I keep trying to figure out where to start talking about this. It's such an overwhelming process for me that when I really try to boil it down to the beginning, I can't get my thoughts straight. That's why I am starting with this picture. We can call this the new beginning. This is a picture of what my body will be ingesting over the next three weeks. This is baby making in the 21st century.
For the past couple of years, Maks and I have been trying for a baby. The day after we got engaged we decided to pull the goalie and see what happens. We figured we were too old to wait. Well, not old and I certainly wasn't too old at the age of 32, but you get the picture. Alas, I would not be sitting at my kitchen table faced with this elaborate start your own drug lab kit (as Maks calls it) if any of our prior attempts had been successful. Last summer we started attending the fertility clinic at UCSF in order to try and figure out what we might be doing wrong. It turns out that my preacher was not exactly correct. Sitting next to a boy, holding hands, kissing with tongue...none of those things will get you pregnant. My eighth grade science teacher was also not correct. Unprotected sex (no matter how much or what position) will not always get you pregnant either. In fact, contrary to what I had always been taught, getting pregnant is quite a process, especially for us. Don't get me wrong, I know the old fashioned way works for some and that's great. It's just not our way, I guess.
We started with Clomid and IUI. We did that 4 times. Basically, the run down on that is that you take Clomid for a week and have hot flashes and nausea for a month. Half way through the cycle you do a shot of Ovidril to make yourself ovulate and 36 hours later in the most romantic of laboratory settings, your husband goes into a room on the 8th floor and makes his deposit and you go into a room on the 7th floor and have his freshly washed floater and sinker eliminated sperm deposited into you by a very nice lab tech. Our clinic doesn't have music in the room which is a shame. I feel like it might make the sperm march with motivation. Sadly, this just didn't work. I had a small polyp removed just in case that was blocking the path but no dice. I would describe the entire process as genuinely irritating and uncomfortable. I felt like I never knew when I would have a hot flash. I would get it and then 2 minutes after be freezing. I gained some weight. I cried a lot for stupid reasons. Reasons like mayonnaise on my burger or tripping on the dog leash are just a few. I yelled at my poor husband for even stupider reasons because I was genuinely more irritated then I had ever been in my life. Like I said, it was an uncomfortable couple of months. Perhaps the hardest thing about it is that you're supposed to try to stay stress free and the entire process of being irrationally irritated by the smallest of things and trying not to explode is quite stressful. However, exploding has its stressful repercussions as well. The benefits of Clomid are that it's supposed to help you create more mature follicles. Instead of creating one mature follicle a month, I made 2-3 each month. Each time we did the insemination, we put roughly 75-85 million sperm next 2-3 mature eggs right inside my uterus. You would think I would be a mom to triplets at this point. But, after all that, no baby.
That's the hardest part. No baby. I have never in my life wanted something as badly as I want a kid. I wouldn't say that I have always wanted to be mother but I would say that I always expected to be one. I have never envisioned my life without children. As an only child, my goal has always been to have more then one. And once I found a partner to share my life with, the desire to make our family bigger grew exponentially. For the past few years we have expanded our holidays to include my in-laws who are now just family. I am so excited to share them with our children. I can't wait for him or her to learn Russian and even do little baby vodka shots (sub voda for vodka) or take a ballet class. I envision myself at baseball games and soccer games passing out Gatorade and even yelling at my children for dragging smelly stinky stuff into the house. I see my mom teaching them to dance and sing no matter where you are. I know that I am romanticizing it. I have been told that it is difficult. I was even recently told how much I don't understand because I don't have children and how unprepared I am for the reality of it by someone I considered close to me. That hurt a lot. All I can do is imagine it at this point. I don't even have the option of being afraid. I am constantly being told to just relax and think positively so the best I can do is imagine the positive. I can't face the reality of parenthood at this point because my reality is a tabletop full of needles and vials.
That's why I am starting with that picture. After receiving the drug package and going through it, a friend facetimed me to show me her daughter who just started crawling. It was the most perfect timing. This table of drugs is going to get me to that. It's going to bring me smiles bigger then I have ever experienced. It's going to be hard and I will write about it a lot. I have scoured the internet for blogs like this about how people are dealing with IVF and sadly, I can't find enough. I want to know everything. I want to know about side effects, good times, hard times, and most of all successes and failures. I'm now a part of that circle so this is my voice and my take on it. It's not perfect. It is probably not even grammatically correct. I don't fancy myself a writer. I have thought about writing about this for months but shied away from it because I wanted it to sound so much more eloquent. It wasn't until I found myself reading the same blog post of another IVF participant over and over that I realized my words don't have to be perfect. They just have to be mine because this is my journey and God knows it's not perfect. It feels good to share it. I won't have a lot of the moments that some pregnant women have. I won't have a big surprise pregnancy announcement. IVF will either work or not work and I will have to spend the 12 weeks after it hoping for the best and I don't want to do that alone. Technology has not only improved my chances of having a baby, it's given me the tools to talk about it with everyone I know on Facebook. I would love to hear from anyone who might have dealt with this, as well. I also love hearing from my friends who made babies the old fashioned way. And as undecided as I am about religion, I am asking any of you who do pray to put me on your list. If you meditate, put me on that list. I have started praying too. I don't know who I am talking to. It might be my little babies soul. I think it's worth the effort, though. In the end, this will all be worth the effort. Thank you.
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