Waiting; or, X dpIUI

This will be a quick post. Not much to report here. The waiting continues, but fortunately, the writing continues, too. The studying doesn't continue quite as swimmingly, but I aim to change that today.

Lawyer Guy and I kept busy this weekend. On Friday, I had dinner and drinks at Eataly (Mario Batali's awesome new food hall near the Flatiron Building) with a friend. A few too many drinks, if I'm being honest, but we all have our little lapses. On Saturday LG and I saw The King's Speech, which we loved. On Sunday we met the BIL and SIL and their kids for brunch in New Jersey and then came home and cooked dinner together and watched the Golden Globes.

And throughout, I've been peeing on sticks, which is definitely not how I usually spend the two-week-wait. But the four (now two) hpts remaining from the stash I ordered back in March '09 are set to expire next month. I hate wastefulness. I also hate seeing BFNs. Testing the trigger out seemed like the perfect solution to this problem. I've been taking a test every two days and the line is fading steadily. I've got two tests left and I imagine it will have disappeared by the time I take the last one. Conversely, LG might take the last test for us to use as a control in the future.

Perhaps some of my more experienced pee-sticking friends can offer some advice. In the past, I have always PIAC before testing, as that seemed to allow for the highest level of control and accuracy. But now that the results really don't matter, I've just been holding the stick directly in the urine stream for a count of three. And it is getting SOAKED. The entire testing window is suffused with liquid, though when it dries the test looks normal. Am I doing this wrong? Holding it too long? At the wrong angle? I'll go back to P-ing IAC if I ever take another test with a legitimate shot at being a BFP, but I'd still like to know what I'm doing wrong here.

I'm not tracking how many days post-IUI we are. I haven't tried to calculate an EDD. Sometimes I feel certain that I'm pregnant (that I just have to be pregnant), and most of the time I'm certain that I'm not. I feel content when I consider either possibility until the thought of moving on to injects or IVF intrudes. I'm not sure that I'm ready for next steps yet. I've just gotten used to this one. But I'm also sure that whatever happens this month, I'm equipped to deal with it.

Tea and Sympathy; or, the Next Two Weeks

Lawyer Guy and I had breakfast this morning at Le Pain Quotidien, in what is becoming a while-they-mix-the-magic-sauce-up tradition. He's always very relieved when his contribution is over, so it's a nice time to check in with each other and decompress a little. We talked today about what might come next and about how we've both been coping with it all. Then as we were finishing, he said, "This is going to work. This is going to be the one that works."

As he said the words, I realized how much I wanted to hear them. This is strange because I never say those words, not even to myself, not even in the quiet spaces of my head or while I'm walking alone through the snowy city streets. I try even to avoid "If this works" constructions and focus instead on everything we will try next month or the month after when this avenue fails for us, too.

But perhaps I'm not afraid of hope so much as I'm afraid of being hopeful. And if someone else is willing to carry that burden of hopefulness for me, I'm willing to partake of some vicarious optimism.

The procedure went well. The nurse was super fast, which made it all much more bearable. LG's sample was again quite good: 77 million and 87% motility post-wash. I didn't have another ultrasound after my disappointing one on Tuesday so I don't know how things were going ute-wise at insemination time, but I've been chugging red raspberry leaf tea by the barrel-full the last few days. I'm hoping that the lining has plumped up closer to 10mm. I'm hoping that the 13mmer follie took some steroids and swelled up like Barry Bonds before it popped. I hope I have two potentials this month, but I'm trying to be okay with only one.

I'm drinking a two-bag cup of tea right now, since it's the last day I'll let myself drink any before giving it up in the two-week wait. My yogi brand tea bags inform me that "Whatever character you give your children shall be their future" and "Happiness comes when you overcome the most impossible challenge." My impossible challenge for the next two weeks is to center my mind on writing and studying and all the dreams that are at least partially in my control. I'm sure that happiness will come when we overcome the most impossible of our challenges and that perfect happiness (or the closest thing to it) isn't achievable until that challenge is met. Still, I'm going to give this not-perfect happiness thing a try in the meantime.

More Dispatches from the Clomid Train; or, My Underachieving Ovaries and Me

After getting my follie-centered hopes up at Sunday's appointment, today's was a rough fall back to earth. I've got two follies on my left ovary (a 17mmer and a 13mmer) but I suspect that only the larger one is in play. There's nothing but a giant cyst on my right ovary which the doctor said has apparently been there a long time-- in fact, I think the same doctor noticed this cyst back during monitoring in November. And my lining blows. It's at an impressively awful 5.9.

I have to go back tomorrow morning for my trigger shot in the middle of a blizzard. No way I can drive, so I'll have to hope the subways are running. IUI will follow on Thursday.

