burnt toast life

dead ends and best friends

When I was a little girl, my mom used to go for acupuncture at a lovely place that’s still in business, so I knew that was the first place I wanted to check into. He’s a chiropractor, but no longer offers acupuncture. DEAD END.

The nice chiropractor dude suggested a place nearby. There aren’t many acupuncturists in my area, which is annoying. I called the place he suggested and they want $150 for the initial session and $85 for each session thereafter. I was willing to spend about half that. Sure, I spend oodles of money on drugs and commutes to Manhattan for treatment, but those are proven things that work. Someone sticking little needles into me just makes me skeptical, and for that kind of cost, is it worth it? I’m calling this a DEAD END.

The Reproductive Immunologist who offered free Skype consults? He doesn’t do that anymore. You can Skype him for an hour… for $250. Better than $900, but I was really digging the “free” thing. You guessed it – DEAD END.

I’ve been getting really frustrated with the progress I was supposed to be making in August, because now it’s the 9th, and I feel like I’m going nowhere. My diet is… better, not what it should be. I’ve been in control of breakfast and lunch, but then a coworker brought in these amazing looking mini pies, and I ate one. There’s a 9 day long music festival going on in my area that features lots of food and booze. I can’t skip that! And I haven’t. I’ve gone for dinner more than once, and trust me, my meals have been far from Paleo (can we argue that vodka is Paleo since it comes from potatoes?). I still haven’t been able to give up my beloved coffee yet, either. Blah.

every morning is a cuddle morning

every morning is a cuddle morning

Exercise? I’m going to share my biggest problem with you, and maybe you’ll think it’s silly, but here it is: it’s my dog. Every morning Eric gets up at 5:30 and takes the dogs out. And every morning they come back in, eat, and then my little Bird dog comes back to bed to snuggle with me. He curls up into a tight ball and smushes his little rump right up against me. So there I am, in a sea of down comforter and memory foam pillows, looking out into the just breaking light of dawn and feeling this warm ball of love next to me. I think, “Should I go run right now? Should I do yoga?” and it seems impossible. It’s like there’s a magnetic pull in my bed, and I’m unable to resist it. Are these excuses justified? No. Do I feel a wave of guilt sweep over me around 11 a.m. every morning and think, “You should have gone running, you lazy bitch?” Yes. But still, I stay in bed. I effing love my bed.

I’ll get there. My new job starts on Monday and the hours are different, so my morning routine is going to change even if I don’t want it to. I’ll run. I’ll yoga. I’ll eat better, especially when Muskifest ends. There’s light at the end of this tunnel, even if it’s taking longer than I want it to.

Now, enough dead ends and on to best friends.

You know how sometimes you have an absolutely perfect and amazing night when you don’t even expect to? Wednesday was like that for me. I had planned on going to the aforementioned music festival of food ‘n’ booze (Musikfest!) with two of my friends. You can walk around the city streets and drink beer or cocktails from giant plastic mugs, listen to live music for free, and eat all the delicious food you can possibly imagine. It’s the event of the summer for my area, and something we all look forward to all year long. Anyway. I was going to skip out Wednesday because the sky was gray and threatening rain, I was tired, it was muggy, my hair frizzed up and did I mention I was tired? I was just feeling blah. I was two seconds away from saying, screw it, you guys go on without me when I had a change of heart. I hadn’t seen my one friend in months and I wanted to catch up. I dragged my unenthusiastic butt out the door and figured I would just make the best of it.

Please don’t take this the wrong way if you have kids and talk about your kids. Please don’t, because I love them and I love hearing about them. But I figured out that besides just seeing my friends, one of the best things about the night was that NO ONE mentioned babies ONCE. That never happens. Ever. We drank, we ate, we talked. We talked about girl things; we talked about sex and relationships and vacations and things I can’t even remember. We laughed and were silly. It was just so much fun.

The most remarkable thing about this is that the friend who I hadn’t seen in months is a mom. She has two adorable tow-headed boys. But she made it through an entire evening without mentioning them one time. I even asked about her recent vacation to Florida, a perfect opportunity for her to blab on and on about how cute they were doing this or doing that, but she managed to talk about Florida without talking about kids. Like, wait, there’s more to life than just obsessing over kids? WOW.

