So, ummmm…yeah.  Mother’s Day. 

Sigh.

Or, why I am overly-sensitive and need to chill the frick out.

Everyone keeps telling us to ‘have more fun’ and to just ‘relax’ —  each and every one of us infertiles has probably heard this <bunny ears> advice <bunny ears> a quadrillion times since we started trying to get pregnant.  And even though I usually sigh and with an exasperated and barely-disguised sneer on my face say, "I know, thank you.  We should try that.  I’ve never thought of THAT."  As frigging if.   

But. 

In the spirit of trying to have more fun and relax, BeBop and I decided to get massages yesterday at a local spa.  (I know:  I am married to a total metrosexual.  Well, this IS Northern California after all, what did you expect??  He gets massages and wears sandals and I have made my peace with that.  Moving on.)  We couldn’t get appointments at the same time, so instead he went in at 4:00 and I went at 5:00.  While he was paying for his massage and I was checking in for mine, the women at the front realized we were married and both at the spa at the same time.  Eee gads!  For some reason this was very alarming to one of the attendants.

WHERE ARE THE KIDS?  She screeched at me as we were walking to the back room where you’re supposed to relax before your treatment.

"Ahhhh….we don’t actually have kids."

"Oh. How was your Mother’s Day?"

And my reaction to that lovely remark?

"Ummmm….well, actually we’re trying to have kids, and when you’re trying for a long time Mother’s Day can actually be kinda crappy.  To tell you the truth.  Since you asked, and all, and ahhhh ummmm…"  I stammered on and on and ON like a complete raving lunatic moron.

I just wanted to STOP but my mouth kept forming words and stringing them together in half-sentences and I was powerless to stop it!!

It was just the kind of response that sent her, I’m quite sure, scurrying back to the front desk to report on the ‘crazy lady in the white t-shirt who is obviously in need of something MUCH stronger than body work.’

Actually, the massage itself was pretty good.  And I needed it, after spending the morning with MY mother.  She’s a kick, but rather exhausting.  Which you’ve probably picked up on if you’ve read more than a couple of posts here.  Brunch was all bird flu, the evils of sugar substitute and a comprehensive report on how the hybrid car we want to buy just ‘explodes without warning on the freeway’ or some such thing. 

Good times.

Last night’s conversation over dinner:

BeBop: When you finally get pregnant I am going to throw a huge party.

Me: Really??

B: Yep. Just like Christopher (from the Sopranos)’s visit to California!

Me: Complete with booze and hookers?

B: Yep. And blow too. Lots of blow.

(Kidding, of course! But since you don’t really know us I thought I should make it clear before someone calls AFT or DHS on us or something.) (And yes, I know jokes about elicit drug use and prostitution aren’t really funny.) (Except they are, kinda.)

Here I am on CD8, getting super excited (insert sarcasm here) for my next ultrasound on Monday.  I am neither excited nor dreading it, I’m not worried or relaxed.  I am not optimistic, but I’m also not particularly pessimistic either.   I am not hopeful, but I wouldn’t say I was hopeless.

So where does that leave me? I just don’t know.  I am stuck in this really weird in-between-ness that I’ve never experienced before.

For the 1st IUI, I considered it the trial run and didn’t think it would work.  And it didn’t.  For the 2nd one, I was slightly more optimistic, but actually getting pregnant still seemed highly improbable, like I just couldn’t picture it.

And as I’ve written about, last month I really and truly focused all of my energy into being hopeful. I really believed it might work.  I tried to stay open and relaxed throughout the entire ultrasound/trigger/IUI routine. When I had a one-day temp drop 10DPO, and then a temp rise, I freaked.  This is it, I thought.  We all know how that turned out.***

So now I’m sort of stuck in this no-woman’s land between hope and despair, and I’m not sure what to do.

Should I try to stay in this zen space and just have a wait-and-see attitude, should I prepare for the worst so I’m not caught off guard, or should I try as hard as I can to be hopeful and open to the possibility that this might actually work?

What would YOU do?  What HAVE you done?  Any and all feedback is most welcome.

***This is just a note to say that I know millions of women have gone through much worse…tests up the wazoo and IUIs and injectibles and IVF and more over years and years.  So to some, my whining over 3 failed IUIs might seem like nothin,’ but that’s just my experience to-date.  Any way you slice it, IF sucks.

Just a quick edit to last night’s post.

I realized this morning that it sounded like I had a bruise the size of a small Korean man on my body – which, really, is quite ridiculous isn’t it??  What I meant was:  I have a small Korean man’s THUMB-sized bruises all over my body. 

