StoryWorth: Fertility
What was your fertility experience?
The previous question was originally “What was your pregnancy and birth experience?” but those are two separate questions and, in my case, skip right over the most difficult part of the process.
Memory is full of shifting layers, changing focal distances, and altered perspectives. The following was written in 2013, six years after the events I describe. And now it’s been six years since then and reading it I can see how much further I’ve come from what I hope will always have been the most difficult time in my life.
_____________________________________
When we married, in 2000, Jason very much wanted to have a couple of years of marriage before embarking on parenthood. So we moved to London and had a lovely time and didn’t start trying to get pregnant until early 2002, when I was 33.
Now, I knew that I might have difficulty getting pregnant. My sisters and I are nine years apart, after all. What I didn’t know was that my grandmother *also* had trouble getting pregnant-found that out when Alice was a few years old, from a random family story Mom told. But I wasn’t exactly shocked when it didn’t take in the first year.
At that point, both Jason and I started testing. Turned out that he had a varicocele, which had to be removed-causing a small hernia in his groin, which then had to be fixed in 2010. Fun times. In the meantime I had various tests, including the hysterosalpingogram, which I love to say-it’s a womb with a hue! Nothing seemed wrong on my end, but I didn’t get pregnant.
By this time, I was starting to get depressed. I feel lucky, in three ways: first, because my depression was situational, I could explain to people why I was depressed and they were pretty supportive and understanding and I avoided a lot of the negatives that I know can come with depression; secondly, when the situation was resolved, the depression went away, and while I definitely know that depression is a pathway my brain has learned and I will have to be wary of it for the rest of my life, it’s not an ongoing issue for me; and thirdly, now that it’s gone I feel very privileged to have had the opportunity to see what that’s really like, so that I have a better understanding of what so many of my own friends, not to mention so many people in general, are living with every day. Oh, there’s a fourth way: I’m pretty proud that I think it took me only about three weeks to realize what I had was depression and to get help, and that help was readily available and I was treated professionally and with compassion without any financial strain. So, those are the good things about being depressed for more than three years. The bad part, of course, was being depressed.
In the meantime we embarked on fertility treatment at Reproductive Science Center in Lexington. First we did several rounds of plain old sex, while taking Clomid. That didn’t work. Then we did four rounds of ICI-that’s the high tech acronymn for what is essentially the turkey-baster method, or, as I like to call it, the “poke in the cervix with a sharp stick”. They didn’t offer any medications for that procedure-I hear other places give valium, or that they would have given me valium if they’d known I was in pain (because apparently my agonized gasps, yelps and moaning failed to alert them), but I got to grit my teeth and swear a lot. After that we moved up to IVF-this is the real “test-tube baby” part, for those of you following along at home.
During the first round, despite excellent follicle production and retrieval, none of the embryos survived to be implanted. The second round resulted in a chemical pregnancy-that’s where the hormone numbers go up and then…come back down to baseline within a couple of weeks. By this time we had maxed out what was then the $5000 lifetime cap on insurance for fertility treatments, so we were paying about $10K per round on our own. I had learned to give myself shots (as I said at the time, I’d always drawn the line at poking holes in myself to get high, yet here I was huddled in my basement every night with the needles laid out before me) and come to hate the dildo-cam, especially since it turns out I’m sensitive to the gel they use.
The hardest part is the hope. While you’re going through a cycle, you have to believe it will work-you have to, or why on earth would you be doing these ridiculous things to yourself? So you believe and you think positively and you visualize and when the news comes back negative, it is crushing. Because not only did it not work, but you were a fool, a fool to ever believe that this dream could come true, that you deserve to be a mother, that you are not an utter failure as a biological creature. And then they want you to do it again. At the fertility clinic that’s all they care about-that you do it again, exactly as they tell you, that you have no other focus in your life, that you bend everything else around that schedule, that you become nothing but a walking womb.
At this time I got some difficult news and the depression was swallowing me whole. Fortunately, I correctly interpreted serious suicidal ideation as a bad symptom, rather than a factual statement about the world and my life, and got on anti-depressants for a few months. Turns out I’m hella sensitive to SSRIs, what a surprise (not actually-next time you really want to hear about my bad trip). But they got me stabilized and eventually I was able to continue. Third round, another chemical pregnancy.
Fourth round-and now for something completely different. After three rounds of failure, the RSC team decided to try a different protocol, part of which involved giant horse needles full of progesterone in my butt every night. Not only did this result in the most erotic dreams of my entire life, but it also ushered in a new era for several friends who were called on for injection duty when Jason had to be out of town. Apparently there is a protein deficiency of the uterine lining that is impossible to detect without a biopsy that no insurance company will pay for, but in theory there’s nothing wrong with treating someone as if they had that deficiency, so that’s what we were trying. Of course, if it worked, we still wouldn’t know-that might just be the round that happened to catch-but it was a new approach and I was definitely ready for that.
I was starting to say that this would be my last round and sending off for applications for graduate programs in theatre. Jason was hoping to talk me into continuing through the rest of the year and we’ll never know who would have won that argument, because at last, I got pregnant. And it stuck. And forty weeks later, just after my 38th birthday, I had an incredible child who has been a joy every day since. And it was all worth it.
This entry was originally posted at https://lillibet.dreamwidth.org/1316657.html. You can comment either place! There are
comments over there now.
