Leery Polyp

Today, I Am a Man

Gee whillikers, I can't hardly believe it. Pops got me my first razor and showed me how to shave my chin as smooth as my backside used to be before all that puberty kicked in. He said he would explain to me how ladies get babies in them too, but first he needed something to take the edge off and go get me the scotch, would you, son? Then he fell asleep in his recliner.

Well okay really it was a very nice osteopath (with medical acupuncture training!)(oh, remind me to tell you why I stopped going to my previous acupuncturist!) with a very nice Sciton laser and the reason I have to shave my glossy whiskers is that plucking them will interfere with their growth cycle, and we want them all to be in Super Grow Fast and Make Jo Look Like Homer Simpson stage when we (say it with a fakey German accent, now:) BLAST THEM WITH THE LASER. Oh, and she didn't actually pass out at the end of the consultation.

I am also having microdermabrasion, since PCOS makes me all lumpy and granular about the face.

That visit to the New Agey Centre for Mustache Removal (actual name) has left me with a few questions, however, all of which may be boiled down to the following: Why in hell does a glorified spa manage to do everything right that your average gynecologist and fertility clinic do wrong? Observe the following list:

1) Consultation complimentary. You can schedule it -- and any future appointments -- via the website, which provides a tidy dropdown menu with options like "Consult -- Laser -- Bikini Area" and "Laser -- Tattoo Removal -- Images of Former Girlfriend's Lopsided Melons." No attempting to convince mouth-breathing scheduling departments, over the phone, that it really would be more convenient if you got in to see Dr. Expensive today since THAT'S WHEN YOU SCHEDULED YOUR IUI TWO DAYS AGO.

2) Lucky Magazine displayed prominently in pleasant, roomy, empty-of-other-patients waiting area.

3) 3-minute wait for actual doctor. Did not even have time to skim Lucky.

4) Full explanations including actual costs provided for every procedure. Explanations did not contradict everything on internet.

5) Doctor seemed to know more about the subject than I did.

6) Doctor had heard of PCOS and was familiar with a variety of treatment plans.

I know, right? I wanted her to give me a pelvic, maybe prescribe some heavy sedatives for me and insert a large needle through my vagina into my ovary. I'm considering lasering my bikini line (which can only be considered a "bikini" area in comparison to the olden-days striped knee-length singlet style of bathing suit) just so I can wear a paper drape. It was that good.

******

Here's why I stopped going to my acupuncturist (after my second IUI). She:

1) Insisted I "think positive." That's what gets you pregnant
2) Suggested I visualize being pregnant while she was working on me
3) When I told her that whole approach really made me edgy and uncomfortable, she threw down some 'tude and continued to insist
4) Recommended reading: Christiane Northrup's Women's Bodies, Women's Wisdom
5) Refused to listen to carefully reasoned, only a little sputtery, arguments on above
6) Was extremely anti-choice
7) Didn't seem to know jack shit about latest research on acupuncture and infertility, saying only: "They do such amazing things these days!" in an attitude of wonderment
8) Described decline and fall of her marriage for a full thirty minutes whilst I lay impaled by a million tiny needles
9) Apparently learned not a goddamn thing from her own seven years of infertility

I Can't Even Figure Out What to Call This. Oh, Screw It. I'm Going To Watch TV.

Eh. So uninspired these days. I have little to report.

Things that happened today:

I spent an hour at work using the prison bitch name generator, which I will not even link to because it is so puerile and offensive, and because I don't believe for a second that "Heywood Djablomi" is a prison bitch name, unless the prison is populated exclusively by the twelve-year-old younger brothers of frat boys, to assign names to various department members*. Yes, it's awful. But there's something very satisfying about seeing the head of the department dubbed "The Receptacle."

*Mine was "Honey Hole."

I had a vodka tonic with tart cherry juice. On a school night.

My husband asked me why we weren't presently watching The Wicker Man.

Did you know they make liquorice Altoids?

Things that happened over the weekend:

My mother-in-law visited. It was a lovely visit, with the hilarious exception of a conversation regarding dressing boys in pink. I maintained, in stark contrast to the opposition, that it will not damage them forever. Tune in on Thanksgiving for the next exciting debate.

