Update for the soap fans - Part 2

This is my longest blog post ever... possibly THE longest blog post ever. Proceed at your own risk - there is no lifeguard on duty. ;-)

The situation is not yet resolved, to my knowledge, but I think it's as close as it's going to be for the next day or two. People's uniform response to the story has been that someone will need to write a book about all of this someday, so here's the rest of the details, before they are mercifully erased from my memory.

On Thursday afternoon, I came out of a meeting to find a voicemail on my phone at work. It was the office manager at my NP's office, a man notorious for spreading agony and ill will everywhere he goes. (I think I've mentioned this before, but my NP and I work in the same small field, meaning I interact with their office staff on a professional level frequently. As you might imagine, this does make my personal endeavors there a bit awkward at times, but she's the only NP in the city who will do what we need which is, ironically, ignoring the federal booby trap we've just fallen into for "directed donation." This office manager - E - is by far the most hated man in our system. He has made my colleagues cry. Seriously.) So, E left me a message saying I needed to call him back ASAP, which I did. E explained that the cryobank had called him needing some information from my file and he wanted to get it from me to avoid having to pull my chart. However, when I didn't call back within 20-30 minutes, he got my chart out so he was good to go for calling them back. I asked if he knew what they were wondering and he said the message they left was unclear, but he'd call me back if he needed more information or if there were any problems. As soon as I hung up, I started to worry just a bit - ours is a carefully constructed story. I decided I was just being paranoid though, and it's not like I could give much information over the phone anyway. I was on my work phone and I work in a cubicle. Surely he knows the legal atmosphere in which his clinic functions. I called M and we talked ourselves into believing it was probably nothing. We were wrong.

E called back within a half an hour and stated he was really confused now and wanted me to speak to the lab director myself. He mumbled something about our vials not being shipped, a six-month quarantine, and a physical exam for KD, but then said he had no idea what they were talking about. I explained that those things he was mentioning were what they required for cryobank clients who are not intimate partners, which is why the NP instructed us to tell them otherwise, but it sounded as though they had found out the truth. I asked E if he was given any indication of how this could have happened, since I clearly needed to call and lie through my teeth if we had any chance of going ahead this cycle, and after a long pause he said, "Well, me. I told them. I didn't realize that was a secret." He went on to say a bunch of other things about thinking M was KD's wife, then realizing she was my partner and how confusing my chart was with all these names and something about my "special arrangement" with the NP and blah, blah, blah... I couldn't hear much. My mind was racing with if and how this could possibly be cleaned up. As he realized the magnitude of his disclosure, he started apologizing, but he didn't offer to do anything to fix his little disaster. I took the woman's phone number, hung up the phone, grabbed my ttc buddy at work (who is more than familiar with E) and headed for the conference room to freak out. In talking to her, we came up with the following strategy: I call the cryobank the next day to place my shipping order and play dumb. When they tell me that my vials are in quarantine, I come unglued (as your average heterosexual woman would when faced with this situation) and demand to know how this can be fixed because SURELY it can be fixed. I figured the NP would probably need to become involved, but it was too late at that point to call her office back to find out when she would be back from vacation. I just started crossing my fingers that it wasn't any later than Monday.

I had sent an email to KD to give him a heads up and he called a little while later. He said that nothing had been out of the ordinary on his last visit and he was as surprised as I was to hear they'd started digging around in our file. I gave him a run down of "the plan" and agreed to keep him posted.

M and I strategized that night and came up with responses for everything they might be able to throw at me. The one thing we didn't have a ready response for was the existence of KD's wife. What if they had found out about her? What if they have some crazy search program that pulls up marital status and spouse information? If such things exist, it isn't unthinkable that they might have access to it, given the federally regulated field they operate in. Eventually, M pointed out the key: They don't require that I be married to KD, or that he not be married to someone else, only KD and I are "sexually intimate partners." The fact that he's married to someone else doesn't mean we can't be in a relationship or trying to become pregnant. *Sigh* So true. Isn't it amazing that people trying to have children within their extramarital affairs manage to escape moral judgment, but not single women who are attempting to get pregnant with the help of another fully informed and consenting adult? Which atmosphere is likely to be more nurturing to the resulting child? Whatever. The double standard could work in our favor here, so I'm not about to challenge it.

