cocklebur

A cocklebur is a desert shrub that grows in a "disturbed, moist area..." My little cocklebur is not a particularly problematic development. The nurse who found it on the ultrasound did not seem at all bothered by its presence and said that its size and location should not impair my fertility. ("should not" ha!) Not ever having a fibroid before, I was a little blindsided by this. That's silly, of course; why not a fibroid? why not me? But the appointment was not about that, and I was more focused on the fact that she said I hadn't ovulated yet but that I was doing a nice job growing a follicle. I wanted to remember my questions about their injections protocols. So when she was telling me about this fibroid, and even when she was showing it to me, I don't think it was registering. I also did not realize that there were different kinds of fibroids based on location. I'll need to ask more questions.

Anyway. The problem isn't with the little weed itself. It's psychological. Something is growing in there. Not a baby, but a tumor. A fibroid is a tumor. There's a tumor growing in my ute. Nothing grows in my uterus! When I was on my way back home I lost it a little. The tears came and I refused to talk to P and I took my pants back off and curled up in bed with my book. Sometimes you just gotta pretend you're not there. Later I told him (though I think I was cruel about it, telling him first that it was a tumor and second that it was not the cancerous, scary kind) and he gave me a hug and said that he was sorry that he hadn't been at the appointment with me.

All in all, I did not sleep well. Visions of bombs and tumors and creepy things growing inside of me did not make for a restful night. I'm pretty sure this is not a big deal and that I just need to get out of my head.

***

They're coming to install central air today. Money well spent.

irony, thy name is fibroid

and we thought nothing could grow in there!

I'm happy for them, naturally, but...

I was reading new blogs this morning looking for more good "still trying" ones.
I clicked on four in a row with positive betas being the first post.

And there's a fucking first response commercial on right now. Caress your flat stomach all you want, bitch, I hope you miss the stick and pee all over your hand.

Wrong side of the bed anyone?

feeling pretty is so hard

My SIL is serving my little brother with divorce papers. He hardly gets to see my nephew because he can't afford the gas. I haven't seen them since Christmas (which is understandable, since we live in different states, but my mom lives there and she doesn't get to see them either.) The whole situation just sucks.

Friends of ours just had their baby. The ones who I suspect had problems. I'm happy for them, but jealous and sad for me.

There's a chance I may not get to start injects again next month after all. Timing issue. We'll see. I've been looking forward to starting again, but I'm having a hard time getting excited. I hope getting pregnant does not require positive thinking or I'm screwed.

I gained 10lbs between the time we left our old house and when we got here. I'm getting tired of the constant struggle to get back to normal. I told P I was going to call about a job I saw advertised on Sunday. I never did. I never finished fixing my resume either.

Just having a down day.

In which I say, "right?" a lot.

Now, why do I have concerns about my new doctor? Well, the biggest, reddest flag is that he "knows" SatanInASmock the doctor who runs the program at BastardClinicFromHell my last clinic. (see, I can let go of the past!) I mention that I'm coming from OutOfState and he says he knows a guy out there. "It's not Satan?" I ask him, knowing that it is. Sure enough. It was all I could do not to jump up out of the chair and run for the stairs. That abruptly ended my monologue on "why I'm here and where I came from" and made everyone a little uncomfortable. He tried to make me feel better by noting that he and Satan do not exchange Christmas cards.

Just because he knows the guy is no big deal, right? I mean, I know there are a lot of REs, but it's not an enormous community or anything, right? It's probably just a coincidence, and of course he wouldn't violate patient confidentiality by talking to the other doctor about me without my permission, right?

Sigh. So much for my fresh start.

The good things:

1. No more clomid. He agreed that I'd done enough.
2. He did not say I was crazy because I said that dex made me psycho. He acknowledged that the "erratic mood swings" are rare, but entirely possible when taking steroids.
3. He is known for being the more aggressive Dr. in the group (according to the nurse.)
4. He seems willing to work with/around insurance issues. So far.
5. They are open on weekends and do blood draws on the proper days.