In addition, she purchased for me a pair of purple fishnet knee socks.

Blah blah blah, what else? Oh yeah, I made an appointment for a consultation to LASERBLAST THE SHIT out of my chin hair and twirly turn-of-the-century-villain mustache. Maybe it'll be a total scam, where they're all like, if you don't pay us forty thousand dollars to fry those pubes we can see cresting over your sexy purple knee socks, we're so not touching your bristly chin. And I'll be all like, HRRAAAAAA! SMASH! But on the inside.

On the outside I'll be all like, *sniffle*.

(Later, however, I will lash them to the railroad tracks to the accompaniment of plinky piano music.)

The Diarrhea Makes Me Pretty

I never should have called that previous post what I did, because now all I can think about is that episode of My So-Called Life where Rayanne totally wants to join Jordan Catalano's band so that Angela will have to hang out with her, and the band gets a gig, and they're going to sing "I Wanna Be Sedated," but Rayanne chickens out and they just KEEP PLAYING THE BEGINNING of the song OVER AND OVER AND OVER and finally Rayanne blunders off the stage in tears and Jordan Catalano has to gather all his hotness and STEP IN and sing that song in the MOST ANNOYING WHINING NASAL BOYZ-II-MEN VOICE that has ever been applied to a Ramones song, oh Jesus Christ please make him stop. But he never does. He just never does.

It sort of follows then, doesn't it, that I'm thinking about drugs. No, not the good kind, stupid. I mean the ones that mother gives you, the kind you have to take to live. The kind that are dispensed by licensed professionals into those fetching amber bottles, the kind you line up on top of your microwave in cascading order of height, labels turned out, so that casual guests and passers-by are made aware that you require nitrofurantoin-macro and metformin-XR and benzonatate in order to maintain, maaaaaiin taaain, dude.

Last week, or the week before, I was talking to Jilbur about this, because she'd been talking to someone else about it -- okay, you know what? This is the best I can do. See, I've been taking all these drugs -- about the point you reach when the teevee's recitation of disquieting side effects ("If you get an erection that lasts more than 4 hours, get medical help right away*.") deters you not a whit, when you say, night sweats? Seizure? Tingling extremities? Why, yes, please! Rectal incontinence? I'll take that! I will wear a mouthguard and an adult diaper all day, if I could just please God feel like a normal person for a few hours. Thank you.

So I take, each night, three olive-pit-sized pills (that's the metformin) that I know, without question, will want to exit my body at a time determined by a complex mathematical equation based on what I had for dinner, what I have for breakfast the next morning, and how deeply I become involved in my work. Somewhere between 8 a.m. (if I'm lucky) and 1 p.m. (if I'm not), those pills will send word, by way of intestinal cramping, stomach pains, chills, sweating, and the incontrovertible knowledge that IT IS TIME TO FIND A BATHROOM, NOW, that, well, it's time to find a bathroom. Now.

I don't want to alarm any newcomers to metformin, since this routine is due in large part to my own unwillingness to properly modify my lifestyle, by which I mean my unwillingness to not eat half a box of Back To Nature's organic Oreo-style cookies every night between nine and ten p.m. No, this is borne of my own addiction, the sugary monkey on my back. It is sort of like an enormous Peep, in the likeness of a white-handed gibbon. I reach back, periodically, to pull off a hunk just to keep the buzz going, and oh, it's.... No. I'm sorry, that's not true at all. But if you should ever happen to make a Peep like that, please let me know. Even if it's a Peep you make yourself out of hundreds of other Peeps and royal icing. I would still need to know about that.

Anyway. As I was saying, I get the runs EVERY DAY. It is the normal state of things, and I am pretty used to it, and it's not that troublesome, though I do frequent an out-of-the-way bathroom in a building other than the one in which I work, because seriously, you can HEAR exactly what I'm up to in there, and our bathroom door is ten feet away from the front desk, and it's just better this way, trust me. And they will never get my diarrhea pills away from me, do you hear? Because I need them. They make me pretty.