The next morning, I called the NP's office first to find out when she would be returning - Monday. Hallelujah. Then I called the cryobank. I initially tried to do it while driving, thinking that having to focus on something else would help disguise my anxiety, but I was shaking too badly from nerves so I pulled over. I got B (our regular lab contact) and tried to place my shipping order. "Ohhhh," he said slowly when I identified myself. "Um, you're going to need to talk to B2."

"OK," I answered cheerfully.

B2 came on the line. She calmly and politely explained that it had come to their attention that KD is not my partner, which makes him a "donor." Not a donor in the cryobank sense where you call up and give them a number - she was quick to add - because clearly I know KD, but a donor in the legal sense nonetheless. And so, this means that their lab has to... blah, blah, blah.

I knew I needed to interrupt her quickly, if I was to have any credibility, and demand to know how she had come to this ludicrous conclusion, but (1) she was talking really fast - I think she might have been as nervous as I was, and (2) I still didn't know how she had come up with this information and I needed to know what I was up against. It was a balancing act between wanting to show my own righteous indignation and needing to give her a chance to show her cards. I let her talk a little bit longer, then dove in head first.

"I'm sorry to interrupt you," I said, cutting her off. "I'm just confused as to what might have given you the idea that KD and I are not intimate partners." This silenced her for a split second. She wasn't expecting that. She explained that something in our file had tipped them off, and when they called my doctor's office for clarification, their suspicions were confirmed by someone named E.

I won't bore you with all of the details here but in the end, they knew about both KD's wife and M, and I had a lot of explaining to do. After I denied being in a same-sex relationship, she said, "so you don't know an M?"

"Know her?" I shrieked. "Of course I know her, she is KD's sister, but I'm not in a relationship with her. That is absolutely absurd!" I think I even laughed a little, in a totally dumbfounded way. This was the moment that secured my Emmy, and my farthest departure from reality. I may have even bordered on homophobic. Perhaps it was too much, but I just reacted the way I thought the average heterosexual woman would react if falsely accused of being in an intimate relationship with the sister of her male partner. It worked. B2 was clearly embarassed, and I felt bad for that.

When asked about KD's wife, I declined to comment and said I'd have to have KD call because "his personal life may be complicated but it is certainly not my place to discuss it with you." She said that speaking to KD would definitely help.

She asked why we were living in different states and I said that people do it all the time. He is working there, I am working here, and our plan is to be living in the same place within the next year, but we would prefer not to have to wait until then to start a family.

As I type all of this, my comment above about denying my relationship with M being my biggest lie seems strange - the whole phone call was so far out on a limb, it seems silly to quantify degrees - but if you think about it, everything else had some element of truth to it. Are KD and I sexually active in the way she meant it? Of course not. But is there much difference between that and having nearly a year of inseminations under our belt? I think not. If the purpose of the law is to protect my health (which is the BS claim they make), I've already been exposed to whatever it is they're worried about. Seven times. Oops. It is also not a lie that my intention is to be living in the same place as KD a year from now - that's the current plan - or that this family that we are creating is "ours" if you look at the big picture. KD will just be the uncle rather than the dad. There were significant departures from reality to come in explaining KD's relationship with his wife, but those unfortunately fell to him. For my part, my feigning shock and - I hate to say it, but a little bit of disgust - at the "accusation" of being in a lesbian relationship was the hardest pill for me to swallow. I just have to keep reminding myself that I did it for M and I, and it's only a means to an end.

