Literally, nothing to update — I just thought it would be nice to post something when I was not in an emotional and emotive state. One of my friends told me that infertility writing is hard to read because you write so much of it when you are angry at the world and the emotions are always so overwhelming and disproportionate to everyday life. This is really true, particularly in those two bad days (ok, sometimes more than two) a month. Oh, also, my FSH level was 15. Yep, 10.5 to 15 in 8 months. Shocker. Maybe the pre-stimulation process for IUI really does lower your viable eggs by pumping out more than a few each time.
Funny thing is that you vascillate between happiness and unhappiness over the two halves of the month. For the half where you can't really do anything about it (i.e. before fertile period), I often find that I couldn't be happier. You're not truly expecting the natural method of trying to work out, as much as you might want it to. You're probably tired of taking your body temperature and not particularly excited about anything. Just the other day, while daydreaming, I somehow thought of the injectibles and how many I would have to take. And psychosomatically, I could feel the needle just touching, pressing on my skin, before it poked in. How weird and yucky is that, right?
More granite walls get chipped away. The two girls I went to Africa two years ago are now both giving birth. One isn't even married. More classmates from school are pregnant. Younger cousins get pregnant, right off the bat, because they are 26, 27 — it doesn't seem that far from the age you are but boy, does it make a difference. You get more updates, more pictures, more startling, truth be told, unpleasant surprises. Each time, I push down the desperation that comes bubbling up to my throat and try to remember that it doesn't really matter. It has nothing to do with you or your chances. Pregnancy is only the beginning. Not all pregnancies, certainly yours, may not result in a take-home baby. (A take-home baby being the wonderful term that NUH uses to describe their absolute success rate — I imagined chicken nuggets in baby shapes, in a styrofoam happy meal box.) If you don't have a kid by 35, just adopt. All we want is a little girl, any little girl — so what does fertility matter. That's the automatic response of what I think.
In the first part of the month, you are ambivalent. Then, toward the second part of the month, where you actually do try and wait for results, you veer into unhappiness or growing dissatisfaction. Sometimes my mind wills the rest of me to Think that it doesn't really matter, because if it doesn't happen when you're stressed about it, then I should try not to be stressed. This is called trying to not think, after you've already had the thought. I try not to tell people about this because, invariably, someone will unhelpfully suggest that "I think you're over-thinking things". I hate hearing that because even when you try not to think, you're thinking. If you know what I mean. (If you don't, then you probably belong in the camp that tells other people not to think).
While we're on the topic of what to tell people, I remember a friend that I used to have. We drifted after college and spoke, maybe every year or two. I guess we didn't have that much in common, in the end. During that period, he met a girl, whom I also really liked but didn't know well, fell deeply in love, and got married. I was there at his church wedding. Then his wife left him for her golf coach, with whom she had a baby within a few months. Their mutual friends told him that she felt so very happy. When we next met up, I didn't really know what to say. It was as if I had missed so much of the story that whatever I said would be rubbing salt in the wound. He told me that many people who subsequently found out said, I'm sorry I wasn't there, which he found odd, like it was a paradoxically and incredibly empty apology.
Sometimes I feel a bit like that, when yet another friend finds out and sends me a religious clip (the last one was about defeating infertility by relaxing into God and, boy, was it ingratiatingly cheesy and painful), or recommends a fertility doctor (unless you've been through IVF yourself, trust me, I'm really past the point of being interested to know what you think) or suggests adoption (caveat, I'm for adoption, I just think that those who suggested it, again, should either have done it themselves, or at least know that last year, there were 340 adoptions in Singapore — yes, the number was that small). This applies for pretty much all suggestions, except the funny, quack ones. I did try the leave-an-open-three-podded-peanut-by-your-bed therapy that one friend repeated from her fengshui master and I still have the good-for-fertility deer bits in my fridge (my Chinese wasn't good enough to figure out which deer bit it was, except that it was large, black pellets).
