Postscript

As a postscript to yesterday's post, I wanted to share that I just unfriended someone on Facebook.  She's one of the worst about posting constant kid updates, and I haven't talked to her since high school; I don't know why I waited this long to get rid of her.  This morning she announced that she's pregnant with baby number three, and I barely hesitated before clicking "unfriend."

It felt gooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooood.

Milestones

Over the past few days, all of the babies around me seem to be hitting major milestones.  My niece is sleeping through the night, my work friend’s baby recently said her first word, and yesterday Facebook told me that one friend’s baby is walking and another is crawling.

Is there a Facebook setting that can remove posts like this?

While nothing can quite match the gut-punch of a pregnancy announcement, these baby milestones are pretty depressing to hear about.  I’d even contend that they’re worse than the actual births.  Why?  Here’s four reasons:

They’re more surprising.  Birth is rarely a surprise.  When you announce your pregnancy on Facebook, I’ll probably make a mental note of your approximate due date.  If I see you on a regular basis, I’m going see you getting bigger and realize you’re getting close.  Plus, you’re going to give me all sorts of other reminders that you’re about to have a baby (a recent Facebook example: “The milk I just bought expires AFTER the baby's due date!”).  So, I’m mentally prepared for you to give birth.  Baby milestones?  Much less precise, and unless you’re really annoying you’re probably not posting “Baby is getting really close to taking his first steps!” to Facebook.  The milestones sneak up on me.

They’re cuter.  Let’s be honest: while cute, all newborns sort of look like my thumb after I spent too long in the bathtub.  It’s easy to get desensitized to the parade of similar-looking sleepy newborn photos, but by the time milestones hit, those babies’ personalities are starting to shine through and it makes the pictures so much cuter.  A first toothless smile below crinkly little eyes? So sweet.  My friend’s baby toddling across the room with a serious face in his tiny baby jeans and plaid shirt, looking like a miniature grown up?  Adorable.  The cuter these babies get, the more my heart aches.

They never end.  While birth is a singular event, there are tons of milestones for me to hear about.  Babies smile, roll over, sleep through the night, crawl, walk, talk… etc. etc. etc.  So many things for you to tell me about your baby!  And, even worse, the volume of information keeps growing as more and more people keep getting pregnant and having babies.  I already have everything from pregnancy announcements to first-day-of-school pictures on my newsfeed, and it’s going to keep snowballing until it meets some sort of critical mass and I lock myself in the bathroom to escape it all.

They show the passage of time.  Whenever my friends’ babies reach milestones, all I can think of is the fact that we’re falling farther and farther behind.  A small, irrational part of me expected everyone else’s babies to stay babies until Henry and I had ours, but of course they won’t: these newborns are becoming babies are becoming toddlers are becoming kids.  And all the while our baby isn’t reaching any milestones, because our baby doesn’t even exist.  It’s only going to get worse, because I am painfully aware that any babies born from here on out were conceived after Henry and I started trying.  In other words, please excuse me while I go lock myself in the bathroom.

Snow!

Everyone is posting pictures of their kids playing in the snow on Facebook, and I'm just over here like "Um, I have a dog..."

You have to admit, though - he is pretty cute.

Perfection Industrial Complex

Before I begin, woooo Ravens!  Super Bowl bound!  I’m not a huge football fan, but the Ravens are fun to root for and Baltimore is such an awesome sports city.  Everyone is so happy and excited that you can’t help but feed off of it.  And, seeing as how I have to relate everything back to my infertility, I can’t help but think about how the Super Bowl it at just about the time I’ll be starting my birth control pills.  Somehow it always makes time move faster when I have something that I’m looking forward to, and a Super Bowl party where I’ll actually care about more than the commercials definitely counts as something to look forward to.

In a stroke of luck, Henry and I ended up with Ravens playoff tickets

I had a couple of friends come to visit me this weekend.  One is a friend I’ve mentioned before, who knows about my fertility issues and is actually going through her own.  We’ll call her Hillary.  The other friend, we’ll call her Charlotte, since if we were assigning everyone Sex and the City identities she would definitely be the Charlotte.  (I’d be the Carrie… I know everyone claims to be the Carrie but I am more bohemian than most of my friends and I write, so I think I have a pretty good claim on being the Carrie of my group).  (I swear I'm not obsessed with SATC, we just watched a few episodes this weekend so it's on my mind).

