I was fine with the news. It sucked, but honestly it’s kind of expected. Did I REALLY think I could get pregnant two cycles in a row? Did I REALLY think my luck was that good? So the beta confirmed that I am indeed NOT pregnant, as I expected.

What I did NOT expect, however, was for them to tell me that the lab is closing down next month, so I’ll have to sit out a cycle. The lab re-opens on August 15… so that’s when I can start my stims cycle. Two months of doing NOTHING! Two months of sitting around just waiting. Another two months of being not pregnant. And that is when I started feeling hazy and angry and wanting to throw my cell phone out my car window. (Which I would never do because it is pink and I love it – but, you know, I just wanted some kind of handy projectile to shatter on the highway.)

The negatives, I can handle. The doing it all over again, I can handle. The mockery that is my “luck,” I can handle. But I cannot handle waiting. The entire summer, wasting my time. Another three months from this point in time that I may (or may not) be pregnant. Hasn’t this gone on long enough? Haven’t I waited long enough?

But like I said to Kel, there’s nothing to do. It would be different if we had done 4 fresh + 2 frozen cycles and gotten absolutely nothing, then I’d be ready to move on to donor eggs. But this? We know it works!! I had a beautiful baby boy. I got pregnant again, just in the wrong spot. It’s so fucking close! It’s possible, it’s achievable. It’s just a question of how long do we have to wait for it.

Everyone says, you need to take some time off. To relax. I say, bullshit. What I need is to get pregnant, and sitting around doing nothing is NOT going to get me pregnant. I have obstinate eggs and only one tube – and I gave up hope of ever getting pregnant naturally long before I lost that tube. Sane people don’t bank on winning the lottery – especially people who tend to lose every lottery they have ever entered… and some they didn’t. Time off only serves to make me pissed off and frustrated. Trust me, I am pissed off and frustrated enough as it is.

But there is nothing to do but waste my entire summer doing NOTHING. It even looks like it’s going to be a crappy fucking summer, weather-wise… mid-June and we’ve had a week of rain and are looking at another one. I feel like I’m back in Vancouver (which does not in any way inspire a happy nostalgic feeling). Predictions do not show a happy sunny warm summer.

I guess there are two very minor positives that come out of this delay (the kind that I really don’t care about, but it’s something I guess): I don’t have to worry about taking more days off work mid-summer when everyone’s on vacation; and my next cycle’s due date won’t be in April. Oh, and I’m going to visit Kel… just have to figure out when.

I feel sick to my stomach.

I’ve been feeling anxious ever since Thursday, when I learned that something might be wrong with my coworker’s baby. Which, now that I think about it, may have contributed to my mass meltdown this weekend. I just felt such dread in the pit of my stomach. Everyone else could say, “Oh it will probably be fine!” but I know too much. I really, really hoped I was wrong.

I desperately want to do something, but I don’t know her very well. People deal with grief differently, maybe she just wants to be left alone with her husband to deal. I gave her my number and told her to call me, but I know from experience that sometimes making a call is just too much to handle. I don’t want to intrude, but I want to make sure they know they are supported. I want them to know that even if the rest of the world doesn’t understand, I do. I have some baby loss books and other resources, and I think I’m going to deliver them to her… I’m just not sure when.

Being on the other side of grief is hard… harder than I thought. In some ways it would be easier if it was a close friend or family member.. then I’d have a better idea of how the person dealt with things, and what they would appreciate. Right now I feel like I’m just staggering in the dark and hoping I do something helpful along the way.

::

My plan was always to test on Tuesday morning. I’ve spent the evening wondering if I even should. It’s so strange to be the one whose life is moving forward when someone else’s stands still. What if it is positive? It feels so wrong to walk into work on Wednesday and announce happy news in the midst of this horror. Maybe to everyone else it wouldn’t seem weird. But it feels like a time of mourning, not joy.

And of course it could just as easily be negative. More bad news. I feel too drained right now to get too upset… remembering that there are worse things than not getting pregnant in the first place. I am in a different place tonight. I am scared – not of not getting pregnant, but of reliving loss. Of reliving the fear. In some ways the fear scares me more than the grief.

And then I think about taking a test and staring at it as my hand shakes, watching as no line shows up after 1 minute, 2 minutes, 4… and I feel sick to my stomach all over again.

I do not know what the morning will bring. I’m not even sure I’m ready to face it yet.

To answer the question on everyone’s mind: no, I do not have any pregnancy symptoms. Nothing at all. Which is not at all surprizing. In fact I was thinking about how early I was feeling symptoms in April and then realized, duh, it was ectopic so of course I was feeling it more. Tubes are not nearly as adept at dealing with an embryo implanting. (But even in that cycle I didn’t have any cramping or anything until after I tested positive.)

