Monday Morning was Almost a Relief

Hey, how was your weekend? Good? Glad to hear it. What did I do? Oh, well, I cried. I oscillated between sobbing → weeping → choking for breath → welling up during an otherwise normal conversation → doing the "ugly cry" → screaming into a pillow → sniffling behind my sunglasses in public → curling up in the fetal position on the floor. (Oh, but I did watch Downton Abbey.) I am literally hoarse today and have a sore nose from all the crying. I also got about 10 hours of sleep total between Friday night and Monday morning, because I just couldn’t stop my brain from obsessing – it finally took two antihistamines and a dramamine to knock me out at 4 AM on Saturday.

This whole “we only plan on relieving 80% of your pain during egg retrieval” thing has just opened up the floodgates on my emotions relating to IVF, and none of them are good. Let’s try to break them down one by one, just like we did with the takeout bag of medications:

1. Anger.
I don’t know why this is missing from so many of my fellow IVFers’ blogs. Aren’t you angry that you have to do this? Am I really the only one who feels this way? I titled my blog the Reluctant Infertile, but what I should have written was the F*cking Furious Infertile. I wish I could say that although my diagnosis was intially upsetting, I managed to come to terms with it and now have a positive attitude towards treatment, but this is just not true. A terrible thing has happened, and what I want to hear from my doctor is that he will do everything in his power to help me and make me as comfortable as possible, not “this is what we offer and if you don’t like it you’ll just need to find another doctor and pay out of pocket.” Why don’t I deserve 100% pain relief during surgery, huh? Why are you subjecting me to anything more than the bare minimum?

2. Self-Loathing.
You know, I probably do deserve this. I’m sure I’ve done something to cause my infertility and I don’t know why they’re bothering to relieve my pain at all. And Harry? Harry shouldn’t be part of this process at all. Harry is fine and fertile and he would be so much better off if I were just out of his life entirely. He could find someone else and be happy and procreate naturally and never have to wake up in the middle of the night to find his wife doubled over next to him in bed trying to sob as silently as possible because she can’t perform the most basic function of making another human.

3. Fear.
One unpleasant surprise from Friday’s scan is that although my ovaries are resting just fine under the influence of the leuprolide acetate, the endometriomas that caused this problem in the first place have already recurred. The one on my left ovary is actually big enough that it’s borderline whether I can go through an IVF cycle at all, and although my RE wants to proceed with this one because, he says, “we just can’t keep doing more surgeries on you,” my plan of doing one cycle and then taking off a few months to assess my options if it’s unsuccessful has gone out the window. At one point I thought there might be some light at the end of the tunnel – come Feb. 1, if I’m not pregnant, I’ll hopefully have some frozen embryos in the bank and I’ll be able to take a break from the crushing depression of infertility for a few months while we gear up for another cycle. Now it looks more like an unsuccessful cycle will end with another, more aggressive surgery, or a round of more aggressive hormone therapy, and both options are just so unpleasant to contemplate it's ridiculous.

Conspicuously missing from this list, you may notice, is any mention of excitement that the cycle might actually be successful and I might get pregnant at the end of it. Yeah. For a few weeks there I was reading stories about people’s joy when they discovered they were expecting, and thinking that this whole baby thing was pretty great, but I’m just so upset right now I can’t see straight. Oh, and in case you were wondering about my last post, the official word is that Harry is not allowed in the room during my egg retrieval. And because of the way my insurance coverage is structured, this is the only clinic that they will reimburse for my IVF expenses – remember when I said that I had a very generous four cycles covered? There’s a catch, and this is it. I have until Friday to figure out some kind of plan.