Anyway, those of you who have been reading for a while know that I have a constant internal struggle going over whether or not to tell people about my fertility issues.  For the most part, we’ve landed on the side of no – Henry and I have each told our immediate families (although his sister doesn’t know) and one friend each (whose spouses also know).  Altogether, that means that there are 13 people who aren’t us or our doctor who know.

I’m pretty happy with my decision not to tell many people anything.  Sure, there are days when I imagine writing a melodramatic you-might-not-be-as-fertile-as-you-think-so-start-trying-now e-mail to all my girlfriends, or randomly posting an infertility awareness article on Facebook (this one, especially), or dropping the news into the middle of a conversation like a big ol’ awkward bomb, but I resist.  If the people who know have taught me anything, it’s that once it’s a topic of conversation, I don’t have control over it.  Sometimes my mom feels positive while I feel negative, and nothing in the world is more annoying than that.  I console myself with fantasies of how I'll shock everyone with my IVF revelation once I get pregnant.

Anyway, not wanting to tell people led me to bite my tongue with Charlotte this weekend.  Charlotte broke up with her long term boyfriend about a year ago, and is feeling a little… lost.  She’s just in that funk, the same one we’ve all been in, where you realize that your life isn’t exactly how you imagined it would be at this point (told you she was the Charlotte) and start comparing it to everyone else's.

So there Hillary and I are, several mimosas in at brunch, giving Charlotte the same crappy platitudes everyone gives their friends in a funk of self-comparison:

"No one is as happy as they act on Facebook."

"Even if you were married, life wouldn't be perfect."

"You never really know what other people are going through."

"You don't know what tomorrow holds."

Do I think that it would have made Charlotte happy to learn that I'm infertile?  Of course not.  But at the same time, I can't help but feel like I am part of the perfection industrial complex that is contributing to Charlotte's malaise.  I'm married, financially secure, have a cute husband and an awesome dog, and seem to be living a fabulous life, even if I do mostly keep it off of Facebook.  If I were Charlotte, I might hate me.  But of course, I bit my tongue and - rather than sharing proof that everything we were saying was true - continued to spout the same tired cliches.  Sorry, Charlotte.  I'll tell you one day.

I Love Plans

To close out the counselor saga: I did eventually get an appointment, although not with any of the people I called that day.  Reinvigorated by writing that post, I expanded my search a few miles farther out the next day and found someone who seems great.  I called, left a message, she called back, and we scheduled.  Done and done.  It was sort of funny because I think she assumed I am in worse emotional shape than I am* – I have a terrible cold at the moment and when I answered my phone the first thing she asked was, “Have you been crying?”  After I laughed and said no, she offered me an appointment for that very day (she had a cancellation).  I told her that I’m really fine right now, just making the appointment to get ready for my next cycle, and since that isn’t starting for a while I would wait for an evening appointment so Henry could come.  We made a date for a few weeks from now! 

*How pathetic do you have to be to consider yourself in not-that-bad emotional shape when you only cry once on the phone while making an appointment with a counselor?

Speaking of appointments, I had my post-IVF-failure-follow up appointment, (I’ve seen it referred to as the “WTF appointment,” and I love that) with my doctor this week.  I didn’t learn a whole lot of information that I didn’t learn when I talked to him the day of my negative pregnancy test, and the plan we made is just a fleshed out version of what we decided on then, but since I never wrote about any of that here I can fill you in.

One of the first things my doctor told me when I got that negative was “It’s not like you had a perfect cycle and didn’t get pregnant.”  This statement is actually the epitome of how my doctor is: on first glance it seems harsh and insensitive, but ultimately it’s actually pretty reassuring.  I mean I started with a hydro, developed a cyst, only made eggs in one ovary (and therefore got about half as many eggs as we wanted), only had one egg fertilize naturally, and yet STILL ended up with a chemical pregnancy?  All things considered, I think that counts as a success.

Some of those things we have no control over – if I’m meant to get a cyst I will, no amount of pleading is going to make my left ovary make eggs if it doesn’t want to, and ultimately we can put back the most perfect embryos in history but their developing into a baby is up to chance/fate/the universe/God – but we made a plan that will hopefully account for the others.