M and I have both been struggling with the "rule breaking" aspect of all of this. For better or for worse, we are the type of kids who like to stay out of trouble and do what were told to do. The decision to throw caution to the wind and GO for this was a scary one, but we felt it was worth a shot. I kept thinking of the King quote about breaking an unjust law openly and lovingly. I'm not putting this miniature act of resistance to discrimination anywhere near on par with the Civil Rights Movement, but it was the "some laws must be broken" nudge that M and I needed to feel comfortable with pushing forward. Up to that point, we had been able to get by using semantics and lies of omission, for the most part. This was going to call for a full scale deception, and would surely carry more serious consequences if it were to blow up in our face.

The other thing I have held in my mind that has helped me stomach all of this is the belief that B2 - who is actually a really nice woman - knows what's up and is cool with it. The idea of her as collateral damage is too unsettling to me. I like to think of her as someone who knows this law is a bunch of BS, but she's got a job to do and she needs to dot her Is and cross her Ts. She wants this all to work out for us, just not at her own expense, which means we still have to get all the documents to her and declare to the death that our relationship is what she needs it to be, but deep inside, she's glad we're sticking it to the man. Perhaps I'm kidding myself, but it makes me feel better about both her and I, so I'm going with it.

But I have digressed, and badly. In the end, B2 agreed to lift the quarantine if and only if I would have KD call to testify about the respective roles his wife and I play in his life, and our NP would write a letter declaring that we are indeed "sexually intimate partners." She said to be sure it used those words exactly. She initially said that it would need to be an original signature, so it would have to be mailed. I insisted this would be impossible for us because I am due to ovulate next week and I couldn't afford to miss this cycle because I had an HSG last month. (At this point, B2 said "awwww" in the most genuinely sympathetic way. Apparently she is familiar with the hell that is an HSG.) She put me on hold for a minute while she asked someone else about making an exception. When she came back to the phone she said they would ship upon receipt of a faxed copy, but I had to promise to have a hard copy mailed as well for my chart. I said I would make these things happen as quickly as possible and we ended our conversation.

After I hung up, I immediately called KD. I recapped a couple of key points from my conversation and asked KD to think about whether he would be willing to call and support the story I'd put out there. He sounded appropriately stunned by the whole thing and said he'd figure something out. A few minutes after getting off the phone, I realized what an idiot I was. Perhaps I should fill him in on some of the details I provided about our life together, huh? We talked again, briefly, to compare notes, and KD said his current plan was to call back and say that he and his wife are amicably separated and pursuing divorce, and she is aware of our relationship and our plans for me to become pregnant. (Is it even necessary for me to say something at this point about how amazingly lucky M and I are to have KD in our corner? Are there even words that would come close to expressing it?) KD agreed to make his phone call by the end of the day, and I left a message for the NP stating I had a logistical emergency and I needed her to call ASAP when she returns from vacation.

KD called later to let me know B2 had been receptive to his call and his side of the story, and now we were just waiting on the letter from the NP. This is where we sat all weekend. For most of the weekend, my mind was at ease, knowing the last piece of the puzzle had to come from the woman who taught me the lie in the first place. By Sunday night, I was a ball of nerves again. For some reason, I decided that the NP was going to say that putting that information in writing was where she would draw the line. She was with us to that point, but that was a threshhold she couldn't cross professionally.

On Monday morning, I called her pager for my standard day 10 check-in (I have to call her daily from day 10 of my cycle on to update her on my ovulation indicators) and left an extra message that I needed to speak with her ASAP about some documents the cryobank needed. She called back about five minutes later. I explained that E had told the cryobank that KD was not my intimate partner and had gone so far as to give them my partner's full name. After a pause, she said that she hadn't talked to E to hear his account of this yet, but she hoped he would not have done that. I recapped my conversation with E in which he admitted it, and she was clearly disappointed. She apologized and asked if she needed to call them. I said that they actually had requested a letter from her and I gave her the specific wording to use. I explained that she needed to fax a copy and put the original in the mail, and gave her all of the relevant contact information. She agreed to do it that morning.

At 12:45pm on Monday, I called the bank to confirm everything was resolved and place my order. I got B, again, who was clearly uncomfortable speaking with me, again. He said that the fax was received, but he could not speak with me further or take my order until B2 had a chance to approve it. I asked if I could give him the information for my order and he could just call me if there was a problem and he said no, but reassured me that B2 would be in within half an hour and he'd leave her a message to call me ASAP.

