This American Life of Complaints

When I'm driving, I usually listen to NPR. I love the intelligent reporting (it doesn't matter what you look like on the radio, so brilliant newscasters aren't cast aside to make room for skinnier, younger, blonder and perkier replacements) and am a sucker for Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me! and This American Life. NPR also gives me hope: listeners have soared in recent years - all without Fox sensationalism (FOX ALERT!! Obama missed church one weekend in 2002!! FOX ALERT!!), or It Bleeds It Leads or faux "investigations" aimed at luring the lurid (Our hidden cameras follow the crew of Girls Gone Wild - are underage girls being victimized? Warning: For mature viewers only).

But in the past few weeks, there have been several NPR programs featuring new books having to do with child-rearing (one about whether it's better to be a young or "older" parent and another about returning to work after a decade of stay-at-home-parenting) and I find myself becoming really, really annoyed listening to all the parental complaining.

It's boring.
You never get to sleep.
They suck the life out of you.
Having a child changes your life forever.
I just want an adult to talk to.
We haven't had sex since the kids were born.

And on. And on. And on.

These people sound so selfish and self-centered: they are complaining about what I so desperately want and can't have. Yes, I understand that being a parent is the hardest job anyone will ever have, and that it's misery to get 31 minutes of sleep a night and spend all your waking hours changing diapers, cooing, holding, feeding, changing, etc.

On the other hand, complaining about it to a national audience is sort of like complaining that your dinner at Le Bernadin was a wee bit salty to an audience which includes homeless people who are eating one meal a day if they are lucky.

No one thinks about it this way, of course, because no one talks about infertility in public, so no one thinks about those who can't have children, and really can't handle hearing another single, solitary woman who cries that she hasn't left the house in four months in anything other than formula-covered sweatpants.

I blame this partially on famous people - those who are already getting press (BUMP WATCH UPDATE!!) and could be honest and say, "yes, I'm 42, and I needed help to have a baby." I'm sorry, I know they have a right to keep their reproductive life to themselves, but I just don't buy that J Lo, Marcia Cross, Mia Hamm and the myriad other famous women who have given birth to twins in the past year didn't have any help in the form of fertility drugs or IVF.

The only good thing to come out of this whole infertility thing is that I will be much slower to complain about sleepless nights, tantrums, colds or allergies. I'll think twice before going on about my stretch marks, boring days doing finger paints, and how annoying Barney is.

Okay, I take that back. Barney is really fucking annoying.

But in the same way that I am careful not to constantly complain about married life or gloat about its wonders to my single friends as we all near 40, I'll be slow to complain about something that so many people will never have the luxury to complain about.

- L.

Is There Life Beyond Babies?

Let's review history for a moment. What started the women's movement? Women everywhere were at home, caring for their children, husbands and homes, just as their mothers and grandmothers had done before. But that generation of women gave voice to the thoughts their mothers wouldn't allow: Is that all there is?

I don't know what's happened over the past few years, but if you pick up any women's magazine, you might find yourself checking the date (1958 or 2008?). Anyone know if Jessica Alba is starring in a new movie, working on a new project, launching a new perfume, perhaps? I can't tell you anything about what she's doing as an entertainer, because all of that is drowned out in favor of hearing about how much she loves her new, huge belly, her growing feet, her "fashion challenges" due to her new, extremely pregnant state. Did she mention that she's pregnant?

And it doesn't stop there. We read all about bump watches (it's two inches bigger than it was last week!), buns in the oven. We hear about breastfeeding, middle-of-the-night changes. Blow-by-blow labor & delivery stories.

I was at a professional communicators networking event last week -- one of the last baby-free zones, I thought, safe from the pregnancy- and baby-laden rest of the world. I thought it would be kind of an even playing field -- all of us professionals there to talk about our careers, not kids that we may or may not have. I was so, so wrong. One mention of someone's kids and they were off. Sleeping habits, the best nursery schools, crazy schedules filled with practices and lessons. One member of the group, perhaps noting my bored, faraway look, asked me directly: "Do you have any kids?" In the past, I would have dropped in a qualifier with the answer, "No -- not yet," to make everyone comfortable. I'm all done with that. "No," I said. Just no. It took everyone a moment to figure out what to say, but they all finally chimed in, "Oh, enjoy your life now." "Everything will change when you have kids."

To get there, these people that I hardly knew had to make two significant leaps: they assumed that I wanted kids but was deliberately waiting, and that fertility was not even a question. Bold assumptions among a group of acquaintances, don't you think? But typical.

How have we become so baby-obsessed? Why is talking or reading about pregnancy and babies suddenly more compelling than movies, books, art, culture, careers? Here's what I find interesting: biographies. The Presidential campaigns. Home improvement shows. Improving my golf swing. How many stretch marks you have? Not so much.

I want a baby, desperately. But it's not all there is. It can't be.

-J.

If At First You Don't Succeed...

So I pretended to be all pessimistic and sure that the IUI and the Clomid wouldn't work, but really, I thought they might. I just thought maybe on our own we'd been doing something wrong (like what, I'm not sure) and so with 33 million chances, there was just no doubt that one little swimmer would find his way.

