herveryown

Another Spin-Off

A few of my co-workers were unable or unwilling to comply with my request for relative privacy about the pregnancy, so now all of my co-workers know about it.  This means that every day, I am subjected to numerous sappy "How aaaaaare you, Akeeyu?"s.  When I pretend oblivion and offer a generic "Fine, thank you," they move in closer and say "But how aaaaaaare you?", inevitably meaning how is the pregnancy.  The women, especially, seem to want something, seem to expect me to start exuding some form of giggling camaraderie or kinship that we never had before and certainly don't have now.

What I don't say in response is "It's none of your fucking business, and when I want to discuss my uterus with you, I'll come find you," or the more succinct "How the fuck should I know?", but I want to, every single time.  Right now, we don't know a damned thing, and we won't until the end of the week.

In lieu of any sort of news, let me offer y'all my suggestion for Dick Wolf's next drama:

Law & Order: IVF
In the criminal justice system, the people are represented by two separate, yet equally important groups: the detectives hopped up on Progesterone in Oil injections, and the district attorneys they haven't (yet) bludgeoned with stale breadsticks in fits of hormonal rage.  These are their stories.

Beat Cop: "Thank you for coming, detectives.
IVF Detective One: "Oh, we were in the neighborhood anyway.  That new deli just opened up down the street, and their pickles are fucking fabulous."
IVF Detective Two: "Yeah, we would have been here sooner, but we had to take a three block detour around the construction site on the corner.  Man, those portapotties reek, to say nothing of the guy working the jack hammer.  Anyway, let's get down to business.  Is that B negative I smell?"
IVF Detective One, rolling eyes: "That's AB negative, obviously."
IVF Detective Two: "Well, one thing's for certain: The killer definitely needed a shower.  Fucking A."
IVF Detective One: "At least he brushed his teeth recently."
IVF Detective Two: "Ah, yes, Colgate."
IVF Detective One: "Tartar Control."
IVF Detective Two: "Yes, very nice."
IVF Detective One: "Now, the killer's last meal was obviously one of those nasty ass sandwiches from Lunchables R Us.  You know, the kind with those chicken strips that smell like laundry detergent?"
IVF Detective Two, sniffing intently: "And he cracked his molar on a sesame--" (sniff sniff) "--no, make that a poppy seed.  Must have been quite painful; I can smell his tears over here.  Quick, to the phone!  Now, I can smell his grody fingerprints (and my God, you do not want to know where those fingers have been) on the five, seven, three and eight buttons..."
IVF Detective One: "Hang on, I'll just Google for local emergency dentists with those digits in their phone numbers...a-ha!  Three blocks west of here.  Let's go."
IVF Detective Two: "Ooh, west?  Is it anywhere near that ice cream parlor you were talking about earlier?"
IVF Detective One: "Kitty corner."
IVF Detective Two: "We are so stopping there on the way."
IVF Detective One: "Clearly.  Now, let's call for backup."
IVF Detective Two: "Okay, but make sure they've all applied deodorant and haven't been anywhere near the ocean this week.  I swear I smelled whale pee on that last guy."

It's Almost Like Being Famous

As I've said before, I am in love with Seattle's Express Lanes.  It's not the casual kind of love, it's deep and abiding.  It's not just the idea of them, it's the experience of getting on a mini highway with several thousand other people, all of whom share the common goal of hauling ass until we run out of ass.  My fondness for the Express Lanes knows no bounds, and it's the kind of passion that cannot be extinguished by something so trivial as being involved in a multi car accident big enough to make the Internet.  Oops.

Everyone's okay except for the vehicles.  I was not remotely at fault.

Incidentally, did you know that if someone hits you hard enough from behind, random pieces of trim inside the car's cab will fly off?  They totally will.  It's kind of cool, in a "Fuck, my car is completely destroyed...hey, that's interesting," kind of way.