The most complicated issue is that hydro.  My doctor said that his instinct is that the hydro isn’t causing a problem – it’s in an open tube, he never saw the hydro on the ultrasound during stims, and there was never any fluid in my uterus.  Still, he agrees that it’s probably a good idea to close off that tube, just to take that variable out of the equation.  EXCEPT!  That the hydro is on the same side as the ovary that makes eggs, and the surgery that would fix the hydro also comes with a certain risk to that ovary.  So he’s very nervous about going ahead with the surgery; his discomfort with the surgery outweighs his discomfort with the hydro.

So how do we solve that dilemma?  The plan is to put me on a significantly higher dose of drugs (hopefully fixing the half as many eggs issue).  Then we will go ahead with the egg retrieval, ICSI all of the eggs (hopefully fixing that low fertilization issue), and let them grow.  From there we have three options:  (1) If I have lots of embryos and the hydro has stayed hidden throughout the process, we’ll go ahead and do a transfer and freeze the remaining embryos.  Then, if I don’t get pregnant, I’ll do the surgery and have plenty of frosties as insurance against the risk.  (2)  If I only have a few embryos and the hydro is dormant, I’ll forget the surgery and just do the transfer.  (3)  If I have a medium amount of embryos and/or the hydro seems to be causing a problem, I’ll freeze everything, have the surgery, and do a frozen transfer at a later date.

Whew!  Does all that make sense?  It does in my head.  I’m rarin’ to go - I joked with my doctor that he had my full permission to overstimulate me to the point where they wouldn’t do a fresh transfer even if the hydro wasn’t there.  He laughed, then decided on the higher of the two doses he was debating between.

I feel good.  I love plans.

Going in Circles

As I mentioned recently, I decided to go ahead and make an appointment with a counselor.  I felt ambivalent about the idea – at the moment I feel pretty good, emotionally (honestly it’s mostly out of my head), but I would still love to talk with someone about strategies for coping as time ticks by, especially if the next round is negative.  I’ve never been to a counselor before, so I’m a little nervous, but I’m also curious.  So I decided to make an appointment.

Let’s just say that it’s good that I don’t desperately need help.

I started off with the fertility center’s counselor about a week and a half ago.  I talked with her on the phone, and she seemed very nice.  She said to call her administrative offices (at a different number) and give them my insurance info to find out how much my insurance would cover before I made an appointment.  Seemed reasonable.  There was some implication that treatment costs would be on a sliding scale depending on my coverage, which was cool.

I called her secretary, spelled out all of my insurance coverage, and hung up with (at least I thought) the understanding that they would call me back once they had an answer for me.

So I waited, and waited, and waited.  Never having been to a counselor before, I wasn’t sure about the procedure, so I waited some more.  I felt ambivalent about the idea of going to a counselor anyway, so I waited some more.

Finally, today I decided to call back.  I have an appointment with my RE tomorrow, so it seemed like a good time – I’m about to get thrown back into infertility world after a couple weeks off.  They were, once again, very nice, and gave me some details about my insurance.  Just some though; not all.  To get the rest, I’d have to call my insurance company.

While momentum was on my side, I called the insurance company.  They were surprisingly helpful and gave me a few concrete answers.  Putting together what they told me and what the doctor told me, I did some math and realized that my visits to the out-of-network counselor would cost me about $100 each (assuming she didn’t adjust her fee for me, since I do have some coverage).  And this was AFTER I met the $250 deductible.  Ouch.

Out of curiosity, I logged onto the insurance website and checked the coverage for in-network doctors.  Much better: no deductible, and better coverage.  A quick search revealed that within six miles of my house, there were 13 doctors who listed infertility among their areas of expertise.  I looked over the list, did some Googling, and decided on my top few.

I called the number from the insurance company for my top one, a psychologist at the University of Maryland, and was told that there wasn’t a doctor by that name there.  Google had brought up a different number, so I tried that one.  No luck there either, or at the number they transferred me to, or at the number that THEY transferred me to.  Finally I tried a third number that Google gave me, but there was no answer, and the voice on the machine identified it as a university center that didn’t sound right.  I hung up.  If my insurance company’s website had out of date information about the phone number, she might not take my insurance anymore anyway.