Without them I puff up from elevated insulin, I get cranky and bloated and my face changes and I break out everywhere and I get clinically depressed and irrational. I gain weight from things like lentil soup and plain oatmeal, and I gain it fast. And I get really, really tired and mood-swingy. If I wanted to feel like a normal person, I would have to cut every ounce of sugar from my diet, every refined carbohydrate; I would need to live on eggs and chicken and lettuce. I've done it, and while it's survivable, it has a tendency to siphon away one's joie de vivre, you know what I'm saying? For the small price, though, of a daily commode dash, I get to eat some cookies, if not bread or rice, I can have ice cream and beer and the occasional french fry and I'm just fine. The offending products, as well as everything else, will exit my workings in much the same state as they entered, and I get to stay pretty and nice. I like to be pretty and nice. Don't you like me better this way?

Oh, and blah blah something about decreasing risk of heart disease and diabetes and some other hypertension whatever. But who cares about that? I feel PRETTY!

And it's all thanks to the diarrhea.

I love you, metformin. Let's never fight, 'kay?

*Honestly, does anyone believe that symbol to be a flame? 'Cause, dude, I have seen external female genitalia, once, accidentally, and...yeah. I'm just saying, is all.

The Kind of Tired that Sleep Doesn't Take Away

Shortly after writing that last post, and whilst ensconced on the office commode, it occurred to me: this is SO VERY MUCH about the infertility. We are coming to the end of treatments. Like, for real. We get this cycle, then one or maybe two IVFs. We'll be done by March, probably, at the latest. It's almost over.

And I just realized how exhausting it's been, how this has been my life for a really long time, and part of the shock of all the treatment finally being done with will be that I am at loose ends. I won't know what to do with myself. Knit, I guess. Learn to play the guitar better. But what will I write about? What will I think about? I guess there will always be sex and poop, that being the nature of human existence.

When you're in it, it's hard to take stock of what it's doing to you. But when you get to the outer edge you can look back and see how much effort it's taken. My sister Gretchen put it this way: "When you get toward the end, you're not even sure how you did get through it and it sometimes looks worse than it felt at the time. I know, it wears on you so much in ways you don't even know.... You're the kind of tired that sleep doesn't take away."

I just feel very...not up to much of anything, challenge-wise. Inadequate to whatever comes next. Whatever's happening now. I've expended this huge amount of energy, and now here we are. I am of two minds: on one hand, no baby (yet), but on the other hand I emphatically do not consider it a waste. I'm so much better now than I was a few years ago. I don't want to say it was worth it, but I do think I've made the best of it. I've managed to wrest something useful out of the chronic ordeal. At such a cost.

If I believed in a grand design, which I sometimes do, I would reason that this has been one long transition (and here I am referring to the childbirth kind of transition), something that clears the final way in a fashion most unbearable but necessary, so that what comes next can pass through. The times when I don't believe in a scheme, I think the preceding is still true, except without the sensation of being preordained. The Extreme Jo Makeover of the past few years has made room for a whole host of ideas about how to build a family, how to find happiness. How to exist in ways deeper and more richly shaded than you thought were possible.

And so I forgive myself for indulging, this morning, in the verbal hair shirt that made me feel worse each time I looked at it. I don't know why I was so shocked -- shocked! -- to look down and discover that I am indeed still a completely normal imperfect human, when that wouldn't faze me in anyone else. I think it's glaringly obvious that I need a rest, in between the end of this treatment phase and the beginning of the adoption phase.

To everyone who commented, thank you; I needed the firm shake by the shoulders, the lightening of mood, whatever it was you gave. It embarrasses me, sometimes, what a black hole of need I can be, for reassurance, for validation. And to Blue: if we truly share all these features, perhaps you might want to get in on my latest venture, which is an amateur porn project for those who like a little body acne. I was thinking of calling it Clits and Zits.

You like?

(Then again, it would be totally hilarious to steal Gretchen's Proactiv and use it all up on my ass.)

Oh, Fuck It

I have a major case of the Fuck-Its.

This is not a bad thing. In fact it makes the whole injectable cycle thing a lot more tolerable. The process works like so:

Fuck-It Jo: Damn, that cold Hoegaarden looks good.
Responsible Jo: Women who drink even moderate amounts of alcohol have slightly reduced chances of success in an IVF cycle!
F: One beer is not "moderate consumption"! And I'm not doing IVF, motherfucker!
R: Well, considering you had that chocolate chip banana muffin this morning, don't you think you'd better abstain? Both those things are bad for your circulating insulin levels. Metformin only works if you work with it, you know.
F: Oh, fuck it. (Drinks beer.)

