The Eternal Guest Room

Hello to everyone who is here from ICLW! This is my second time to participate and not a whole lot has happened since the last one.

To summarize as briefly as possible:

We’ve been TTC for almost 3 1/2 years. Had a varicocele repair, a polypectomy, and a diagnosis that everything was ok after that. We’ve done 3 IUIs and are about to start another round.

At this point I’m almost just tired of the whole thing: talking about it, thinking about it, being poked, going through treatment, waiting…

Lately I’m not feeling very hopeful, and I’m tired.

We’re giving it another shot though, because for some reason there’s still a little bit of hope somewhere deep in there, and we’re not ready to quit yet.

I’m afraid to do another IUI. I’m afraid it will fail again.

Everything was perfect last time. There was no “oh well the numbers weren’t that great” or “I think the timing may have been off.” There was no reason for it not to work, except that it’s a crapshoot. Everything could be perfect and still not be successful, while crack addicts on birth control with one drunken night can still conceive.

We’ve tried just about everything. With the last IUI we tried Hope and Positive Thinking. We talked as if it had worked, hoping that would help make it work. It didn’t. In the past we’ve taken the “cautiously optimistic” route with the same outcome.

We saved and set aside money specifically for the past IUIs but did not for the next one (an accidental oversight, albeit a big one). I’m watching our savings account drain away.

People say “it’s not about the money” and “don’t think about how much it costs, it’ll be worth it in the end” but how can we not think about the cost? I’m afraid to sit down and add it up but I’m pretty sure we’ve come close to spending $10,000 all together (including surgeries) with no baby to show for it. I have these panicky fears sometimes – how are we supposed to afford raising a kid when we spent all our money just to have one? I tell myself that it’ll work out, that people make it work with less income and less financial stability, but it weighs me down sometimes.

At this point it just feels like we’re throwing money down the drain.

I tell myself that it’s a matter of time – fertile people sometimes take months to get pregnant, that’s just the way it is when “normal” people only have about a 20% chance every month. But I have this nagging fear that it will all be for nothing.

I was ready for the last IUI, but I’m on the fence about whether I’m ready for the next one yet. The pain and disappointment of the last failure are still so vivid. When it failed I was completely emotionally drained, and I haven’t filled back up to normal yet.

I guess I’m mainly just afraid to put so much hope, emotion, time, energy, and money into something that I can’t see really happening right now.

I wish I had a crystal ball. I wish I knew how this would end.

If I knew what the future held, I could deal with whatever I needed to deal with. If I knew for sure that we would have kids someday, I could wait patiently and enjoy the time we have together, just the two of us. I treasure our first few years of marriage when it was just the two of us. I hear about newlyweds getting pregnant and I don’t envy them. I do envy how easy it is for them – that something that seems so simple actually is – but I wouldn’t want to be in their shoes. I’m angry at the injustice of it but it’s not a path I would have chosen, personally.

In grief and tragedy there comes a time when you need closure, so you can move on. If I knew that the answer was “never,” I could find a way to start the process of coming to terms with that.

It’s so easy for other people to say “I know this will happen for you.”

But of course in life there are no guarantees.

People seem to think adoption holds guarantees – but it doesn’t. It’s a complex process and adoptions fall through every day. Someone recently told me about a co-worker who was about to adopt, but then the birth mother changed her mind. The would-be adoptive father said that receiving the phone call with the news was like getting a call about a death in the family.

I recently heard about a girl who finally gave birth after 5 IUIs – only to have her baby die after 2 weeks on this earth.

People who don’t have any issues with infertility get that positive test and expect to have a baby in 9 months – but people who struggle for years know that 2 pink lines doesn’t necessarily equal a “take-home baby.”

Obviously it’s just a part of life, that we don’t know what the future holds, but this is such a biggie.

I am quite honestly running out of hope.

Sometimes it feels like there’s this big club that we’re just not invited to. Even though I know it’s not true, it honestly feels like everyone else has children.

Several months ago I ran into my next-door neighbor only to get a surprise announcement and hear her bemoaning the poor timing of #3. Shortly after that I walked outside to see two yard signs in the diagonal neighbors’ yard: one said “It’s a girl” and the other “It’s a boy.” I met the across-the-street neighbors sometime later and the subject of kids came up. After telling her that we’d been in the process of trying for several years, she of course felt the need to tell me that their son had been conceived in the first month of trying.

It’s like an endless assault.

The neighbors congregate and chat on the sidewalk and I have no reason to join them. I’ve tried in the past but I’m out of place without kids running around. We have nothing in common.

In the past 24 hours I’ve gotten 2 emails from the church list telling me that yet another happy couple has had their wonderful, perfect, healthy baby. I can’t bring myself to go to church; it’s too devastating and isolating. Over the years I’ve felt more and more that the church (in general) is 100% focused on families and the rest of us are left out in the cold.

I’m surrounded by people with kids, people who don’t want kids, and people who plan on having kids someday.

I feel broken in the midst of them.

Not only do I feel shut out of the “moms’ club”, I feel like I’m losing touch with the “girls’ club” as well. It’s this basic, given thing, having children. You decide you want it or you don’t. And either choice is fine.  But I’ve lost the ability to make that decision, and I don’t fit in on either side, and the gap is enormous in my heart.

I feel most alone when I’m in a group. But after removing myself from almost every group situation, I don’t feel any less alone. I don’t know what to do.

Just a quick update as S rests up (she’s eating ice cream and watching Wheel Of Fortune).

