After much deliberation, I've settled on this icon. It captures this whole thing best.

[thirdbase]

After my brother-in-law's wedding last July, I realized that various ovulation prediction testing had only ever caught a single "go fuck yourselves" day, so we decided that since my 36th birthday (and it's negative pregnancy test, ensuing fabulous bottle of wine and a 45 day cycle in which I got PMS twice and wondered if I had in fact somehow screwed up the pregnancy test) was fading, we might as well get a medical opinion. Result: blocked fallopian tube, surgery, and a meeting with the infertility clinic about why I was a great candidate for IVF, and should not waste my time and money on other forms of infertility treatments that better benefit 28-35 year olds with 2 working ovaries and fallopian tubes. We had a fun January and February, and when nothing came of the fun except March, we started the process.

I was reminded: stay calm, get sleep, eat right, don't worry about things, Shady Grove (the infertility clinic) has assigned me a personal nurse (who is awesome) and a personal financial counselor (who has a several religious icons in her office, and lots of Biblical quotes posted there, where she meets with the patients. I have no idea if McKayla would be impressed. We weren't).

I'll tell you I'm not usually a worrier, Captain Legoland would probably choke on whatever he was drinking if he heard me say that. I just like to understand what I'm getting into so I don't have to worry about it.

Money: if you look up "cost of infertility treatments online" you find such reassuring statements as "It's really, really expensive" and "How to pay for your infertility treatments" and "Are your finances in order?" Ok, no problem. We have the worksheet from Shady Grove telling us how much the procedures are, though it take us 2 more weeks to figure it out because the financial counselor may be a whiz at talking to the insurance companies, but is really horrible about patient interaction. If someone says they don't understand, simply repeating the words more insistently doesn't actually engender understanding. And doing it a 3rd time, even slower, actually makes things worse. Nothing like feeling like a idiot before you even get through the first office visit. It took me almost a month before I walked out of the office not crying. The first day I was not crying, I had them re-take the picture for my file that they took on that first visit.

Drugs: The drugs cost more than the procedures. But it took We have a list of drugs from the nurse. The counselor tells us to call the insurance company and ask them for drug prices.

Aetna Specialty Hell: Actually, it's called Aetna Specialty Pharmacy, but I can't tell the difference. By the 5th phone call, I was no longer crying during the phone call. I had honestly given up. I would get told different things by different people and when I repeated what I had been told, I was told (yup, you guessed it) that I was wrong, I couldn't possibly have been told that. Long and short of it, I never found out what the medicines cost until the receipt and the medicines showed up on my doorstep. I hadn't even been told they were shipping that morning. They were supposed to confirm it Friday night, as I was supposed to start the medicines on Sunday morning (everything is timed based on what my blood levels and ovaries are doing at the time). I asked Ben to stay home while I went out Sat morning at 9:30 and when i got back at 11am, the medicines had arrived.

Important point: During the series of calls with the pharmacy, I had been put on birth control. They do this to even out the body's cycle, get everything reset, as it were. The first time I ever went on birth control, at 17 or 18 to control very very painful periods, I never made it to day 3 of the pill. On day 2, I sat on the edge of my bed for most of the day, peering over it, trying to decide if it was worth getting off the bed. Not worth it, since I wasn't having sex. I don't remember going on it again, but I've had to switch pills a couple times, each time to a lower dose because I'd go a little crazy/weepy when I'd start a new pill. Eventually I would even out. When I went off the pill March 2011, I was fine for the period week, fine through Wed, had a little crying episode on Wed and on Friday when I got home from work, I informed Captain Legoland that I was not looking forward to the next day. As we were planning to go camping, he hugged me and said "we'll have fun!" To which I responded "No, you don't understand. I'm not looking forward to the sun coming up tomorrow because there won't be anything good about it" and I burst out crying. I spent the whole weekend (camping and having fun) feeling very delicate indeed. Suffice it to say, hormones make me very emotional, very edgy, sad, etc. Can you even imagine me sad? Over the past 2+ months, I've had trouble remembering myself as happy.

I got through over a week of crying, moping, deep breathing followed by more crying, feeling like I was going crazy -- there's nothing quite like crying uncontrollably and when your husband hugs you and says "What's wrong?" you say "I don't know, everything is bad," and cry even harder. I was overwhelmed by everything. There were dishes in the dishwasher that needed to be put away! Couldn't he see this was horrible? I was an awful wife -- a good wife would put the dishes away! I would have made dinner and cleaned the house and gone grocery shopping and instead I was paralyzed by tears. And there were emails at work that I HADN'T ANSWERED. I was going to lose my (federal employee for 11 years and I do really good work) job and then we weren't going to be able to pay the mortgage! Couldn't he see what a bad person I was? Then I would cry and apologize for being such a horrible person. I honestly can't imagine being him in that situation. Talk about no-win.

