Last leg
Yesterday I see Dr. M. for a follow-up visit. I ask her if the vaguely menstrual cramps I’ve been feeling are anything I should be concerned about. No, she says, pressure is good. I feel a little better, but still anxious because we are closer to the day of finding out whether or not this cycle is successful. This is the worst part, because this is where hope might end.
Each step of the process is a hurdle: will I make enough follicles? Will there be enough good eggs? Will we make embryos? Will they last three days? Will the quality be good? We cleared every hurdle. We did the best could have done this round. Dr. M. is pleased and says she would not do anything different. She asks me if I’ve thought about what I want to do if we don’t get the results we want. Shit, I think. Already we are talking about this? I tell her I take it one day at a time. That during a cycle I think: “I can’t possibly do this again.”
But I also tell her I’ll try maybe one more time. Honestly, I don’t think I could do this again. I say this every time. And after each negative result, I say, I will try again, because I haven’t figured out how to cope with the information that I will not be pregnant. (And I know this is all negative stuff I shouldn’t be thinking now, but I’m hoping I can dump all this and get on with my day).
Dr. M. says she only asks now because she will not be there on Monday when I find out and if I do want to try again I will have to go on the pill three days after I start to bleed. I am not ready for this conversation. I say, I think I’ll need some time off to recover. She says, I’ll have the month on the pill. A month? How can I tell her that is not nearly enough time for me to recover. A month? How about two? Or three? How about a year? A lifetime? I long to be med free, to have my body back, to have my head back. I kind of miss myself. I’ve been foggy and lethargic for weeks now. To go right into another two months of hormonal manipulation is too much to think about.
I won’t think about this again until Monday. I’ve considered giving myself a home pregnancy test this weekend, as most women in my position seem to do. I am the only IVF patient I know who waits for the official blood test. But I still haven’t figured out how to handle the information whether or not I find out at home or on the phone from a nurse. I suppose I should be braver. I suppose if I were younger and felt like I had more time and options, this wouldn’t be such an end of the road journey for me.
But on the flip side, we did have good results. Dr. M. doesn’t think I’m a lost cause. But we don’t have a lot of time, she says, which makes me feel like I’m in the last leg of a race and I’m completely out of breath.
Golf balls
Between retrieval and transfer, I’m on four medications. I deluded myself the other day thinking I was drug free. I was injection free for one day, to be exact. Now I’m on antibiotics, Medrol, Estrogen, and Progesterone. Last night R. administered the first Progesterone oil shot in my butt. The long 1 ½” needle is unnerving to look at. We had trouble getting the gooey oil in the syringe — it’s the consistency of honey. Oil is looser than this. It was equally as gooey going into my right cheek. Slow as molasses. The nurse said this shot is the most dreaded, not because it hurts but because women say they feel like they have golf balls in their butt afterwards. I try to imagine what this feels like, and admire the description because I can somehow imagine golf balls in my butt. Pockets of something must harden and feels like knobs. Maybe the oil doesn’t dissipate throughout the body. After the injection, I apply the recommended warm compress to prevent golf ball butt.
After injections R. needs a little affection. Giving me the shots is stressful and probably traumatic for him on some level. I certainly wouldn’t want to do this to him. But after the shot, and the pending golf ball sensation, I stay on the bed stomach down and read a New Yorker short story by Ha Jin. It’s my distraction. R. wants a hug. I say, get away from me. On a dime, I am verging on hostile. There goes that liver Qi. It’s all too much. The disconcerting blood I noticed that morning, the pills I’ve been eating all day, the estrogen patch, the long-needled goo shot. I still feel the lower abdominal pain that hurts when I turn side to side. I think I can’t take much more and I certainly don’t want a hug or any physical contact. I need to shut down for a while and have no interaction with the world. So I pick up a book.
Day Three (or Five?)
I told myself I would start a blog when I started my next cycle. I’m three or five days in, depending on how you count these things, so I missed my deadline (as I did with this whole getting pregnant thing).
I started Lupron on Monday (to hold back ovulation) and Menopur and Follistim on Wednesday (to get the ovaries going). The real action starts with the Menopur and Follistim; these drugs stimulate the ovaries to make way more than the usual one egg a month the body normally produces. Now my body is going through a kind of tug of war with itself. At least that’s how I see it. How can part of my body be making eggs and another part say “la, la, la, I’m in menopause and will not release them.” I’m no scientist, but I try to piece together what the doctors and nurses tell me. I vacillate between wanting to know everything and wanting to know nothing. Some days its best to sink into ignorance. Some days its impossible not to feel like a science experiment.
This is our third round of IVF. When we started our first one in Novemeber (which we entered into with blinders on), we said “let’s try it once, we’ll only do it once.” By the third day, we said “we will never do this again.” And we crossed our fingers and prayed that luck would be with us and that we wouldn’t ever have to go through the injections and mood swings and early morning doctors visits and proddings and pokings and procedures. We didn’t like this new thing in our lives that at times felt like a third person who had moved into our already too small apartment. But we weren’t lucky with the kind of luck we wanted that first time, and were even less lucky the second. So here we are at three, and we’ve said again, this is our last time, but four is my number. It has to be. You can’t do something like this knowing it is your only chance. That would be more devastating than the loss of something we’ve never had.
