAAAIEEEE’ in its face before slamming the door shut again, and occasionally having a real good histrionic wallow in concentrated essence of melodrama and declaring myself a future lonely abandoned mad cat lady found dead in a bin being eaten by foxes and whose name no one knows or cares about.

Calm composure, May my dear, calm composure.

Life without kids will not suck, will not destroy me, will not lead to my abandonment and feral death, will not burn out my retinas. Life without children will, in fact, be dandy. I will grieve, I will feel burning flailing resentment for the costs to my health and sanity trying to have children exacted, I will heal, I will pull by bloody socks up, and I will move on. This may take years, it may take months. But there it is, and there am I, and that will be that.

Meanwhile, what with the Summer of Needles looming before me, Shakespeare says it all rather well

Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more;
Or close the wall up with our English dead.
In peace there’s nothing so becomes a man
As modest stillness and humility:
But when the blast of war blows in our ears,
Then imitate the action of the tiger;
Stiffen the sinews, summon up the blood,
Disguise fair nature with hard-favour’d rage;
Then lend the eye a terrible aspect;
Let pry through the portage of the head
Like the brass cannon; let the brow o’erwhelm it
As fearfully as doth a galled rock
O’erhang and jutty his confounded base,
Swill’d with the wild and wasteful ocean.
Now set the teeth and stretch the nostril wide,
Hold hard the breath and bend up every spirit
To his full height. On, on, you noblest English.

So. Right. What am I doing, again? May 5, 2013

Item – We, H and I, have our initial, Be Poked For All The Blood Tests, Endure All the Probes, Produce All The Samples consultation at the Riverside Clinic in a week’s time. This will take a good couple of hours. And then we will, possibly that very day, know if we are doing IVF in June, or if we are hopeless cases who will never have a biological child grown in this ‘ere Uterus Of Despair. So H and I are TOTAL SHUDDERING NERVOUS WRECKS OF HORRIFIC HORROR.

Item – Riverside Clinic are prepared, if we are suitable candidates, to do a cycle with us the very month we have LIT, so no worries there. *Waits for other shoe to drop with a resounding clang*

Item – I need to have a smear test. H needs to have an HIV test. I shall be going to the GP this week to organise the Pokening. I don’t know how H is organising the HIV test, or if it is being done by the LIT people, or by the Riverside Clinic, or what. I’m sure H has told me, but my brain is startlingly non-retentive at the moment. H? Did you tell me? What am I doing? Who am I and why am holding a rubber chicken?

Item – The stress of this, and the constant rows with H, and the general run-down-ness, and I am as brittle as spun glass and as irritable as a sackful of wet cats being bounced along a holly-hedge. I think, this week, I have managed to piss off every single person I know. Go me.

The unbloggable April 28, 2013

H and I have been going through a Bad Patch, relationship-wise.

I, even I, May, the Greatly Articulate, do not have the words to be fair, to be reasonable, and to be accurate about it all.

Disclaimer! There has been no adultery, violence, addiction, crime, financial misdemeanor, lies about Really Important Stuff, or any other Irrevocable Deal Breaker. You may continue serenely in your opinion that May and/or H is and/or are sweetness and rectitude personified who chiefly need a cuddle.

We just fundamentally came adrift on the matter of infertility, miscarriage, treatment, progress, lack of progress, what to do next, etc.

Since the chemical ‘pregnancy’ of Valentines’ Day 2011, I have been considerably more gung-ho about pursuing treatment than H. H has dealt with it all by simply pretending none of it existed, not infertility, not adenomyosis, not PCOS, not endometriosis, and absolutely not the nasty little biological fact that his wife was getting older.

And older.

I will be 38 in less than a month.

I have dealt with it by wasting appalling amounts of time and energy in trying to get H and I onto the same page about treatment-or-not. OK, same chapter. Same book? Same section of the library?

I had – still have, frankly – a neurotic ungovernable horror of the idea of trying to have a child without my spouse’s full cooperation and consent. I know many partners have been reluctant and uninterested right up until the child arrives, and then become doting parents of the bestest sort. This is not how it works in my family, though. In my family, a partner is reluctant and uninterested until the baby is an undeniable and looming reality, and then said partner will cycle through furious, trapped, raging, hateful, abandoning, depressed, shitty uninvolved parent of epic sexism, and divorced. So. As far as I was concerned, for my increasingly brittle sense of mental equilibrium and inner strength/peace/not-flaking-outness, I needed H to understand what was involved, what was at stake, and to be prepared to ring clinics, make appointments, nag mildly dense and disorganised secretaries etc. while I got on with the Epic Physical Suffering and Angst (this deal still seems absolutely fair enough to me. If H would like to take custody of the uterus while I make the phone-calls, I would be delighted). And H did not get it. At all. Especially not the bit about May getting older and iller and LESS ALMIGHTY FUCKING FERTILE with each passing month.