F: I just spent a total of 20 hours traveling over the past two days. I'm tired, dirty, and my house is a mess. Think I'll just pack a bowl of...
R: Now just what the heck do you think you're doing, missy?
F: Oh, lay off. Two hits before I even start injecting isn't going to hurt anything.
R: You don't know that! Studies show that tetrahydracannabinol might upset natural hormone production in rats, and that means...
F: First of all, those studies are deeply flawed, and furthermore, FUCK IT. (Strikes match.)

R: Did you know that even decaf coffee contains harmful levels of...
F: (slurp)

For some reason I'm much less worked up this cycle.

However, sometimes Responsible Jo wins out. Even Fuck-It Jo knows when to capitulate.

R: Hey, don't you think you'd better wash off that Preparation H applicator?
F: Naw, dude, I'll just wipe it off real good with this toilet paper.
R: But the tube says to wash it off after every use!
F: It's not like it's gonna touch anything but my own ass again. See, it has this little cap that fits over it, and it isn't anywhere near the toothbrushes.
R: Fecal matter is fecal matter. Would you take a day-old turd and stuff it back in?
F: Okay, fine, I'll just squeeze some of the goo out the little holes. See? Any possible contamination removed.
R: But it's been in your ass.
F: I wiped it off! I squeezed out extra goo and I wiped it off. It's probably fine. (Sniffs.)
R: But IT'S BEEN IN YOUR ASS.
F: Oh, Jesus. Whatever. Look, I'm washing it with soap, all right?

Lo, How The Mighty Have Fallen, Finger-First Into Their Own Vaginas

We were feeling mighty smug, we were, as we sat on the toilet last night.

"Been a long time since you went digging around, eh?" said my vagina.

"Sure has!" I replied. "See, when I'm on the pill, things get pretty boring with you. Not much going on but a bunch of thick impassable acidic mucus."

"Really," it said. "You think?"

"Of course! It's not like there are any hormone changes happening here -- it's all synthetic ethinyl estradiol, all the time! And you know, it's not like I live face-to-face with you at all times -- I do think about other things, you know! Really I'm a very well-rounded individual!"

"Look, I'm sure you're a very smart girl," my vagina reassured me. "But if you're so smart, why don't you just...prove it? It'll be like peer review in science!"

"Well, all right...see, here, it's just like I...hey, what's all this brown stuff?"

My vagina snickered a little, then said no more.

Yeah, it's meaningless. But dammit, it's interesting. Thank Google I couldn't find any of those "I have PCOS and I got pregnant on the Pill!" stories that abound in the message board world.

(Technically it is day 11 of my cycle, so this is midcycle spotting and very, very normal. But whatever, you know?)

*****

For all the lipservice I give to the idea that PCOS is a condition requiring lifetime management, most of the time those same lips are involved in the consumption of things like ice cream and cookies. Seriously, every day I eat something with sugar in it. And I know how awful it is for me; I can feel it.

Last night I had for dinner Sesame Tofu, which is fried tofu in glucose syrup, and to round out the meal I added a small box of those divine Jordan almonds from the gourmet store, the ones that are pure white and so heady with perfect vanilla, with the gigantic almonds in the middle, oh how they crunch in my teeth and fill my mouth with that delectable perfumed grit. But it's important to focus on nutrition, and I try to eat organic whenever possible, so to absolve the sin of that dinner I ate a good handful of Newman's Own chocolate chocolate-chip cookies. Organic, of course.