The IUI happened without a hitch as usual, but there was a big difference this go around.  My numbers were immensely improved.  The number that sums it up is the Total Motile Sperm (say that five times fast – it’ll be the most fun you have all day).  The number to shoot for there is 10.  Our first IUI, mine was 4.62… not sure why we still did that IUI.  Our second, 7.70… should be good enough.  This time, 17.64.  I’m all man.

Another impressive number is the count itself.  The number to shoot for is 20 million/milliliter.  First IUI was 10.8.  Second was 20.5.  Today’s was 51.  I don’t think I have male infertility any more.

My numbers plus S’s lining and two good follicles point to chances being good.

As many of you know, I’m into the comedic arts.  So before S gets pregnant, I want to share a video from one of my favorite comedy folk duos, Pregnant Women are Smug by Garfunkel & Oats:

I recently came across something that I wanted to share. Sometimes it’s hard to put everything very succinctly myself, so it’s nice to find things already put together that say what I feel. It does a good job of summarizing what we go through with this stuff.

And the pictures are pretty.

http://www.tearsandhope.com/emptyarms_video.html

I’ve had several people comment on my honesty and openness on this blog.

But I don’t feel that I’ve been all that honest, honestly.

There’s a lot I haven’t said. I haven’t really told anyone how I really feel in my darkest moments. Or anywhere close.

I haven’t told anyone how angry I’ve been. I haven’t admitted a lot of the thoughts I’ve had. There’s a lot I’ll only say to a therapist, or to Darek, or just to myself. If half of the people I know didn’t read this, I’d probably be a lot more honest. But I don’t even know who reads this stuff, so I self-censor quite a bit. I worry that people might treat me differently or think less of me, knowing about all these raw, yucky emotions I have.

I haven’t been totally honest about a lot of my feelings. I’m not sure if anyone wants to hear those anyway.

Lately I feel like we’ve given up hope completely. Yes, we’re planning on doing IUI(s), and yes that might work, but it might not. It’s been a long time with no major problems and it hasn’t happened; we know it may never happen. It’s a reality that we face that I don’t think most people really grasp. Darek used to say all the time “It will happen…” but he doesn’t say it anymore. We used to talk about how it would be to have a kid. We used to make tentative plans. We don’t really do that anymore.

It feels so distant and unattainable. I measure our failures in other peoples’ successes; how can other peoples’ kids be turning 2 months or 2 years when we started trying long before them?

Lately I feel like this will be our reality forever.

It’s just so hard to imagine it any other way.

If this whole thing wasn’t so emotionally draining, I would laugh.

We first saw the RE in September, and we planned to do up to 3 IUIs before the end of 2009.

2010 is nearly halfway over, and we’ve been able to do ONE. (I don’t really count the one we did when I had the polyp.) That’s one realistically possible IUI in 9 months. Now that’s some sobering math.

Cysts, thin lining, and surgery all got their delays in. And then something went weird and put all of the potential IUI days on days when we are going to be out of town.

Our trip to Hawaii knocked one out. A trip to Seattle next month will knock out another one. And the current one is being cancelled because I’ll be out of town for my sister’s wedding.

What??

It’s almost funny – except that it’s not.

The decision to skip this month’s IUI for my sister’s wedding was not an easy one. Ultimately though, it was just too much, and that’s not the way I want to spend the week of my sister’s special day.

So we continue to wait.

This year will be over before we know it.

This has been going on for a long, long time. It’s just been awful. We know we can’t go through this forever – at some point, one way or another, it has to end.

We’ve made some decisions about how far we’re willing to go.

This will be our last year to try to have a child. We can’t take the heartbreak and monthly devastation for much longer. At some point we need to move forward – and we’ve decided it will be at the end of this year.

In the meantime we’re willing to try as many IUIs as our doctor thinks is worth trying. Our doctor doesn’t keep trying something that isn’t working, so there will be a definite limit on these – though I’m not sure exactly what that is yet.

 Our next IUI will be different than the previous 2, which were a combination of clomid (a pill) and FSH injections (shots). Our next IUI will be full injectibles – a week of shots, and no clomid. Any following IUIs will have a similar protocol.

Over the last few months, the terrifying letters I, V, and F have been creeping into our conversations. I’ve always said that I wouldn’t be open to IVF – it’s something like $12,000 with just a 50% success rate. I felt I couldn’t handle the disappointment if it failed.

But we’ve made a decision about that too: we’d be willing to try up to 2 rounds of IVF if it came to that. At this point, we feel that to come this far and not try everything we can would be a bigger disappointment and a potential lifetime of asking “What if?”

Of course, there’d be a lot of details to work out to do IVF – primarily funding – but if it ends up being an option, we’ll be open to it.

The decision for this to be our last year was made awhile ago; the fact that today is June 1 and the year is half over is a bit depressing, since we’ve only been able to try one IUI this year. But we needed a deadline, and we need to stick to it, for sanity reasons.

At the end of the year, if we aren’t expecting our own child, we’ll be moving on. I’m not sure exactly what that will entail, but we’ll be on a different path than we are now.

None of these decisions have been easy, and we still potentially have a lot of hard decisions ahead of us. But there is something about having a plan that is better than the uncertainty of not having any plan. Closure, perhaps. Being able to deal with things, instead of facing a complete lack of control.

So that’s the plan.

We’ve been away.

We just got back from a week in Hawaii and it was wonderful. I barely thought about IF or TTC or BBT or OPKs or IUIs or anything else along those lines.

It was nice to get away.

We’re back now and I plan to give an update on where we are with stuff very soon, but first I have about a million things I need to do.