Tomorrow will be monday and I have not had to fight off the slightest inclination to test early. Which may very well be the first time that has happened.

To be honest I do not feel positive at all about the outcome of this cycle… which is the same way I feel every cycle now. My heart is so guarded I don’t even let myself go “there,” I just don’t picture it. I try to just run on the assumption that I’m not pregnant and make plans from there.

Now excuse me while I ramble on about philosophy and fate. Feel free to skip.

::

This morning I found myself laying in bed thinking about Fatalism and Free Will. I quite obviously do not believe in a maker, a god – there is no question in my mind about that. I for some reason always thought the non-god version of the world was pretty straightforward. Then Saturday night I found myself reading the Wikipedia article about Fatalism, thinking, Well that sounds nonsensical. But the morning dawned with me puzzling over it, especially in the context of the crappy events in my life.

It boils down to one question: are our lives on a set path, or not. It’s a question that doesn’t bother with the why – it doesn’t matter if you think it’s because of a god making the decisions or if it’s just “fate” or “the way things are.” Either way there is a fundamental question of what is possible.

You hear it sometimes from people not really intending to suggest such a philosophical issue: “It was meant to be,” “Whatever will happen will happen.”

On one side is fate. Your decisions all lead to the same end game. I was destined to get married to this man, struggle with infertility, get pregnant that particular cycle, conceive a baby boy through IVF, who would then die in the womb. It wasn’t coincidence, it was the path my life laid out for me. In a way I can understand that viewpoint. Since I am standing in one place looking backwards I can see how every decision in my life inevitably brought me to the place where I now stand. It could be a comforting thought: my life will take me to where I need to go. There is certainly a kind of freedom in giving up control. But the downside is that in this imagined world you have no choice, no freedom – whatever you think you have is just an illusion. It doesn’t matter if you can see the bus coming, there’s nothing you can do to stop it.

The other side of the debate is free will. If you as an individual have the ability to make decisions that change something, it means there is no fate, no destiny. It means there is a tree of endless possibilities among which somewhere our life paths will travel, switching paths at every juncture. That’s where it’s easy to fall into the paranoia. If I make this small decision, that could lead to a circumstance that would necessitate this decision that could lead to some horrible event. Suddenly choosing a paint color feels like an overwhelming life decision. Maybe, if I had painted the room blue instead of green, I’d have a baby. Crazy thought? Maybe. (But you can’t tell me you don’t have them.)

Of course there are some – maybe many – who believe that it’s half and half… that there is a larger “plan”, but the details are left up to chance and free will. I think once you wade into that realm you’re left requiring a higher power making those judgement calls as to what fits into the plan and what is inconsequential. I don’t think the nature argument works well with this halfsies idea.

As for me, I think I fall within the free will camp, though I picture it less of “free will” and more of chance. Luck. Nature’s laws. I do see a tree of timelines, I do overanalyze my choices. That’s always been a problem for me. We as humans can make choices that affect our future, but I do feel like so much is beyond our control – but not because it is already set and decided, but because we are only human, we can only do so much.

Here’s another scenario: fortune-tellers. The only way that is even possible is if there is a fated plan. If there is no plan, then there is no way to know what will happen. I was thinking about this a while back, when some girls were talking about getting “readings” online regarding when they would concieve. I realized quickly that, while it once seemed attractive to have reassurance and know that pregnancy was going to happen, I no longer have any interest, even if it were possible. For one thing, I am a wimp and I can’t handle rejection. What if the answer sucked? What if I had known ahead of time that I would get pregnant after much heartache, only to lose him at 36 weeks? There’s no way I would have enjoyed my pregnancy the way I did. And I wouldn’t exchange that true, unfettered joy for anything.

The second issue with fortune telling is this: what if I had been told that I would get pregnant in March of 2009 from an IVF cycle (and knew that it was true). Well I can’t see me doing any IVF cycles prior to that, knowing that it wouldn’t work… I mean, who would do that. But in order to get pregnant in March I had to have a stims cycle in February that produced enough embryos to freeze some, and in order to do the stims cycle that gave us that many embryos we had to go through the December cycle that utterly failed, prompting us to change the protocol completely. It’s the age-old problem. Knowing the future means you change the future, which means you can’t know the future!

But who the hell knows. I feel like I’m too old to be concerned with such deep, philosophical questions. I had far more time and mental energy to fret about existence when I was 14. Now it just seems inconsequential. And it makes my head hurt.