So I have been on Spring Break this past week and I am sad to see it end. I go back to classes on Tuesday. Tuesday will be another ridiculously busy day. I have to be in Springfield at the RE for 9:40, which means we have to leave our house at 7:40, 8am at the latest. Oh and we have to take two cars because when we are done at the RE I have to drive to Pittsfield to the college for a class at 1:30. Then I have to go to work for 3-11 and I will get home around 11:30ish. Gross, what a long day.
On Tuesday we are signing all of the consents and learning what medications the RE is going to put me on. I need to make a phone call or an appointment to meet with the insurance woman to make sure that we are going to be able to get insurance approval for IVF. It shouldn’t be a problem because of Jeff’s SA being so poor. But it could get tricky since we haven’t done any IUIs. Anyways I just need to make sure it is all set.
I went to a bridal shower yesterday for a friend I grew up with. She was actually in my wedding a couple of years ago. Its strange to think that she is getting married. She is a few years younger than me. I actually first met her at our summer camp when I was a CIT (counselor in training) and she was one of my campers! Now she is getting ready to graduate from college and get married! Makes me feel old! Anyway, the shower was at our church and a bunch of the girls I grew up with in church ,who are either a few years older than me or a few years younger than me, were there. None of them know about my IF struggle. There was one friend of mine there who has a 18 month old girl and a belly that’s ready to pop, another girl with a 4 month old, and then someone else I didn’t know with a baby that was maybe a year old. That was hard enough.
But what really got to me was everyone teasing the bride to be. Talking about how many ribbons she broke opening gifts equaling how many babies she’ll have and how big her belly will be when she gets pregnant, her future mother in law was talking all about how she wants grandchildren. I remember being at my shower and hearing people saying things like that to me. I remember innocently thinking how much fun it would be to get pregnant and how it would happen whenever I decided I was ready. I wish there was an understanding among the general population that fertility is not a guarantee. It is not always as easy as just stopping your birth control. If 12.5% of the population suffers from infertility and recurrent pregnancy loss, why on earth is there not better education and understanding of infertility. I know it goes back to the infertile world vs the fertile world but good Lord! No one would sit there and have such a lack of compassion for breast cancer victims. I guess it was just hard sitting there remembering how hopeful and innocently I went into our marriage regarding starting a family.
Oh and to add to it all, today at Easter Sunday service, the wife of someone I grew up with, someone who I happen to know went through IVF to get pregnant with her first baby (she also magically got pregnant on her own when her first baby was a few months old), asked me in front of many people when I was going to start having babies. I just gave my pat answer of “I don’t know, we’ll see” but I just wanted to say something smart assed like, “oh I don’t know I guess after the docs take my eggs out of my ovaries and put one of Jeff’s screwed up sperm into my egg and then a few days later put an embryo back into my uterus and we pray for two weeks that it sticks and then continue to pray for 9 months that nothing awful happens. I guess that will be when” but I guess I’ll just smile and give my pat answer yet again.
Oh and I got outed at work the other day. I think I have mentioned a nurse that I work with who has gone through IVF. However up until the other day she and I had never spoken about it. Well, staffing at the hospital was looking for someone to work a double shift and I was considering it. The charge nurse, who is aware of everything I am going through says to me, just make sure you don’t over do it, you have a lot of stuff going on with school and going back and forth to Springfield all the time, don’t take on too much right now. Well the other nurse picked right up on that and asked me why I was going to Springfield, was I going through infertility treatments. I must have looked like a deer in the headlights, I was so thrown off. I said yes and it actually turned out to be okay because we had a good conversation about it all. I just felt bad because the one man we have who works with us was sitting right there when this all went down. I wasn’t really ready for him to know about all of it but hey whats done is done. She must have heard me talking to our charge nurse at some point about our IF treatments because as soon as Springfield was mentioned she jumped in asking about IF. So while I was mildly horrified at first I am glad she knows and I now have someone in real life I can talk to!
I hope everyone is having a good Easter. I will check back in after Tuesday’s appointment.
Life with Baby K 