The cat is out of the bag...

and man does it feel good. If you'll all recall from this post my husband had no idea that I was blogging only that I was reading blogs. So yesterday, I was talking about you wonderful ladies and he brought said, out of no where, "Do you have a blog?" and because I wasn't prepared for him to ask the question I couldn't very well lie so I caved and told the truth. He poked fun at me a little but in the end he was super supportive and I'm so happy the secret is out.

He swore that he would never come find it. I know that he could if he wanted to because he is a computer genius. I asked him how he had the strength to not come and find it and I confessed to him that if he had a blog and I knew about it that I would feel compelled to read it. I know that's awful of me.

The one thing that he did ask was that I'd never replace him with you ladies. I told him I never would. He is my rock and confidant and friend and lover and ... the list goes on and on. But you ladies complement his strengths so well. So now I have two outlets for all this infertility stuff and it feels great.

I feel like a huge weight has been lifted now that he knows about the blog. I hate not telling him everything.

Hope all is well in the Infertile Kingdom.

I hate pregnancy announcements...

We've all been where I'm at right now. I've just been hit with a drive-by announcement. My cousin, lovely gal, just sent me an e-mail with the subject line of "GREAT NEWS!!!" and before I even opened it I knew what it said. Still, as I read the words, I felt as though I'd been punched in the stomach.

I really am happy for her because she and her husband will be excellent parents. But,...oh what am I explaining here of all places for. You all get it so just make sure to send me some love.

I'll talk with you later.

Neuroses and Paranoias

So glad to see you all liked my evil game. I can't believe all of the goody-two-shoes I'm surrounded by in blog land.

In the lead we have sojourning crow with 68% and in last place we have bugsy at 14%. I do like Pru's idea of getting drunk while driving to the bar to pick up a one-night stand and hitting an animal along the way. That's what I'm talking about!

So this leads me to my next topic of neuroses and paranoias. If you couldn't already tell that was a forwarded link. Does anyone else have the same paranoia that I do that because I don't forward my forwards to at least 7 people in the next 7 nanoseconds that I will have bad luck cursed upon me for 7 centuries? I seriously have had to tell my family and friends to stop forwarding me that crap because I couldn't take it anymore. Anyone else?

I now turn the discussion over to you ladies...what paranoias and neuroses do you have and are willing to share? I promise there will be no name calling, maybe :)

I am 38% evil!

Come on, follow the link below and see what percentage evil you are.

http://www.hilowitz.com/john/test/evil.html

Don't forget to be honest.

Make sure to put some extra logs on the campfire for me this weekend

Sorry my posts are so long, I will try to make them shorter. This is a long one too though so get your popcorn...

I don’t think I’ve told any of you about my sister. My sister is 5 years younger than I am. She’s one of those people who used to feel entitled to everything, like the world owed her something. This is how she spent the latter part of her teenage years, mad at the world and know-it-all, typical teenager, I guess. She even threw a snit and ran away from home just before my wedding causing me to rush and ask my cousin to stand in for her. In short, she was a real asshole.

Fast-forward a couple years and she’s still not living at home but is slowly on the path to adulthood. She has an OK job and is still living with abusive boyfriend #1 but that’s on the way out. She breaks up with boyfriend #1 and starts dating a boy who we’ll call baby daddy-in-law (he is my sister’s baby daddy so I figure that makes him my sister’s baby daddy-in-law). They are together all of 2 months before she calls to tell me that she’s pregnant. This wonderful news comes right around the time when I’d just been laid off and at that point we’d been trying to conceive for 1 ½ years. I’m livid and all “why not me.” I don’t tell her that because I want to be supportive because until this point she’s been a general screw-up in life. I want her to know that she can come to me with any problems especially now since she’s pg. I’ve always wanted to have a good relationship with my sister, but it was difficult because there’s a pretty big age difference between us and our general attitudes are completely different. She always thought I was a goodie-two-shoes and she never took responsibility for anything. We were just different.

