The Eternal Guest Room

This has been going on for a long, long time. It’s just been awful. We know we can’t go through this forever – at some point, one way or another, it has to end.

We’ve made some decisions about how far we’re willing to go.

This will be our last year to try to have a child. We can’t take the heartbreak and monthly devastation for much longer. At some point we need to move forward – and we’ve decided it will be at the end of this year.

In the meantime we’re willing to try as many IUIs as our doctor thinks is worth trying. Our doctor doesn’t keep trying something that isn’t working, so there will be a definite limit on these – though I’m not sure exactly what that is yet.

 Our next IUI will be different than the previous 2, which were a combination of clomid (a pill) and FSH injections (shots). Our next IUI will be full injectibles – a week of shots, and no clomid. Any following IUIs will have a similar protocol.

Over the last few months, the terrifying letters I, V, and F have been creeping into our conversations. I’ve always said that I wouldn’t be open to IVF – it’s something like $12,000 with just a 50% success rate. I felt I couldn’t handle the disappointment if it failed.

But we’ve made a decision about that too: we’d be willing to try up to 2 rounds of IVF if it came to that. At this point, we feel that to come this far and not try everything we can would be a bigger disappointment and a potential lifetime of asking “What if?”

Of course, there’d be a lot of details to work out to do IVF – primarily funding – but if it ends up being an option, we’ll be open to it.

The decision for this to be our last year was made awhile ago; the fact that today is June 1 and the year is half over is a bit depressing, since we’ve only been able to try one IUI this year. But we needed a deadline, and we need to stick to it, for sanity reasons.

At the end of the year, if we aren’t expecting our own child, we’ll be moving on. I’m not sure exactly what that will entail, but we’ll be on a different path than we are now.

None of these decisions have been easy, and we still potentially have a lot of hard decisions ahead of us. But there is something about having a plan that is better than the uncertainty of not having any plan. Closure, perhaps. Being able to deal with things, instead of facing a complete lack of control.

So that’s the plan.