And so when I was no longer so wound up as to be actually paying bills and doing laundry and bustling around plucking dust bunnies from the floor, I lay there in bed, that rancid sugar taste in my mouth, worrying, and picking at a patch of dandruff on my head, as I am wont to do in times of trouble:

Man, adoption sure takes a long time. Even in the best possible scenario it'll be another year and a half before we have a baby. (Pick, pick.) And all our money's tied up in CDs and IRAs that don't mature until next fall! (Pick.) I guess we could take out a loan (pick) and pay it off when we got the (pick) money (pick pick pickpickpick). That's cool. But then we'll be living in a city on a postdoc salary (Pick! Pickpickpick!) and I won't be working but I don't want to work but we can't buy a house now so we'll have to be paying rent and that's really expensive (pick)! And what adoption agency is going to look at our finances and say, yes, YOU are okay! Jesus Christ, we're basically atheists! No one will want to give their baby to atheists! Let alone atheists who live in a one-bedroom apartment! (Pick pick pickpick dig.) Damn I'm hungry. Stupid sugar dinner. Maybe I should get up and get some food but then I'll never be able to get back to sleep and I'll have to brush my teeth again (pickdigdigdig dig digdig pick OWFUCK I'm bleeding!). I should just lie here (pick). (Ow! Dammit!)

*****

But jacked-up Jo had a point, really. Technically I'm not exactly an atheist, but Sean is (albeit a Jewish atheist), and I sure am not a Christian any more, on which subject more later. But so many people seem to put a premium on that, in the adoption world, and I'm so afraid we aren't going to measure up. The agency I like best, so far, even mentions in the religion section that "the family selected for a child shall be one in which the child will have the opportunity for spiritual and ethical development." We're plenty spiritual, in our science-loving nature-based way, and we've got ethics out the wazoo. And I think I can explain our belief in the wonder and beauty of the world, the capacity for goodness in humanity, and the connectedness of all living things. And with our families we celebrate Jewish, Christian, and nature holidays. But what are the chances of finding a birthmother who's okay with that?

In The Kid, Dan Savage talked about how he had a hard time imagining the birthmother who would be willing to give her baby to a gay couple. Whenever he tried to picture a hip-ish woman who found herself unhappily pregnant, he wrote, it was hard not to also picture her with her feet up in the stirrups at an abortion clinic. How will we ever find a woman who'll joyfully say, "I gave it to GODLESS FREAKS!" -- ?

Long road ahead, methinks.

So Very Cranky. And Yet So Very Grateful.

I am fortunate to have many people in my life who think well enough of me, wish me no ill, heck, even love me. I have no doubt that my never-ending ride on the Tilt-A-Whirl of Infertility and Endocrine Disruption is rough on them, particularly since, when they most want to offer comfort, and likely when I most need it, I grow spikes all over my body. No, no, don't try to hug me; those spines break off easily, and we'll both just get hurt. Now back off and leave me to my blogs, will yaz?

I know I'm not the most rewarding sympathy-sponge. It makes me squirmy and irritable, being on the receiving end of that sort of thing. The internet is excellent for that. It provides the perfect balance of distance and closeness, allows me to hide from my blog when I need to, smear my sorry story all over when I need to do that. But --

***WARNING! TMI ALERT!***

(That's Too Much Insight, mofos.)

--I'm pretty certain the reason I turn into such a styrachosaurus is that I hate, oh how I loathe, needing that sympathy. I am not happy with that particular area of my life, wouldn't have chosen for it to go that way, and detest being reminded of it. When I'm in a mood, this particular bristly mood that I am in right now, I am so deeply ashamed of my failure to reproduce in a neat and orderly fashion that I will distract you, dear friends, with exacting descriptions of what Gonal-F does, indirectly, to any incipient hemorrhoids one might be keeping in one's, um, pocket. My shame and disappointment and sadness are so overwhelming sometimes that I have to be very careful about when to let them out. Must keep it all inside, lest I become unable to hold a job. It's a delicate balance, and most of the time, I'm fine -- when I am, hug me all you want. Sniff my hair. Pinch my juicy heiner. It's cool.

But, yeah. When I'm down, I hide. I am an introvert masquerading as an extrovert, and every social interaction (excluding those with my sisters and/or husband) takes a lot out of me, and I have to retreat to my cave, which is filled with catalogs and Ethernet.

So that's one thing, with the bristling. Another thing is the fury.

Have we talked about the fury?

I have a temper. It stays way far down inside most of the time, not in an unhealthy bottled-rage way (you think I have the energy to bottle my rage these days? It is to laugh!), but just because it's not that easily roused. Most people, even my closest, dearest friends, will never, ever see it.