Since it was Seattle, everyone involved in the accident was excruciatingly polite.  Witnesses stopped and gave statements.  Apologies and thanks ("Thank you for stopping...and having insurance.") were exchanged all around.

The niftiest part of the whole thing was that the accident made the Washington State Department of Transportation website.  When Sam told me that, I threw my hands in the air, Kermit style, and yelled "Yaaaaay, I'm famous!"

Yes, I am that big of a dork.

Blame the Giraffe

I don't think I'm a very good patient.

It is probably not good patient etiquette to laugh maniacally when your surgeon says "Other than this issue, are you generally healthy?"

Because a lot of things go wrong with my body, when new things crop up I tend to ignore them until they reach crisis point.  I do this for several reasons.  Sometimes I worry about sounding like a hypochondriac, even though I know I'm not one--I'm just medically unlucky.  I am also stubborn and have a high pain tolerance, which frequently works against me.  It's easier to tough it out and ignore the problem than get it treated right away, which probably doesn't thrill most doctors.

Maybe I made up for it.  When my surgeon started going over risk factors and quoting odds like "1 in 250,000", I was polite enough not to run away screaming "Oh my God, the small numbers!  I'm fucked!"  Then again, I wasn't in any condition to run, so I probably shouldn't get credit for that.

 I've got some shredded cartilage in my knee which is making it difficult (sometimes impossible) to walk.  I will have to have surgery to repair or remove it. 

People keep telling me that it's minor surgery and I shouldn't worry, but I do worry. I'm not crazy about being anesthetized by total strangers.  I worry about complications.  I know someone who was permanently disabled after this type of surgery, and while I accept that this outcome is statistically improbable, knowing that it is possible makes me distinctly uneasy. Also, I can't afford the surgery.  Then again, if I don't have the surgery, I can't walk very well.  If I can't walk, I can't do my job.  If I lose my job, I lose my health insurance.  If I lose my health insurance, I really can't afford the surgery.

All I know for sure is that this shit is getting old. 

Aside from the general annoyance of what happened to my knee, I don't have a single plausible explanation for why it happened. There was no injury, no accident, no trauma to point to.  This means that when people see me on crutches and ask what happened, I don't have a good story.  That's right, I've got a shredded knee and no exciting story to explain it.  This is literally adding insult to injury.

Here's what I've decided to start telling people:

"Well, it was the damnedest thing.  Sam and I were having sex the other night, nothing too athletic, just the usual, but when the Crisco heated up it started to smoke, and--I know what you're thinking: Crisco's smoke point is like, 400 degrees, but I guess if your husband is wearing a hot pink Vicuna fur vest, he heats up a lot faster.  Anyway, when the Crisco started to smoke, I got startled and fell off the giraffe, and that's how I hurt my knee."

That's my story, and I'm sticking to it.

Low Res

I have a lot of things to say, but since the past week has been a lot like a very unfunny version of the movie Planes, Trains, and Automobiles (substituting a funeral for the traditional happy ending, of course), I'm a little too tired to type it out.

In lieu of fifty paragraphs expounding on the virtues of never ever ever traveling during the holidays, I'll just put forth the Buttmansion New Year's Resolutions, which are as follows:

Sam has resolved to spend all of our IVF budget on wifebeater undershirts and grain alcohol, on the theory that they have a higher rate of success than any IVF clinic in the country.

I resolve to start referring to my cooch as 'my Vicuña,' partly because I think it's cute, partly because yes, I would love to have my private panty parts protected by Inca law, but mostly because my Vicuña and Vicuñas at large share the characteristic of being annoyed when bothered by strangers.

What are your resolutions?

