E is struggling a bit. And that makes me want to kill someone. I will start by punching our Doctor in the face if this doesn't work.
She has few indications that she's pregnant. No boob soreness. Aside from a few waves over the weekend, no nausea to speak of. Still some cramping low down in her abdomen...but that's a classic progesterone side-effect.
She cried this morning. I will punch him in the face.
What makes IVF so vicious is the sheer amount of information one has in one's clutches. It is a strange circumstance to be utterly powerless with so much information at hand.
Watch me obsessively pick apart the minutia:
We know how many embryos. (3)
We know their quality. (A+, A, A)
We know how many cells they consisted of. (9, 8, 8)
We know what she felt last time. (Not much. Some pulling and pinching on her left side)
We know what she felt the time she was pregnant. (Very painful boobs starting between 5 and 7 days past ovulation.)
We know my egg quality. (Normal FSH but thick zona pellucida - or "shell" - for my age)
But we also know they have a way of breaking free. (We did assisted hatching)
We also know we have none frozen. Zero. All but one arrested prior to blastocyst stage. The one that made it looked "abnormal."
I feel like we're already staring down the barrel of IVF #3.
We're 28 and 31. What. In. The. Fuck.
I pushed off starting for years because I thought it would happen instantaneously. I had no doubt. The stars have aligned for us over and over throughout our relationship. Fertility abounds in E's family. She has those sick child bearing hips. She'd be an elvin princess wood nymph mama. It was all there in the cards.
So I pushed it off. Pleaded with E to wait. And wait she did. It was rough for a minute but then we were happy. We had such good years before this shit.
But O, how little I knew. From the very beginning we stumbled.
Known donor said no...high FSH (fuck, did I make us wait too long?)...negative test after negative test...IV assing F...my donated eggs funkdified.
Our 40 year old friends have lapped us.
And I sit here thinking to myself: this is our life now. We just do this. At least it has made me confront my ambivalence about procreating. But there are - honest to god - times when I have to remind myself this isn't a damned competition. What we're working for is a human, not a positive. It's hard, though, when your love is a mess, a wreck, a broken little shell of herself because she wants the one fucking thing that you can't give her.
Taking years out of our young lives for this feels all wrong.
I feel ancient. And I feel like we've just begun.
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4 comments:
I'm there with you guys. It's not right that people who want children so much, who are willing to sacrifice so much to have them, have it so damn hard. It's not fair that our bodies betray us when we're so young. I'm hoping hard for you.
You write it like I feel it. Thank you. You are not alone.
First, I want to say that S's two pregnancies felt totally different, in the early days (before testing) and even now. Totally different. I still have tons of hope for you both. But seriously, it is TOTALLY insane that two young women are going to such great fucking lengths, which such heartbreaking roadblocks, the entire time. Fuck. Fuck that.
Sending you hugs. This is such a hard part of the process
xxx
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