Or not.

In a way, taking the pregnancy tests every day was a good idea - each day I was let down a little bit more - instead of being depressed all at once when the wierd cramps, tiredness and bloating were just my period arriving again. You can take drugstore pregnancy tests as early as five days before your period is supposed to start - but only 58% of women have pregnancy hormone by then (and 63% the next day, and 83% after that, and 93% percent the day after that, and then 98%...so you see what I mean about being let down incrementally).

The worst part (other than not being pregnant, of course) is that now I worry that something really is wrong. Maybe it's something they'll never figure out, and never be able to fix. The not-knowing is the really hard part of unexplained infertility.

I hear all the statistics - only 25% of couples undergoing fertility treatments will "take home a baby" (something about this lingo - "take home baby rate" really bothers me - like it's a drive-through or something). Or that each month with IUI, I have a 9% chance of conceiving (this is the number my doctor gave me - of course, I did a ton of internet research and have read books, and the number they give seems to be 20% per month). And, like most couples do, apparently, we figure that we are in that 20 or 9% - that the other 80 - 91% must have something really wrong.

Or not.

It's so frustrating because WHAT IS WRONG?? In my life (my Dad is a doctor) when you have something physically wrong with you, you go to a great doctor, and they solve your problem. When I had nine strep throats in one winter, a fantastic surgeon took my tonsils out and I have not (knock on wood) had strep throat in 23 years. When I kept breaking my right ankle, another world-famous surgeon took a half inch off of one of my foot bones, built me some new tendons, inserted a pin, and voila. Within 6 months I was playing lacrosse and wearing high heels without fear.

I could go on, but you get the point. The progression is: realize you have health issue, find best possible doctor and hospital, follow instructions, wait a bit, and your reward is a cure.

SO far, I've found the best doctor and clinic, done everything I'm supposed to, and still, nothing. And the worst part is, no one can tell me what is wrong. If I just knew, I'd fix it.

Instead, I search for answers. I've quit smoking, cut back considerably on drinking, cut out more than 50 mg of caffeine a day, worked on my diet, taken pre-natal vitamins, and taken the Clomid at exactly the same time every night for five nights. I've started exercising more, but not at too intense a level.

Lately, I've decided that my BMI is too high (ideal BMI for conception is between 21 and 24 apparently). So that's what I'll work on next.

And maybe the hard work will pay off. Or, for the first time in my life, maybe hard work will have nothing to do with it.

- L.

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.

Goldilocks and the Eighteen Eggs

It's only been a few days since my last post, but it feels like a lifetime of things has happened. Remember how I couldn't ovulate on Clomid? Yeah, um, not my problem on Gonal-F. Turns out I am a follicle producing machine.

My ultrasound/bloodwork last Thursday showed that everything was progressing nicely -- I actually heard the words, "You're doing great" from a nurse's mouth for the first time. When I returned on Saturday, though, the pendulum had swung too far -- I had too many follicles growing too quickly. They told me I could either "coast" -- not take any more medicine -- or convert to IVF, because there was no way they were going to give me an IUI with that many follicles. After a lot of deliberation, I decided not to take the medicine that night, which I thought was ruling out the option of converting to IVF. I went back on Sunday and my levels were still high so it didn't look like coasting was going to work. The options -- if you can call them that -- were to cancel the cycle or I could still convert to IVF. In a fit of optimism and exuberance, I took the medicine (though a sharply reduced dose -- 37.5 instead of 150 cc) thinking I would go for the IVF.

Yesterday, I went in for a "pre-op" and to sign a dozen forms basically agreeing not to sue them if anything catastrophic happened (those possibilities were spelled out in detail). That's when I really started to freak. First of all, I am phobic of anesthesia, due to a traumatic experience when I had my tonsils out at the tender age of 9. I guess these things stick with you. Quite simply, I don't like the idea of not being in control of my brain at all times. And they can call conscious sedation "a nap" as much as they want, I know that's not what it is. The other option for the egg retrieval is a spinal, which they don't like to do and therefore aren't shy about describing the dangers of.

Also, I made the serious error of searching on the Internet about the actual egg retrieval procedure, rather than listening to my doctors. As a result, I became terrified of a series of bad to disastrous things that can go wrong, which I won't describe here because if I shouldn't be thinking about them (the odds are less than one percent), you shouldn't either.

Overall, something about it just wasn't sitting with me right. It felt awful -- so wrong -- to be passing up such a tangible opportunity to finally get pregnant. But it felt like rushing into something that may not be necessary. We hadn't had time to make a decision about whether IVF was something we even wanted to do -- hadn't fully explored this stage before rushing into the next. I think IVF is a wonderful thing for people -- maybe me -- who need it, but if there's a way for me to get pregnant through a bit of a lower-tech method, I'd like to see that through first.

Next steps: Wait for a period. No sex (unless 18 children appeals to me -- yes, I have 18 follicles growing in there). I don't even have to wait a month, I can jump right into the next cycle when I get a period. Meanwhile, I guess I'm the Goldilocks of infertility treatments -- not enough, too many eggs -- until I find something that's just right.

-J.