Ladies and Gentleman, We Have Insemination; or, Blueballs and Wee-Wee Pads

Finally, I get a chance to discuss this morning's IUI with all of you, and the first thing I have to say is: Ow!

I mean really, why did none of you tell me how much that catheter hurts going in? Lawyer Guy said he could tell how surprised I was by the pain because I was talking and laughing with him and then all of a sudden my eyes bugged out like Bella's when the vet sticks a thermometer up her butt. That was not the most fun way to spend a morning, for sure. But I'm feeling okay now even after having to stay on my feet teaching for the rest of the day, and I'm sure these last few cramps will go away by tomorrow morning.

And the important thing is, I've got spermies all up in my ute! Good ones, too, I think. DH's count was 35 million and motility was 60%. We don't know the morph numbers, unfortunately (they weren't on the sheet), but I am not going to let that keep me from thinking POSITIVELY about those results. Positive, positive, positive.

Now that the procedure is done and everything went the way it was supposed to, I can tell you about those wrenches I alluded to yesterday. I didn't want to dwell on them when I was still worried about how truly wrenchy they might become, but with the benefit of hindsight they have gained in humorousness.

So yesterday post-monitoring, as I'm sitting outside the bloodwork area waiting to get my trigger shot, LG pulls me aside and tells me that he needs to confess something. Immediately I freeze, terrified about what he's going to say. He goes on to explain that:

In an agony of anxiety about having to produce his sample for the IUI, he started "priming the pump" several days before, hoping to build things up to such a state that finishing on demand on Tuesday would be easy. But he did too good a job and had to pull back on Saturday at the very last minute, leaving him in an agony of blueballs for the next three days. He said he couldn't sit, he could barely walk around, he was so uncomfortable he wanted to cry. He also confessed that he let out a teeny bit on Sunday to try to relieve the agony, which helped for a few hours but not as long as he thought it would. He was also terrified that he had ruined the sample by that moment of release.

It was tough. He kept berating himself, saying "This is all my fault. I fucked everything up," and I was both crying at the thought that he was going to have to relieve himself yesterday and not abstain long enough and laughing at the complete absurdity of the situation. I was glad that he told me about this (because he was acting super distant and weird for the days before and I didn't understand why), but we agreed not to talk about it too much for the rest of the night, so he could try to think about other things and I could avoid becoming insanely anxious.

Thankfully, after some hairy moments, he managed to keep it in his pants until we got to the clinic this morning, when he produced said excellent sample. Crisis averted, much laughter ensured.

In fact, I was laughing all over the place in what was probably a semi-hysterical reaction to the stress of it all. As we were waiting in the exam room for the insemination, LG reminded me that it is his brother's birthday and that I should send him an e-mail. I whipped out my blackberry to do so and just collapsed with the giggles. There is no freaking way I could e-mail my crazy brother-in-law while sitting skirt-less, tights-less, and panty-less in a hospital exam room waiting for a pair of nurses to snake a catheter through my whooha and inject me with my husband's pre-prepared, Pepto Bismal-pink sperm. No. Way.

So I laughed and laughed and kind of couldn't stop laughing and then started to cry and then started to laugh again and then the nurses came in and I held LG's hand while they did their thang.

And now comes the worst part. The waiting. It's all so strange: as much as I hope and pray that this was our lucky shot, I can't believe that it will be. Not only because we have not been first-time-lucky even once during this process (first month TTC: a bust; first pregnancy: a disaster), but also because that is not how babies are made. No one ever said making a baby would involve sitting on a Wee-Wee Pad while strange women poked sharp sticks at my cervix. It's just...it doesn't compute.

How the hell am I going to last the next two weeks?