The only place in the world...

Where infertility is not on my brain.

Because frankly folks, there is no room for anything other than lipoprotein biochemistry right now.

Yup, I'm in SF at my board review course. 16 hours with 50 uber nerds nerding it up together whilst being overwhelmed with alphabet soup. If you thought lipids were all about LDL, HDL, and TC.. wait! What about those ABC1 transporters and don't forget those SRB1 receptors and the LXR receptors and who doesn't love some CETP and ApoA1 and ApoB100 and...you get the point.

I guess there's some relief in being so completely brain drained that I cannot think about infertility or next steps or much else. All I really want to do is sleep right now and will someone please wake me up when I have taken and passed this damned board exam?

Plus, of all the people I've met today NOT ONE has been interested in my fertility (or lackthereof). Seriously, no one has asked me how many kids I have! No one cares. No one cares! Instead everyone is going nerd to nerd with the scientific stuff, trying to impress each other with their nerdliness. Gawd, you gotta love doctors, especially the cardiologists.

Fine by me. Here, I am just Mrs. LC, nerdy little lipid lady.

PS A commenter asked for my email address: lastchanceivf@gmail.com Send me those numbers!! :)

When a friend hurts...

There isn't much you can do.

I have a very good fertile friend, who is hurting right now.

It may seem silly, but you guys know what support can mean, even if it comes from people you don't even know. Sometimes the kindness of strangers touches us the most deeply.

I guess I'm just asking you to lift her up, show her some support and love. She doesn't comment on my blog much, so you might not have ever seen her link around here, but believe you me, she has supported me wholeheartedly through the last five years of IF hell.

It's the least I can do now...

Her blog:
http://ihatericecakes.blogspot.com/

Ahhhhhhhhhhhhh it's HERE!

Yes! Yes! Yes!

The one holiday that--made up as it is--does NOT involve children. There will be no adorable kids in costumes at my door begging for candy, there will be no cuties on Santa's knee, or folks with hands joined around the table counting family blessings, there will be no toddler's toddling through fields of spring flowers looking for Easter Eggs, there will be no days devoted entirely to Mothers and Fathers....today there will be me and DH and our love.

Nothing more and nothing less.

And since infertility stories are really the deepest and bestest love stories of them all (I know I'm biased) today is a celebration of something big. Something special. It's commitment that goes deep, love that survives repeated batterings. It's two people that are running an ultra marathon together, pulling each other up the steep hills when necessary, huffing and puffing next to each other, sharing cool drinks of water and sometimes amazing vistas along the mostly painful path, but never stopping running...

Today, we will celebrate us.

And I hope you will, too.

(OK, not celebrate US as in Mr. LC and I--but celebrate your own love story!)

Enjoy!

Be Mine. Or just Be.

So many of the infertile ladies I 'follow' online are becoming pregnant lately and I see a recurrent theme.

Not over the top scream from the top of your lungs jump up and down and run around in circles like a nutter happiness, but rather...trepidation. Fear. Happiness tempered with rampant 'what ifs.'

It makes me so sad for them. So sad.

They have been through so much that even finally hearing the words "I have good news! Congratulations!" is not enough. It simply cannot be.

And I wonder for them, if they can just 'be?'

Just be...pregnant.

The practice and idea of mindfulness is ancient. In overly simplistic terms it means being fully focused on the present...or maybe not even really focused on it, but moreso in that strange other-wordly place of bliss before the mind can start processing and sorting and assigning and labeling and thinking....and worrying and ruining everything.

It probably only lasts a millisecond for an infertile woman when she sees that second line, before she wonders if her beta will be high enough, then if it will double, then if she will see a heartbeat, then if she will pass the nuchal fold test, then if she will make it to...well, you get the point.

I think about the morning Mr. LC and I got the second line. It was blissful...for more than just a few seconds. I honestly didn't start really worrying about the number until the next morning. I guess I felt so surely that it was our time that the second line was all I needed to see. And honestly, I wanted so desperately to just be happy.

To just be....pregnant.

When I got the fake two lines a year before IVF #1 I ran around our house like a chicken with my head cut off whooping it up to my dogs, laughing and crying, laughing and crying, falling on my knees thanking God and man was I present in that moment only--there was simply no room for anything else.

I wish, to my fellow ladies that are in the process of crossing over, that your pregnancies are full of joy only. No room for fear. It's the way it is supposed to be, and I hate that IF robs you of that full experience.

No day but today--the theme of my favorite play. I promise I am not going all Zen on you--gag me with a spoon, man! but boy do I love that song. I love to sing it from the top of my lungs (badly!) and pretend like I am on the set. You can stop laughing now.

Happy Valentine's Day Weekend! I hope that whatever you are doing, however you are celebrating, whoever you are loving, whatever you are eating, that you do it fully and wholly and enjoy it one hundred percent without room for anything else and just....be.