Good.  That’s all cleared up.

The actual story coming a little later today…

Well, I have quite a story to tell, if I might say so myself…which I may, this being my blog and all.  Unfortunately, I am trying to get out of the office soon and my tale will have to wait for another day.

I don’t have any spectacular news from my doctor’s appointment on Friday.  When I asked the nurse practitioner, "Ummmmm…when exactly do we start talking about what in the freaking hell to do when the IUIs don’t work?" and she answered, "about now,"  I almost started crying.  But then, the doctor came in and said we should do a 4th IUI, and that I shouldn’t lose hope.  I asked if they ever had patients who actually get pregnant after 4 or 5 IUIs, and she said yes.  But I suspect she was lying.  Regardless, it was nice to hear, the whole ‘hope’ part.

So, no, my story does not revolve around some miraculous panacea my doctor found last week curing all cases of unexplained infertility.  DUH!  I like, totally, would have e-mailed y’all by now if that was the case!

No, my story has to do with a ‘healing’ I had this weekend, at the hands of a Korean ‘healer’ my mother sent me to.  (And it’s scary how many of my stories will start with a phrase just like that one.)  Of course I went willingly because (not to promote any stereotypes or anything) in Northern California it’s quite common to spend a Saturday evening in a run-down office off the El Camino Real, being poked by a small Korean man who speaks precious little English.  Totally normal, I tell you.

So tomorrow, I will regale you with the story that ends with…wait for it…me covered in small Korean man-sized bruises ALL OVER MY BODY.  But am I HEALED, you ask frantically!?!?

I’ll let you be the judge of that.

Do they say fourth time’s a (fill-in-the-blank-with-something good)? 

No, they do not. 

They say beginner’s luck if you’re successful at something on the first try .  They say fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me.  And they say once bitten twice shy, which I think was part of a movie title from a Dracula spoof starring George Hamilton back in the 80s, or something like that.  And of course the ever popular third time’s a charm!  They say that one all the time.  But no one EVER says anything about the fourth time.   

What is the fourth time, anyway?  If you’re still trying after the 3rd one, you’ve failed on three previous attempts.  You don’t have beginner’s luck, you scooted right through number two and for some reason, the third time was NOT, in fact, a charm. 

So where does that leave you?  And by you I mean me.

For some reason I’ve always thought the IUI would work. Not necessarily the first one, that was our trial run and I didn’t expect that to take.  For the second try, I was more hopeful but not off-the-charts crazy optimistic.  But last time, I was all, I just KNOW this is going to work — I can feel it!  Plus that psychic I went to said so, so it just must be true!!

Even BeBop thought April was our month.  We were both as optimistic as you can be under these circumstances.  And by these circumstances of course I mean the suckitude that is infertility.

For some reason, whenever anyone mentioned IVF I changed the subject. I just didn’t want to think about that yet, I didn’t want it to be part of my reality. (Which sounds crazy, I know, after trying for like a million years.)  But like I said, I just had faith that we needed some help, and that the clomid/IUI combo would do the trick.

Of course, now my faith is shaken.  As is the optimism I felt, and oh yeah the hope I actually allowed myself to have this time.

I want to go into this next IUI with some semblance of hope, because what’s the alternative?  Feeling like it won’t work? That just can’t be good. To each her own, some probably feel better steeling themselves against the bad news and preparing for the worst and I’m all about whatever works for you.  But for me, I have to have some small glimmer of hope just to get up in the morning and drag myself to all of these freaking doctors’ appointments.

I’m going in today for the clomid challenge test or whatever they call it.  I wish that instead of jamming that gloved finger up my hoo-ha and at the same time pressing down on my vital organs to check for cysts, the clomid challenge was more of an obstacle course or something you’d see on Survivor. 

I can see it now:

Survivors, ready? 

On my go, crawl through the mud on your belly under those bamboo poles, vault yourself over that high wall into the mud and swim through that to the netting hanging 15 feet in the air.  Crawl up and over the netting, while you’re doing that grab a fish, a wooden snake and a bucket full of water.  Carry these items to the top of that 50 ft. palm tree and stand there until one by one you lose your balance and fall off into the ocean.

The survivor who lasts the longest on top of that tree, holding the fish the snake and the bucket wins the  challenge.

Want to know what you’re playing for?  A BABY!

Now, that would be a cool clomid challenge. Waaaay better than what I’m looking at later today.

