Trauma, Recovery, and IVF

When I was sixteen, I went through a tough event at high school. I won't get into the details here except to say that it taught me one important life lesson. That lesson was that there is no cavalry coming. No one is going to save you. You are responsible for saving yourself. Bad things happen and even if you played no role in causing them, that doesn't matter. There won't always be justice and the people you trust to protect you won't or can't help you when you need them. As Blazing Saddles illustrates, son, you're on your own.

That traumatic event is connected to my recent departure from the blogosphere. (And let's just pause for a second here to acknowledge how very small my corner of the blogging world is: I do have a handful of regular readers, but most people who visit my blog are searching for pictures of my pregnancy tests so they can compare them to their own; sorry, guys, for letting you all down. Hope you found someone else's urine to look at.) It's connected because in both cases I felt completely blindsided by a tremendous life change, I looked to people in positions of authority for help and comfort and didn't find it, and it took a very long time for me to recover psychologically. That's how I feel about my infertility diagnosis and treatment experience, from the distance of almost two years: it was a trauma. A huge, life-altering trauma that still has me floundering.

To bring you up to speed, here's a brief synopsis of events that have taken place since O's birth last fall:

October: Have baby. Labor and delivery go pretty smoothly and we are blessed with a healthy, adorable, bouncing baby boy. I notice that I have a few weirdly obsessive nights where I keep thinking about the birth, and it takes much longer to feel physically "recovered" than my doctors predicted, but I move on to focusing much more on my delicious little newborn than my IVF cycle, my pregnancy, or my delivery.

December: 6-week followup appointment with OB. Have promising ultrasound showing no major endometriosis-related problems, decide to start the mini-pill, generally feel optimistic about life.

January: Go back to work. O starts daycare, immediately gets a series of minor colds and coughs, and everyone's sleep and commuting schedules suffer. Still, as the days get longer and the sleeping arrangements get back on track throughout the spring, I continue to feel pretty great.

April: Find out that the events of the past year and a half have had external consequences that I genuinely didn't see coming. Memories and anxiety that had previously been held at bay come flooding back. Another ultrasound shows that my endometriosis is about as quiet as I could hope, but it doesn't matter, because everything else is completely falling apart.

June: Find out that our current insurance plan - the one that covers four cycles of IVF at one clinic and one clinic only - will be ending in June 2014. Would we like to have another child between now and then?

July: After a tremendous amount of discussion, agree to see a therapist. Spend 45 minutes of a 60 minute appointment grilling her on her treatment style, philosophy, approach to patient care, and make her agree to send me a copy of her notes. Tell her the digest version of what's happened in my life since 2010 and she makes some sympathetic noises. Three weeks later she actually does send me the notes, which thankfully are unobjectionable but are also completely unhelpful. Decide not to return.

August: Go for appointments at two different fertility clinics. Clinic 1 is where we went for the fresh cycle that created O and where I left my egg retrieval feeling utterly destroyed (a feeling I re-experience daily and which generally leaves me sobbing and gasping for air, but which seems weirdly right when we actually have to walk into their building again.) Clinic 2 is brand new in every sense of the word - their offices are still partially under construction, even.

Here's what we learned at Clinic 1: they consider me a success story, what with my single cycle of IVF and my single embryo transfer and my term birth and my (if I do say so myself) utterly gorgeous son. The conversation takes a bit of a turn when I mention that I think about my egg retrieval all the time, I'm completely haunted by the memory of it, I'm generally miserable, etc. etc. Our RE is sympathetic about my bad experience and understands why I would choose to go elsewhere for further treatment, but it's clear that the financial implications of my insurance coverage are not his area of expertise. We talk about how to transfer embryos to another clinic if need be. We also talk about what would be involved if I chose to somehow get past my earlier experience and have a Frozen Embryo Transfer (FET) cycle with them. It's nowhere near as invasive as what I went through before, obviously, and they even say they prescribe Crinone for progesterone support so I wouldn't have to do those vile progesterone-in-oil shots. And to his eternal credit, right before the end of the appointment, our RE does admit that "we tried not to hurt you, but it sounds like we did hurt you a little bit, and we're sorry about that." I leave feeling like we repaired the relationship quite a bit, but part of me wished that I had abandoned RationalCharlotte at the door and taken advantage of the opportunity to scream and curse at someone who was "responsible" for all of my unhappiness. Except I didn't, because he isn't. And while I was sitting in his office and during the weeks following our visit, my anxiety level has continued to be through the roof - especially when I think about even stepping foot in that building again.

And here's what we learned at Clinic 2: they will knock me out during egg retrieval if it ever comes to that (which it probably wouldn't, because that would be very tough for us to afford just paying cash, but it's still the first question I asked.) They're willing to accept a transfer of our frozen embryos and work with us on a FET. They too are sympathetic about how upset I've been - maybe I'd like to try some valium before a procedure, or investigate acupuncture, or join them for Fertility Yoga on Tuesday nights? The price tag for a FET without insurance coverage will be steep but not prohibitive. However, they do use progesterone-in-oil shots, and the minute I hear this the whole world seems to dim for a moment. Those needles are long and thick, injecting them into my ass is humiliating, the process as well as the aftermath is painful, and my heart rate skyrockets when I so much as think about the shots. And even in a new space, with new faces, the mere discussion of what's involved in infertility treatment is enough to make me feel completely terrible.

So, what do I do? Start blogging again, it seems. Other than that I have no idea.