This evening Den invited me out to a dinner following the charity golf tournament he played in. I happily got dressed up and went – we had to pay some money, but it was a nice steak dinner and some of his family members were going to be there. It wasn’t a fancy deal and the sheer amount of people packed into the room was making me a tad claustraphobic, but the promise of food (steak!) lured me.

While waiting for dinner to be served we were sitting at a table sipping on ice water and chatting with his dad and step-mom. I happened to look up and see an obviously pregnant woman enter the room and make her way slowly down the aisle. It just hit me all wrong and I gulped and immediately averted my eyes. I started to feel a little panicky, like the room was far too small. I wanted her to move far, far away. Den noticed and asked me what was wrong. “There’s a pregnant woman,” I replied. “Where?” he asked. I glanced over my shoulder to check her location, then turned back to him. “Beside me.” Tears welled up in my eyes. Her presence felt like an elephant sitting in the chair next to mine as she chatted with the friends of hers whom we had the misfortune to be sharing a table with. It taunted me. Of all tables, of all chairs, why that one? I turned towards Den and steadfastly ignored her; he pulled me against his chest and stroked my hair. I tried to not cry. I didn’t want to have to go running out of the room. I didn’t want to draw attention to myself. Thankfully she moved on later – I don’t know when.

We ate dinner and tried too ignore the obnoxious, too-loud cackles from the ladies a table over. After dinner was of course the raffle. Now understand that Den and I never win at raffles or lotteries or anything of the sort. It has always been somewhat of a joke to us – we just don’t win at anything luck-related. Den kept saying we weren’t going to win, but he had purchased a couple of tickets (for a necklace, of all things – I asked him why and he shrugged and said, “for you”). I held my breath. Of course we didn’t win the necklace. I asked myself why I even held out hope.

Den wanted to leave after that, but they moved on to the blue tickets, the small item raffle. We had a string of blue tickets and there were 25, 30 items on the table. They would just pick random tickets from the bin, and you could choose your prize. And I felt stuck there until they called every single number. Den ended up leaving and going home and I just sat there, staring at my tickets, repeating my ticket numbers over and over in my head as if that would help conjure up a winning one. Number after number they called, none of them mine. I found myself getting angry. We won the worst jackpot in the world – one in 20,000 – and yet I can’t win a fucking raffle prize? In all my life I’ve never been on the small end of odds, I’ve never been lucky… so how the FUCK did I end up being the one with a dead baby because of some rare condition? How the hell does that happen? So I couldn’t leave. I had to stay, I had to see and wait and hope. I was waiting for something, looking for something: salvation, reassurance. I didn’t even care if I won something completely useless, I just wanted MY number to be called. I wanted to know that a dead baby isn’t the only thing I’m ever going to “win.”

I walked out empty-handed.

Today I’ve been working on “storyboards” of a sort… baby name storyboards. I’m trying to figure things out in my head regarding what we will name the next child if it’s a girl. The girl’s names are driving me crazy. There are so many variables I won’t get into it here, but suffice it to say it’s complicated and at this point I’ve had to resign myself to the conclusion that the name will become apparent when I’m pregnant, and no sooner. This troubles me. I hate not knowing in advance. If we end up with twin girls we’re totally set… otherwise we’re going to have to make some tough decisions.

The storyboards have two girl names and one boy name. And I didn’t feel right about that, so I added Devin’s too. To complete the “family”. And I was okay with it all day… feeling pleased, feeling proud. It all comes together, and I’m getting used to the whole concept of him being our angel son, our dead son… our past, instead of our future.

But then once in a while I open up a storyboard and think FUCK! It’s not fair, damnit. Devin was supposed to be so much more than broken promises.

“I held my breath waiting for the ultrasound technician to tell me you were okay; I haven’t been able to breathe since.”

One Sentence. What’s yours?

I really want to go back to the RE.

But it’s not why you think. I’m actually perfectly fine with waiting out these natural cycles, and with our insurance deficiency we couldn’t start IVF right now anyways – which is why I’ve been putting off making an appointment. It seems silly to go if you can’t or won’t do anything, right?

Yeah, well, I find myself getting exceedingly frustrated because I don’t know what’s wrong. I’m sure everyone who has dealt with an “unexplained infertility” diagnosis can understand that one. Not knowing is torture. But with us… when we did our second IVF cycle, with ICSI, we got some light shining on it. “Finally!” I said. “At least we know what’s wrong!”

Thing is, I’m extremely unclear as to what the issue is. I google “low ferilization” and “immature eggs” and many other terms and I still can’t seem to find any similar cases or explanations as to what the hell happened. When I’m talking about our IVF experience people say, “So it was your egg quality then?” And I don’t know what to say. Maybe? But every time I look up poor egg quality I get articles that involve high FSH levels and a high FSH:LH ratio. I didn’t have that. My FSH levels were a little on the higher side, but firmly within the “good” ranking. And my ratio was very close to 1:1. Neither of which indicate any kind of egg quality problem.

Low fertilization… well that just gets me a bunch of articles about how great ICSI is. And one article mentioning how if the ICSI fertilization rate is poor then it suggests an egg quality problem. But then it defines poor ICSI fertilization as the number of fertilized eggs out of the number that were injected. Well, we had one injected, one fertilized.

That would lead me to conclude that the conclusion that the first IVF was also mis-labeled. 24 eggs, 2 fertilized – they said poor fertilization. But only 4 eggs were mature, 2 of which were “dead”! Only 2 would have been ICSI’d. So doesn’t that lead to the same conclusion? NOT a fertilization problem?

Which brings me round to poor egg stimulation, poor egg maturity. Different than egg QUALITY by far. That suggests that it was the stimulation protocol used during IVF that caused the poor “fertilization rate”s and all that crap. But the flip side of that is this one little niggling problem: that doesn’t explain why we’re infertile!!! ALL that explains is why the IVF didn’t go well. It was a medication problem, a protocol problem NOT an inherent problem that happened during my un-medicated cycles. So what, does this mean I’m still unexplained? Just bad luck?

So yeah, I want to go sit down with one of the REs, just to say, “Okay, please explain to me what the fuck happened, why it happened, and what we can do to fix it.” I’m probably going to make an appointment soon. I’ll probably wait until after AF shows to make it, though. I do this every month. Maybe I should just make it now. Lady Luck likes irony.

::

Pee sticks? Still pretty dark. I’m getting pissed at them. It showed a surge, then won’t go back down. I thought it was, yesterday… then today it’s still dark. I started fretting, did I even ovulate? I felt “ovulation” pains, but like others have said, it could – and probably was – my ovaries gearing up to ovulate, not actually doing it. And I’ve had aching since… that could mean either that I ovulated, or that it’s still dicking around in there. I started thinking damnit, maybe I should chart just to figure out what the hell my body is doing and to confirm that it’s actually ovulating.

Then I realized, check my CM. Duh. No fertile CM at all, cervix is high (it was very low). Is it a smoking gun? No. No guarantee. But it’s enough to make me stop fretting, and that’s good enough for me.