I admit, I'm bummed. I thought 150 mg of Clomid would get us a number of follies to write home about. I'm not sure why, but my ovaries appear to absolutely hate this drug. At least I'll never have to take it again after this cycle. I'm sick of the headaches and the emotional turmoil and the thin-ass lining. Gonal-f has to be better, it just has to.

I've been telling myself I'm detached from this cycle. I've been convincing myself that I'm focused on my orals studying and my novel writing and that babies can take a mental backseat for the next six or so months. I'm disappointed enough today to suspect that none of that is true. But I am going to try very hard the next few weeks to focus on other, more fulfilling parts of my life than this one. And I'm going to try to forget about the tough conversations we'll be having with Dr. W next week if IUI #3 doesn't work.

Full Psycho; or, Weekends With Crazy

People, this past weekend was seriously intense.

For starters, I think I finally learned firsthand about the Clomid Crazies. All week, I'd been feeling so cheerful and optimistic and pumped about getting back into writing and taking pleasure in crafting stories again. And suddenly, out of nowhere, I was overwhelmed with anxiety. Friday morning, I finished a book I really, really liked by a relatively new author and was filled with this strange mixture of self-loathing shame and reckless ambition. I careened between hating myself for even thinking I should write when I would never compare to this author and spurring myself on to write more and more frequently because her book was such an inspiration.

I even e-mailed the author to let her know how in awe I am of her talent and (as her bio mentioned she is also a doctoral student as well as a writer) to ask her for some time-management tips. (And she wrote back the loveliest, kindest, and most helpful e-mail the next day, so now I adore/hate her even more!)

And from there, my mental state just fell off a cliff. For the rest of the day, I was either sitting on the kitchen floor sobbing about my lack of talent, my idiotic self-sabotage of my writing career, and my total worthlessness as a human being or I was running around the apartment, pulling out old manuscripts and books on writing and frantically e-mailing everyone I ever knew who could help me with my career (i.e., "Hi editor at prominent publishing house who offered to take a look at my book two years ago when we chatted at an industry event. Remember me? No? Wanna read my book anyway? I'm finally ready to stop being a chicken-shit and send it to you!")

My emotions were utterly out of my control. Lawyer Guy and I had plans for dinner and a movie that night, but as I spent most of dinner fighting tears, he begged that we just go home afterward. I could not understand why I was feeling and acting this way when only a few days before I'd been suffused with a calm and steady sort of ambition and a willingness to take each step as it came.

Then I remembered: Clomid. I was bumped up to 150 mg this cycle. I had no anxiety on it before, but this utterly manic and uncontrolled behavior is so not like me, I have to believe it stems from the drug (the anxiety is all too familiar, unfortunately). Once I realized that, my panic subsided a bit. I no longer felt like I was a victim of my emotions, and things have been better since.

I'm still writing and still feeling hopeful about my writing (when I'm not feeling worthless, as I mentioned before, but I think that's the inevitable pendulum for any sort of artistic endeavor). My long-term critique partner and I had a phone chat on Saturday and agreed that we're both fully rededicated to the quest for publication. I've worked out a writing/academic research schedule that will take me to the end of the summer, at which point I'm hopeful I'll have both a dissertation prospectus ready for approval and some quality manuscripts I feel excited about shopping around. I wonder if I have any talent and if my work will ever live up to the books that exist in my head. But writing is the hardest and most miserable thing I have ever loved to do, so I don't have much of a choice. I can either half-heartedly write, not succeed, and always wonder what I could have done or go all out and fail spectacularly and, if I'm lucky, improve a little with each year and each book.

The rest of the weekend was calmer, if still emotionally strained. I wrote and finally finished my grading from last semester. LG and I had dinner at our friends' place where I drank just a little too much for the sake of my head at Sunday morning's 7 am monitoring appointment in Manhattan. I had a hot date with Wandy, who revealed some promising developments but nothing definitive yet, and then yesterday afternoon I went to a NYC-area blogger meet-up at the home of the hilarious Jay of The Two Week Wait. I got to meet Jay and The Infertility Doula and Lady Pumpkin along with another area blogger (who's an actual real-life friend of mine, so she and I don't read each other's blogs). All of the women were funny and lovely and we had a great brunch and a chat about all this crazy place we find ourselves in. I hope we can meet again!

So now I'm back to the familiar patience of cycling. The IUI will likely be this week, with more waiting to follow. But despite my emotional eruption on Friday, I've been feeling more calm about IUI#3 than any of the previous. It helps that I've got such thrilling and engrossing things to think about these days: I spent all my waiting time at the clinic yesterday working through a thorny plotting problem in one of the books I'm mentally figuring out right now. I hope I can spend the two-week wait similarly occupied, and that if this cycle ends in a failure like the others, I can cheer myself up with the thought of an extra month of writing time nine months in the future.