If I Were A Guest, I'd Kick Myself Out

When people visit a dying person, a large number of them want to talk about death.  On the one hand I understand this urge and think it's perfectly natural and on the other hand, good God, people, change the fucking subject.  The dying person's family members and caregivers are just about up to here with the morbid chatter, and I know for a fact that this topic has crossed the mind of the person in question about 56,000 times since June.  So no, we don't want to hear about your dying (or dead) relative, we don't want to hear your theories on the afterlife, and we really don't want to hear about your elderly relative's recent brush with cancer (or whatever), because that intense look on our faces doesn't mean we're thinking "Wow, I'm sure glad so-and-so survived that nasty infected hangnail," it means we're doing the math in our head and figuring out how much older your elderly relative is than our not-so-elderly relative will ever be and resenting it.  A lot.*

Incidentally, I am totally not talking about any of the sweet comments and/or emails y'all have sent, which have been wonderful and kind and supportive.  I'm talking about the people who stood in my father's kitchen for fortyfive minutes waxing poetic about mortality while I stood there, nodding politely and thinking about the laundry I could have been folding and the lunch I should have been preparing.

The death-related assvice is intense.  "My (insert family member) had that, and is fine now."  "Have you tried...?"  "You should..."  "If you just think positive..."  Wait, come to think of it, a lot of it sounds oddly like infertility assvice.  Huh.

I feel suffused with death and I would desperately like to talk about something else, but at this point I'm having a hard time focusing on anything else for very long.  It's a bit like that old story about stirring porridge for five minutes without thinking about little green monkeys, and am I the only one who remembers that story?  Apparently the Internet has no recollection of it, and neither does my mother.

Anyway, in light of my total lack of focus and the fact that I may have gone completely crackers and invented an old story about porridge and little green monkeys, I think I'm going to drag a few old posts out of mothballs and air them out, if you don't mind.  Like all things pulled out of the back of the closet, they may be a bit out of fashion or have a hem in the wrong place, but I think they may still have some wear left in them.  We'll see.

*The best thing to talk about at somebody's bedside, other than whatever the hell the person in bed wants to talk about, is your warm regards for them, your favorite tales from the good old days and any ways in which the person in question has influenced or improved your life.  This melts everybody like a pocketed candy bar in the summer, leaving the same sweet aftertaste.

Good Time Girl

I always feel like the life of the party.  I don't need to drink anybody under the table when I can do injections faster than the world's twitchiest heroin addict, and I'll be doing so again soon enough.

I've been in touch with Nurse Sweetie, and there's no reason to think that I won't be healthy enough to start cycling again in a few weeks.  Sometimes I think back to the beginning of the year and remember how wretched I was, how I used to wake up screaming from the pain, how I could barely walk, how extravagantly badly it all went, and I think "You want to do that again?  Are you out of your fucking mind?" and then I remember.  Why yes, yes I am.

Speaking of crazy, I cannot even fathon why would I show up at all when people Google "fun things to do while pregnant."  I don't know what to say to the perky fertile woman who landed on me and my "Fun Things To Do While Miscarrying" post while merrily traipsing across the Internet.  "Oops, my bad.  I got bitter in your milkshake."  "I think you should have taken a left turn at Albuquerque."  "Run."

I am also coming up high on searches for "successful FET," which I find hilarious.  I mean, yes, technically they both worked, but since neither of them resulted in a live baby, I'm hardly the posterchild for IVF's happy endings over here. 

By the way, if you ended up here by Googling "what was ivf retrieval like" and landing on the post where I said "Retrieval hurts like a motherfuck, but at least there are drugs," I should probably apologize.  It's entirely possible that your retrieval will hurt less than mine, and hey, did I mention the drugs?  They're really good.

SPF 60,000

When Dr. Dainty said "Always wear sunscreen" last week, I chirped "Okay," without a second thought.  I'm starting to have second thoughts.

This was my old routine:

• shower
• put in contacts
• dab on under-eye cream
• wonder if it's really helping
• inspect eyes for crow's feet
• decide that squinting intently into the mirror is not the best way to objectively evaluate the effectiveness of under-eye cream
• squeeze a tiny dot of SPF 15 moisturizer onto finger, smear across nose and cheeks
• put on deodorant
• smear product in hair
• get dressed
• verify that no crucial body parts are hanging out of clothes
• leave

This is my new routine:

Boredom In My Pants

As I understand it, a great deal of the Internet is dedicated to the viewing of vaginas and such, which completely mystifies me.  I mean, I have one, and believe me, it's the most boring thing on the planet.

