guiliana, bill, and me

I have a few embarrassing TV loves. I kind of like Tori and Dean: Inn Love in Hollywood With Babies And Motorcycles, or whatever the name of that show is. I used to like Bridezillas, but now the women are so crazy-ass rude that it makes me want to take a shower afterward, so I stopped that one. I'm slightly addicted to Say Yes to the Dress.

And then I got sucked into Guiliana and Bill, about that super skinny girl from E! and her cute reality-TV husband. Really: he is about the only normal person I have ever seen on TV. And also, cute.

Anyway. Tonight, they're airing an episode about how they're going to a fertility doctor. This could be good. Let's watch together, shall we?

5:05: oops; forgot show was on. Turn on. My bad.

5:06: They go to the fertility doctor, who first off tells them that they are not considered infertile until they've been trying for a year. I missed the first 5 minutes, wherein they might have discussed how long they've been trying, but obviously it's less than 12 months. I hate them right now. Wimps.

5:07: doctor gives them this creepy speech about how making babies is like "making a recipe," so they need sperm, and eggs, and then "a quiche dish," which is apparently supposed to be her uterus. I would have kicked this guy in the head.

5:09: But they like the doctor, so whatever. Doctor performs ultrasound on Guiliana. Lord, but that girl needs a sandwich. All looks good.

5:10: Doctor leaves room. Bill whispers that doctor pulled him aside in the hallway to tell him that Guiliana needs to gain 5 pounds. (Note earlier comment about sandwich: I am now able to diagnose fertility problems just from looking at a person. Am brilliant scientist!) Guiliana immediately looks depressed. I would be depressed that my doctor had neither the respect nor the cojones to tell me this himself, but Guiliana is only thinking about how her job requires her to wear Super Skinny Sample clothing, and she is crushed by this news. I can feel every woman in America hating her right now. Including me. Also am wondering how she plans to deal with pregnancy and post-baby body if gaining 5 pounds puts her into a tailspin.

5:11: Doctor ready to give Bill's sperm analysis results. But network puts "long, fake pause with dramatic music" moment here and goes to commercial. Bastards.

5:16: back from commercial. Bill has 47 million. Apparently they are having too much sex. Bill thinks she has "old eggs." (They are kind of cute together, actually.) Doctor prescribes "sex every other day." I think of entire drawer of fertility drugs in my bathroom. Sigh.

5:18: Guiliana goes shopping with Generic Gay Assistant for ovulation predictor tests. (That guy has had a really bad tan job.) Guiliana and Matthew laugh about ugly maternity underwear. Lesson One: do not buy underwear at drug store. I feel like I know that already.

5:20: Guiliana and Matthew try out ovulation predictor tests. Fertility problems are so funny! Ha, ha, ha! Too cute! Extreme emotional, physical, financial and spiritual pain of millions of Americans is THE FUNNIEST TOPIC EVER and I am SO CUTE WHEN I MAKE FUN OF IT WITH MY ASSISTANT! Ha, ha, ha! Look at my hideous maternity underwear!

5:21: Bill ignores them and goes to watch TV. I like Bill.

5:22: Guiliana goes to make ovulation calendar. Agree with Bill that presence of Assistant is creepy and weird. Bill and Guiliana find out that they will be in separate cities on Magic Baby Day. Think of all Magic Baby Days in past four years. Sigh.

5:23: Bill has really well-groomed eyebrows. I'm just saying.

5:23: Bill goes to some university for motivational speaking. Insert motivational cliches here. Then goes to see Rachael Ray. He's giving coupon tips. Bill does not look like much of a coupon-clipper, but you never know. Think that Bill is unaware that most of the coupons in newspaper are for overpriced and unnecessary items.

5:24: Guiliana tries to spice up their sex life. Meanwhile, Bill is signing books, all the while thinking about Magic Baby Night for which he MUST RETURN HOME BECAUSE THIS IS THE NIGHT TO MAKE BABY. Guiliana home, waiting for Magic Baby Night to commence. Commercial.

5:25: Included in commercial break: ad for pregnancy test. Consider claim of ad that huge numbers of people can't read pregnancy tests correctly. Weep for future of nation.

5:26: Back to action. Bill sells lots of books while Guiliana, who is nearly too stupid to open a bottle of wine (or perhaps too weak: eat sandwich, woman) sets up candles and roses, etc. Bill is running late. Guiliana is bored. Eats mud pie. Now I like her a little more. Guiliana keeps leaving messages for him, which is clearly stupid as he is on a plane somewhere. But she eats more. Good job, girl. Keep eating.

