PerchanceToDream

One of the greatest advantages of working for a Jewish organization is getting Jewish holidays off. This is great if you are observant and then don’t need to waste all of your vacation days to sit in a synagogue and it is great if, like me, you aren’t observant and get these random days given to you like a little gift tied up in ribbons and bows.

These past few weeks though, my free days have been spent playing phone tag with doctors. Dr. Celebrity, my new RE, has asked for some further testing (but that took over 2 days, multiple calls, faxes and e-mails to determine) before he can even decide if we should proceed with more IUIs. The records office of my old RE, Dr. Perky, has finally copied my records but now I need to find a way to get there to pick them up and deliver them to Dr. Celebrity together with my 2006 tax returns, HSG report and probably a photo of my puppy in order to apply for the government grant that will allow us to even try IVF.

Oh..and did I mention that I’ve had bronchitis for over 3 weeks now which my MD thinks actually was pneumonia (I’m sure my co-workers would be thrilled to find this out) or some sort of strange once-in-a-lifetime asthma situation. It took about 5 calls to reach her, I believe.

Between that and the normal errands of the week, I’ve gotten nothing done with my “free” days. I have one more next week that I’m trying to schedule with fun things that I can’t possibly cancel, just to have a small break. And if it takes me another year to clean out the linen closet? Well, it isn’t going anywhere….

On more pressing issues….I realized that while our fall-back plan has always been to adopt (”Hey, if IVF doesn’t work, we’ll just adopt”) the more I read up on it, the harder it sounds. Just like I said to Dr. Perky when she wanted to hold up an IUI cycle because I was a week late in getting my mammogram - people have babies while drinking, being late for mammograms, having unsafe houses, no close relatives, various personal issues. Maybe everyone should be screened? I’m sure our healthcare system would benefit from that!

I’ve been watching a lot of Babylon 5 lately and have “stolen” one of my favorite titles for this post (sorry JMS, you can have it back now!). I don’t know if it’s particularly relevant but it rather fits my mood of late. (Plus there is that nagging reminder that hell, if a Minbari who turned half human can have a child what in the world is my problem???)

Which brings up the list I was given by Dr. Celebrity’s IVF coordinator yesterday. It contained everything you’d expect: billing info, what may or may not happen in the course of treatment and a list of things that you are meant to stop doing three months before IVF. Namely, no caffeine, no alcohol, no stress (yeah right!), no “excessive” exercise. Along with a healthy diet and mainlining folic acid, you’re then good to go. But there is still only a 17% chance that it will work if you’re 42.

The flip side of this is all of the crackheads who get pregnant, the college girls who have one too many at a frat party, the malnourished woman in the third world who can barely find enough food to make it through the day, the couple whose condom breaks or the normally diligent woman who forgets one pill and finds herself pregnant.

Either the universe has a sadistically wicked sense of humor or it really just is so random that we can’t get our fingers on it. I truly believe that there are no coincidences, that everything happens for a reason. I just wish those reasons made more sense.

My paternal grandfather moved to the US from Russia when he was 15. He came with his younger brother and his parents. His parents died within 2 years of their move. As far as I know, he didn’t have any type of schooling once he got here.

Yet he ran his own business and paid for everything in cash: his store, his house, his card. I wonder if anyone still does that? He always saw the US as the land of opportunity and from him I learned that anything is possible if you work hard enough.

Only it isn’t true. There are some things that can’t be organized into shape or learned with enough effort. Some things are out of reach and there is nothing we can do about it.

Today I met with Dr. Celebrity. I liked him, although he wasn’t as warm as his website led me to think, and I liked the practice which is more than a step up from the one I’ve been going to.

I didn’t like his prognosis although I appreciated the direct way he delivered it. This was no overly-perky doctor saying “it just takes one sperm and one egg to make a baby”. He laid out the challenges of our situation and the very low success rates.

Although the existing plan with Dr. Perky had been to pursue 2 more rounds of IUI (one with a higher dose of clomid and one with injectibles), Dr. Celebrity said that he isn’t sure that IUIs are even worth it for us - assuming that the test results are what we think they are.

We can go straight to IVF at the beginning of 2008. In the meantime, should Dr. Celebrity choose not to pursue IUI, we can always do it with Dr. Perky. The insurance will happily cover that (until the end of time) but won’t help with IVF which is what we really need.

I’m scared of IVF though. Not because of the shots (and I am the biggest pain wimp I know) and the welts and the needles and the hormones and mood swings, but because if it fails, that will be it. Forever. The end. And I’m not much for final endings and I’m not looking forward to letting go of these new-found hopes and putting all my efforts into moving and adoption. I will if I have to. And I probably won’t fail at those. But sometimes, not failing, isn’t the same as succeeding.

