I’m now at the point of the IVF cycle where I wake up wanting to punch something. It’s like my PMS has PMS only it isn’t PMS it’s a shitload of injectable hormones coursing through my system making me super irritable. I can sense people fidgeting in other rooms and I WOULD LIKE THEM TO STOP RIGHT NOW.
You, with your leg bouncing up and down making that squeaky sound. JUST STOP.
And the clock in my bathroom, ticking. Is it always this loud? It’s all very Edgar Allan Poe.
Someone just honked. I hate that person.
And my dog with her breathing. Actually, she gets a pass.
My stomach just growled or gurgled and it was deafening.
OH THAT INFERNAL TICKING. I have half a mind to march in there and yank out that double AA.
The real kick in the pantaloons is I’m trying to stay calm and relaxed because I think everything works better if you’re calm and relaxed however yesterday my anxiety and frustration began ratcheting up and today it is off the charts.
And the thing with hormones is you can’t be SURE that’s why you’re feeling so easily agitated. Maybe everyone really is being a fucknut and clocks are ticking loudly and nothing’s going right and no one cares and everyone’s ignoring you and THINGS ARE SUPER FUCKED. Probably not, but maybe.
Yesterday I began crying at the fertility clinic and I’m kind of surprised it’s taken me this long to lose my composure there considering the nature of infertility and all the hormones and the clinic’s insistence on early morning appointments and my not being a morning person.
So I trudged in there with my very little buffer yesterday and found out that even though everything looked really promising this month (it varies monthly and if things don’t look promising they will make you come back the following month instead of trying to do a cycle of IVF on a month where it won’t be effective. This has happened to me repeatedly and sometimes it’s a relief because I feel like I need a break and sometimes I just feel disheartened and as if I’m losing time), and even though my labs were excellent, like better than they’ve ever been, and even though I’m now on day 7 of jamming needles full of drugs into my stomach, and even though I’ve been feeling so positive about this cycle and so in tune with my body in a way I never have before to the extent that I thought I’d turned a corner and worked through whatever was holding me back prior to now and here we go, now my body will respond to the medication like most women respond and I can be like everyone else who does IVF and finally I’ll produce a bunch of eggs, enough that they can sort through them and find the good ones and we can create a real family with more than one kid instead of me being this weird outlier who for whatever undetermined reason isn’t pushing out many eggs (one in five eggs are good however I’m producing fewer than 5 eggs a cycle which means the road ahead is long and hard) and isn’t really responding to the drugs, um, this sentence has turned into a word labyrinth and I can’t find my way out.
Or maybe it’s turned into a corn maze of words? I could go either way.
Anyway, I guess it’s kind of silly to think just modifying my lifestyle a bit (working out more, changing my diet, meditating, getting massages which is as close to acupuncture as I can get presently because it scares me) would change something so fundamental inside me. And yet I kind of got into a magical thinking trap.
I’ve seen people close to me do this: blame themselves when their physical ailments or illnesses don’t abate despite a lot of mental work. And it always breaks my heart because it’s like, life is already piling on and now you’re kicking yourself too?
But for the short time when I thought that somehow I’d righted this ship by trying to take control of my mood and thoughts and “energy” and all that, I felt so empowered. And to fall back into what is probably the truth: that it’s capricious and random and out of my control, feels more scary than liberating.
Aaaand I’m realizing I never finished my thought above which is that I found out yesterday that my right ovary is “sleeping,” meaning it isn’t responding to the medications. My left is producing a few eggs which is good and which means all hope for this cycle isn’t lost, I just thought I was clearing the finish line and instead I’m in the dugout. (That’s the correct sports metaphor, right? I AM JOKING.)
And I know I said my goal was to be not tethered to the outcome. To live my life and do everything I can to get pregnant but not to be so hung up on if it’s working because it’s out of my control and etc. But things were looking so good that I allowed myself to really get my hopes up even though I wasn’t aware at the time that’s what I was doing.
But really, if I’m being honest which I am, this is partly about having a baby and partly about feeling like a weirdo outlier like I suggested earlier. It’s about feeling like I’m running in a race with all these swift, able bodied people but I’m lame and misshapen and my body just isn’t working like it’s supposed to. And I realize there are a thousand judgments and distortions in that sentence but it’s kicking around my brain and probably napping on my sleeping ovary.