The previous question was originally “What was your pregnancy and birth experience?” but those are two separate questions and, in my case, skip right over the most difficult part of the process.
Memory is full of shifting layers, changing focal distances, and altered perspectives. The following was written in 2013, six years after the events I describe. And now it’s been six years since then and reading it I can see how much further I’ve come from what I hope will always have been the most difficult time in my life.
_____________________________________
When we married, in 2000, Jason very much wanted to have a couple of years of marriage before embarking on parenthood. So we moved to London and had a lovely time and didn’t start trying to get pregnant until early 2002, when I was 33.
Now, I knew that I might have difficulty getting pregnant. My sisters and I are nine years apart, after all. What I didn’t know was that my grandmother *also* had trouble getting pregnant-found that out when Alice was a few years old, from a random family story Mom told. But I wasn’t exactly shocked when it didn’t take in the first year.
At that point, both Jason and I started testing. Turned out that he had a varicocele, which had to be removed-causing a small hernia in his groin, which then had to be fixed in 2010. Fun times. In the meantime I had various tests, including the hysterosalpingogram, which I love to say-it’s a womb with a hue! Nothing seemed wrong on my end, but I didn’t get pregnant.
By this time, I was starting to get depressed. I feel lucky, in three ways: first, because my depression was situational, I could explain to people why I was depressed and they were pretty supportive and understanding and I avoided a lot of the negatives that I know can come with depression; secondly, when the situation was resolved, the depression went away, and while I definitely know that depression is a pathway my brain has learned and I will have to be wary of it for the rest of my life, it’s not an ongoing issue for me; and thirdly, now that it’s gone I feel very privileged to have had the opportunity to see what that’s really like, so that I have a better understanding of what so many of my own friends, not to mention so many people in general, are living with every day. Oh, there’s a fourth way: I’m pretty proud that I think it took me only about three weeks to realize what I had was depression and to get help, and that help was readily available and I was treated professionally and with compassion without any financial strain. So, those are the good things about being depressed for more than three years. The bad part, of course, was being depressed.
In the meantime we embarked on fertility treatment at Reproductive Science Center in Lexington. First we did several rounds of plain old sex, while taking Clomid. That didn’t work. Then we did four rounds of ICI-that’s the high tech acronymn for what is essentially the turkey-baster method, or, as I like to call it, the “poke in the cervix with a sharp stick”. They didn’t offer any medications for that procedure-I hear other places give valium, or that they would have given me valium if they’d known I was in pain (because apparently my agonized gasps, yelps and moaning failed to alert them), but I got to grit my teeth and swear a lot. After that we moved up to IVF-this is the real “test-tube baby” part, for those of you following along at home.
During the first round, despite excellent follicle production and retrieval, none of the embryos survived to be implanted. The second round resulted in a chemical pregnancy-that’s where the hormone numbers go up and then…come back down to baseline within a couple of weeks. By this time we had maxed out what was then the $5000 lifetime cap on insurance for fertility treatments, so we were paying about $10K per round on our own. I had learned to give myself shots (as I said at the time, I’d always drawn the line at poking holes in myself to get high, yet here I was huddled in my basement every night with the needles laid out before me) and come to hate the dildo-cam, especially since it turns out I’m sensitive to the gel they use.
The hardest part is the hope. While you’re going through a cycle, you have to believe it will work-you have to, or why on earth would you be doing these ridiculous things to yourself? So you believe and you think positively and you visualize and when the news comes back negative, it is crushing. Because not only did it not work, but you were a fool, a fool to ever believe that this dream could come true, that you deserve to be a mother, that you are not an utter failure as a biological creature. And then they want you to do it again. At the fertility clinic that’s all they care about-that you do it again, exactly as they tell you, that you have no other focus in your life, that you bend everything else around that schedule, that you become nothing but a walking womb.
At this time I got some difficult news and the depression was swallowing me whole. Fortunately, I correctly interpreted serious suicidal ideation as a bad symptom, rather than a factual statement about the world and my life, and got on anti-depressants for a few months. Turns out I’m hella sensitive to SSRIs, what a surprise (not actually-next time you really want to hear about my bad trip). But they got me stabilized and eventually I was able to continue. Third round, another chemical pregnancy.
Fourth round-and now for something completely different. After three rounds of failure, the RSC team decided to try a different protocol, part of which involved giant horse needles full of progesterone in my butt every night. Not only did this result in the most erotic dreams of my entire life, but it also ushered in a new era for several friends who were called on for injection duty when Jason had to be out of town. Apparently there is a protein deficiency of the uterine lining that is impossible to detect without a biopsy that no insurance company will pay for, but in theory there’s nothing wrong with treating someone as if they had that deficiency, so that’s what we were trying. Of course, if it worked, we still wouldn’t know-that might just be the round that happened to catch-but it was a new approach and I was definitely ready for that.
I was starting to say that this would be my last round and sending off for applications for graduate programs in theatre. Jason was hoping to talk me into continuing through the rest of the year and we’ll never know who would have won that argument, because at last, I got pregnant. And it stuck. And forty weeks later, just after my 38th birthday, I had an incredible child who has been a joy every day since. And it was all worth it.
This entry was originally posted at https://lillibet.dreamwidth.org/1316657.html. You can comment either place! There are
comments over there now.