The questionable (aside from the unfortunate satan association):

1. He asked me if I was doctor or a nurse. At first it felt like a compliment, but now that I've had time to over-analyze it, I wonder if I'm setting myself up to be labeled a pushy patient again. Oh well.
2. He's not ready to schedule me for a lap. Though he "likes to cut people open," he wants to do a couple rounds of injects for now and gave me that "tsk, tsk, little lady, no sense worrying about what could be nothing" look when I began talking about endo.
3. The nurse instructed me to stop taking my big motrin. Um, ok, but you know my ute laughs at tylenol, right? You know that motrin is only the first line of defense and that I only left tequila off as a pain reliever because I didn't want to look like both a lush and a headcase, right? She okayed my tylenol with codeine though, and I got a lecture about NSAIDs.

It's really about me finding my way home

P likes to sleep late on the weekends and I don't. I prefer to keep a similar schedule all week. Why do you care? Because I had to go for day 3 bloodwork this morning (they only do blood draws until 9 on the weekends) and I had to go all by myself.

I woke up, detangled my legs from kitty-sleep, got out of my warm bed, and I made it there in plenty of time (I was shooting for 8-830)

She did not miss my vein.

She was nice to me.

She did not require ten vials of blood like the last clinic's intake required.

I made it home without looking up the directions, without using the GPS, and without getting lost! (um, until I drove past my house on my own street. But let's pretend that didn't happen.) When you suck at directions as much as I do, you celebrate the small victories. One of the hardest things about moving for me is finding my way around a new place.

Two hours later, P is still sound asleep.

And so, even though I have some concerns about my new doctor, my diagnostic cycle begins.

Walkin' up a tightrope

I was reading Katie's last entry and I thought, "yeah, me too." I lingered in the comments section and realized that I had more to say.

I tell myself that I'm indifferent, that the pain and sadness that comes with infertility and childlessness is tolerable, that I'm used to it, that it doesn't effect my day to day existence. Then something happens to prove that I'm delusional.

I have things put away in the main living areas of my house, but the den is a disaster with office stuff everywhere. The "guest" bedroom is a mess where the movers piled clothes, books, and miscellaneous items into a corner. There are many things I can't find yet, but I know they're here, so I don't worry. P asks me for his large CD case and I can't find it anywhere. I tell him that it'll turn up and I stop looking when I have to actually move heavy things.

Then I realize that I can't locate my brown bag of clothes. This bag has a long history of meaning for me. When I was little, my mom used it to put treats in when we went to Disneyland. We had no money and I don't know how long it took my mom to save the money to take us on that adventure, but I bet it was awhile. She had things all planned out. We couldn't afford to eat there, so she packed bread, peanut butter, jelly, fruit, etc., and we went back to our hotel for meals. She couldn't afford souvenirs, so she packed the brown bag full of little toys, candies, and books that she could dole out as necessary. The blue bag was prettiest, but it was full of clothes. The brown bag is just special.

Sometime during a clean-out, years later, I come across the brown bag in my mom's donate pile. No way is this bag being donated, so I rescue it. For the longest time it held my baby pillow and blanket. Then it held t-shirts from school plays and events. Then it held nothing but a ticket from my first concert (The Village People, in 1997, to my chagrin) and a spot in the back of various closets. Still, it's the brown bag and I can't get rid of it.

The people who lived in our last house before us must have had a baby because they were on the Huggies diaper mailing list. I passed along as many diapers as possible to friends, but there were many inappropriately sized diapers that I tucked into a closet. I do have the packrat gene. Somehow this stash grew without me buying a thing and I began to store these little diapers in the brown bag.