So now she’s pregnant and it’s heartbreaking for me. I didn’t talk to her much during the pregnancy, took some “me” time and tried to be a grown up. My mom wanted some help to throw a shower for her in July seeing as my sister was due in September. I swallowed my bitterness, washed it down with a nice shot of vodka (who am I kidding, several shots), and said bring on the baby bottle favors. So it was during the shower preparation that I found out I was pregnant. I was thrilled and immediately told my mom and husband’s mom and a few close friends. I wanted to wait to tell my sister till after her shower so she wouldn’t slip up and say anything in front of our friends and family at the shower. So I whispered it in her ear as we were leaving and most of the guests had gone. I was thrilled and thought finally that the universe was working in my favor.

We found out August 6, 2004 that our baby didn’t have a heartbeat but it had grown to the eight weeks it should’ve been. Of course I opted for a natural miscarriage and don’t know the cause. Now it was even harder to talk to my sister because she was in her 36th week of pregnancy. Once again, I had to swallow my bitterness and be an adult when all I wanted to do was roll around on the floor kicking my feet screaming why.

My nephew came in to this world September 7, 2004 and my sister’s life has been changed ever since. Seeing her in the hospital with him was like a knife in my heart. That should be me in the hospital bed with the new baby, the first grandbaby. It’s not fair.

He was an angel though. Never even made a peep when we were there. His perfection would be even more evident as time went on.

Husband had a really hard time at the hospital. He never appeared to be direly upset during the miscarriage. Don’t get me wrong, he was sad and grieved with me, but differently. He was visibly upset at the hospital and it made me even more sad and the fresh scab was picked and my heart started bleeding again.

So all this is the history to tell you why I’ll need the campfire to be extra warm for me this weekend. My nephew is being baptized Sunday and I’m the godmother. I made a promise to myself not long ago that I would no longer put a happy face on to allay everyone’s concerns. I decided that I would be a WYSIWIG gal and that was that. This weekend, however, I have to break the promise to myself, I have to pull the happy face out of the closet and iron it. I’ve got to be the good big sister and godmother this weekend. I love my nephew immensely. He is the best and cutest baby in the whole wide world. I want one too. I hope mine will be as perfect as he is.

My sister’s life is greatly improved and she appears to be on the right track now. She has realized what a screw up she was and has made peace with her old self. She is a wonderful mother and I thank God everyday that her baby came in to her life. If he hadn’t, who knows where she’d be now.

More confessions

I have another confession for you…my husband doesn’t know about my blog. I mean he knows that I read several, hard to hide that on a Saturday morning when he comes down and sees bloglines open. I think hiding this from him will become harder and harder. He thinks blogs are self-absorbed rantings. I agree with him to a certain extent, but they are also a source of support for those of us on infertility island. I’m also having a hard time with it because we share everything. I have to give a bit of our history here for you to understand exactly what I mean.

Let me begin by throwing some numbers out there. We’ve known each other for 20 years, we’ve dated for 10, and we’ve been married 3 ½. I will also throw our ages in there, I am 26 and he is 25 (we’ll be 27 and 26 in August).

Our story begins in 2nd grade, I was new to the area and had moved around quite a bit before then. I was used to being the new girl. I’ve always been a bigger girl and I hated being the new, fat girl. Being the new, fat girl more often than I’d have liked gave me a really tough exterior. I remember being young and just hating everyone at a new school. In retrospect, I realize it was my defense mechanism, but at 7 years old you just don’t think about stuff like that. So I remember him from grade school and I hated him and was mean to him, just like everyone else. According to him, he hated me too. He specifically remembers an incident where the teacher had us draw stuff on the chalkboard and I made fun of his drawing. I don’t specifically remember this, but I believe him. He also tells me that he remembers using a Quija board with one of his friends and he asked it who he was going to marry and it said me. That’s freaky thing #1. (You better keep tally, they add up) My mom decided to transfer me from that school a few years later because it wasn’t challenging me enough. So I left that school at the end of fourth grade and started a new one in fifth grade. Yay, I got to be the new, fat girl...again. Husband left the school in fifth grade and went to a new school in the sixth grade. Very odd thing (freaky thing #2) about the new schools we both went to was that they were considered sister schools and often went on outings together. I never saw him at an outing but he swears we experienced the same things.

