Category: Uncategorized

My way of looking at the world.  I’d sort of grown up believing that the world was fundamentally fair.  Naive, I know, but that’s how I thought.  Maybe it was because of all the Disney and fantasy I’d spent watching and reading.  Villains got hosed in the end, heros got what they were owed, and everyone but the villain went off and was happy.  I’m not sure precisely when the real world hit my head with a baseball bat and went “get a clue”.  I know it was still present when I started on the path to baby.  That first diagnosis, of well, you can’t have kids because of this, but we can help put me into a funk.  Medical issues were supposed to be easy to solve.  An hour, tops, then our magical healthcare system could work around or cure my disease.  (I don’t think I spent enough time around doctors.  They could have slapped me down and gone “it really, really doesn’t work that way and you’re a gullible idiot for thinking that a pill cures everything.”)

At least I know what’s wrong.  Some women don’t get even that for a long time.  I can’t have kids without medical help because of a disease called PCOS (poly-cystic ovary syndrome).  It does turn out that if that’s really the only thing wrong with you, that an iui or ivf will get you pregnant.  It doesn’t mean you’ll keep the baby, but it does mean you’ll get past that first step.  (more on that in a future post).

I remember when I got to see the specialist, he immediately diagnosed me.  No puzzlement, no googling (don’t laugh, it’s a dr thing these days), just him handing me a sheet of paper about it and scheduling a butt ton of blood tests.  They wanted to know if there was anything else wrong with me.  Also PCOS comes with more than one comorbidity  problems and they wanted to find those too.  He also wanted to be sure his diagnosis was correct.  PCOS is very common, and I have classic symptoms.  He wanted to check for other possible causes for infertility as well.   So here I am, he’s told me what’s wrong, and I’m thinking, “this is great, sounds easy to solve.”  See that?  One hour medical solution and we would be off.  It wasn’t quite so easy and figuring that out smashed out some of the naivety.  Not all, but some.  More on that in yet another future post.

This has been some fast and dirty stream of consciousness writing.  I’ll get better I promise.  I might even revise this post later.

Originally, I started this blog to document the fertility “journey” I’ve taken.  I haven’t actually done any posts about that yet.  I figured it was time.  No, Andris Sage is not my real name.  I’ve also changed the names of anyone I mention in this blog.  This was a personal experience that changed the way I look at the world in ways I still haven’t fully unraveled.  I don’t really want people who know me to figure out just how much changed when I don’t understand it myself.  Maybe I’ll figure it out as I write about it.  Maybe not.

I guess I always knew something wasn’t right.  I didn’t know what and didn’t really care, because whatever it was let me be a little risky.  I could drink, pick up someone, use expired condoms in the full expectation that I wouldn’t get pregnant.  Which I didn’t.  I never had deep pains or debilitating cramps the way some women get.  I just had a period that wouldn’t show up more than two or three times a year and a history of risking pregnancy and never getting pregnant.  I thought this was great.  I didn’t want kids then and here it was that somehow my body decided that if I didn’t want them, I wasn’t going to get them.  It was wonderful.  STD’s didn’t scare me.  The thought of having creatures who were wholly dependent on me not to screw up their lives did.

Time passed as it does, and eventually I settled on one person to be my partner in everything.  He wanted kids.  Not enough to be a deal breaker, but enough that it was a major personal goal of his.  I was still scared of the idea, but willing to give it a shot.  I stopped all birth control and we did the nasty in the hopes of getting a child.  A year and a half later we still didn’t have even a scare we could identify.  By this point, my age was into its late thirties.  A gynecologist asked at a routine visit if I wanted kids because the clock was ticking.  It would run out soon.  This time, for this question, I said yes.  He examined me, decided that the color of the skin between my legs meant I wasn’t ovulating, and prescribed a drug called clomid.  Clomid is supposed to make ovulation happen by doing weird shit to hormones.  I took it, my doctor setup blood tests to check that I had ovulated and off we went.  Four months later, every blood test had come back as not ovulating.  Right around this point in time, my husband graduated with his PhD and my job became stable instead of on again off again. I also quit drinking which is a whole other topic.  It meant we had the money and coverage to start talking to specialists.  My gynecologist that the years, my age, and the ovulation tests meant it was time to make that referral.  He did, and we were off.