5:28: Bill arrives home. Magic baby night commences. They decide to - get this - relax. Not worry so much about it. Just have fun sex. Prepare self for inevitable Guiliana Pregnancy Announcement in Next Freaking Episode, followed by cutesy speech about how all they needed to do was relax. Imagine following episodes of Generic Gay Assistant laughing about breast pumps. Maybe will not watch show anymore.

5:29: preview of next episode shows family needling couple about needing to have a baby, pronto. Suddenly feel overwhelming and illogical gush of love for poor Bill and Guiliana. They are working on it! Leave them alone!

5:30: realize that next show on schedule is all about celebrity kids. IDIOTS.

Verdict: Could have been worse. Appreciate that some celebrity couple is willing to talk about fertility problems. But strongly suspect that this particular couple makes all infertile couples look like whiny, self-centered, impatient yuppies who panic when they don't get pregnant after 3 months. Very strongly suspect that E! people are sending subliminal message that "infertility" is solved by "relaxing."

Still better than Private Practice, however.

the best week

I think, of all the weeks it takes to complete a treatment cycle, this is the best one: The Week Before.

I love this week. Because, this week, it's all possible. Fantastic response to drugs? Could happen. Lots of healthy eggs retrieved? Completely possible. Lack of Crazy Bitch Side Effects? Feasible. Awesome quality embryos to transfer? Can absolutely happen. Pregnancy? That too.

It's like the week before Christmas, when you're still anticipating all the fun things, and it could all be just as great as you've always dreamed - the family could all get along, the gifts could all be wonderful, that person could scream with joy at the present you chose for them, the food could be delicious, the weather could be perfect - it's all out there, in the future, in your head, and it could all come true. It could happen.

This is the best week. It's perhaps the cruelest as well, when you look back.

But that's another week. This is the good one. The happy one. The anticipatory one. It's one of the few weeks when I hate pregnant women just a little less, because I feel like I could be one of them in the not-too-distant future. Don't get me wrong: I'm not throwing myself into ecstasies of pregnancy-dreams quite yet. I haven't been infertile for four years for nothing, you know.

But not even those four years can quite ruin this week. I love this week.

counting down

One week until injections start.

Yesterday, the Fe.dex guy arrived, smack on time, with my Big Box O' Drugs - always an exciting day. I meant to take the requisite picture of all the stuff and post it, but I was in a hurry to get to work and had to refrigerate a bunch of it, so no time for the photo. You can imagine it, though. I love the Big Box O' Drugs. So exciting.

We also sent the Freakishly Large Cashier's Check off to the Shared Risk people yesterday - a little scary, sending that kind of money off into the wild blue yonder, but it arrived safely and all is well. HUGE load off my mind.

It turned out to be a bit more complicated than I thought - long story short, it took visits to three separate banks, a half-hour drive up to my husband's workplace to get his signature, a panicked phone call to the Shared Risk people while standing at the teller's window because I had forgotten the one piece of paper with the "make check out to" clarification on it (of course, of course, when I brought every other freaking piece of paper in my office WHY WHY WHY did I forget the one I really needed?), and a slightly panicky drive to the Fe.dex office for overnight shipment, arriving there at 3:59pm when the overnight truck was leaving in exactly one minute...

...but the amazing piece of the day, stressful as it was, came from the fact that every single person who helped me yesterday - the delivery guy in the morning; the guy at my bank who couldn't process the check the way I wanted but helped me figure out how to do it; the woman at the bank across the street who patiently explained what I needed to do; the woman at the next bank who waived the cashier's check fee and made an exception for us, non-customers at said bank, to get this check done; the shipment guy who held the overnight truck for me while I go the package ready - every single person was enormously courteous, helpful, patient, competent, and kind. Every. Single. Person.

That is a small miracle to me. (With emphasis on the miracle, not the small.) And now, we're ready. Acupuncture appointment in an hour. Fun family visit this weekend.

And, next Friday, the Festival of Belly Poking begins. At last.

victory garden

My husband, who is a teacher, is the kind of person who needs a project. When he doesn't have one, I'm always a little afraid that I'll come home and find a wall torn down or a toilet removed, with a smiling, sweaty, dirty husband next to it proclaiming, "but I needed a project!" (This has almost happened, several times. It has happened, actually, just at a lower level, though one time I did come home and the front porch had been ripped off. We were going to do that, but it got started a few days earlier than I had planned.)