That, Gentle Readers, was very difficult for me to deal with – his utter indifference to the fact his stalling was directly prolonging my suffering and reducing our chances. Not that he was stalling per se, mind you. If he’d asked for a time out so he could have a good old stall I could’ve gone on the pill or what have you and Not Suffered Epically while he carefully eased his head out of his bum. I wouldn’t've been pleased, but I would’ve understood. And we could’ve negotiated time limits and rules – six months No Talking About It and then we talk about it again, nine months then final decision, sort of thing.

This refusal to talk about talking about it (very meta) also meant that he was never saying he wouldn’t pursue treatment/consider quitting/have sex with me this month. So I would wait for an answer, or hope for a timely shag, or whatever, and it wouldn’t happen, and I’d be angry, and H would explain he had a headache/tummy-ache/bad day/bad leg/bridge was blown up by squirrels, and this only applied to THIS month and NEXT month would be different, and I would shout ‘oh for FUCK’S SAKE, that’s what you said LAST MONTH,’ and H would look bewildered and say, ‘no, last month it was raining/business trip/man-flu/attack of the were-rabbit,’ and I would say ‘DON’T YOU SEE THE PATTERN HERE?’ and H would look even more bewildered and say ‘errr… no?’ and I would throw a cup at him.

No, I’m not saying I dealt with it particularly well either. Constant physical pain will do that even to someone as God-like in her understanding and general loveliness as me.

And then the possible chemical pregnancy this February. On the anniversary of the last one.

I… I shall draw a veil, I think. I don’t want to revisit the past few months in detail. It was all very very angry, and very unhappy, and I still feel betrayed by H, and not as forgiving as I would like to feel.

I believe it only just these past few weeks that it actually dawned on H for the first time ever that the adeno/endo/PCOS/age thing was not actually in stasis at all, and he may have disastrously fucked things up by spending so long on that peaceful river cruise in Egypt.

(I know that when he turned to me the other night and asked, in tones of dawning wonder, if I’d ever considered the fact that my stiff and distorted uterus might actually be a problem, I very nearly jammed my wedding ring up his fundament and walked out on him. Because I have ‘only’ been worrying myself sick about the same fact since I was first diagnosed three or four years ago, which is why I asked every single medical professional we ever did see about it, and why my conversation since has been littered with such terms as miscarriage, bleeding during pregnancy, restricted intra-uterine growth, premature labour, obstructed labour, placenta accreta and post-partum haemorrhage).

Anyway. You can judge either or both of us if you like, but I’d rather not hear it.

I mean it. I will go on a comment-deleting spree if you make me cry and feel ashamed.

The net result of all this Weltschmerz is that I am thoroughly under the weather. 2013 has been The Year Of The Unwellness. I began February with norovirus. Then I had the possible chemical pregnancy that shattered me. Then I had the flu – proper, six days of fever, laryngitis, cough that lingered for weeks, oh-God-I-feel-awful flu. Then I got my period again and that was again shockingly and lingeringly painful. And then, right in the middle of that cycle, out of nowhere, I got thrush. I spent a week with my favourite lady-parts a fiery itchy hell-circle of No Sleep For YOU! (Canesten sorted it out. Canesten and I are kissing in a tree). Then I got my period again last Tuesday and I was horribly sick. I haven’t vomited that much that hard for nearly two years. My entire intestinal tract, from mouth to… well… anyway, none of it is speaking to me, and Cute Ute the Destroyer is still rampaging about bleeding everywhere and generally acting like a baited wolverine chained to a stake. And I’ve had two migraines already. And violent cramp in my leg, almost certainly due to dehydration, so now I can’t walk normally. And hayfever, now that bloody Spring is bloody here at bloody last and all the bloody trees are bloody flowering.

Fuck my life.

Mice and men February 25, 2013

The Plan:

• Step one: Find a private clinic who do hysterosalpingograms of some sort, and check that the interior of the blasted wasteland of my uterus is respectable, and the one-and-only fallopian tube is unblocked and lacking in endometriosis-induced peculiarities (you know the patch of endo in my Pouch of Douglas? I can feel it for over a week after my period finishes, like a sort of bruise).
• Step two, gentle version: If Cute Ute and her tube are still functional, we do LIT, and then spend three or four months shagging like bunnies in the hope of impregnating me. We may or may not do intralipids at the same time; we will discuss this with Doctor Fourth Opinion when we go for LIT.
• Step two, fuck it version: If the tube is blocked or damaged, we go straight to IVF. With LIT and intralipids.
• Step two, scorched earth version: If tube is blocked and Cute Ute is fried, we insert a Mirena coil and then blow the savings on a holiday to Canada/USA/New Zealand/Patagonia/The Ends of the Motherfucking Earth.
• Step three: if step two gentle version does not work, move to step two fuck it version.
• Step four: if step two, fuck it version doesn’t work, move to step two, scorched earth version, only possibly with a reduced itinerary, because we’ll have made a sizeable dent in the savings.