I called them again at 5:30pm, having stared at my silent cell phone for hours. This time I spoke to B2 who explained, nicely as ever, that they had received the NP's letter, but could not accept it because she is an NP and the letter needed to be from the supervising physician. B2 said she had spoken to the NP and she was working on arranging this, and they expected to receive the fax that afternoon or the next morning. As long as this occured, my shipment would arrive at the NP's office on Wednesday morning. She said that they would confirm a ship date with the NP once the fax is received. Why with the NP and not me? Who knows. I was so DONE talking to these people, I just let it go. The NP is nearly impossible to get messages to unless I use the pager (which I'm not supposed to except for my daily check in) and she doesn't call me for anything, so I know better than to expect to hear something from her to put my mind at ease. I could call the cryobank this afternoon to find out what happened, but frankly, I don't have it in me to call them again. I feel like every phone call to them is a roll of the dice and the whole thing might blow up in my face at the slightest misstep on my part. I've kind of accepted that everyone knows what needs to be done and no amount of hand-holding on my part is going to make that happen any faster. It will come together or it won't. I've done all I can do.

All signs are pointing to early ovulation (hmm, could it be from STRESS??), so I expect I'll be calling in the next day or two to schedule my IUI, and I guess I'll find out at that point if the vials have arrived. M and I just keep saying how much better we'll feel once the vials are here in our own time zone. Perhaps they are already en route. I think that if these 4-6 vials (yeah, I don't even know how many they are shipping) don't do the trick, we'll have to move on to another plan. I think our relationship with the this cryobank may have run it's course. Here's hoping this all becomes a moot point soon.

My apologies for the excessively long update. I should have put an intermission in there somewhere. LOL! I can not WAIT to tell this story to our teenager the first time they throw a fit about how we don't appreciate them enough. :-)

almost out of the woods

I talked to the NP this morning. She was pretty shocked when I told her about her office manager's disclosure. She said she hadn't talked to him yet but she "hoped" he wouldn't do something like that. I told her that he admitted it to me on the phone and she was pretty much speechless.

I explained what needed to happen and she said "I only ever know what my patients tell me. Are you telling me that you and KD are 'sexually intimate partners'?"

"Absolutely," I replied.

She's sending the fax this morning and will put the hard copy in the mail.

I'm going to continue to hold my breath until I talk to the cryobank in a couple of hours, but it looks like this may actually all work out.

ugh

I'm gearing up for my big phone call to the cryobank. I am so nervous. I can't believe how much is riding on the outcome of this conversation. Talk about a test of my acting abilities...I couldn't sleep last night. My mind just kept racing about all the possibilities, both good and bad. This morning, I changed our home answering machine so that it has a generic outgoing message. No more of this "Hi, you've reached K and M" business. The need to do that makes me so sad. I feel like it's the 1940s or something.

Update for the soap fans - Part 1

What a bizarre 24 hours it has been. I made the phone call - certainly one of the strangest experiences of my life. I've never lied so blatantly, or with such high stakes. It seems this whole ttc process is one of constantly rediscovering the lengths one will go to.

It turns out that having the quarantine lifted requires three steps:
1) I call and lie.
2) KD calls and adds his own side of the lie. (talk about going "above and beyond")
3) Our NP writes a letter to verify said lie(s).

Steps 1 and 2 are done, and I have a message in to the NP to call me ASAP when she returns to work on Monday morning. I feel confident that she will agree to write the letter we need, especially since her office manager violated my legal rights by disclosing some of the details that he did. If everything continues to click along, we should have no trouble getting the samples here in time for next week's festivities. I can not count the times I have sighed with relief today that we left ourselves a buffer, timing-wise. Having a few extra days of wiggle room in this "waiting to ship" phase will be the thing that saves us for this cycle. That, and a whole lot of very well intentioned dishonesty.

Baby-to-be, you are so very loved.

FUCK.