It made me realized how often I keep my guard up. I’m always on edge, ready to mentally steel myself against pregnant bellies and pregnancy announcements and baby photos and and toddler stories of “Omigosh she usually naps for 45 minutes but yesterday she slept for a whole hour and isn’t that just the cah-raziest thing you ever did hear?” I didn’t even realize how tense it made me until I felt my guard slowly being let down on Wednesday night. I truly relaxed for the first time in what feels like ages. It felt so damn good to just talk about stuff that didn’t stress me out. Stuff that was interesting. Stuff that matters to me, as a woman without kids, right now.

I sent my friend a text later and thanked her for making it through an entire evening without talking about her kids. She didn’t do it on purpose for me; she just did it because she had other things to discuss. She said when she has a girls night, she likes to just leave all that at home. Doesn’t that make sense? I wish this happened more often.

Once again I want to say thank you, best friends. Thank you for a night I absolutely needed. Let’s do it again soon.

It’s February

I keep referencing February and psychics, so I figured I would give a little background on that for anyone who doesn’t know the whole story.

Back when we were diagnosed as infertile and when I was riding the emotional roller coaster of not getting pregnant every month, certain things were tough. Baby showers were tough. Kid’s birthday parties were tough. Any event that may or may not feature children was tough. That’s practically everything, by the way. Kids are everywhere and any little thing was likely to set off a sadness bomb inside of me.

As you may imagine, Mother’s Day was a particularly hard day. On that Sunday in 2011, I awoke in a foul mood. I distinctly remember lying in bed at my apartment, delaying the start of my day and wallowing in self pity. I checked my phone, as I always do first thing in the morning, and discovered the following message from my dear friend:

I would like to offer you this small piece of hope on this special day… I went back to the psychic yesterday. The one who did a group reading for me a couple of months ago and left me with goosebumps after reciting my entire life story. This time we were alone and I asked her about you and Eric. I told her I had friends who are having trouble conceiving. She asked me for your first name only and paused for a while. She said she definitely sees you getting pregnant and the pregnancy surrounds something with a 2. She thinks the 2 is for February. She said to give you 2 pieces of advice. One, be patient because IT WILL HAPPEN, and 2 continue using those fertility sticks. The second they show you’re ovulating you need to find Eric and go to town!
I know it doesn’t take a psychic to know fertility sticks help people conceive, but the specifics of info this women gives about everything else tells me she certainly knows her stuff.
Also, she said sees a beautiful baby girl. (I loved that part because she said it so full of emotion.)
I hope you have a Happy Mothers day, because you are a mommy, even if your baby hasn’t arrived yet.

Ok, let me premise with this: I didn’t know if I believed in psychics. It certainly never occured to me that I should go to one for this issue. And given the choice, I’m not sure I would want to know. What if the psychic said I would never have kids? How could I live with that every day, true or untrue? So this scenario was perfect. I had not asked my friend to ask for me, so I wasn’t worried about getting an answer. Plus, the answer was so full of hope on a day that I desperately needed it.

Remember, this was May. I manipulated that psychic prediction every way I possibly could all year long to fit my needs at the time and justify a pregnancy. In late May and June, I said the baby would be due in February. In the summer, I said the baby could be premature. In the winter, I said February would be the month we found out the gender. So no, I did not sit by patiently waiting for February to arrive.

February 2012 was a fantastically stressful month. It was, not coincidentally, the time of my first panic attack. I was driving home from work and had to pull over because I got myself so worked up that I could not breathe. To say that I had become obsessed with the prediction would be an understatement. I spoke to people about it as though it was a fact, not a prediction. The friend who sent the message was probably ready to disown me. I begged her for more details, nuances, anything she may have left out. She’s probably happy to live 300 miles away or I would have been at her house every night dissecting something that may have been literal, symbolic, or who knows, may have just been a big hoax.

February came and went. We did not get pregnant. It was almost a relief to have it over with, even if relief was quickly replaced with despair. I went through the rest of 2012 with a lack of enthusiasm compared to the year before. I don’t know if I believed it anymore.

As soon as we got our appointment with New Hope last year, I began thinking about February again. I started getting really excited. Without trying, all of the scheduling lined up for February of this year. Our first tentative embryo transfer (ET) was supposed to be Feb 1, but with my high estrogen was delayed to Feb 24-27. It’s still February. It’s still all about February.

I’m definitely less worked up and anxious than I was last year at this time. This is our first real, honest-to-goodness try, and that’s incredible. But tell someone you’re undergoing IVF and they’ll tell you about their friend’s neighbors cousin who tried 5 times or 6 times or 12 times and was unsuccessful. It rarely works on the first round; I know that. But I do have my determination, my hope, and a very promising psychic prediction on my side. Take THAT, universe!