Anyway. Being a teacher and therefore home for Winter break, and stuck inside the house while it rained a bunch, he was started to get pretty antsy by this weekend. I felt the tool belt coming on. Sometimes the man needs a trip to Home De.pot like an addict needs a hit - he gets this certain look in his eye which makes me want to start leaving post-it notes on all the walls: "do not remove." So we found him a project.

Remember, it's January. It's cold. And wet. And DARK. The sun sets at 3:30pm around here. But he decided that he wanted to start the garden. (I called my mom to ask for her advice on this project, which we'll get to in a second, and there was a long pause before she asked tentatively, "He does know that it's January, right?")

This is a man with a plan. He's obsessed with growing tomatoes, for one thing. We moved here from a land of much summer sunshine and heat, where tomatoes grow the size of your head and taste like heaven, and he has a PLAN to replicate said conditions here in the land of clouds and rain - this PLAN involves heat tape in the dirt (laugh if you want, I did; apparently you can order this online at Wildly Desperate and Crazy Gardeners.com, or something), black plastic over the roots of the plants, special fertilizer, probably generating our own heat source, etc.

But it is January, and the tomatoes will have to wait. For now, he wants to grow lettuce. So he built this thing:

which, yes, looks something like a giant Old Lady Rain Hat for the garden bed.

But wait, there's more:

That's right: he put a heat lamp in it. On a timer. So it goes on about 4pm, until about 9pm, during which time our backyard looks like we are either a.) growing pot; b.) hosting a convention of very small campers; or c.) insanely trying to grow lettuce. In January.

I was all set to roll my eyes at this, until I thought about the fact that there will be a box chock full o' drugs arriving at our house on Friday. I will inject myself with these and visit the doctor's office a hundred times, all in our efforts to get pregnant despite the odds otherwise. I am bound and determined to make of my uterus a womb, even if, to the outside observer, my chances look about as good as starting your garden in the middle of winter.

So now I am cheering on the lettuce, and my sweetly deluded husband. Lettuce in January? Baby in 2010? Why the hell not?

lord of the flies

This has never happened to me before.

We put up the Christmas tree fairly early this year, for us - about December 4th. I'm usually more of a second-weekend-of-December kind of tree-putter-upper, but this year we had a party to get ready for, and the tree went up shortly after Thanksgiving.

It's a gorgeous tree. Probably one of the best we've ever had, apart from the weird left-leaning branch on top which makes the angel look like she's about to take off into the wall above the fireplace. Otherwise, it's perfect: lovely shape, nice green branches, very little needle loss, drinks water like a champ.

And chock full o' flies.

Has this ever happened to you? Because it's DISGUSTING. It started a few days after we put the tree up, when I found a strange number of flies in the living room. "Huh," I thought. "They must have come in while the door was open when we were getting the tree in here." I killed them with a flyswatter.

Then, the next day, there were about 10 flies in the front window. "Huh," I thought. "I didn't think the door was open that long." I killed them with a flyswatter, and then I had to clean the window because it looked like Fly Killing Field. Not very Christmas-y.

Then, the next day, there were easily 15 flies in the living room. "WHAT THE HELL?" I wondered, as I abandoned the flyswatter and went for the vacuum cleaner instead. I felt guilty about sucking them into the hose. I even turned off the vacuum cleaner and put my ear up to the bag, wondering if they were buzzing around in there. My mom taught me that, if you are going to kill a bug, you have to kill it DEAD so it's not suffering. I have a bit of a complex about this.

But I got over said complex within the next week, while I sucked about 50 flies into the vacuum cleaner. I kid you not.

Remember, we were having a party. "Festive holiday gathering," my ass. "Festering," more like it. A house full of flies does not exactly inspire confidence in the cleaning abilities of the host(ess). Which irritates me, because I actually have a ridiculously clean house.

Last night, my husband and I were chasing flies in the kitchen with the flyswatter and the vacuum. Oddly entertaining, actually. He sat all evening in his recliner with the flyswatter at the ready. We must have rid the world of at least 10 more flies last night.

Usually, I'm sad to take down the tree. This year, it will be a relief.

Happy holidays to you. Hope they are fly-free.

grab your bags: it's on.

All kinds of good things today:

• The Shared Risk people called - we're in! Woo hoo! (As an aside, they and the mail-order pharmacy I work with are all East Coast people, and I love their accents. It's like getting phone calls from the Sopranos. Only less scary.)

