Clear Your Cache

Over the past week, in between beating myself up incessantly, weeping uncontrollably and talking nonstop about passing up the IVF option, and against the advice of my husband and friends who've calmly but firmly advised me to step away from the computer, I have been obsessively lurking on infertility message boards, blogs and websites, on which you find advice from people with signatures like:

Jane Doe
TTC #1 since the beginning of time
Clomid 50 mg BFN
Clomid 50 mg IUI BFN
Every single thing I've ever tried - BFN

...all replete with emoticons and graphics illustrating their long and fruitless attempts to get pregnant. I don't know what it is about reading these boards, but even though they usually leave me feeling discouraged and depressed, I am oddly addicted and have been reading them nonstop. I find them by Googling every possible combination of search terms that might yield some nugget of truth that will foretell my ultimate success, like "IUI + PCOS" and "IUI success rate" and "IUI didn't convert to IVF but got pregnant the very first month tried IUI."

But here's a good reason to stop, and let this be a lesson to all of you obsessive Googlers out there to make sure you always, always clear your Google cache when people beyond your husband (who already knows you're nuts) are going to be in your home. On Thursday, against my better judgment, I allowed my husband to invite two colleagues from India, who have been working out of his office, to our house for dinner. Everything was going fine until someone started talking about the population of India, which led my husband to power up our computer and look it up. A few minutes later, one of our unsuspecting dinner guests then went over to said computer, pulled up Google, and began trying to hunt for a song he'd heard for the first time on MTV. It took me a while -- too long -- to realize what was happening, but by then it was too late. I could only imagine what that poor guy had seen.

Later, I opened Google and began punching in letters to survey the damage. I think it can be summed up with this one, priceless search term, which I'm sure left our poor guest with a disturbing image of American women to take back to India:
Gonal-F + sore boobs.

Clear. Your. Cache.

-J.