**Side note about the 1-year age difference. He was double promoted in grade school. When I went to the school in 2nd grade he was in 1st grade. He totally skipped 2nd grade and was in my class for 3rd grade. He is a super smart guy and that’s just another thing I love about him.**

So now we fast-forward a few years to high school…in 7th and 8th grade, I swore up and down and was very much looking forward to attending a high school not too far from where I lived, we’ll call this place C. I had big plans for myself at C. I had gone to all the orientations and get-to-know you stuff. I was going to get involved in the performing arts program they had there (the perfect thing to get involved in as I’m not a very creative person-I figured it could help fan any creative spark I may have). I was ready to go. Do not ask me what happened, because I, myself, do not know what happened. I swear it was like the movie “The Butterfly Effect” like I had a blackout moment and don’t know where the decision to change high schools came from. I wind up going to a completely different high school and it was way far from my house (freaky thing #3). As a side note, this high school was also far from husband’s house too, he was also supposed to go to a different school.

Since we were both relatively smart people, we both wind up in these high honors courses. Not just honors courses, we were in high honors courses, yes we were both super nerds. We are informed that there is only one high honors course for the whole school. So here we are, this group of 30 kids that will probably be together until we graduate. Some were lost and added along the way, but there were about 23 consistently there. Husband and I were among the core 23. Our first meeting was in study hall where I keenly observed and said to him “hey, you used to go to ___ school,” to which he replied “yeah.” He was really verbose (note the sarcasm). That was about all we said to each other during freshmen and sophomore year. He hung around with a completely different group of people. So, junior year comes around and we, of course, have chemistry class together (it’s ironic isn’t it, that we would have chemistry class together and that’s where our romance begins). I start talking to him and realize that he’s a really nice guy and he starts counseling me on my love life. At the time, I was dating a guy that wasn’t good for me. He was physically abusive and when you have the fat girl mentality you think any attention is better than no attention at all. So along comes husband, who is nice and listens and actually cares enough about me to tell me that this guy is no good. So I start to develop feelings for him. This happens during the early part of junior year. So over the course of that year, my feelings deepen and I started flirting. Of course, husband is a thick as a brick and doesn’t read the signals. It takes all junior year and we don’t officially start dating until July.

So things go along well for a few months and I decide, don’t ask where I get this from, that I want to lose my virginity soon. Of course I don’t say anything to husband about it, I expect him to be like any typical teenage boy and be all over it when we start dating. Well he decides that he wants to take things slow as he’s already ruined a relationship because he took things too quickly. I want none of that and immediately break up with him. I turn in to semi-slut, I lost my virginity to some guy at a party when both he and I were in a drunken stupor. In the light of day, I realize that he is a 28, ex-navy loser who still lives at home. Oh if I’d only had that 20/20 vision before. So here I am, a big, stupid idiot who broke things off with a genuinely nice guy and now what. Husband would not speak to me. He hated me and did everything he could to get his seating assignments changed. It was a hard thing because I, of course, wanted to be friends. He wasn’t having any of it. Finally I broke down, I went to a teacher that we both respected and that we had a class with that year and asked for his intervention. I will forever be grateful to Mr. Palmer. He’d known the both of us since we were wee freshmen and he was one of the 2 teachers that actually challenged and engaged us as a class. So Mr. Palmer is the one that talked some sense in to husband. In December of senior year, we finally got back together and all has been right with the world ever since.

I love my husband and can’t imagine my life without him. He truly is my best friend. We’ve shared everything together and now I have my blog. I almost feel as though I’m cheating on him.

I have a feeling that one day the cat will be out of the bag and my blog will be discovered. I only hope he takes it in stride. I also hope that MIL doesn't find the blog because we never told her the reason why I broke up with him. God help me if she does, cuz I will sure have some explaining to do.

Hope I didn’t bore you all to death. It’s just another piece of me that you now know.

You like me, you really really like me

Sorry for the bad quote above, I just never knew how cool it could be to have people comment and such. I've now become a commenter on other people's blogs, you know the ones that I've been reading for months now. I feel like a member of the community. So I'd like to say thanks for commenting, I really like it. And thanks for the support too. This campfire thing is where it's at, thanks Mare. I just wanted to drop a quick line to let all you posters know that I read your comments and really appreciate them. Keep them coming.

I'll post a real entry later today about the dinner I had with my mom to talk about all this infertility stuff. You thought yesterday's post was long, wait till you see this one. For now, I will bask in the glow of being discovered.

