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.

So we spent the last week up in sunny Seattle. Part of our trip involved checking out the Point Defiance Zoo & Aquarium in Tacoma. For some reason God doesn’t want us to have children, but thankfully these meerkats did. They’re so cute!

One thing I’m doing to defy the natural order of things and increase our odds of conceiving is taking supplements. I take two different pills three times a day.

Fertilaid for Men: It contains key vitamins and minerals as well as the amino acid L-Carnitine which helps sperm count, motility (how fast they go), and morphology (their shape).

Pycnogenol: According to the site it is a “natural plant extract from the bark of the maritime pine tree which grows exclusively along the coast of southwest France in Les Landes de Gascogne.”  It’s supposed to greatly increase morphology (my biggest problem).

Unfortunately, according to the interwebs highway, it takes about three months for the supplements to be fully effective and I’ve only been at them for a little over a month.

Tomorrow we make our first visit to the Reproductive Endocrinologist.  We’ll see what happens.

To bring you up to speed, my excellent wife/blog co-author Stacie and I have been trying to have a kid for two and a half years now. The hardest part (you know, aside from not being able to have children) is seeing her feel more and more alone and hopeless after each cycle starts anew.  That’s what led me to the idea of blogging our experience.  Hopefully we can reach out and connect with the countless others that are going through the same ordeal and also help our friends and family to know what we’re going through.

I’ll eventually be bringing you up to speed on what I’ve been through (like my surgery… YOWZERS!), what I’m actively doing (I thought only old people took this many supplements), and what the future holds (acupuncture for male infertility?  Sure, why not).

That’s me riding fiercely against the odds.

(Note: It’s Stacie’s bike.  I rode it for 30 seconds.  I understand that prolonged bike riding can impair male fertility.  Once we have a kid, I will purchase a bike… with which I will ride far away from stinky diapers… just kidding… possibly.)

(Also also note: Stacie doesn’t think “Riders on the Storm” by the Doors is good writing music.  I can’t think of better writing music personally.)

So here’s something I never thought I’d be doing.

Starting a blog focused on infertility? Yeah right. How lame.

I find that I eat my words every single day these days.

A quarter of a decade ago, we decided to have a kid. Zillions of people do it every day, mostly on accident, so how hard could it be?

I always said that if it turned out we had problems or it wasn’t easy, I’d be ok with that. We’d just travel a lot. No biggie.

Be careful what you wish for.

So here we are.

After 14 months, Darek finally convinced me that we needed to see doctors. I was OK; he wasn’t. Surgery? Great. That sucks. Every appointment took at least 2 months to book. When you’ve been waiting 14 months, another 2 feels like an eternity.

After surgery, we waited three months. The numbers went up. There was HOPE. Hope hope hope. Beautiful and terrible all at once. Three more months went by. The 6-month waiting period. Numbers went up more. Yay!

That was five months ago. We wasted three whole freaking months with a drug that possibly and probably did the exact opposite of what it was supposed to do. A friend took the drug for a month and bam. So easy.

That was two months ago.

It’s so, so easy to discount the years. But when you’re walking this path, struggling through this crap, it feels like a lifetime. Every month: hope. Every month: disappointment. Every month: grieving. Every month: mourning a loss. Every month: starting over again.

And this month we start a new chapter: going totally, completely public.

Here we are. Here it is.