heads or tails

Preparing yourself for IVF is just one giant mindf~ck, best I can tell. It's like this constant balancing act between feeling a need to protect yourself in case this cycle ends up just like all those that came before it and allowing yourself to get appropriately excited about the significant shift in odds. At my clinic, and for my age group, the odds of me becoming pregnant at all are 52% and the odds of me becoming pregnant with a baby I will go on to deliver are 48%. So, it's roughly half and half. It's a coin toss.

M and I really don't know what to think. We talked the other night and realized we're on the same irrational page: We both fully expect IVF to work, because c'mon, it's freaking IVF, right? At the same time, both of us have accepted K Being Pregnant as a state that exists in the same realm as unicorns and the tooth fairy. Reverting back to high school logic (you remember it: If A then B, and so forth), if IVF works, then K will be pregnant. K can't get pregnant, therefore IVF can't work. But... how can IVF not work, because c'mon, it's freaking IVF, right? Cue quagmire.

I have taken a lot of statistics courses over the years and I get that they are only useful in aggregate. My own odds are skewed by my relative age within the group, my other identified health issues (or lack thereof, thank you unexplained infertility), my response to the medications, and a thousand other tiny variables no one can know. Still, I feel the need to embrace this concept of having a 50/50 shot. I feel like it's my best hope for preparing myself mentally for what is to come. It helps me to wrap my head around both possible outcomes in equal measure and keep an even balance of optimism and pragmatism. I'm also hopeful that, if faced with a BFN, it will help me not to give up hope. All it will mean is we landed on the wrong side of the fence this time and there's no reason to believe it won't go the other way if we figure out a way to try this again. It may just be the most helpful tool I've stumbled into so far.

To help cement this concept, M and I have begun a daily coin toss where heads means BFP and tails means BFN. For every day since stims started, M has flipped a coin and we see what we get. The score so far is pregnant: 1, not pregnant: 2. We forgot to flip last night, probably on account of the fact that I had a bit of an emotional breakdown, but we'll do it twice tonight to get caught up.

Everything else continues to challenge us. The A/C nightmare drags on - we've pretty much given up the dream of having central air in time for my retrieval. I've started referring to my wedding party cohorts as "The Bridesmaids: Ruining good moods for 20 days and counting." M is caught up in the a particularly intense few weeks of summer-school-slash-full-time-employment hell, and my moods are swinging like Sandra Day O'Connor. It's good times around the old homestead, let me tell you! We're keeping a sense of humor about it. Mostly.