So H called any number of private clinics until he found one that would do a ‘hycosy’, as they cutely refer to it, without me needing to be their IVF patient or having an NHS doctor’s referral. It’s a well-known clinic, and conveniently near to work, and doesn’t cost a terrifying amount of money, and they share their results with you immediately (which makes a lovely change from the NHS).

And I am going there tomorrow. By tomorrow evening, I will know. We will know. Hurrah.

I am going by myself, as H has a very, very important meeting he can’t get out of. I’ve had HSGs before, and not suffered vastly, so I am electing to be optimistic, take an ibuprofen, and carry cheerfully on. If this backfires, I will thoroughly and happily enjoy the resultant melodrama. Especially if it gets me off work for a few days.

I am still in rather a state of angry grief about the way the last cycle ended, you see.

Brace the mainsail January 30, 2013

The thing about getting a fourth opinion is, that you might agree with the fourth opinion. And then you have to do something about it. And then, and then. Hope is painful. Medical treatments raise the stakes, and failed cycles drive those stakes into your back. It’s been two years, nearly, since I was last officially, look-I-have-two-lines pregnant. It’s been miserable, but, as Woody Allen said, life is divided into the miserable and the horrible. Be happy when you’re miserable, at least it isn’t horrible.

H is liaising (or, actually, playing telephone tennis) with Dr 4th Opinion’s secretary. We are seeing about scheduling an HSG, to check the endometriosis hasn’t glued the one-and-only fallopian tube shut (it’s been over a year since anyone last took a peek at it). And then we do LIT. And aspirin, and heparin, and Intralipids. If the tube is damaged, we go straight to IVF. If the tube is fine, perhaps we carry on trying au naturel for a few cycles, then retest to see if the LIT sensitisation is still holding, and then rethink the IVF option if there have been no two-lines. Dr 4th Opinion thinks IVIG, neupogen, clomid, steroids and progesterone support are all unnecessary, especially as the lining of my uterus is not infested with psychotic killer cells looking for embryos to slay.

I can go with this. H can go with this. So we are going with this.

I Just don’t expect any enthusiasm or positive thinking. They burnt out of me long, long ago.

The roller coaster of IVF November 11, 2012

To date I have not been overly keen on, if not in reality actually more against, IVF (for me personally, I hasten to add – this is not a moral or technically principled qualm).

As the weeks and months of TTC have merged into years, however, I think this needs reevaluating. Firstly, we now know a lot more about what we are dealing with/are up against. Secondly, we are seriously starting to run out of time (why yes, it is my birthday in a couple of weeks – how could you tell).

So, you may well ask: what were my problems with IVF in the first place?

One of my biggest fears has been the perceived risk/danger. As May only has one ovary remaining, if something goes wrong with that (ovarian hyper-stimulation syndrome, for example) then it really could be game over. I had/have the impression, possibly unfairly, that especially within the NHS IVF is not a well-invested-in process and therefore may lack the individual care, attention and precision to reassure me. I think I’m justified in stating that their attitude, when we did get to the first step of consideration for treatment, seemed to be a very rule-based, “same for everyone because we must be fair to everyone on very limited resources” approach. I had/have also witnessed that, while the NHS is a fantastic service for dealing with the majority of everything, it didn’t/doesn’t handle edge-cases, such as May, very well. These factors combined all played into my fears.

I think we are in a very different place now. We’ve run the NHS gamut as much as we can; therefore if we go private now it would not compromise how we may be treated on the NHS, which I’ve heard can not be overly helpful to patients who are also doing parallel private treatment (for I think perfectly understandable/reasonable overall cost effectiveness reasons). We have been saving over the last few years and combined with offers from May’s mum to help with costs plus age and other complicating factors I think private is our only realistic option now anyway. I have the impression, possibly unfounded, that a private clinic will do things absolutely on an individual basis and take care (for fear of harm to reputation – and therefore profits – if nothing else).