• I talked with my nurse, and we set the dates - the calendar arrived via email this afternoon, and Day One? It's on my birthday. Sweet. Hopefully the beginning of the best birthday present ever. (Edited to add: I'm doing the Luteal Antagonist Protocol. Anyone have experience with this? Please share!)

• The Kin.kos lady relented and figured out how to print my chosen hymn verse on the green cards I had bought. Apparently this is much more complicated than I thought. But it was nice of her to figure it out. Now, of course, this means I actually have to assemble these Christmas cards and send them out, which sounded like a GREAT idea about two months ago.

• Also, there was no traffic on the way to said Kin.kos today, which is unusual.

• And I have no evening meetings tonight, which means I may actually get to have a decent conversation with my husband before we both fall asleep at, oh, about 8:00pm. Because evidently, we are in the third grade.

• My husband's not-so-good basketball team (he coaches the 7th graders at his school) actually beat their generally-much-better cross-town rivals last night. In overtime.

• Good day all around, really. Hope you had a good one too.

pieces of a week

Because I'm up to my eyeballs in writing at the moment, a bulleted list will have to do here:

• After hearing nothing from the Shared Risk program for two weeks (as opposed to last time, when they emailed me within 48 hours), I called my clinic to discover that, oops! They forgot to submit the application. Not a big deal, really. They faxed it in yesterday and we should hear back in 3-5 business days. I'm trying to remain zen about this, as we have two more tries funded either way. It would take some of the pressure off, though.
  

• Last Tuesday night I went downtown to the kids' hospital to visit a family whose 3-month old foster daughter was having surgery. Keeping the details confidential, it wasn't a life-threatening situation, by any means, but surgery for your child is scary no matter how low the risk level is. I heard the parents' story: how long they tried to have children, how many surgeries the mom had for endometriosis, how they took home one foster child only to have her removed by the state a few weeks later, and then how they received their older foster daughter, now thirteen months old, a short time later. And then how, ten months later, the state contacted them to say that the biological mom had another child (small aside: can you imagine? Giving birth to 2 children, 10 months apart? My hoo-ha hurts just thinking about it) - and that, if they weren't willing to take this second child, the first might be removed in favor of a home which would house both children. So, naturally, they said yes, and now they have 2 foster daughters whom they are in the process of adopting, and who are only 10 months apart. I thought about the biological mom, who is homeless. And I didn't think about how unfair it is that some people can have more children than they want: I thought about how profoundly complicated fertility is, both on the in-fertile and the over-fertile sides. "Too many" unwanted children is just as tragic as the ones you want desperately but can't have. And I thanked God for foster families.

• That was not really a short bullet, was it?

• But this one will be even longer. I also spent some hours this week with a couple in the midst of their second stillbirth. There are no words for this, except to say that it was a very holy encounter. They lost a child several years ago at 20 weeks, and this one at nearly the same time - and although they have a lovely, healthy, and delightful daughter, we all know that nothing can fix the grief of these deaths. I asked them how it felt this time, and the mom said quickly that it was easier for her, this second time, and when I asked why, she said plainly, "Because this time I know that it won't actually kill me," which opened a huge window into the depth of her pain at the first loss. I thought about the phone call from the nurse to tell me that my beta number was not as it should be, and I remember thinking, "maybe my heart will stop in the middle of her talking and I won't have to stand up and live through this." We talked a long time about prayer and God, and whether anyone is really listening to us, and they both said that the only thing anyone can really say now is something like, "this sucks, and I'm sorry," and that there just isn't much more that makes any sense. And I thought about how, when I posted the news of our bad beta, the only thing I could stand to read in the comments was, "I'm sorry," and absolutely nothing more, and how when people said, "I know how you feel," I wanted to reach through the computer and rip out their throats. I said almost nothing for an hour, because sometimes there isn't much to say. I would not have really known that two years ago.

• On Sunday morning, a mom asked me why we had mentioned the couple above in the prayers, and I shared their news, which they had given permission for us to do. She shook her head and tears welled up in her eyes, and within a few seconds, she had said something which most people might not recognize, but which tweaked my infertility radar - and when I said, "I know what that is like," we realized that we are on a similar road. I would not have said that a year ago.

• Sometimes, oddly enough, I am grateful for infertility. Because, in spite of all its attendant shitty-ness, it has broken my heart open enough to listen more carefully to the losses experienced by other people.
  

• I wish there had been another way to learn that.