Hearts

Boy I hate that I have to put a disclaimer here--after all, my blog, my words, my opinions, should be A-OK--but we all know that isn't always the case. Sigh. So after what B went through earlier this week I'll put this disclaimer: I know that my troubles aren't necessarily any worse than anyone else's or that many people have it much worse. That is nearly always the case if you get right down to it..sure, there is one person out there who has it the absolute worst in the entire planet but...I doubt they're blogging about it :) So there you go. I do not need any drive-by STFUs.

This has been a tough week. Tough. On so many fronts, on so many levels.

My Dad is not good. At all. I call and he gets on the phone (unwillingly) and I might get two words from him. Two words. Either he's cognitively slipping that fast or he is so depressed that he cannot even respond to his own daughter. I cry every day over this, either in my office with the door shut after my lunch-break phone call or in the evening with Mr. LC after my drive-home phone call or all by myself in the shower when it just gets to be too much. He could live like this for years. Trapped in a body that has ultimately betrayed him, trapped in a brain that has suffered a traumatic and devastating injury. There is nothing about this that is fair or just or right and every day--sometimes every hour--I think about this, think about how I can help, reaching out to other health professionals for their opinions, reading articles about stroke, researching and researching and nothing helps. I just feel more helpless, more lost.

I guess I finally know how my parents have felt all these years watching Mr. LC and I hurting so much. Watching what we had planned for our lives slip away, bit by bit, as it was taken from us. Watching us get hopeful about a treatment and thinking we'd finally break free of our nightmare and then watching us get crushed all over again. Watching us navigate amongst friends and families who blissfully move through life having babies and babies and babies while we sit on the sidelines clinging to each other, hoping for a simple chance at what they have. My parents could only watch and want to help so desperately but had nothing--nothing at all to offer other than love.

I have always said that IF causes a heartache that you didn't even know can exist until you go through it. This is the same. I can't fix my broken father just like my parents can't fix the broken LCs.

On the IF front things are no better. I can't fix us. I have read and researched and read and researched and poured so much of my life into this and I am exhausted.

This week has been very hard. We have big decisions to make. Time looms. No one can make these for us and it is just hard. That's all.

Mr. LC's car is teetering on the edge. It's a 1995 model. When I think about the 20K check I wrote last month to pay for our twelve hours of two-line bliss I think about his car. His need for something else. Only we don't have a choice, do we? Those of us stuck in the trenches. We can't just choose to have car payments or vacations or building large retirement funds over building our families--we don't have that option. Some how, we have to figure out how to pay for chances that cost more than most people could save in a year but we do it, don't we? Choiceless, we do it.

We are choiceless in so many things.

My heart is heavy this week. So heavy. I can't even get into it all here, my safe place.

Instead, I will be grateful for certain things. Grateful for going to the movies with two of our favorite people and then going out for a late night meal to pick apart said movie (Avatar ya'll--once someone said "Dances With Wolves" only with aliens, well....). Grateful for my pets and my husband who never judge me, only listen and snuggle with me and catch my tears when they fall. Grateful for hobbies, and exercise, and two legs that work--that automatically run when I tell them to run and do yoga poses when I tell them to do yoga poses--my body may not work the way it is supposed reproductively, but I am at least grateful that it moves because in those moments of running hard, of breathing hard, of sinking deeper into a yoga pose, of feeling lactic acid searing through my calves I know that I am alive, that this is not a dressed rehearsal, and that somehow, I have got to get out of this place.

With that, I'll leave you with a distraction, pure and simple. Dark chocolate brownies with a raspberry ganache and a cream cheese frosting piping. Cut into the shape of hearts, because even when your heart is broken, it is good to bake.

Out of the mouth of babes...

One of my Mom-blog friends wrote a post with the same title and it made me think about my own 'mouth' when it was a 'babe.' Not as in a hawt babe but as in an IF babe. OK, not in that way (what? stirrups and wands and follicles aren't sexy? who knew!) but meaning when I was just starting out on the journey. Before I blogged I had to write it all out somewhere and I did on an online support group's journal feature. Thankfully, I have all of those journals because frankly, I wouldn't believe they were mine if I didn't have proof I ever thought that way! Sheesh indeed.

So for your amusement, check out the journal I wrote after the first fertilization report I ever received. I will highlight in a different color the ironies of that post....

Well, out of the eleven only six were mature. This makes me very sad. Five fertilized. I know that's not bad, but I guess I was hoping for a nice big number so we could make a day 5 transfer and also maybe have some to cryopreserve. I really want to have two children (I can't imagine my child not having a sibling since I'm so incredibly close to my own) but at this point in time, I cannot imagine doing this again. I think every few days all these emotions just catch up to me and I get really upset. When my RE called personally to tell me the news and said he was disappointed in the lower number of mature ones, it really got me down. I know it only takes one.... I just feel like my body continues to perform at less than stellar performance. And I was having such a good day...