But.

When I'm all spiky and fragile, I get all Jersey on discourteous drivers with much fist-shaking, neglect to modulate my voice when speculating about the nefarious misdeeds of those who pick more than their fair share of strawberries at the farm. ("Family share! We're picking for two families!" said the overhear-er, obviously pissed off. Whatever, lady. I didn't see "as many as you can clutch in your expensively manicured hands" on the list.)

And beware to those who hope. Beware! Take care! Even my dear mother, who mentioned to my sister that she believes I can get pregnant someday, it just might take me a little longer. In her mind, I know, this is a good thing -- I can get what I want, which is pregnant, right? She is hopeful! I should be hopeful!

That feels like a crushing judgment, all the more humiliating because I know it isn't intended as such.

But --

***WARNING! TMI!***

--when did the sympathy and hope and love of people I care about turn toxic to me? A statement like that, it makes me want to scream and pull out my hair. Or fire off a cranky email to my sister.

The hope of others -- specifically, the hope that I will get pregnant and produce a child -- feels like one more expectation I can't fulfill, one more set of cheerleaders that I will disappoint as sorely as I've disappointed myself. The weight of that hope is too much to bear. I can't give them what they need to persist in their belief in an ordered universe. I don't put out any more, sorry.

If I can only get them hoping a nonspecified kind of hope that stakes itself only to my eventual happiness. That I can do. Hell, I'm happy now. I really am, most of the time.

I'm grateful for every minute I get to live. I am filled with joy every minute I spend with my incredible husband, even when we're cranky with each other. I have an amazing family and wonderful friends. I have overcome clinical depression, and while I'm sad sometimes (and rightly so), I'm definitely not depressed. I'm so very much alive, and so astonished with my own ability to roll with the punches, to break and heal. I know, I know we'll have children somehow, and with every passing minute the "how" means less. I come to the idea of parenting with profound gratitude and hard-won insight and love. I think we're ready for whatever child comes our way.

What else could anyone hope for?

Forbidden Fruit

For the record, got another perfectly snow-white negative Answer this morning. Not so much as an evaporation line. I checked it under several different light sources, with and without my glasses, and it's still negative. I'm feeling the usual pelvic stirrings that herald the mighty gush, so I made sure to wear a white thong to hasten things along.

Since last night have consumed the following controlled substances:

-1 medium-size cardamom-ginger ice cream
-1/2 beer
-1/2 glass white wine
-1 cup diner coffee
-1.7 buttermilk pancakes with syrup

And it feels so good.

My mood has improved tremendously, no doubt from the infusion of naughty-naughties, and also because the natural progression after devastating (or in my case, just very disappointing) news is: misery => happy thoughts of adoption. Really. We want to do two more IUIs, but will have to reassess priorities after that.

But the future is ever out of reach, and so I want to narrow my focus to the present for a bit. Last night I got the following email from my sister G (edited for time and formatted to fit your computer screen):

okay, so there's something i've seen about you that gives ME hope, since i can have it more openly than you, and forgive me for any offensive stuff since i'm treading on thin ice and other stoopid sayings about not shutting up when you should.

your body is functioning much better now. there was a time when you were overweight, moody, depressed, and hormonally fucked. even your features seemd to change...it was, to me, odd and representative of your body freaking out. over the last few years, you've lost every bit of weight that was unnatural to your body type, your mood has equalized (as much as a leery polyp mood can), your features have gone back to their normal shape (and i can't explain this one: you just seemed to look very different before). and your body shape has changed. something about you before looked uncomfortable to you, something about you looked off, like your unhappiness changed your features. you looked like your hormones had kind of changed you. and they had. but you are on the right track now, every bit of you that i know has improved. you are amazingly strong, and i don't toss that phrase around lightly. you look incredibly good, like you've not worn a day of this life on your body. you have resumed a normal cycle, and your general level of health is so good, it's fucking great. and the thing i keep thinking but won't say because it's zen crap to you is that hopelessness is the same devastating emotion as too much hope. you can't deny one is there if you feel the other. laa dee-freakin-da, i know. but i hope that in all this, if you catch yourself blaming your body or despising it or wondering why this is happening or just get pissed and impatient, you do not neglect the fact that your body has repaired itself so thoroughly from where it was before. even two years ago, especially three. give it time to rest comfortably where it is before you try to coax it elsewhere again. i don't know where the hell i'm going with this. i can just see that you are on a road to complete balance and well-being (not to get all rodney yee on yer ass).

i doubt this was any help to you, but it's what i'm thinking of you.
love
g

Everybody should have a sister like that, throwing down the crazy wisdom when it's needed most. And I'm not just saying that because she says I look good.