It's been too long...

Sorry it’s been so long my lovelies. You’ll all be happy to know that my body has stopped some of its revolt. I finally started spotting on Saturday. So at least the cycle has started. You’ll also be happy to know that my husband finally persuaded himself that we need to do something about the situation and that just waiting for it to happen naturally wasn’t getting us anywhere.

So I have to give a little background here. We were about to pursue treatments in June ‘04, we saw the RE, were going to go clomid and IUI for the next cycle. Lo and behold I was pregnant at the time we were making these arrangements. So fast forward to August, I had a couple spotting episodes and with each one ran to the OB/GYN as fast as I could for an ultrasound. The first ultrasound was early and everything looked OK. The last ultrasound was when we got the dreaded news that there was no heartbeat but the baby measured 8 weeks and I was at 8 weeks and 4 days. So the baby died just a few days before. It was devastating. I have no other words than that.

So September rolls around and I have my first post-m/c cycle. Everything appears to be going normally. I need to preface this “normally” by saying that I hadn’t had a normal cycle since I started metformin in January ‘04. So I thought I was getting back on track. Little was I aware of the revolt my body was planning. In December, my cycle was MIA for 60 days. I decided to take the provera I had laying around from my pre-metformin days so I could finally start the next cycle. Here comes the *confession* that I promised you lovelies from my last post. I got to be my own doctor for the months that followed. I had clomid lying around too and decided that I was going to make my body behave as it should and I naively thought the clomid would do this.

How on earth does my body know that I don’t have an MD from Harvard hanging from the wall of my perfectly decorated study? Huh? So I took the clomid and was excited when I got a positive OPK, my monitor was reading peak, and my bbt did exactly as it should all at the right time. I thought great at least I was able to accomplish that feat. My lp (luteal phase, for those of you not in the know) was 13-14 days pre-m/c so I assumed it would be the same on clomid and certainly not longer than the 18 days that FF (fertility friend) swears by. I start testing like a mad woman at 12 DPO (days post ovulation) and everything is negative. I finally slap and shake myself and say get a hold of yourself man. My period was 1 week overdue and I finally started the next cycle at 22 DPO. Just when you thought it couldn’t get any worse I took clomid the next month too. I wanted to prove to my body that I am a good doctor and know what I’m doing. So what if my Harvard degree was purchased on the internet and says that my name is Dave Thomas (founder of Wendy’s you know) and is not hanging in a perfectly decorated study but on the wall in my head. [You’ll soon learn about me, if you don’t already know, I go off on tangents, tirades, etc. on a whim. You’ll either love them or hate them.] So where was I, oh yes, I was talking about my latest Dr. Thomas prescribed cycle. I wound up going all the way till 29 DPO with this last one. So, to save my sanity, I’ve decided no more clomid. My husband was actually quite um…upset, no, disappointed, no, worried, a little, didn’t want me to do it was his general attitude. He thought I was insane to be taking these meds without doctor’s orders. I tried to explain to him that at one time they were given under doctor’s orders and that I thought that this was what the doctors would be doing anyway. He thought I should stop being Dr. Thomas and quit consulting with my best friend and colleague Dr. Google. But how, my friends, can you stop trying when you seemingly have everything at your fingertips and your husband wants to wait to seek professional help (an RE not a psychiatrist-although I may need one of those soon too).

I’ve now explained my last 2 cycles and why I need to take my Harvard MD off the wall in my head but let me explain the part where we wanted to wait to seek professional help. It wasn’t so much that WE wanted to wait it was that HE wanted to wait. I was on board with him on the thought till my body pulled it’s latest and decided to revolt. I was all for waiting and trying again “naturally” but my body had different ideas. Our thought was that if we did it once naturally we can do it again. We’re not sure what caused the m/c. It could’ve been my hormone imbalance meaning not enough progesterone to sustain things. God the guilt I’ve felt over that one. Or if it was chromosomal, it could’ve been his misshapen puppies. We know he has some. As my little intro says we have slight male factor. His numbers are slightly under the 20 million/mL that they like to see (analysis #1-19 million/mL, analysis #2-11 million/mL) and his morphology was low but I don’t remember if it was on the low side of normal or the high side of less than normal. Whatever the case, there’s nothing that can be done about it now. I’d even attempted to have recent discussion with him about wanting to see someone now and me being sick of waiting. I finally had it and said we are seeing someone in June if nothing happens before then. He agreed and became more comfortable with it as time went on.