Now part of this blog is to explore the feelings of what was going on not just the actual goings on.  So I guess the feeling after trying and the tests was mixed.  I still wasn’t quite sure I wanted children, but I did want my husband happy.  There was a deep hole in him where kids should have been.  If he was going to help raise them, if I wasn’t going to be the 100% stay at home mom, maybe we could do this.  That’s how my thinking went back then.  He wanted children far more than I did.  I thought that would mean he’d spend as much or more time raising them.  I was sort of happy the attempts had failed so far.  It meant I didn’t have to have the conversation about not really wanting children.  I was also sort of sad because it meant part of me didn’t really work right.  That part, the not working right, that may have driven me far more in our fertility “journey” than the actual desire (more on the reason I put that in quotes later).  I have a chronic need to fix things.  If something’s broken, I want to figure out why, and do something about it.  This counted as broken, and something that we could do something about.  So here we were, going to a specialist, my husband still not knowing how much I was wanting it to not work out but also wanting to fix the part of myself that was broken.  (And also sad I quit drinking, but as I said, that’s another topic.)

Next up, first visit with the fertility doctor.  We’ll call him Fertility Dude.

It’s driving me crazy.  Whenever it rains, we start all over as if she’s new to this whole potty training thing yet again.  I don’t understand it.  Yes, she doesn’t like being wet.  In the dry days that follow the rain she still keeps peeing inside.  We take her out, stand with her, sometimes pee out there all in the hopes she’ll go back to peeing outside.  No luck, she pees inside.  I just don’t get it.

The number of times people have walked in on embarrassing moments on a holodeck makes me wonder why that door doesn’t lock.

Star Trek has a lot of plot holes.  Some are because it’s story, written by people who don’t know anything about science.  That means that sometimes moons have circular orbits.  Some are #metoo moments, that I credit to the age of the show.  And sometimes, people walk in on holodeck self therapy sessions.

This has been a random thought of the day.

and sometimes I have to fight it off with every weapon I can come up with.  There’s plenty of posts about how to deal with your depression.  This is not that post.  My depression got a name somewhere along the way.  Merry.  It’s name is Merry.  It bothers me so I call it Murray instead.  Murray, the copperhead in the well tended grass of my life.

(none of this is true.  The truth is her depression is named Shadow and started as a black unicorn from my little pony the old one, not that new stuff)

Bleah, whatever we call it, it does sometimes just go.  I don’t know why or when it will happen.  In those moments I’d love to say I get as much done as possible, but that’s not what happens.  I sit and enjoy some show, petting the dog, or cat, and trying to figure out how to make a small child come out of limpet mode

Darkness who had been hanging around for weeks now, just disappeared.  I wonder when it will be back.

Sometimes something so tragic happens that whenever people get together to talk about it, inevitably the question becomes “Where were you when you heard?  What were you doing when you saw it on tv, read it in a paper, saw it on a streaming site?” What’s strange about this (to me anyway), is the people asking those questions, having that breathless conversation (maybe over drinks with people you’ve never met before and don’t care if you meet again), are never the ones who were there or who had a piece of themselves destroyed that choose to speak about where they were.   It’s never the mother, father, friend, daughter, co-worker or the poor sod who had to pick up the bits left behind who have that conversation (at least not with me but maybe my own prickles keep the people with the raw open wounds from confiding their own memories of one of the worst days of their lives.)  The first of the “where were you” moments for me happened when I was a child just discovering that the world around me wasn’t always so safe.   But I wasn’t there, in that moment.  I saw it on a TV and even then, it was years before I understood that what I’d seen was a collective tragedy that echoed through a people that thought “No, this could not happen.   Not here.” My child self knew something awful had happened, that the front of a building shouldn’t ever look like that when there are people inside, that 144 (what I remember now, nearly 30 years later and probably wrong) is a lot of people murdered.  But I do remember the room I was sitting in, and a blue couch with soft wood arms that I would scrape patterns into with my fingernails while watching TV.   The room was white, and the end tables that matched that terrible couch had lamps on them that were bulbous and blue, with white lampshades.  And I was alone, and watching something, and the report came on.  And for the first time, a tragedy outside myself, something that had nothing to do then, and still not much to do now with my day to day life, made me feel something.  A sadness, maybe, but not really, because my immediate response wasn’t tears or sympathy for those people or their families, or their co-workers who got out or just got lucky they weren’t there that day.  It was a poem.  A bad one.  A “where were you” poem for people who also had a “where were you.” Something to talk about how shocking it was, that it could make me write about such things so young.  It wasn’t a where were you.  It was a “look at me” as many of those conversations are.  Shallow.  To go with the drinks with people you don’t care if you see again.