But she's right; I look very different from the way I looked three years ago. In photos I'm barely recognizable as the same person, and it's not just that I weighed forty pounds more -- the actual shape of my nose and eyes were different. Now I look like pictures of myself in high school, before the PCOS kicked in. I believe that the high testosterone and the high circulating insulin of PCOS give a subtle but distinctive appearance to a face, and now I can recognize it in others as well.

I've come far, and I've done a lot of work over the past four years. I need to remember that, and be as gentle and forgiving of myself as I would be to someone else. I don't know what's going to happen with any future IUI's, but I think I need to be very mindful in how we proceed, careful not to obliterate myself in the process. It doesn't seem farfetched, the idea of shattering my mental health along the way. Physically, I'm even more concerned that these potent hormones I'm shooting up are setting back my healing, leaving me a physiological Superfund site, undoing all that progress I've made. I would hate to have finally reached that delicate balance only to set things wildly a-swing, once again. I don't know; I need to think on that some more.

Hopelessness is the same thing as excessive hope. Both presume to know the future; each denies -- yet proves -- the existence of the other. Either way it's a tremendous energy suck.

I'm feeling pretty tired right now, emptied out, and not just because the Chock Full o' Nuts has worn off. These injectables cycles, they take it out of you; I need that month of respite before I can attempt another one. But I'm content. I'm happy, no longer preoccupied. I can let go, move on, just a little ways until it's time for the next round.

When I was maybe ten I took a corner too fast on my mother's outsize ten-speed, spun out in the gravel, dropped the bike on top of me and skidded along on my knee. I was afraid to get up, terrified of what gore I might see. The skin on my knee felt numb from the scrape, but I heaved the bike away, turned over, looked: the wound was shallow, the skin barely grazed. It wasn't even bleeding. I was fine -- a little unsteady, maybe, but unhurt. I was okay.

And I'm okay now.

Can You Tell Me Where This Road Ends?

There has been much discussion, these days, of the brutal truth of motherhood and its effects, visited equally upon the daisy-eyed enthusiast and the worldly realist. No one is immune to the deconstruction. Which is reassuring, in a way; it’s just what happens, part of the process, certainly not evidence of insufficient commitment or constitution.

Jilbur and I were talking about this, at lunch today. I’d read her post, but hadn’t commented, because, as I told her, “What could I possibly have to add to that?” She looked at me quizzically, said something along the lines of, “Um, everything? I think you’ve been through a similar process.”

Oh yeah, that infertility thing.

From my current position of relative comfort, it’s so easy to forget everything infertility has cost me. I spent probably a total of twelve months clinically depressed, here and there, mostly in the early months of our marriage. The hormonal abnormalities of PCOS probably had a lot to do with it. Whatever the specific root, I lost a certain amount of newlywed bliss – and so did my husband, who had to cope with a scarily depressed and irrational wife, far away from our support system. We weathered that well, though, for which I am endlessly thankful. Eventually it passed. I have to work, now, to remember it, how I spent all day walking around the little woods behind our apartment, thinking, this time next year, this time two years from now. Next time the leaves turn, I’ll be pregnant.

Then I did get pregnant, at Christmastime, back in 2001. We’d been trying for a year and a half by then. It seemed like a miracle, but I also felt it was owed me: we’d put in our time. Now we could move on. But it didn’t feel right, even from the beginning, and by the first week of January I was battling an incompetent doctor to get treatment for the ectopic pregnancy I knew I had. The three weeks I spent terrified and in pain left me hollowed out, pathetically grateful to that same doctor for the methotrexate that saved my tube.