Our society is so bass-ackward. Meet M and I: two intelligent, capable, resourceful, and motivated people who want to have a baby, pay for it ourselves, and love it unconditionally. Now meet the morally corrupt system that is telling us we can't.

We have suffered a monumental setback today. For some reason that I can not understand, the cryobank decided to do a little digging into the mysterious nature of my relationship to KD. In their quest for discovery, they did not call KD or I, who would have been happy to reassure them. No, they called our nurse practitioner's office. Unfortunately, our nurse practitioner (the person that first sat me down and informed me of the bullshit laws that are designed to prevent single women and lesbians from conceiving AS WELL AS how to get around them), is out on vacation, so they reached the office manager (weasel) instead. He dutifully informed them that KD is in fact my brother-in-law, and I am attempting to become pregnant via artificial insemination.

And that was that. Our cryobank account has now been flagged as a "directed donation," and we have to put KD through another expensive and time-consuming battery of tests before we can receive any of the samples he has already deposited. The silver lining? We've got nothin' but time to do it in. As a directed donation, all samples are also subject to a SIX MONTH quarantine. That means that all the samples that KD went entirely above and beyond to accumulate in preparation for our next shipment (supposed to be going out in a mere five days) must now be held until the end of J A N U A R Y of 2 0 0 8.

The office manager called me to say that they were mandating quarantine and said he was "so confused" as to why this might be! I said it sounded like they found out we were not "intimate partners" and asked if he knew how that could have happened, since our NP told us what to say and we've never strayed from the story. "Oh," he said. "Well, I guess I told them then. I just read what was here in your chart." He proceeded to tell me how very sorry he was to have caused this situation, but he did not offer to help clean it up. I asked if the NP was available. My first thought was to see if she would be willing to call on our behalf, say that her office manager was confused, and "clear up" any "misunderstandings" that may have occured. This is when I learned she is out on vacation. I didn't have the presence of mind to ask when she would be back - the world had already begun to spin too fast for that.

I really don't know what to do. I can't fly to KD next week. I would miss ANYTHING work-related at this point, but I'm set to ovulate ON the opening night of a play I am in. I can't stomach the idea of taking another break for one month, let alone six. This past month off was too hard on me. Even if I could, we'd be crazy to miss out on one of our 3 post-HSG elevated fertility months. My best idea at this point is to call the cryobank tomorrow morning and feign ignorance. I'm just going to say that I'm calling to make shipping arrangements, and when they tell me about the minor change to my account status, I'm going to be outraged and demand to know how I can fix the mistake that the "clearly confused" office manager has made. How can they possibly ask me to prove that KD and I are intimate partners? Will the demand a demonstration? I think not. On one hand, I can't imagine this will work. On the other, I'd like to see how they can prevent it from working. I'm interested to see what kind of "proof" of intimacy they can possibly ask for, other than our word. The bottom line is that I don't know what else to do. I kind of feel like this is our only hope, and if it doesn't work, well, then we won't be any worse off than we are now, right?

I'm just so shocked and sad that in the midst of a society filled with so many unplanned, unwanted, and unloved children, someone would make this process so damn near impossible for people like M and I. What do they care how I want to get pregnant? Can't I just sign a frigging release saying I won't sue them if I get some horrible disease? Isn't that what lawyers are for, to write contracts like that? I'm so sick of people feeling that they have the right to make such intimate decisions for me and how M and I create our family. We're not hurting anyone. We're just trying to build OUR own family and not be discriminated against. Wouldn't these legislators efforts be better channeled into preventing teen pregnancy, treating babies born addicted to crack, or improving the foster care system. Damn it! Leave us alone already!

I shouldn't have written this right now. I should have let myself cool off. I'm just so...

Damn it.

A story

During the first month that I went to KD's, my cycle was perfectly synchronized with two other women on my chat board. The three of us ovulated on the same day and proceeded to discuss our imaginary symptoms while we waited out our two weeks from hell together. At the end of the cycle, both of them were pregnant and I was not.

