I hate waiting. I hate it, but I’m getting better at it.

We’re coming up on 3 years of TTC (mom – that stands for “trying to conceive”). My TTC anniversary is easy to remember; it’s the same as my wedding day. We started actively trying to start our family that very night and have been ever since. I’m grateful for the successes we’ve had, but the subsequent failures pushed us further into the year. Every day that I do nothing fertility-related feels like an eternity. I’m so flippin’ sick of waiting.

Right now I’m waiting for AF to show. I finally feel “normal” again – my stomach shrank back to normal size, mysterious cramps stopped, incessant m/c bleeding slowed to nothing. Now I feel like I’m in limbo. Just like before the egg retrieval, rather than dreading AF’s arrival, I’m eagerly awaiting it. If Good Ole Auntie Flo really does come one month after the D&C, that would mean she’d arrive right on Mother’s Day. You’d think that’d be upsetting, an infertile getting her period on such a day, but for me it would be a huge relief. For once, getting my period means that everything in my body is on track. It’s certainly a strange feeling.

For some reason, Mother’s Day does not decimate my emotional stability. I’ve been able to handle it very well these past two years, so I don’t anticipate there being a huge problem. Then again… talk to me when I’m cramping and bleeding while happy moms in church cuddle their newborns. Then I might be singing a different tune. But as of this moment, I’m not dreading it. I think it’s because I’ve always associated it with my mom and not myself, so I still think of it that way. But this is my first MD post-loss, so who knows… maybe a mental breakdown is just lying in wait for me. I guess we shall see on Sunday.

It’s only been just over a month, but I feel like I haven’t been to the RE in ages. For some inexplicable reason, I imagine myself calling them up only to find the number disconnected, or arriving at a completely revamped office and being treated like I’d never been there at all. Like I didn’t experience my greatest joys and my lowest lows within the confines of those office walls.

I know I’m being quite dramatic. I think the difference between being a paying customer vs. a clinical trial patient is that it’s always seemed too good to be true. I keep waiting for someone to realize that they’ve accidently given me $20,000 worth of medical procedures for free and send me a bill or lock the doors or something. I remember feeling relieved after we found out the procedure worked, thinking there was nothing they could do to take it back if they changed their minds. Now once again, I’m at their mercy. There’s small comfort in knowing that at least we have the embryos created and frozen, but if I had a nickel for every time I felt a shiver of panic imagining a fire/mix-up/catastrophe in the lab and losing those little snow babies… well, I’d have a whole bunch of nickels.

My impatience isn’t entirely unjustified. The deal with this clinical trial is that they’ll try to get you pregnant for six months or until they run out of embryos, whichever comes first. I don’t know when they start counting from (again, questions that I only think to ask in retrospect), but I started my IVF protocol on December 31st. If we start counting from then… June is it. The end. Finito. How strict are they on the six month thing? Again, not a clue. The doctor certainly didn’t mention it at that fateful ultrasound, and made it sound like we could definitely try again. But what if it takes two months to get my period? What if they try again and I don’t get pregnant? What if this happens all over again and we lose the pregnancy? I could sit here and “What if?” all day long.

I’m definitely making a bigger deal out of all this than they do at the RE. I’m sure as far as cases go, I’m one of the less tragic/complicated, I’m sure. I also doubt someone is sitting there with a calendar, just waiting for me to hit the six month mark so they can boot me out of the trial. But I still have to worry (because it’s ingrained, that’s why). I’ve intentionally avoided calling or emailing anyone from the clinic – first, because what the hell would I say (“Hey it’s me, still no period, just making sure you still have your phone connected, K thanks bye!”) and second, because I don’t want to hear any bad news. My imagination has been working hard enough to come up with worst-case scenarios, I don’t need any reality to add to them.

On a totally unrelated note, did anyone else go see Gatsby yet? I agree with most of the reviews, and I believe this one sums up my feelings most accurately, but may I just say: Leonardo DiCaprio is so talented. Without him I may have despised the movie, but with him I give it a solid B+ for effort. It makes me want to dust off my copy of Romeo + Juliet, bust out some old Teen Beat posters of Leo and relive a little bit of teenage angst.