Are you laughing yet? Well you should be. I was an idiot at that point. Why was I using the word "cryopreserve" instead of just "freeze?" Oh well. That girl back then couldn't imagine doing IVF again, because really, if someone had told me I'd do five and end up with nothing I would have probably shot them, or myself. And IVF babe, you didn't know anything about being 'really upset' or what feeling down feels like.

A couple of points: our first two IVFs had good fertilization rates. Granted, low numbers of mature eggs but I think that was a stim/protocol problem. I do not understand why my fertilization rates tanked on IVFs 3 and 4 and somewhat on 5. I have my theory, but it just makes me sound like a nut who can't give up.

Oh wait, I am a nut who can't give up.

I had another point but it escapes me.

I feel some major Valentine's Day baking coming on...


If you could go back and meet yourself pre-IF treatments, what advice would you give your babe-self?

It's nobody's fault.

Disclaimer:
This is a post meant for infertile eyes only. Otherwise, if you're not infertile, you will not get it, you will not understand and you will think I'm a bitch or a baby or completely and totally selfish. And if you were infertile and have crossed over, well, this post might not make as much sense to you, either...I'm not sure. Because even though I believe you never forget the pain of IF, once you have succeeded with ART it does take you into a different realm than those of us still clawing our way through this hellhole of a reality.

But I need a place where I can write it all down without censoring. Unfortunately, this post involves a friend who reads this blog and writes a blog. A good friend, a dear friend, who was honest in one of her posts and so I know it's ok for me to be honest here, too. We emailed, she understands, it's all good.

As most of you know, as most of you infertiles have also dealt with, I've been surrounded by fertile friends. It's been hard. Hard doesn't describe it, but there really aren't words adequate to describe the myriad feelings one experiences watching their friends get pregnant and birth beautiful babies so easily. I hosted more baby showers than I ever care to recall during our infertility...and even though they were hard, because we were still in treatment I was always stringing myself along with the notion that I would be next. I went to brunch after brunch with my friends and either their ever expanding bellies or their ever expanding broods thinking, surely I will join the fray and belly up the table with my own bump one day. It was no fault of their own--hello, I wanted to BE THEM SO BADLY--but it certainly hurt nonetheless. Because that's the biyatch that infertility is--causing hurt and pain when nobody is really at fault.

A few months ago a friend with two beautiful girls wrote a post about wanting a third so desperately but her husband did not. In fact, he was going to get a vasectomy. And while I do hate it when people don't get what they want and ultimately want my friends to be happy (duh) my most overwhelming emotion at the time was...relief.

Relief.

As in, I could mark them off the list.

You guys know what list I'm talking about, that neverending list in your head of 'who is going to be next'. Who's pregnancy announcement will knock you to the floor, reduce you to a heap of tears.

She had her two kids, there would be no more. And so I could cross them off.

I'm sure it was a similar relief that she or my other fertile friends felt the morning I got two lines on an HPT and excitedly called to tell them. I'm sure they felt happy--another duh--but I'm sure they also felt relief. Relief that finally--FINALLY--we could move forward in a friendship not complicated by the shackles of the infertile friend always dragging everything down. I felt relief, too.

This past Sunday I was prepared to have a good day. Studying (bleh, but necessary), a trail run, yoga class with Mr. LC, good food, etc. etc. etc. I innocently clicked on my friend's blog.

Oh how I wish the disclaimer had been at the top, not the bottom. Although let's face it, I would have read the post anyway.

Needless to say, the post revisited the issue of having more kids, and it turns out the issue is back on the table...they're debating on the third baby.

I read the post and immediately felt gutted. Sucker punched. Kicked in the ribs while I was already down.

No, not by anything she did. Let me be clear here.

I cannot even fathom having the choice, two or three, two or three.

I have none.

I cannot have babies. I desperately want babies.

I have no choices in the matter.

I cannot have sex with my husband and have a baby.

I cannot look into the eyes of a daughter and see myself.

I cannot have babies. I desperately want babies.

I cannot sit around and think about the pros and cons of a third versus having only two. Only having two.

Instead I sit around and think about a life without children versus spending more money on a snowballs' chance in hell versus exploring other options when I'm already at the end of my emotional rope and just want a fucking break in life.

These are my choices.

I cannot have babies. I desperately want babies.

She says she knows she might not be so lucky to just have a third easily but as irrationally as this sounds I know--because she knows me--she doesn't have to worry about having secondary infertility. I've soaked up all the infertility for my friends.

My perfect Sunday was thrown for a loop. It's nobody's fault. It's not my friend's fault for wanting more more more and having that choice. It's not my fault for having a fucked up body that can't accomplish the most basic and human of tasks nor is it my fault for having emotions that are raw on a good day, but are bloody pulp on most days.

It's nobody fault.

It's just infertility.