Day Four of Crotch Watch yielded absolutely nothing.  I don't even have so much as a not-so-fresh feeling.

In lieu of interesting news from (whispered) down there, allow me to pass on this article.  I'm not saying it's fascinating or well written or anything, but I love it to pieces simply because it's the first time I've ever seen a country's low birth rate and poor fertility blamed on men. 

Raise Thumbs, Begin Twiddling

*updated*

"No, really, Pins, the miscarriage is one situation in which being Manic Depressive is incredibly helpful,"  I told my sister.
"How?"
"Because you and I, we have a high tolerance for emotional pain.  We know that eventually, it will go away, or at least get better.  Having a miscarriage is like being forced to run a triple marathon through hell, and the Manic Depression meant that I was already in pretty good shape for the run."

I still miss Good Embryo.  I miss him/her every single day.  I told Sam that miscarriage is the gift that keeps on taking, because while some things get easier, some parts just get harder.  This week, I would have passed into my second trimester.  I remember that without trying to, without wanting to.  It's just there.  Sometimes, when I'm in the mood for a strange food and am trying to justify a late night twenty minute trip with Sam to procure said food, I still have to catch myself before I say "Yeah, well, Good Embryo wants..."  Oh, wait.  Nevermind.

Sometimes for just a moment in the morning, in that hazy stage between asleep and awake, I forget and think I'm still pregnant.  That pretty much sucks.

Somebody at work giddily announced her pregnancy while clutching a handful of blurry ultrasound pictures.  Her due date is three weeks after mine.  I looked at those tiny black and white pictures out of the corner of my eye and wanted to say "Hey, I have those, too!  And then it died!" but I didn't.

Mostly, I am doing okay, though.  Ever since I got The Best Little Cancer In The World, I have regained my ability to smile sincerely.  For example, I can now look at cute little fuzzy baby geese without immediately glaring at the big geese and thinking "God, everybody has babies but meeeeeeeeeeeeee!  Stupid fertile bitch goose.  You know she didn't have to do IVF."  Now I just smile and say "Look, cute little fuzzy baby geese!" and Sam says "They're called goslings," and I say "I know," (an exchange we go through every single time) and then their parents waddle over, hissing quietly, and we scoot away before they peck us in delicate areas.

So, you know, that's an improvement.

The Metformin has been very interesting.  I find that I can still eat fried foods, dairy, snorf up carbs and drink alcohol, but I consume everything in much smaller quantities.  The mad dashes for the bathroom now only happen in the two days after I up my dosage.  Also, I must confess that I have been cheating just a little.  The day I started the Met, I also started to take iron supplements with Dr. DoesNotSuck's blessing (as I constantly skate on the edge of anemia).  The extra iron backs things up, the Met speeds things up, so most days I stay comfortably in the middle.

I've lost five pounds in three weeks, and I'm not really trying.  It's just stunning, the difference a little normal blood sugar makes.  I used to read articles promoting this diet or that regimen, and I'd think "But none of that will work.  I can't possibly diet, because I need to eat every two hours, or I'm not functional."  I did my damnedest to chose healthy snacks every two hours, but it was still annoying.  Since the blood sugar problems had come up gradually, it just never occurred to me that there was anything abnormal about them.  I just thought that other people had significantly better self control than I did, that having low blood sugar didn't bother them as much, that they were stronger.

Nope.  Turns out, I was just sick.  And the Metformin makes me better.