One of them dropped off the board shortly after, but the other has remained a regular poster and I've followed her pregnancy with affection. She's a neat person, and someone I would have been drawn to anyway, but given the circumstances, she also became my living, breathing (if virtual) marker of "what if?" Her due date was set for the same day mine would have been. When she posted pictures of her growing belly, I would look down at my own and think of how strange that would be. When she passed her due date (nearly 2 weeks ago!), I thought about how insane it would be if M and I were having a BABY right now, and also of how anxious she must be to meet the little person that's been kicking her and keeping her up at night for so many months now.

She finally had her little boy last Friday. He was 11 days overdue. She returned to the board last night to post a quick report and a picture. He's adorable, of course. I am very used to these "s/he's here!" posts. There are 3-5 per month on my board, and I usually have no reaction to them, other than thinking the babies are cute and being relieved that everyone is healthy and happy. But reading this story and looking at this picture, I felt a strange and unexpected little tug. It wasn't sadness or jealousy or anything like that. It was just this weird sensation of looking at something that could be mine, chronologically speaking. I have lived vicariously through his mother's pregnancy, and now here he is, and I feel a connection to him that I didn't expect. Aside from that, he is like a living, breathing (again, if virtual) representation of how much time has passed since we began trying. And that time that has passed adds up to a person. It's just kind of crazy, and amazing, and I'm not sure what all else. This probably doesn't make much sense. Admittedly, I haven't made sense of it myself yet. I just thought it was interesting.

Back in the game

Next IUI should be around August 10th.

baby step

I've had a breakthrough. It's a tiny one, but that's all I'm hopin' for these days.

Last night I was thinking about the millions upon millions of possible DNA combinations between sperm and egg and how crazy it is that at some point, this process is going to work and a whole brand new person is going to come into existence - a product of a towering number of tiny variables. (Sidebar: In order to understand my point of view on this, you have to know that despite the impatient venting that frequently appears in this blog, I do genuinely believe that everything happens for a reason, and at the right time... but it doesn't stop me from wishing that right time was sooner rather than later.) Anyway, I had a lightbulb moment when I realized that if this process works even a month (or day or hour) sooner than it is "supposed to," our entire future family will change. Think of the difference between you and your sibling(s). Same sperm provider + same egg provider = totally different people.

The not knowing how long we will have to wait makes the interim months hard, but it doesn't change the fact that there is a certain formula for the creation of our family and if we wish for that to change (i.e. TTC working sooner rather than later), we are actually wishing for a different child than the one we are destined to have. Let's say I'm supposed to get pregnant on try #12. If I were to get pregnant on any of the previous 11 tries, I would be deprived of ever meeting the amazing person that is supposed to come into our lives. That doesn't make the first 11 tries any less disappointing, but I'm hoping this new perspective will help me make some sort of sense of it. We'll see. :-)

HSG... check.

The HSG is behind me. It was worse than I hoped but better than I feared, so all in all, I guess that's not bad. However, if I ever have to do another one it will be too soon.

The radiologist said everything looked good. Of course. One more test to tell me there is no reason why I shouldn't already by pregnant. I wish that results like that could be good news, but at this point, they just freak me out. It's just one more "fixable" thing checked off our list of possibilities. The radiologist said he would go over the images in detail and get a final report to the NP by today. I'll call sometime this week to check in since I know she won't call me. Now it is just a waiting game. Our next insemination should be sometime during the second week of August.

I had a really bad night on Friday. It had been building all week and it had to come out sometime, I guess. Some unexpected news ended up being the straw that broke the camel's back and all of the sudden it was like ALL of my grief over our journey so far welled up and spilled over. M and I talked a lot about options and the current thinking is to give this NP one or two more tries, then move on to someone who is willing to be more aggressive. That will be tough to do logistically because of my alter ego (you know, the one who is intimately involved with my brother-in-law, uh, I mean, my heterosexual partner?) but we'll figure it out. I don't have the emotional stamina to keep doing what we're doing with no success and no escalation in sight.