Age is a funny thing. I vaguely remember one of my parents telling me that time goes faster as you get older. It didn’t make sense to me until I hit my mid-30’s. Now, having past 40, time goes so fast that I seem at a loss to find a way to document it; to hold on to it.

I look younger than I am and up until recently would still get carded every once in a while. I don’t miss that. The hard part is that inside, I’m very much who I was when I was 16. I’m proud of that fact; proud that I haven’t let the horrible things that life can throw at you, change my general outlook and personality.

I am an only child. The oldest grandchild on one side and the only one on the other. I grew up being far more comfortable on my own or around adults than around kids and it wasn’t until high school that I really found a group of friends my own age. Even in college, I was frequently shocked by the immature behavior of some of my peers.

The problem is - when you’re a serious kid, there is nowhere to go from there. Nothing to grow up into. Because you are unable to see this progression in yourself (aside from on the calendar), you never really feel like you’re “growing up”. Which makes you feel like you have all the time in the world.

That’s pretty much the kiss of death when you’re talking about fertility. As technology advances, women are having children when they are older and older. But for every one of those women who are successful, how many fail?

I was in college when I first had sex. Two close male friends (both of whom I’m still friends with) played floor hockey outside my door that night, just to make sure that I was okay….that sounds odd to read but it was appropriate and touching and representative of the types of friends that I want.

These same two friends drove me, a few weeks later, to planned parenthood when my period was late and I was scared that I was pregnant. I’ve never been a fan of needles and as the nurse went to draw the blood, I murmured under my breath “this is the cost…this is the cost…” The test was negative and I went on the pill for about 12 years before following my gut instinct that they weren’t really preventing anything that my body wasn’t preventing anyhow and went off them.

But for all the time we spend, when young, being terrified of a positive, I wonder if there isn’t some sort of cosmic wheel that balances out all of these times that we pray for the second line on the stick….

I don’t know if this blog-thing will work for me. I already keep a 100-words a day “diary” and try to manage a more or less professional Myspace page. But I also know that I need an outlet, and frankly, writing has always served that purpose.

Today I should be on day 2 of 15oMG of clomid in preparation for round #3 of IUI. But instead I have a cyst that was managed to be missed on the ultrasound but not on blood levels. And even though I’m meeting with a new RE on Tuesday from a renowned program - who is a bit of a celebrity in the infertility world, I’m devastated that this cycle will be a wash.

To some extent, that depression surprises me. When I was very young - I always thought it all happened by magic. You were “given” a spouse, a career, a house, a child. And I couldn’t wait to see what I got. Somehow I missed the fact that you had to work for it; make choices and that some of those choices would be wrong and would leave you walking a path other than the one you thought you’d be going down.

I have a spouse and a calling more than a career. But the house is still a dream and at some point I pretty much gave up on having a child. Or rather, I assumed that it was impossible due to unexplained infertility, bad relationship choices, lack of financial solvency.

But then things came together and I started testing and found out that my egg reserve isn’t all that bad for someone my age and we started IUI. Only cycle number one had timing issues, cycle number two had poor sperm and my case of bronchitis certainly didn’t help. And now cycle 3 has been canceled due to high estrodiol. And timing is of the essence due to our leaving town for my college reunion and a work convention that will keep me out of town during a crucial time.

Then there is money. We need 4 failed IUIs but good potential for success to get the NYS grant for IVF. Even with the grant I think it’s going to put us back in a financial hole. And that would be fine if we weren’t planning on moving not so long after that. Not moving for jobs or frivolous reasons but to save my husband’s sanity before the Big City destroys what’s left of it.

As usual in my life, timing sucks and all things converge.

I’d hoped to go to my 20 year reunion pregnant. I’d hoped to be able to be one of those radiant glowing women who didn’t turn away from the cute kids of others. But it’s not to be.

Part of me thinks of looking into adoption instead of playing IVF roulette (because deep in the night, I’m certain that they’re going to find that my eggs are unviable - have never BEEN viable or that whatever mysterious factor caused my mother to think that she could never conceive has been passed down) we should held straight to adoption. But my husband is right in thinking that having a house and jobs set up will certainly serve us better than an apartment outside NYC. I worry about the viability of adoption as well, seeing as though the lists of available kids I’ve seen all involve serious disabilities. And we’re just about handling ourselves. That would be too much to fit into our sensitive dynamic.

And so, like I’ve done for so much of my life. I wait. I pin my hopes on the Specialist on Tuesday. On the future. As always.