We did our first iui February 1, 2015. My RE said AF was
supposed to arrive 14dpiui; instead, she came 15 dpiui, which gave me and my DH
more hope than usual for 24 hours straight. During those 24 hours, I kept
telling myself: PUPO. Today marks CD8. In translation: My “DH” (dear husband) and I
are going through infertility treatments, and I’ve officially reached the point
of obsessively reading online infertility forums.
Besides learning a new language in acronyms, we’ve adopted
words like clomid, letrozole, follicles, andrology, vericoceles, morphology,
and motility into our daily lives over the last several years.
To make a long story short, cumulatively between not
preventing, sorta trying, and really trying, we’ve “tried” for over two years
to get pregnant (thirty months, to be exact). Honestly, it didn’t become hard
until about nine months ago when we learned there were anatomical things going
on preventing us from getting pregnant on our own (unfortunately, it’s not
“stress” like so many well-intentioned people assume). Since then, our experience trying to get
pregnant has become very different from what I expected it would be like –
romantic, exciting, even naïve to some extent.
Instead, it’s become a carefully calculated science where we could
literally get pregnant without even having to see each other in the same day.
Essentially, here’s how it works: Each month after being
pumped full of hormones, I am basically poked and prodded for different things
at different times throughout the month.
The first poking happens through an ultrasound, where instead of
anxiously checking on a baby, we hope for at least one mature follicle, which
is a sign of a mature egg about to ovulate.
A few days later, I’m given a trigger shot to ensure ovulation 36 hours
before the insemination, and finally, a catheter to my uterus performs the
insemination after Tanner, you know, does his thing. After all is poked and prodded, we wait for
two weeks, hoping for a “BFP” (big fat positive). If we get a disappointing “BFN” (big fat
negative), we feel sorry for ourselves for a couple of days, and then we start
the process over.
More annoying than the physical process of poking and
prodding is the waiting, because it is like being in a constant state of limbo
– except you know exactly what you want, which makes it that much harder to
wait patiently. Meanwhile, it seems like
everyone you know is getting pregnant – and while you truly are happy for each
one of them – it is also a reminder of your own desires that feel like they are
becoming more and more unreachable, even if they are not. There’s just no way
to know for sure. Besides, even if you could know, all your synthetically-charged
hormonal emotions wouldn’t listen to logic anyway. Honestly, I do believe it
will work out one way or another and we will be content with whatever that is,
but that doesn’t always translate to a feeling of peace, and as much as I
believe in the future, I believe in accepting and living whatever is happening
in the present. And oftentimes the present is hopeful, but other times it’s
disappointing, discouraging, or unfortunately, full of jealousy.
One thing I’ve learned is that it is what it is until it is
what we make of it, and right now, I haven’t made anything of it, so it is what
it is. We go to late night movies. We
make dinner together. We stay up too
late, and I sleep in too late. We
plan trips on a whim. We spend hours watching Netflix. We eat out when we feel
like it. We get brunch on Saturdays (and that’s the only reason we get out of
bed). We go on dates every night of the
week. And as quickly as we’d swap a baby for our current way of life, what it
is means doing our best at waiting by living in our present, even the hard
parts.