Well, okay, except for this one little thing, and it's really bugging the shit out of me.  Ladies?  Ladies who are on Met?  Help me out again, here?  I have suddenly and dramatically lost my taste for chocolate.  What the fuck is that about?  It's not that I dislike it, it's just that I never really feel like having it anymore.  My house is full of TastyKakes and Lindt Truffles and Reese's Peanut Butter Cups, and I'm barely nibbling them.  I cannot find "You will lose your gastronomic mind and become apathetic towards The Food of the Gods" listed anywhere under Metformin side effects, and it's just freaky.  So.  Chocolate indifference?  Anyone else?

Update:  So, a couple of commenters wondered about a link between Bipolar and PCOS/metabolic issues, and it reminded me of an article I read a while ago.   In it, a psychiatrist from Oregon talked about treating Bipolar patients with Metformin to try to counteract the chubbifying effects of the psychiatric drugs, but what really caught my eye was this: a link to an article discussing whether or not Depakote causes PCOS.  Interesting reading.  Depakote is frequently used to treat Manic Depression, and I took it for about a year back in college.  All the other kids were smoking pot and doing shrooms, I took Depakote.  Man, I got robbed.

Last week's beta was kind of a disappointment.  Dr. DoesNotSuck said it was good, but going from 30 to 12 in seven days?  Let's see.  If it's supposed to halve every 48 hours, and mine dropped by slightly more than half in...168 hours?  What?  So, I worry.  Then, of course, I feel like I'm obsessing (I am), splitting hairs (maybe), worrying over nothing (we'll see).  My next beta is tomorrow, so we'll know more then.

Cold Filtered

Infertility distorts things. 

The other day, one of the many pregnant women at work heard that I, too, was pregnant, and dashed up to congratulate me.  "Are you excited?" she squealed conspiratorily.  I was so startled by this just-add-water camaraderie that she apparently felt that I forgot to lie.  "No, not really," I said, and then watched her chin hit her enormous belly.  Her mouth opened and closed a few times, and I kind of wanted to mimc Mary Poppins and say "We are not a codfish," but instead I said "It's still very early.  There are an awful lot of things that can go wrong at this point.  Also, I have a birth defect that I might pass on, and I'm waiting to see if everything's okay."  To me, this sounds completely rational, but to most people I sound like a raving loon.

At lunch, I listened to a group of women chatting about their reproductive plans.  "He wants to have six kids," one said.  "But I don't know.  I think maybe we'll adopt.  You know.  After we have a few of our own."  The other women nodded approvingly.  "Oh, of course.  You want to have your own, first."  "It can be complicated, though," one of them added.  "Because your own kids will have grandparents, and the other ones won't, and they might get jealous."

Oy.  I didn't say anything, just winced internally, kept eating my lunch and thought "Forgive them, Soper, they know not what fucking morons they are." 

Upon reflection, I realized that they were not unusually stupid, just typically so.  Most people are goddamned ignorant about adoption (hence the term "Just adopt") and infertility because it's information that is non-essential for their lives.  Most women get pregnant when they want to, or even when they don't.  They squeal over two line sticks and take it for granted that everything will work out.  Why wouldn't it, after all?  Most people do not strain their lives through the filter of infertility.  They don't pan for flecks of happiness and good fortune, but instead trip over boulders of the stuff on the way to the john.

I still can't quite get into that.  Yes, I know, seeing the heartbeat at 6 weeks was good, goddamned nifty, even, but I am still waiting to see if The Law of Akeeyu's Fucked Up Snatch has another trick to play.  I am still very grateful to be pregnant, but it's a guarded kind of happiness.  I want this to work out more than I can say, but I find that I also don't really want to talk about it because I know how much all that expressed desire will hurt if something goes wrong, so instead of talking, I breathe deeply and reach for another KandyKake.   If we met in person, you might think I was waiting for a phone call or listening for some far off sound.  These days, I always appear somewhat preoccupied. 

I have another date with Dr. BrightEyes and his magic wand, so I'll be assuming the position next Wednesday in hopes of good news in hopes of any news in hopes.