P and I had begun trying for a baby, but were not buying any baby items. He was against it, and I went along. Eventually, he okayed an outfit that was on sale at baby gap and it was lovingly added to the brown treat bag. Every now and then, when I'm feeling hopeful, I'll give in to the impulse to buy something sweet for a child who may be. The diapers eventually came out of the bag as the bag filled up with tiny clothes. There was one cycle that I had "a feeling" about as I bought a tiny onesie and I put it in my dresser drawer, away from the items that were just hope items. I don't know if that makes any sense, but this blue striped onesie was special. That baby was real. Of course, I was wrong, and there was no baby, and the onesie made it into the bag. There are little things like that in there.

The bag lived in the spare bedroom for the years we lived in the old house up on a shelf in a closet. I didn't spend much time in that room. I only ever had one guest, my mom, and the room didn't get much use. It housed "the big dog" that my friend's daughter played with when she came over, and it stored a ton of books, blankets, and a TV in the same closet that held the brown bag. It got tucked away on a high shelf and I really didn't spend much time thinking about it. I don't take the clothes out and look at them. I don't think about them being up there, packed away and waiting. I don't long to put them on a real baby. I just have them. It's all abstract.

Yet when I can't locate this bag in our new house, I panic. I mean really panic. Everything that I've squirreled away since we started trying is missing, and I lose it. It's as if having that brown bag was a sort of safety that allowed me not to think about things that hurt to think about. It was there in the background like a life preserver on the side of the pool. You like to see it there, but you don't count on using it.

I see things that were in the same closet spread out among the den, the guest room, and the treadmill room. I look under piles and inside closets. I check the basement even though I know the only stuff down there is plastic containers that hold my teaching things and Christmas things. My heart begins to pound a little harder, and I go back upstairs. My life preserver is gone and the babies who do not exist are destined for nakedness and now I have to think about it.

I do finally locate the bag and I exhale a little harder than normal. It may have been in a pile of clothes, in with the shoes, under the fax machine, by the books I haven't read yet; it doesn't matter where it was or which closet becomes it's new home. It's here. It made the move, and my world, (though in a state of moving disarray,) is intact.

Some things

I feel like I'm always behind; I just can't catch up.

1. We moved into our new house.
2. We did get our utilities.
3. I do not have TiVo hooked up yet.
4. One of my boys cried for a whole day (I think he wanted to know where the heck our stuff was. It's here now and the crying has stopped.)
5. I had my first appointment at NewClinic. I'm not sure what I think of them yet.
6. I gained some weight on my trip and I don't like how I feel. I was more embarrassed than usual to be weighed at the doctor's office.
   
7. I never made a decision about grad school and now it's too late to apply this year.
8. Having a GPS is really awesome when you're in a new area. I am much more confident when I go out with it so I go out more (I suck at directions.)
9. I woke up last night screaming that there was a chicken in the bathtub.

Moving courtesy, FYI

When you move out of a house, the new owners usually can't set up utilities unless you cancel your service to that house.

You can set your cancellation to happen on a day in the future (say, the closing date) and use your utilities throughout the time you own the property.

But you really piss "people" off when you refuse to put the order through so that the new owners can't establish service starting on say, tomorrow the closing date.

Having to call my lawer about this is a real pisser.

.

So, I'm not crying anymore (I wish I knew what made this cry-when-frustrated thing began, and why, because it's annoying) and I rescheduled my appointment. I waited this long, what's a little longer, right?

This doc better be good.

This house better be good too.

Our bank, however, is about to lose our business.

complications

Of course, as soon as I actually get an appointment with the RE, I find out that our house is closing at that very same hour and I have not yet acquired the power to be in two places at once.

Having many problems today. Today sucks.

I'm glad I'm not a businessperson. Do they laugh and point when you cry because things aren't going your way? I'm frustrated. Everyone I need to talk to is out to lunch and no one will call me back.

I did it!

I put my big-girl pants on and made the appointment.

I feel better but also nervous. Not the doctor thing so much as the new doctor thing.

I never run out of things to worry about!

Fly by Night

We made it to NewCity.