I'm also looking into options for counseling. I seem to have turned an emotional corner this month and I need some help keeping one foot in front of the other. There have been hard times every cycle around each negative result, but they always pass within a day or two. I'm now going into my third week of feeling really low, and that's no good. Before we started, I told myself it could take a while - years, even - but I knew immediately after our first negative result, and have learned more and more each day since, that I never really believed that. There is a part of me that never imagined for a moment that I wouldn't be pregnant by now. That same part of me still can't quite believe it or come to terms with it, and that leaves me feeling really scared and powerless. I've (now) had nearly every test in the book and there is no medical reason why I am not already pregnant. We've been at this for nearly a year and it's like we're exactly where we started - no, worse off than where we started because we now have 7 failed attempts under our belts and a long list of "easy fixes" that we are not candidates for.

*Sigh* I'm sorry I've been so miserable to get updates from lately. Imagine living with me. Poor M! :-/ This is just a tough month but it WILL get better. I know it will.

:-(

I'm having such a hard day. It's one of those days where you're just sitting around minding your own business and it hits you like a train, knocking the wind out of you. I keep tearing up with no discernible trigger. I think I've just hit a point of being too... everything. Tired. Discouraged. Sad. Frustrated. Pessimistic. I'm stuck between feeling like I want to be Done - like TTC is just. too. much. and I need to stop, and recognizing that stopping is no better than the place we're in currently; the place that is making me this sad to start with. It just feels like it might be better because I would be choosing not to become pregnant instead of having that outcome thrust upon me month after month against my will. I know this line of thinking probably sounds crazy and premature to people who haven't been in this place -- hell, it sounds crazy to ME on any day better than this one. Yes, I absolutely do realize I'm young and we have lots of years and options ahead of us -- but there is this reality looming out there that perhaps choosing infertility would be better than having it imposed upon us, and that's a strange and sad horizon. Also, you just reach a point of being so tired and drained that it doesn't matter if how many options are available if you don't feel like you have the stamina to pursue them. I know I'm supposed to be thinking positively and keeping our struggles in perspective, but I'm just having a tough time with that right now. I knew going in that this could take us some time and I thought I was prepared for that, but I was totally off on my prediction of how consuming the tough times would be.

M and I listened to an episode of This American Life the other day that was on "the cringe." It was all about cringe-worthy life experiences and what gives them that quality. The bottom line was that it boiled down to trying. When you really try hard for something and it doesn't work out, you haven't just failed; you've embarassed yourself by putting forth so much effort. (Yes, this is a selective recap and I'm in a pessimistic mood, but this WAS the basic premise of the cringe theory.) Anyway, there is certainly a part of me that feels like at some point, it will be more livable to just stop TTC and maintain some dignity. I'm not so short-sighted to think I am there now, but I have found my thoughts going there more than is usual for me, and more than I would like.

My coworker went in for her second beta today. I would now put a LOT of money on there being at least 2 babies-to-be in there. From her numbers, it could be 3. She'll have an ultrasound next Thursday and then she'll know for sure. I can't say this isn't hard to be around right now. I can't even get pregnant with 1 and she may have 2, or more. I know it's stupid for me to compare our situations as if there is anything fair or balanced about the dice roll of conception. And, her situation isn't all a walk in the park - having twins as a single mom is no joke. But it still makes me wish it was my turn too. She's just so Happy. She's doing all she can to be sensitive and not give me updates unless I ask and all that, but she's unmistakably glowing already and I'm just jealous. No way around it.

My HSG is scheduled for Monday. There was a big mix-up getting it scheduled and I nearly bit someone's head off the other day. In the end, I forgot to remind the inept admin staff at my NP's office that she wanted me to start on an antibiotic and take some Vicodin pre-procedure. I'll call tomorrow to request the scripts. I'm not calling before then or they might realize their mistake in scheduling it Monday morning (a mistake that works in my favor) and tell me I have to have the test tomorrow, and I just couldn't cope with that little development right now.

I know this will pass. It always does. This is just a low point and things will go back up. This rough patch has just lingered longer than any thus far.