The Never-Ending Saga

And by "never ending saga", I'm not sure if I mean our fertility and adoption struggles, or this journal entry!!! (This is the part where you all jump in and reassure me that your eyeballs are not rolling back in your head from boredom, what with all this talk of mood swings and fertility drugs and cervical {spelled correctly} mucous.)

We had gone from “Wow, we’re going to get a baby from our fertility treatments, AND we’re going to get a baby from the adoption agency, and the fun part will be seeing which way happens FIRST!!! We’re going to have babies coming out our ears!!” to, “You know, it’s looking like we won’t be getting a baby. At all. In any way. Ever. Houseplants don't count.”

The adoption agency, which had pretty much closed down, wasn’t as clueless as it appeared, because they had the good sense to put a TOTALLY-NEVER-IN-A-MILLION-YEARS-WILL-YOU-GET-YOUR-MONEY-BACK-FOR-ANY-REASON non-refundable clause in the contract we signed with them. Period. End of discussion. Actually, we knew one couple who took them to court and sued and successfully got a portion of their fees back, but to be honest, I was so dis-heartened at this point I didn’t have it in me. I figured we’d thrown away so much money in fertility treatments, what did it really matter if we threw away a bunch more with a defunct adoption agency? I was tired of being pro-active. Tired of working so hard. Tired of getting nowhere. Sitting around pouting was the best way for me to deal with it. And eating chocolate. Lots and lots of chocolate.

But our reproductive doctor wasn’t ready to give up yet. Yes, yes, it’s true, none of the “basic” or even “extended basic” treatments had worked for us. But that didn’t mean we should quit! There were still things to try! Options to explore! Money to spend!!!

So, according to him, it was time for the big guns, and he suggested IVF. In-vitro fertilization. What was so maddening about the whole thing is that there wasn’t anything really WRONG with me. Ovulatory dysfunction? Clomid should have taken care of that. Crappy mucous? The decongestant should have worked, at the very least, and the inseminations certainly should have bypassed that problem. None of my doctors could figure out why nothing was working, and yet month after month, year after year, we still weren’t pregnant.

IVF was a logical step, but huge for us to consider. Our insurance didn’t pay for any fertility treatments and the military base where we lived didn’t offer any. We had already spent thousands, and now they were asking us to consider IVF, at eight to ten thousand a pop. And what’s so depressing is that if it doesn’t work --- You sure as heck don’t get your money back.

The entire thing was discouraging and maddening and frustrating. I had never been in a situation like this before, where I had a total lack of control over the outcome. I couldn’t MAKE this happen, no matter how hard I tried.

When I was in school, if I wanted a good grade, I studied. Viola, a good grade. If Blaine and I wanted to buy something, we simply needed to save up the money and buy it. If we wanted to travel somewhere, we researched it, then went. My entire life, my experience had been that if you want something {within reason} badly enough, you just need to work for it and you can get it. And, if you buy something, and it doesn’t work the way it’s supposed to, you return it and get your money back, or exchange it. Can you imagine a store where you pay ten thousand dollars for a TV, and you bring it home, and it doesn’t work? There’s no picture at all? And you call the store to complain and they say, “Too bad, so sad …. But if you want to spend another ten thousand, we can sell you another TV and try again! Of course, there’s no guarantee that TV will work, either.” While having a baby is a normal sort of adventure for most people, we just couldn’t make it happen; we were going broke, and it was making me crazy. Crazy with a capital K.

Women all around me were getting pregnant at the drop of a hat. Many of my co-workers were pregnant and after awhile, it was extremely difficult to feel happy for them without feeling sorry for myself. And angry. And bitter. And did I mention angry? Why did they deserve babies and I didn’t? It didn’t help matters any that I worked at a family practice clinic and the doctor also delivered babies. Not a lot, but enough. Every time an unwed teenager came in and got a positive pregnancy test, it was all I could do not to stand up in my chair and shout ---- HOW IS THIS FAIR????? One young girl got her positive results, said out loud, “Good, now I can get on welfare!” and I swear, I had to turn around and walk out of the room. There I was, married, stable, in my late-20s, and couldn’t get pregnant to save my life, but we had one patient who was on her sixth (welfare) kid and refused birth control of any kind. I was really having a hard time seeing the justice in the situation. Empathy for those people, who truly needed empathy, was long-gone.