I work in a relatively small office, there are about twelve of us all together.  And although I work for a non profit organization, I am surrounded by for-profit people.  They are all Very Important People, meeting with other Very Important People doing Very Important Things with lots of Very Important financial arrangements and such.

Which is why it was bad — VERY bad — that while a Very Important conference was taking place, the following words could be heard yelled from the small women’s restroom we have in the office:

MOTHER FUCKER

Yes, that one is hard to recover from.  It’s difficult enough to saunter out of the single restroom when a meeting is in progress just across the narrow hallway.  I always feel like saying "I wasn’t taking a dump, thank you very much, merely washing my hands to prevent the spread of germs" or "I was simply powdering my nose" (in an affected British accent, of course) or something like that.  Geesh, going to the bathroom is embarrassing!

So to leave the restroom after screaming an expletive such as ‘mother fucker’ is, well, like totally ruhlly RUHLLY embarrassing.

But that’s what happened today when I realized that today is yet another CD#1, as we start this process all over again, again, again, and so on and so on and so on and so on…

Edited to add:  Did you know that the word ‘fucker’ is actually in the Typepad spell check dictionary?  That’s awesome!  I’m actually feeling BETTER after discovering that.

Wowsers.  I am sitting at my desk just crying because of the wonderful and supportive comments you all left.  Man.  You guys rock.  I wish I had good news to share, but alas, that faint line was either the result of my blindness without contacts or my over-active imagination.

We went to Carmel and had dinner Sunday night at a glorious restaurant, high on a hill overlooking the Pacific Ocean. I had a glass of wine and we toasted the fact that hopefully, this would be the last glass of wine I would have for a long time.

When I tested the next morning, there was no line, as much as I tried to see one.  And, the sensation in the boobage area was also gone. You know how when you accidentally attach jumper cables to your nipples (I hate it when that happens!) but there’s no power?  No?  Maybe that only happens to me.  Well, anyway, that’s what it was like. Much discomfort and then?  Nothing.

(Which reminds me of this very funny story about a woman I knew in college who decided not to wear a strapless bra and instead put band aids over her nipples before a formal but forgot, and when she woke up the next morning totally freaked out and ran around the house half naked screaming "what the hell happened to me last night?" but we were laughing so hard we couldn’t tell her SHE had put the damn things on her own boobs.)  Where was I?  Oh yeah…

I was SO depressed to see there was no line, and since my temperature had dropped that morning (yes, I am such a BBT dork I bring my thermometer when I travel), but I couldn’t bring myself to say it out loud and tell BeBop. So instead I chose to lose it completely and  scream at him for something having to do with our room service order.  He knew something was wrong (I am often that bitchy but I guess the volume of my screeching was slightly disproportionate to the issue at hand).  So he asked if my meltdown was because I had taken a test. And then?  I felt like a total. Fucking. Heel.  As if I could feel worse after realizing I was not pregnant, I managed to FEEL WORSE by being such an asshole.  We talked about it for a long time, with much sadness and moping.  Should we do another (#4) IUI?  Think about moving on to IVF?  Just not sure.

But, I must say during my pity party last night when we got home, I was so sad about not having anyone to talk to about this who would understand.  Most of my friends got preggers on their first or second try, and this time around we’re not really talking to anyone anyway, but still — I was wishing I had a circle of friends who knew firsthand what this journey was all about and voila!  I check this crazy blog thing and there are comments from a group of wonderful women I’ve never met but who really, really get how hard this can be. 

Now I might be able to hold off on those vodka shots until my lunch break!!

Well. B and I are off in a minute for a mini-break. I know! So v. v. Bridget Jones of me!! I won’t tell you today’s weight or how many cigarettes I’ve had though.

I haven’t even said anything to him yet, because it’s such a remote possibility, BUT I thought I saw a maybe-second line on the HPT this morning. Now I didn’t have my contacts in so I’m blind as a frickin’ bat, and I had to squint and turn it practically upside down and then squint some more and turn another light on, but I thought I saw it. I used one of those EPTs where a positive is a plus sign. Like ‘thumbs UP dude, you totally did it. You went and got yourself all knocked up!"

I like the double line one better — not as judgmental.

And, my boobs have been extremely sore, like an electric cattle prod being hooked up to my nipples and NOT in a good way. (And if you found this site by Googling ‘cattle prods and nipples’ for the love of GOD, you’re in the wrong place.)

Since I’m not testing again until tomorrow morning, that means I can have wine with dinner tonight, right? RIGHT.

Wish me luck, I’ll either come home v. v. happy or v. v. fucking sad.