So now we fast-forward to 2 weeks ago, my friend, who I lost touch with due to all this infertility crap (you know how it is, you isolate yourself and stop returning phone calls, etc), and her boyfriend and me and husband get together for lunch. Before getting together she and I have a nice re-connection and I explain to her about the fertility and the PCOS etc. She is going to school to be a doctor of physical therapy so she’s researching and stuff. She says she wants to help me with my condition and to do everything she can. She really is a good friend and I really missed her friendship. I know I’ve given you a lot of background here but I promise it’ll be worth it. When we get together for lunch, she has a gift for me. In the bag is the book “What to do when the doctor says its PCOS.” This was after I told her that I’d really done all the research and pretty much any book is gonna tell me all that I already know. Of course I said that before she gave me the book, I may be infertile, but I’m not a complete ass. So I feel really bad about it and profusely say thanks. So I’m in the middle of reading other books and that one is next on my pile. So I read the first few pages and haven’t had a chance to look at it since. In the meantime, husband picks up the book and reads the table of contents and flips to what he calls the meat of the book. He then comes to the realization that we’ve been waiting far too long and we really need to do something about this now. It was like one of those moments you see on TV or at the movies, the heavens opened up and the light shone down and the angles started singing halleluiah. At that moment I was the happiest woman in the world.

See, I told you there was a point. So the short of it is that we have an appt. with the same RE we saw the first time back in June ‘04 on May 4 at 11:30, that’s 19 days away. I can’t wait. Husband mostly agreed to it if we go back and tell him how it is, meaning we go in there and tell him that we want me fixed and we don’t want to jump on the IUI track right away. If he says no, we’re gonna do an IUI then we will go elsewhere. So, for now, I’m being optimistic and hoping that he’ll say that we can work on fixing me.

So that’s all for now, I think it’s an overdose too but there are gonna be times when there’s not much at all so these long posts make up for it.

Hope all is well in the infertile kingdom.

Hope you didn't miss me

I just wrote a huge post complete with links and confessions and Blogger ate it. Is this some sort of blogging hazing that I just went through. Is this supposed to teach me to start a post in MS Word and then copy and paste to here. I think so. I'm packing up here so I guess I get to re-create today's post tomorrow.

Will you, my adoring fans, still be here tomorrow? I hope so, you don't want to miss my confession do you?

I have arrived!

I am officially part of the blogging world. I've been trying for a week or so now to get my blog situated on Bloglines but it wasn't working. For whatever reason I couldn't publish the blog. So here I am. I've joined the Blogger family.

As you can see from the title, I am yet another infertility blog. I've been lurking on several infertility blogs for about 6 months now and I just love them and have become an addict. What better way to feed an addiction than by starting your own blog. Here are some excerpts from my first post about why I wanted to start a blog to begin with...

1.) I've been reading the blogs of other wonderful, infertile women and I thought, hey I could do this.

2.) The older I get, the more self-centered I become and I thought the perfect way to display my new found self-centeredness would be to create a place all about me.

3.) To keep a wonderful marriage. I am a pessimist by nature (I've noticed that's a trend among the blogs I read, I wonder if it's because we deal with infertility or because we're bloggers) and my husband is in the "just relax" group and as we all know, relaxing gets us no where. So I figure if I can be my true pessimistic self here then maybe I can save him from some of my pessimism drive-bys. We'll learn more about him as we go along.

4.) I need a hobby. I've never been one for hobbies or sports or anything like that. I know it's a waste of a brain but my hobby for the past 2 1/2 years has been trying to get myself knocked up. So I'm starting this blog just for me.

Can't really think of any other reasons right now. I'm a bit nervous and the more I type the more courage I work up to actually publish this. I'm now trying to think of a fitting, witty title. As you'll learn, I'm not a very snarky, witty gal but I want to be when I grow up.

I'm sure we'll learn all about each other as time goes on. Can't wait.