So that’s the rational reason; the more psychological block is about the process itself and what that means about my role in fatherhood. This is more difficult to articulate, partly because I have problems identifying and dealing with the emotions surrounding issues (see previous post), but also because it goes against my self-image of me not being a chest-beating, self-important, prowess-obsessed bloke… it’s not me making the baby. I do know enough biology to know it never would be me really anyway, but the micro-details of what happens in utero can be easily brushed over when people think about these things. There is still an overall conception (haha, sorry) of those brave ‘boys’ swimming the tough swim, healthy competition, fittest wins, etc. that provides the ‘natural way’ of these things in the minds of the world. Yes, this is a perception thing as much as anything else. To take that process out of that environment and have an artificial laboratory induced, ‘test-tube’ event – under the harsh lights of scientific judgement and evaluation – doesn’t have that same narrative or acceptable ‘normality’.

Finally, there is another psychological trope that plays into this. Over the last few years, and particularly in psychotherapy recently, I have had to get used to the idea that, as much as I try to deny it, I am a very controlling person. Those that know me may (or may not) be surprised that the gentle, unassuming, introverted soul that I am has this trait. But I can assure you that apparently (I’m still coming to terms with this) I have a strong and wilful mind that has an unfortunate (possibly sometimes unconscious) habit of using passive-aggressive techniques to influence and control. The thing is, the thing about IVF is, that it takes everything out of my control. The same is largely true for May, of course, but this post is about me, all me. Before knowing and understanding this and therefore being able to cede controls and make the choice there was a ‘thing’ at the back of my mind nagging away at this isn’t what I really want to, if not more strongly saying no!

Now we understand that and we are where we are, it’s time to make a positive choice and work for a positive outcome and say… YES!

Not random at all October 21, 2012

Item – You may have noticed H and I have stalled a little on Forward Progress In A Fertile Direction Also Known As Better Reproducing Through Chemistry. We have all our test results, I have a plan and a clear idea of what I will and will not put up with in terms of treatment. But… [awkward pause]… You see, Dr Expensive’s plan is to do LIT, then do several cycles au naturel, while medicated to the freakin’ eyeballs with steroids and anti-coagulants and intralipids and then progesterone too. H is up for it. I am very (very very very irrationally freakoutily) concerned that we’ll get the timing of the sex wrong (this happens, you know, even to H and May the Defiant Sex-Bunnies Of Doom). Or, we’ll get it nearly right, but it would’ve upped our chances to do it one more time which we didn’t. Or something. And the cycle will end in Shark Week and I am – shall we say concerned? Yes, concerned will do – concerned that I will react very poorly to this and put some kind of strain on our marriage. I am inclined to try IVF, frankly. At any rate, I want to put a definite bloody absolute limit on how many cycles we muck about with freestylin’. Say three. H, however, well, apart from my doing the poor man’s head in re: Correct Timing of PiV, he has reservations about IVF. Reservations he is in fact rethinking, admittedly, but he is currently in a Moving Forward In A Non-Committal Way To Preserve Own Sanity Whilst Trying Not To Freak Out The Wife paradigm.

Item – This, I decided, was a propitious moment to do NaNoWriMo.

Item – Basically, for the month of November, May will be closeted in the study/bedroom/kitchen/living-room floor with her lap-top and all the coffee in the Northern Hemisphere. H has nobly agreed to feed May at regular intervals and chuck a duvet over her every midnight. I did NaNoWriMo once before – before this blog, even, and did in fact write over 50’000 words in one month, and I did in fact get a perfectly useful first draft of a possibly quite interesting detective novel out of it, the only drawback with which was that the hero was as interesting as a roofing tile. Since when, eventually, he had gender reassignment surgery and the novel took off – but NaNoWriMo is for first drafts not rewrites, so New Eve is still in a box somewhere awaiting her redraft and I will be doing something quite quite different. However, the first time I NaNoWriMoed I had neither a full-time job nor a bastard set of damaged innards with a thing about chronic pain and fatigue, so I am asking a vast and complicated ask of myself here. This could be messy. Also faily.

Item – But fret not, Gentle Readers! You will not dwell in the suburbs of my good pleasure. H has also nobly agreed to take custody of the blog while Sturm und Drang is in progress. He his very own self even volunteered unprompted to perhaps take this space to explore his ambivalence to IVF and other such related matters (see? All Items Are Linked And Relevant). So feel free to nag him, starting November 1st.

Item – No news of my SiL. My family is remarkably bad at news. People often get married, have babies, get divorced, move house, and even die in total obscurity. Every few years we have meet-ups and the entire room rings to repeated cries of ‘you did what? When? WHY? WITH WHOM oh my God pass the gin.’ I have called my brother and left phone-messages, but I clearly see that ‘updating little sister one sees twice a decade’ is really, really not on the to-do list, and frankly nor should it be. Just… I worry.