They call it the "TWW" or "two week wait" at the fertility clinic and on the online fertility sites. I'm not a very patient person, but this is really trying whatever patience I do have. Because of the progesterone vaginal inserts that I have to take, I'm a little oozy . . . that ooziness feels like I'm getting my period. So every ten minutes or so, I have the feeling that I've gotten my period, and so far, it's just been progesterone ooze.
I guess I could cut down on this false alarm phenomenon by taking the progesterone at night like I'm supposed to, but I find it unappealing to have sex with the progesterone insert in for an hour (precisely because of ooziness), which is what the blogsters out there suggest. My doctor said to insert the progesterone pill AFTER having sex -- this was his answer, after receiving an anxious text from me asking if we could have sex at all for the 21 days I am using the inserts -- but I like to fall blissfully asleep after sex, so the idea of having to go in and put the insert in after sex was not appealing.
At any rate, my period should have come yesterday, today, or tomorrow (depending on what online calendar you use). I have a doctor's appointment Wednesday morning for a pregnancy test, so all I can do until then is try to resist running to the bathroom every ten minutes to check.
My heart sinks, and then it's happy . . . but no matter, I have to keep reminding myself that this was the first month of this type of intervention and it isn't necessarily going to be successful.
What's funny is how similar this "false alarm" feeling is to a "false alarm" feeling when you DON'T want to be pregnant . . . the waiting for the period to come.
New York Magazine had a
really interesting story this month called "Waking Up From the Pill: Fifty years ago, birth-control pills gave women control of their bodies, while making it easy to forget their basic biology—until in some cases, it’s too late." I found the article to be perfectly relevant to what I'm dealing with now. Like this passage:
Now many New York women have shifted their attempts at conception back about ten years. And the experience of trying to get pregnant at that age amounts to a new stage in women’s lives, a kind of second adolescence. For many, this passage into childbearing—a Gail Sheehy–esque one, with its own secrets and rituals—is as fraught a time as the one before was carefree.
Suddenly, one anxiety—Am I pregnant?—is replaced by another: Can I get pregnant? The days of gobbling down the Pill and running out to CVS at 3 a.m. for a pregnancy test recede in the distance, replaced by a new set of obsessions. The Pill didn’t create the field of infertility medicine, but it turned it into an enormous industry. Inadvertently, indirectly, infertility has become the Pill’s primary side effect.
One of my colleagues in the women's rights/reproductive rights field thought that the article blamed the pill too much for women postponing childbearing, but I don't think that was the point of the article at all. What the pill did, I think the article argues, is relieve women of having to think so much about their reproductive capabilities. Like the author explains:
. . . [W]omen are half-consciously rebelling against the artificiality of the Pill’s regime. Removal from one’s true biological processes was more appealing in the Mad Men era, when machines were going to save the world and pills could fix everything, even the ennui of housewives. But for the wheatgrass-and-yoga generation, there’s something about taking a pill every day that’s insulting to one’s sense of self, as an accomplished, adult woman. “I feel like I’ve gotten a message over the years that the less I have to do with the nitty-gritty biological stuff of being a woman, the better, and that’s a weird message,” says Sophia, 35, who was on the Pill for fourteen years. “In my ninth-grade health class, I remember the teacher saying, ‘You can get pregnant any day of the month, so always use protection,’ and I kind of knew that wasn’t true, but because I was on the Pill, I never really cared about finding out the right answer. The Pill takes a certain knowledge away from you, and that knowledge is empowering.”
And, in fact, what I think the article argues for, although I think it could have done so more thoughtfully, is that women should be made aware of ALL of the risks and implications of taking the pill. I am constantly surprised at how much I don't know about my own body: blame it on inadequate sex education in school or at home, whatever. The fact is, before taking a drug that prevents conception, we should really understand conception altogether, and at least for me, I know I didn't. Of course I knew that waiting too long would make it more difficult to get pregnant, but I like the fact that the author talks about how easy it is to hit the "off switch" on fertility for a while with the pill, and not have to think about your body so much.
To arrive at the stage when one stops taking the Pill and starts timing one’s ovulations is to enter a new and anxious universe. After that, if you’re unlucky, you may enter a kind of medical and bureaucratic purgatory of doctors’ waiting rooms and insurance companies and worries that’s very far indeed from the freedom you enjoyed before.
On the Pill, it’s easy to forget the truths about biology. Specifically, that as much as athleticism or taut cheekbones are, fertility is a gift of youth. The body that you wake up with after fifteen or more years on the Pill is, in significant ways, not the one you started out with.
The notion of "choice" and "sexual freedom" in this discussion of the pill was also fascinating. The author talks about how NARAL and Planned Parenthood and other "choice" groups don't want there to be any public discussion about the relationship between the pill and infertility. It may be true that, as my colleague suggests, that the article overdoes it by actually insinuating that a "side effect" of the Pill is infertility ("Inadvertently, indirectly, infertility has become the Pill’s primary side effect."), I do believe that choice groups don't want to talk about how these issues intersect. As the author explains:
[I]ronically, this most basic of women’s issues is one that traditional feminism has a very hard time processing—the notion that this freedom might have a cost is thought to be so dangerous it shouldn’t be mentioned.
. . .