I never lay around and moaned and cried about not being pregnant; it’s not like I went days and days with the bed covers pulled up over my head … but boy, was I angry with all the pregnant women of the world. I pouted and I sulked and I quickly became the person you NEVER wanted to see at a party because I pretty much sucked all the positive energy from a room. And as much as I was angry and jealous, I hated myself for being that way. It takes a lot of energy to walk around in a persistent bad mood, but I managed it most of the time.

The constant up and down from the drugs, the hope each month that it worked, the disappointment when the pregnancy test was negative … even the adolescent hope that the pregnancy test was wrong, only to be crushed again when I would start my period. The knowledge that we had gone through ALL THAT with the adoption agency, only for it to be a dead end. It became incredibly overwhelming and I started resenting every pregnant person I knew. And their husbands. And even their friends and their neighbors and their pets and anyone who *knew* anyone who was pregnant and even pregnant people on TV. They were all stupid, stupid, stupid, and none of them deserved those babies.

You can imagine that it was a very serene and positive time in my life, and people all around me were clamoring to be my friend. Um, yeah. Maybe not.

But when you want a baby, and your doctor says Jump, you pretty much say ”How high?” So off we went on an IVF adventure. Back then, IVF was a top of the line fertility treatment. Nowadays, they’ve added things like sperm injection and assisted hatching and pre-genetic testing, but even now, IVF is pretty much the end of the road for fertility treatments. If IVF doesn’t work, you really don’t have a lot of options left. There’s a lot to be said for desperation, when you realize you’re running out of chances and opportunities.

I was stimulated for optimal egg production, both quality and quantity, and monitored extremely closely via blood work and ultrasound. After the trigger shot, the eggs would be harvested/aspirated with a needle/catheter, via another laparoscopy, and placed in a petri dish with Blaine’s sperm. And as much as I made fun of the guy for being on the Olympic Masturbating Team, he was a damn good sport about going through all this.

Hopefully, dozens and dozens of the eggs would fertilize and three or five days later, depending on their quality, they would transfer the best looking two or three embryos back into my uterus. Ideally one of them would implant, and I continued to give myself injections to make sure my uterine lining remained a perfect environment.

We had high hopes …. Pretty much everything was riding on this. You hear about the rare couple who can afford to do IVF dozens of time, but that wasn’t us. We had decided one shot, and if it didn’t work, it didn’t work

The procedure went smoothly, although they didn’t get as many embryos as they wanted. Ideally we would have had some left over for freezing for later attempts, but we only wound up with four total, so we put them all back in. Well-meaning friends made comments like “Four?? Are you crazy?” and “You’ll wind up with quadruplets!” When the truth was, we were simply hoping and praying for ANY of them to stick around.

You can’t take an early urine pregnancy test with IVF because the trigger shot has HCG (human chorionic gonadotripin) in it, which mimics the hormone that indicates pregnancy. And as long as you’re on the injections to keep your uterine lining fluffy, you won’t get a period. So there’s no way to “know” if an IVF worked ahead of time. You just wait for two weeks, until you can take a blood test. Then you wait that day, for the nurse to call you. Every time the phone rings, you jump. You’re so excited for her to call, because you know, you just KNOW that it worked … this time, this time, it worked.

IVF nurse. That’s got to be the best/worst job in the world. The people you get to call with good news are so overjoyed to hear from you -- can you imagine what a great feeling it is to deliver thrilling reports like that? Of course, then there are the people you have to call and give the disappointing news that it didn’t work; sorry, you’re not pregnant.

We were two of those people. Not pregnant. Again. You’d think as some point it would quit being such a crushing blow to hear those words, but nope. Pretty much like having your heart ripped out all over again. The fact that my very first nephew was born the next day, with me filming it all in the delivery room, was a bittersweet reminder of what had just failed.

And despite the fact we had promised ourselves we would only go through that once, we immediately started saving our pennies to do it again, being the optimists, idealists, dreamers, gluttons for punishment that we were.