I went in for a routine monitoring appointment (bloodwork, ultrasound) one day and they asked me (in the way that doctors will) "How are you today?" and I replied "Horrible. There's nothing good about today." They sat me down and quickly figured out that the pill was really screwing with me. I can't explain what a relief it was to realize that. Be told it was ok to feel what I was feeling, that it sucked, and no, I was not the only one this happened to. Perhaps mine was a little more drastic, but my nurse shared a funny story with me. When she first started working there, she felt that alot of her patients really didn't like her. Then it occurred to her that the patients were required to call on day 1 of their cycles (max PMS time) and otherwise called when their hormones were out of control to say everything was horrible.

I survived the few more days on the pill and they told me the new medicines would be different, so i wouldn't feel the same crazy, but I might be a different crazy. I wish I had kept a better log, but I think those 2 weeks were pretty ok. I was mostly focused on giving myself shots (squeamish? go straight to the next paragraph right now) twice a day in the stomach, which was more medically interesting to me than it was disturbing. Some friends, and my sister-in-law, had to have their husbands do it, they couldn't handle it. Luckily, I have enough belly fat that I didn't feel anything unless I nicked myself pulling the needle out. Ben would sit with me and a couple times, gave me the shots in my arms. Once I had to do it out an evening event and the couple people in the bathroom told me not to worry, their mothers were diabetics too. I just agreed.

The fun part - I promised there would be humor - is that I have a bunch of leftover clean needles that I can use to spike strawberries and such with rum or vodka. So there's that. That went on fairly well, do emotional issues I remember.

IVF is (as I explained to my grandmother) where they give me drugs to trick my body into thinking that it's a great idea to mature around a dozen eggs in my ovaries in one month, instead of just 1 or 2. Once the majority of the eggs (at that stage, still called "follicles") are mature, they give me a time to take a "trigger" medication, which will cause my boy to release the eggs 36hrs later. They book the OR time in the clinic in Rockville (just over an hour drive from home), count back 36hrs and I get the shot. We head to Rockville, I get put under anesthesia, they harvest the eggs, (and as I explained to my grandmother to make her laugh), Ben gives them sperm, they don't just take it from him like they do my eggs. I wake up, I eat saltines (yum yum), I go home, I sleep for 2 days. after 2 days, they call me and tell me whe I come back in -- I got Day 5, which is good, it gives the cells more time to split, and they get more time to figure out which horse is going to win the Thirdbase Derby.

Back to the emotional end of things:
Up to this point, I had never had any problems or emotional upset around kids, pregnant friends, discussion of such, etc. I have a colleague who was never so happy as to be away on detail while my boss was pregnant, because they were having a hard time of things. I had heard stories from friends who were ok around some things, but some subjects had set them off. But I had never felt anything but happiness for friends (who would caveat their own pregnancies by saying "I was waiting to tell you in hopes that you would be pregnant and I don't want you to feel bad"), family, etc. In fact, i got to the point where I wondered to Ben if maybe this meant I secretly didn't want kids? No, we decided, that wasn't it. I just didn't have the feelings that some people did. Didn't make me anything but me.

The Saturday between Retrieval and Transfer (when they give the fertilized egg back), Ben's brother called to say they were pregnant. I found out when I got home from tai chi. I immediately burst out crying. Then I felt bad -- they are such wonderful people, how I could I not be happy, even ecstatic for them? I cried harder. I said "I'm happy for them..." and then said "No I'm not" and cried harder because how could I be that cruel? The rest of that day, if I thought of them, I cried. If I didn't, I was fine. In the late afternoon, we were headed home from the hardware store and I was driving. I saw a large bird in a tree off the road and wondered what kind of a bird it was -- it was huge! Turkey vulture maybe? As we drove past it and our angle to the tree/bird changed, it appeared as if the bird, definitely a raptor now, was leaning forward to take flight. Holy crap, it was an eagle! And I thought to myself, in these exact words, "Well, I may be a complete failure as a woman because of my inability to conceive a child, but at least I'm not useless as a human because I do know my birds." And then I burst out crying (You have my full permission to re-read that whole bird part and giggle. Because this really is pretty funny. Sad-funny, but funny nonetheless). Ben had had his eyes closed in the passenger seat and I could just hear him think "oh god, what now?" That poor guy.

That evening, it was nice to think back on that and think that anyone who could have that kind of thought was clearly under the influence of things beyond her control, and that every other irrational thing that was happening was clearly irrational, and not me blowing things out of proportion for no reason. If that had occurred to me as rational thought, then it was ok, I should just take a nice deep breath, let it out, and repeat. And remind myself that it was ok.

