The Eternal Guest Room

I always used to look forward to the holidays. I loved them all. I used to get way into them. Throw parties, dye Easter eggs, start planning Christmas gifts months in advance.

But they’ve lost something for me these last few years.

I feel this horrible emptiness around holidays now. A very profound sense of loss.

There is something about the holidays that is so synonymous with children. Nearly everything I associate with the holidays are things that are for or centered around kids.

We’re getting into the holiday season – and it’s nonstop. Halloween all the way through to Mother’s Day. Even the 4th of July feels a little sad to me.  The hardest will probably be Christmas. Two Christmases ago was our first Christmas when we’d been trying for kids; most of my family spent the holiday with my younger sister, who was pregnant. It was quite possibly the loneliest I’ve ever felt in my life. I painted the living room but it wasn’t enough of a distraction to take away how hurt I felt that year. We spent the next Christmas with my family, and of course my parents’ first grandchild, and there was something inside me that felt completely broken the entire time.

I’ve had the hope that next Christmas will be different for 2 years now – but with Christmas around the corner again, I feel I’d be an idiot to have that hope again.

I think about the things we’d be doing if we had kids. I remember how fun it was being a kid, and how magical everything seemed. Holidays have always meant Family to me. Now they’re just a reminder of what we don’t have.

Halloween is tomorrow. It used to be one of the times I really looked forward to. I know it’s completely stupid, but I’d always loved those cute little baby costumes. Facing another year of not being able to plan on that sounds like such a trivial thing, but it’s almost like a symbol of the bigger thing that we’ve lost.

I can barely stand the thought of facing another holiday season like this. And I don’t know what to do about it.

Well, we had planned on doing an IUI in a few weeks, but that’s not going to happen now.

I went in for a sonogram this morning to see if everything was good to go, but it isn’t. They found some cysts, which were leftover from the 3 rounds of Clomid I did over the summer. Eventually they’re supposed to go away on their own, but in the meantime the doctor won’t let us do the procedure. Apparently if you have cysts, the drugs that you take before the IUI just go into the cysts, instead of going where they’re supposed to.

I think it’s something like that. I was a little bit shocked when the nurse explained things, and I wasn’t absorbing the details very well.

The bottom line is that we’re back to waiting.

Not only does it suck because we’re tired of waiting, but we’re running out of time in the insurance department. We’re on Darek’s old insurance plan (via cobra) until the end of the year, and his new job insurance covers nothing related to any of this. At least his old insurance covers things like doctor’s visits and sonograms, but the new one won’t cover a thing. Which means we may not be able to afford to do what we had planned. Especially if the cysts are still present next time.

To make things even more awesome, it seems that having cysts might make it harder to get pregnant. And I’ve apparently had them there since July, at least. I guess all those needles will just have to keep sitting in the refrigerator indefinitely.

This is all so hard.

I’m feeling sorry for myself today.

So it’s probably time for an update.

We finally had our first appointment with a specialist – an RE (Reproductive Endocrinologist). I didn’t want to go, but it was time, so we went. It’s awkward to sit in a waiting room where people know exactly why you’re there. We’re in the same boat, for the most part, but it still feels kind of weird. Privacy goes out the window with all of this, and it feels weird, and kind of sad.

We found the doctor through a roundabout referral, and we both liked him enough. I kind of wished he wouldn’t draw so many pictures of my ovaries, but, you know…can’t be too picky here. I’m a visual person so it worked for me in the end.

There’s a spectrum of different treatments you can do, starting with a drug called Clomid and ending with the dreaded IVF. We already tried the drug (fail), so he crossed that out. Then he crossed out IVF. And that was a super big relief, that we probably won’t need to consider that. $14,000 with a less-than 50% chance of success? No thanks.

So that left us with a middle option. Two middle options, actually, which are really just variations of the same thing. We chose the less aggressive of the two – 15% chance of twins instead of 25%.  It’s called an IUI, and I mostly refer to it as a “direct deposit.” You can google it if you want specifics. I feel weird talking about it here.

It involves taking fertility drugs and it involves giving myself shots.

Yes giving myself shots.

Which is not going to happen. I’m the one on the verge of passing out every time a needle is in the room. Darek will be giving me shots at our house. Weird!

We went to our training session yesterday. So you can learn how to give yourself shots properly. Which is everyone’s dream, I know. I should be so lucky.

I don’t know how open I want to be with all of this. To talk about the procedure is one thing, and I think that I’m ok with that. But I don’t really want or need people to know where I am in “my cycle” (ew), or what day a procedure would happen, or any specifics like that. Mostly because I just couldn’t deal with the questions: “Did it work?”

So I leave you with this. This is what we’re going to try. I could write about my feelings, but they’re pretty muddled at the moment.

Mainly I just wanted to give an update on where we are right now.