Sexual freedom is a fantastic thing, worth paying a lot for. But it’s not anti-feminist to want to be clearer about exactly what is being paid. Anger, regret, repeated miscarriages, the financial strain of assisted reproductive technologies, and the inevitable damage to careers and relationships in one’s thirties and forties that all this involve deserve to be weighed and discussed. The next stage in feminism, in fact, may be to come to terms, without guilt trips or defensiveness, with issues like this.
Choice is a more accurate word when the chooser—us—is aware of all the possible consequences of taking different possible paths. But reality has a hard time getting into these areas, let alone the Brave New World of infertility medicine.
On my way to the doctor's office on Wednesday morning, I had a thought that made me gasp: if the test indicated I was pregnant, I hadn't had any sushi lately, and from what I understand, sushi is verboten during pregnancy. Many a friend has counted down the days until she could drink and eat sushi again. 
They call it the "TWW" or "two week wait" at the fertility clinic and on the online fertility sites. I'm not a very patient person, but this is really trying whatever patience I do have. Because of the progesterone vaginal inserts that I have to take, I'm a little oozy . . . that ooziness feels like I'm getting my period. So every ten minutes or so, I have the feeling that I've gotten my period, and so far, it's just been progesterone ooze.
New York Magazine had a really interesting story this month called "Waking Up From the Pill: Fifty years ago, birth-control pills gave women control of their bodies, while making it easy to forget their basic biology—until in some cases, it’s too late." I found the article to be perfectly relevant to what I'm dealing with now. Like this passage:
A doctor friend of mind coined this euphemism for the drug "Clomid" or "Clomiphene Citrate," the drug I'm now taking to spark egg production. I like to call it my "twin pills," because I'm convinced that now that I'm taking it, I'm going to conceive, carry, and bear twins--or worse. I remember thinking, not so long ago, that I would never do this. And I remember darker thoughts: that women who did were selfish, foolish, and over-consumers of health care resources. In presentations that I would give to audiences about moms who were struggling with drug addiction, I asked folks to consider the moral, economic, and legal issues raised by moms who used illicit drugs, compared to moms who used fertility drugs. Didn't it cost society more to care for multiples than to care for an infant with drugs in its system at birth? Wasn't the harm greater?
I just read an amazing blogpost on Offbeat Mama. The founder of Offbeat Bride, the book and accompanying social networking site that helped me keep my sanity during our year-long wedding planning process, started Offbeat Mama, right around the time of our wedding last May. I check back every now and then to see if she creates a feature, like the Waiting Room on the Offbeat Bride Tribe website, for women who are trying to get pregnant. I don't think she did (yet), but I did find this post, by Ariel, the founder herself. She introduces her own story of problems conceiving with a video by a woman who poses a series of "what if" questions...questions that have been swirling around in my mind about infertility for the past year. I have been searching for something to read, something that I could identify with, around all of this for the longest time. My husband is so certain that it will all work out in the end, he insists on speaking in terms of "whens" as opposed to "ifs." Ariel's story was poignant, and scary . . . I hope I only have to go partway through the course of action she had to take in order to become pregnant. But I've already gone farther than I thought I would in order to conceive.
D's chiropractor has been giving me all kinds of advice about fertility--he even gave me a book called Wise Woman Herbal Childbearing Year by Susan S. Weed, a bottle of fertility formula (pictured here), and a bottle of false unicorn. I don't know if these things actually work, but I've been taking 20 drops of the fertility formula three times a day for the past month and a half. I feel like I have a more nurturing womb, but who knows? I hope a fertilized egg thinks so and decides to stay.
So I had the HSG test on July 28, where they shot radiation goo through my innards to see what was goin on all up in there (everything was all clear!) and I leaked for like a day and a half. I did ovulation tests every day since then (19 days now) and no freakin' LH surge. WTF. They say that this HSG test has a chance of resulting a smoother journey for the sperm, so there are some women who get pregnant after the HSG test. Well, we didn't take advantage of this extra boost this month, unfortunately. We should be doing it like bunnies right now, but instead, I waited for a positive LH test, and heat, exhaustion, and other diversions kept us from the job at hand and the LH surge never came. I totally don't understand it, and I am getting very frustrated with how little I know about reproduction, and how little it actually out there in a coherent, public way about conception. July-August was a bust. My doctor says not to worry, try again next month, but I feel really stupid. Not only did I waste a huge amount of money on these ovulation tests which were all negative, we also kept getting ready for the right moment to have sex, which never came. I am going to have to try to plan for less stress this coming month and just get myself ready for sex 24-7.
So after the LH surge test finally showed the surge last week, I think we took the right steps towards conception, at just the right times. : ) The online fertility advice peddlers estimate that "implantation" is to occur at a certain time after the egg is fertilized, and tomorrow was the pegged day for said implantation. Well, yesterday I was walking down the concourse at the legislative building in Albany and I got this weird gripping stomach ache. Never felt anything like it. I kept walking, wondering how much worse it was going to get, but it never did. It just kind of waved, and then subsided.
So today D and I went for a "preconception planning" appointment with an OB/GYN. I visited this doctor in a pinch two years ago (he's right downstairs from my primary care physician), and as I was thinking about this whole project, I remembered how good natured and gentle he was. I was a little nervous about asking D to go with me--he sounded so scared when I called him to tell him about the appointment! He's a good egg, though: agreed to go to the appointment and was good natured and supportive the whole time. The big surprise was how nervous *I* was. It was like: oh my god, we're actually thinking about doing this!