Fast forward a bit. Transfer went fine. The waiting 2 weeks for the pregnancy blood test went fine. They offer pamphlets ad support groups for people waiting those 2 weeks. I had play rehearsal and 2 deadlines at work. I was vaguely aware that 2 weeks had passed. The first test was positive. I came back 2 days later and that blood test was positive and the hormone levels they look for were rising just like they should.

Next spoiler: this is not a post to tell you I'm pregnant. Gains and losses ahead. It's ok to stop reading at any point, though I agree this is a little bit like a train wreck.

I went back the next week? week after? for the first ultrasound. There it was, a dark circle with a light patch on the right and a round circle on the left. The circle was pulsating. At 103 beats per minute. Right on time. It was cool. They gave me a print out. And since I'm being completely honest, I'll add this: right now may be the first time I've been really excited by that little pulsating circle.

We went into this thinking of it as a science fair experiment. We were throwing alot of money (with embryo freezing, it cost more than our wedding) at this, with no guarantee that we'd even get anything to transfer, that we'd even get a positive blood test, that we'd even get a positive ultrasound. At that point, I was counted as being 5 weeks. If I were 5 weeks and we'd gotten pregnant naturally, I'd be staring at a calendar thinking "wait, do I get my period this week or next week? Or last week? I forget..." We were a loooong way from in the clear. I didn't want to get excited. People think about these things very differently and to us, it was not a baby at that stage. It wasn't even a going-to-be-a baby. It was a cool thing and when was my next appointment? I decided I'd write the weeks on the calendar after they had passed.

The medicine I was taking at this point, and had been since just before the retrieval was designed to make my body think it was pregnant. So I would get home from work, and sleep. My bio in the Twelfth Night program thanks Captain Legoland for waking me up for rehearsal. The reason I needed a co-stage manager was that I couldn't handle a normal rehearsal schedule and still stay relaxed, de-stressed, and get plenty of sleep. I don't recall any major emotional snafus with that one, but productivity goes down in all parts of life when you can't have sugar, caffeine, or chocolate, and you sleep all the time. Work emails backed up, laundry backed up, cooking didn't happen, baking didn't happen, etc. I got behind, and had to ignore it and not stress.

My next appointment was Monday of Tech Week. Monday of International Panel on Climate Change Review week. Tues, Wed and Thur, I was going to be in the office for an hour in the morning, in meetings til 1:30, in the office for another hour, and then off to Tech Week, where I'd nap in the car. I arranged not not go to rehearsal on Wed -- instead, I'd go sailing and get to bed early. That was the plan. Gotta have a plan.

It was immediately evident that the ultrasound nurse couldn't find what she was looking for. The doctor walked in just as I was about to say something calming and understanding to her, because she was starting to look a little nervous, knowing she couldn't locate anything. I like the doctor very much. I prefer straight shooting to anything else. Before I could say anything, he looked said said "I have to tell you, we're not finding anything good here. I'm very sorry."

I had a couple tears. He assured me that it was nothing I had done (I had gone easy sailing, everything had felt fine, they had told me as far as they were concerned it was ok), it wasn't the sailing, that something must not have been right, and my body had figured it out. We got straight when I would come back in, and I called Ben from the car and told him. Then I drove to Dunkin Donuts and got a coffee and a donut and drove to work. I got a big hug from him that night, told my skipper I had to be at the theatre on Wed because Thurs was invited dress, and I had my week. You don't have time to process when you don't have time.

Those that follow me on facebook will recall a recent Friday post that said "I can do this." It was the first day of quiet. I was the most senior person who showed up in the office that day, there were only 3 of us total. I had to get 2 letters written, and sort through email. I was sleep deprived. I hadn't actually miscarried yet and didn't know when I would. I had loads on my mind and plenty of time. But I couldn't break down, at the office, with no one there for support, knowing I had a full night of theatre that I had to get through -- a night full of friends, teammates and hilarity. I night where I could be "on" and have something to focus on.