I don’t have much memory of the rest of that winter, the spring after – I just remember discovering myself pregnant, again, in June. This time it felt better, and I pushed myself like a pioneer woman, driving out to our community-supported farm to pick tomatoes in hundred-degree air thick with bees. I was so sick all the time, and I can honestly say I relished every minute of it. Even when just breathing that summer air felt like sucking a tailpipe, even when I couldn’t eat anything that required cooking, I was thankful for it, the reassurance that I was still pregnant.

Then one day, I woke up hungry. I drove to McDonald’s and got three bacon, egg & cheese biscuits, devouring them in the car on the way home. I felt pretty good, for the first time in weeks. Three days later the ultrasound showed no heartbeat. I kept working up until the miscarriage started, three long weeks of forced cheerfulness and some really fucking awful comments. “Could have been worse,” my then-supervisor said. “Isn’t that kind of spooky, walking around with a dead baby inside you?” asked a coworker. Neither of them meant any harm, but that absolves them of nothing. I didn’t have the energy to hate them at the time. I do now, but I only hate them in flashes. Most of the time I’m just tired of them and everyone like them, bored with their irrelevance. But no one will ever get away with saying anything like that to me again.

I lost that second baby in August of 2002, and I haven’t been pregnant since. I’m not going to say I’m glad for that stretch of time, but it’s given me the space to breathe deeply, quiet down, work on healing the damage from that one-two punch. It would be too easy to say I’m a different person; I’m more the same than ever. I am more wholly myself than I have been in ten years, stripped down to the core, stronger and more fragile than I ever imagined.

Is that payoff enough? That’s a question barely worth asking, since I don’t get to choose. It may be all I get from my fertility, so I will try to let go of the anger, hang on to the gratitude I feel for getting to crack the seedcoat of my own life.

Is this disintegration and coalescing anything like what happens when a woman first becomes a mother? I can’t say. I have to believe I’ll find out somehow. In the meantime, I’d love to hear from women who have become mothers after infertility, be it through adoption or birth. From women dealing with secondary infertility. From mothers who love their barren friends, who sit there right beside us feeling as helpless as we do. I want to know: what happens next? Is it the same no matter what road you walked to get there? Is it different for everyone?

What do you think?

The Fear

We are perhaps a week away from the next injectables/IUI cycle (number 2, but who's counting?). I called the doctor's office to check on ordering the next round of ovary plutonium, had my final beer, packed away the stash. Stopped in to CVS for a magazine, and found this.

No, no, not the thing about the periodic table. The one to the right. This one.

Yeah. So I flipped through and discerned the following scientific revelation: since it takes upwards of three months for an egg to fully develop, well, you'd better go back in time and un-expose yourself to any toxins or abnormal hormonal environments.

Oh. Well, good then. Thank you, Discover! Because a freakout about something I have zero control over is exactly what I need right now. You know, you're really starting to stress me out.

I, as you may have guessed, have issues with toxins. We don't have unnecessary vinyl in the house. Our bed is made of natural latex; our futon is sustainable cotton. Most of our food is organic, and our main cleaning products are vinegar, baking soda, and Bon Ami. We don't buy stuff with phthalates, don't microwave plastic, don't drink unfiltered water. (I know that we're still being exposed to plenty of nasty shit, though. The lake that is a quarter-mile from our apartment has astonishingly high levels of mercury.)

None of that matters, because I feel like I'm making a coat out of puppies whenever I have a cup of coffee. What a callous bitch, to completely disregard the health of the embryo she may or may not create. The ice cream I had earlier tasted ever so slightly like not getting pregnant because of the abnormal hormonal environment I created by eating sugar. The occasional toke (never during a cycle)? May as well have some crank with that. How does anyone get pregnant?

And yet: people do. All the time. People who use regular makeup and have vinyl shower curtains and Tilex, who eat farmed salmon and non-organic cheese. Hell, people who take lots and lots of hard drugs get pregnant. Not that this in any way lessens the toxicity and environmental inexcusability of the poisons, no. But in light of that, I can't believe that the (watery) beer I had tonight will make or break this next cycle, or that my practice of drowning my cycle-cancellation sorrows in a Jacuzzi-size vat of Kozy Shack rice pudding has irreparably damaged every last egg. Right?

Right?