So then I tried #2, another University of Maryland doctor.  No luck there, either – the office she is in only serves people who work on the campus.

I moved on to #3.  There was an answer, and it was the right office.  Progress!  I asked the secretary if the doctor took my insurance.  “I think so.”  I asked if I could make an appointment. “She makes her own appointments.”  I asked if she kept evening hours.  “That’s up to her.”  WHAT IS THE POINT OF THIS SECRETARY?!?!?!?!  I left a message, and the doctor is supposed to call me back if she has appointments available.  IF.  How long am I supposed to wait before moving on?

After all of that I was too exhausted to try anywhere else (and, you know, I have a job I was supposed to be doing).  I have to wonder, though, what if I were really depressed?  True depression often comes with the inability to motivate yourself, and it’s seeming like it’s going to take a lot of motivation to figure all of this out and actually get an appointment.  If I was too depressed to get out of bed, I doubt I’d ever find my way to someone who could help.  That seems like a problem.

Ugh!  I’m more stressed and discouraged now than I was before I tried to make a counseling appointment.

Timelines

I know I shouldn’t compare myself to other people, but one of my biggest preoccupations as the months tick by is figuring out where we are in relation to everyone else’s reproductive timeline.  This year I’ll turn 30 and Henry will turn 35, so it definitely feels like a year of reckoning.

My mom had me at 23, and Henry’s mom had him at 28.  My cousins (except for the one who ended up having to use donor eggs and sperm) all had their kids earlier than I will.  Henry’s sister, who is a few months younger than me, had her first baby in September.  All but one of Henry’s friends apparently coordinated behind our backs: even the ones who aren’t married have kids between nine months and a year old. (But I’m not sure exactly how we compare to them, since most of the women are Henry’s age… for example, one of Henry’s friends is a 34 year old woman married to a 39 year old man.  Does that make them our peers, or four years older than us?)  My closest friends, meanwhile, are a hodgepodge of married, single, and even a divorce, but so far there’s only one baby in the bunch.  My best friend, like me, is trying without much luck, but she’s five months older than me so does that mean we’re on the same schedule if we conceive at the same time, or if I get pregnant five months after her?  And don’t think for a second that I don’t know exactly when I’d have to conceive to be on the same timeline as a Facebook friend, a year ahead of me in college, who is expecting her first baby any day now (Fun fact: based on her due date, she conceived the month we started trying.  That’ll be a fun little reminder on my news feed soon!).

Yeah, ok, I’m crazy, no need to point it out (Henry, I’m speaking specifically to you here).  All I’m trying to say is that I’m a little unhealthily obsessed with figuring out where we stand.  We all need a hobby.

That said, I had a really, really good night at my neighbors’ house this weekend.  These are people that I would love to be one day – they’re our block’s unofficial leaders, their rehabbed house is gorgeous, they have two cute kids, and they just seem like people who did everything right and have it all figured out.  They embody the exact opposite of how I feel these days.

They had the block over to their house on Saturday night for soup and wine, and in the course of conversation with the wife she mentioned to me that she will turn 40 this year, and her husband will turn 45.  Of course my mind went straight to their kids, who were asleep upstairs.  Our neighbors are exactly ten years older than us, so how old are their kids?  Suddenly I could not picture their kids, much less guesstimate their ages.  Thankfully, asking about someone’s children is not creepy in the slightest, so I just asked.  “How old are your kids?”  Hallelujah - the older one is about five, and the younger is about to turn three.  Based on their schedule we’re not behind, we’re five years ahead!

I don’t know how our neighbors feel about when they had their kids, but from my perspective they don’t seem like old parents, they don’t seem behind schedule, and they don’t seem out of place among the parents of similarly-aged kids in the neighborhood.  They seem right on track, yet when they were our age they were still five years from their first kid.  In five years, we will have this figured out – we will have either had IVF success or adopted or something.  This limbo can’t last forever (right?).

I ended the night happy – talking to this perfect family was a good reminder that just because we’re behind my schedule doesn’t mean we’re actually behind schedule.  Maybe, in 10 years, when Henry and I are 45 and 40, there will be a young, miserable couple who will looks at us and think, “They seem like people who did everything right and have it all figured out.”  Little will they know.