I was ok. I was more ok than I thought I'd be. I wasn't weepy once, and shared the news quietly with people who needed to know, or who had been following part of the recent part of the journey. On Monday, I was back at the office and since my body hadn't chosen to miscarry yet, we scheduled a D&C (honestly, if you don't know what it is, I wouldn't google it. it's much scarier on-line than it actually was), where a minor procedure would help my body through this, before my body decided that the embryo was a scar that had to be healed over. So for a second week, I missed sailing, as the best time for them was Wednesday afternoon. I stayed home Thurs and Fri, teleworking most of both days. Unexpectedly, though explained to me later than night by a friend who has been through this, my hormones levels came crashing down at about 3pm on Friday. I was nervous, twitchy, delicate. I cried a little bit. As predicted, I got completely bloated, and nothing fit. I showed up for the play on Friday night wearing parachute pants folded down to my hips, and my 2XL crew tee shirt, inside out, so it was Stage Manager black. On Saturday, I hit two stores to try and find something I could wear, proving that the only thing worse than not fitting into your clothes is shopping and not fitting into theirs either. I cried myself to sleep for a nap, really really dragged myself out the door to get to closing night, and gave up completely on the wardrobe: yoga pants pulled down to my hips, black tank top and a black fleece that said "WILDFIRE" in orange from when I sailed with them. I had a great time at the theatre, I had a great time at the cast party. Being around people really perked me up but it was so so hard to pull the energy to get there. I had cried in tai chi that morning. I cried in the stores. On Sunday, I cried to Ben and then apologized in tears for crying.

This whole thing feels alot like hearing a friend of mine talk about how her depression used to affect her before she was able to get on the right kind of meds. I'm tired, unmotivated, lethargic, can't concentrate. My appetite is all over the place, sometimes I'm not hungry, sometimes I'll eat 2 full meals within 30 minutes. I can't decide what I want to eat, what I want to do, where I want to do it, or not do it.

I've been wanting to do this entry for a while, I wanted to keep track of how things were going, how I was feeling. I didn't. No energy. No drive. I don't feel for the loss of the blip on the screen, I feel a loss of myself. How am I supposed to be a coping adult if I can't control what is going on in and outside of my head? I know these are questions that are readily and rationally answered with a smile and the rather easy explanation of "because when you need to do it, it'll get done."

Except I'm not in a rational frame of mind these days. I can't come up with the energy to smile. Seriously, stop and think: when was the last time you saw me not smile? When did I not have a smile for you? I run on smiles. I could power the neighborhood with smiles. Most times. I can't even remember that there are things that are fun. I went grocery shopping with Ben on Sunday because while it would have made more sense for us to divide and conquer on the chores, this was really the first time I had spent with him since the negative test, since the D&C, because of our schedules. And I could not think of a single thing I would have done while he was out. There was a month's worth of laundry (all mine) to fold and put away. There were clean dishes to be put away. There were little tree helicopters that could be pulled out of the mulched garden and gutters. I could have pulled the weeds out of the raised beds so I could plant the vegetables I bought on Saturday. None sounded interesting or fun. I know I like gardening, but I can't remember what fun feels like. I know I enjoy baking, but I really can't be bothered to fish out a recipe. I know I'm not going to wash the cookie sheets or the the bowl for a week so why bother, right? I can't remember fun. I don't have time to find it at the moment. I don't want to take the time, because there are other things that ought to get done, and i wouldn't know where to look anyways. I did the retail therapy thing and got my favorite store (ever. in the whole world) shopped the Saturday of opening weekend. I don't need anything. I don't like clothes shopping when I do fit into clothes, I certainly don't like it when I'm 10-15lbs heavier than I was before I started the hormone shots.

There's just no energy.

I'm still in the throes of unknown. My soft practice kicks in tai chi on Saturday are still hurting the muscle area right where the procedure happened on Wed, so I'm back in the doctor's office tomorrow, because evidently there's another piece I haven't checked off their "Everything is good" list (but I did say no gory details). I am on continued rest, which means no sailing again on Wed (when I am stuck in an all day meeting anyways), so when I got on the boat Saturday, I'll be in coaching,/go-for-a-boat-ride mode, not trimming mode. Maybe I'll start teaching myself to call tactics.

The one really nice part of this is that when you tell someone you're doing infertility treatments, you can't swing a dead cat without hitting someone going through it. When you find out there's not a heartbeat anymore, there's no shortage of women who have been just where you are and offer to listen, to hug, and if you want it, to offer thoughts on how they got through. Even the D&C - no sooner did I mention it to a very very small group of friends, 4 of them came back and shared their experiences, told me what to expect and how to get through it. It's not a group you set out wanting to be a part of, but I'll tell you, it feels oddly good to be a part of it. And sometime, I 'll be able to give back.

I hurt alot physically right now, and my plan still seems to be to sleep-deprive the emotional part. My goal, after tonight, is early bedtimes the rest of the week. I've been typing this out for about 2 hours. Ben is now in bed, and I'll head off myself. I'll find the smiles and fun. They're somewhere. They're with friends, but I don't have the energy to call a gathering, or commit to something. I will. Eventually. "This too shall pass, said the rabbi," as my mother used to say.