Well that’s that. 1 year trying, 12 cycles of sperm and eggs and yet no pregnancy occurring. Hello infertility diagnosis. How the hell did that happen.
And of course, as usual I’m cramping and bloating and feeling like shit. I’m supposed to be cleaning up the house to get ready for the plumber coming tomorrow, but not tonight. I’m crawling into bed as soon as this show is over and I am not moving until morning.
An email to my mother, that I think is appropriate to post here for posterity. My mom knows we’ve been trying, knows I’ve been upset about it. Every month I’ll mention off-hand to her that AF arrived and she’ll offer sympathy. My mom may get a lot of things wrong, her and I have had a very rocky relationship over my lifetime, but at least she “gets” this one.
A very good article about the history and risks of childbirth: The Score.
It actually does a very good job of pointing out both sides of the coin. Especially at the end when it weighs planned c-sections. It has some very good points.
Emailing an old friend today, someone I haven’t talked to for about a year, I was giving the broad strokes on my life and mentioned that we are TTC, still TTC, still not pregnant. I am, as I have said before, very Out. I have no issue with it – I expect ignorant comments (though not rude ones) and know how to respond to them.
So it was no surprize when he responded with the usual well-wishes on our journey, the “don’t worry about it,” and the comment that isn’t it true that the more one “tries” the harder it is to get pregnant, anyways.
Like I said I am not distressed by this. But I am very perplexed. This is a very, very far-reaching myth. Why do people believe that? People who have never been pregnant, never really dealt with pregnancy and know next to nothing about the process – yet they believe very firmly that “thinking about it” and “trying” will indeed prevent pregnancy. These are otherwise very intelligent people who work in all forms of careers, who have brilliant college degrees and are very street-wise. And yet they somehow believe that one’s thoughts can and will affect a physical event. I just don’t understand. Where does this myth come from??
I would expect that it comes from a similar place as the misbeliefs about depression – that one can change it by not thinking about it, that you can just “get over it.” But I understand where that comes from – depression is such an intangible thing and if you don’t deal with it or know someone close who has people tend to not really be able to understand it.
But conception and pregnancy, that is something that people in general have – at least to my mind – at least a rudimentary understanding. You learn early how the sperm swims up to meet and inseminate the egg. If people know nothing else about the cycle and process (and I’m willing to bet most don’t) it comes down the the sperm and the egg. But it is completely physical. I fail to understand where the thoughts thing comes into it. Will my over-thinking scare away the sperm? Will my anxiety adversely affect the egg so that it sulks in a corner?
But as usual I respond with a short comment about how medical problems are quite common and it must be addressed (saying nothing about how asinine the idea that my thoughts are preventing a pregnancy) and left it at that. I try to not go off on people who mean well. (If they don’t mean well, however, I feel quite fine in being snotty and detailing the ovulation cycle, conception and all the medical problems that can and do interfere with it.)
And all of this is why I believe we (as a society) need to be more open about infertility. The fact that it is a topic not typically discussed or even mentioned contributes to the lack of education. People honestly have no clue. How does that change? By knowing people who are struggling, by learning about all the different medical conditions, by understanding what actually goes on in the process. Maybe they’ll never need to know for their own situation, but bets are good that they’ll come into contact with someone else.
I tend to take up causes – just as my poor husband, who has had to listen to many tirades in our time together. My long-standing cause is animal welfare, and again it all comes down to education (well for most people – for some people they are just assholes and no amount of education will change that). And it really is a hard line to tread, because in educating people you run the risk of pissing them off if they do not wish to be educated, if they feel attacked. (I am coming to the belief that many people prefer to have their fingers in their ears and just don’t want to know – it’s easier to go on about your life if you don’t know. And when it comes to infertility, that requires at least some mention of topics that aren’t considered polite, so it’s back to the fingers-in-the-ears thing.)
I’m probably going to join RESOLVE, because I want to support what they’re doing. And I’m going to keep talking about it, even though afterwards I have to sit there, blinking, and wonder how the frick intelligent people can still manage to say idiotic things.
I’ve been putting some of my time and coding skills into doing a few little things for a TTC group I’m in at FF. There are many buddy groups, I’ve come and gone from several, but there’s a group for girls born in 1982 and for some reason we seen to be closer than the “hey, yeah me too” types. The group keeps growing – people come and go, whether because of pregnancy or taking a break or just drifting off, but it seems we have more coming than going right now. So I made up a little chart with our names and DHs and how many kids we have and how long we’ve been trying and what kind of treatments we’re going through. Basically I first did it because I was having trouble keeping people straight, but I find I’m enjoying building more of a mini-community feeling for this group. And this morning I finally realized why: it’s giving me a secret-club feeling like a due date group would be. The longer we go the more I feel “left out” – but in bonding with other TTC’ers with a common theme we can build our own little group.
As you can tell, I love to organize, I love to gather people up into little groups and give them jobs and a purpose and make it all official and pretty-like. I’ve done it for many years with other websites, other hobbies, other communities. I guess I have that leader attitude inside of me.
On another note…
For the past several months I’ve been very careful to avoid referring to myself as infertile or dealing with infertility. I’d say researching infertility, later possibly dealing with infertility, knowing others who deal with infertility – etc. I was not infertile. Well not technically, not for sure. And I didn’t want to make it sound like I was masquerading.
Just now I was typing a post response to just something random someone had said and I said something like, “and now dealing with infertility.” And it sounded so strange. There’s a part of me that wants to go, “No, no, no. We’re not infertile. It’s not how it sounds.” But then the other side of me says, “Crap.” (Okay, so that side’s not all that eloquent.) And as much as I thought I was prepared and ready to take it in stride it was a shocking moment to fit that label to myself. No wonder so many people don’t want to face it right away – it’s a hard pill to swallow.
Relaxing Doesn’t Make Babies… my journey in TTC – and now infertility.
A small blessing (very small) – my period has been not quite as painful as usual. I took a midol the evening that she showed, because I was cramping worse every minute that went by. But then all yesterday I wasn’t bad enough to warrant taking another. Work wasn’t fun, by any means, I had on-again off-again cramping and still wasn’t feeling up to eating a full meal, but it was more of an annoyance. Tonight I’ve gotten up to eat and don’t feel nauseated, and I only feel a little pressure, no cramping. So yay for feeling more normal than I’d expect?
%$#!%#%#^$!
Sorry about the interruption. Major server hardware problems. Hopefully they’re all fixed now.