Some, particularly those already mothers, continually insist on telling me to enjoy my life now, as if motherhood has a monopoly on tiredness. Which is just annoying because you know what, it really doesn't. Unless you have a child or parent who is seriously ill, tiredness happens naturally — it's called Getting Older. Everybody lives between incessant expectation and unthinking exhaustion, changing your kid (nor my non-existent one) isn't going to make you not feel like an overloaded balloon. I've had harried days too, haggard, feverish, depressed, mismatched days when you are so bone-tired you snap at everybody and can't wait to go home and fag out, and if you're in that blinkered camp that thinks having those when you are pregnant, or picking up after your kid, takes it to a new degree, you should try having them when you're not pregnant, or while jabbing your ovaries into the size of oranges.
You know how some women have hair that turns white in their 20s, or get cancer, or how some shave their eyebrows and it grows right back, whilst others shave it and it never, ever grows back? My point is that there is a chilling mathematical accuracy to biological probabilities and yes, everybody knows somebody who tried and tried for 43 years and then Suddenly got pregnant. It also helps to remember that by the time your confident advice is proven good and useless, you will probably be announcing or already past your second (some, third) pregnancy and think just how wonderful I'm going to feel then?
It's hard, I know. What do you say? I guess those that I think dealt with it the best did it by just being there. They were there to enjoy my life with me, whether it was market shopping or making macarons or doing laundry or sitting in the park. They told me about their life and their loves. Some didn't address it at all; when it came up, it came up and then it passed, and then maybe it came up again sometime down the road. And that's really fine. Don't be upset if I don't want to talk, either; just take it that I can't keep rehashing these negative elements of my life, or that I can't really bear to speak them aloud and make them even more real with every re-telling.
One other thing I've been thinking about this month is whether I tell my boss about the IVF treatments, which require you to take up to 15 days of MC after the process, i.e. after they put the blastocyte back in. On one hand, I dread the conversation and I wonder whether he will use it as an excuse to hold back my promotion. I'm sure he will look back at it and realize why I haven't been travelling for work for awhile. On the other hand, I feel like the responsible thing to do is to tell him, so that it doesn't seem, well, irresponsible. I do wonder, though, if he would know anyway, or if you just take a week's leave and then suddenly another week. Some friends told me that at this age, whether you say anything or not, the immediate assumption if you're female, is that the leave is pregnancy-related.
Truth be told, my least grouse is with friends or work, because, more often than not, I realize that it really is only as important as it is to me. Earlier this month, less than a month before we are meant to begin the IVF process and just a month past having rented our house to help cover the mortgage, my husband quit his job. He did it suddenly, although his terse relationship with his group and organization had been growing for some time. I was travelling and in the middle of the night time-difference, he raged on about his dissatisfaction and that he couldn't take another day. He asked my permission, or agreement, to quit. He apologised for letting us down. I wanted to cry. I wanted to plead that the months of chasing a string of different doctors and therapies and countless waitlists, to say nothing of the patience, the disappointments, the mortgage, the thousands of dollars of painful treatments and my basic peace of mind to not need my job exactly when I could not commit to it, should take priority. I knew it was between my stress or his and that it would do no good to blow up over the selfishness of his timing, or his ease of compartmentalizing family, children, work and life purpose, into entirely separate buckets.
And later, when I returned, I discovered that, while I was away, he missed (on a clear and open Saturday) a pre-requisite lecture given by our professor-doctor on the IVF process for potential or incoming IVF patients. The seminar that we had agreed weeks ago that he would attend, because I could not. A seminar for which there had been multiple reminders and a person who has time enough to attend countless meetings on external businesses or app development or swim coachings, who, yes, more often than not, bites off more than he can chew. He simply forgot.
Later in the few weeks of his new-found freedom, I found a ticket stub for Iron Man 3, on a random weekday midday show, while I was back, ensconced, sick and stressed at work. When these things happen, do you hold it as a grudge, or do you recognize that it's not that important to this person? The truth is that, while he has been there at every appointment and is completely open to adopting, all this man has to do is go in a cup. Done.
To him, a child is a child. It doesn't even have to be our child. It is merely a part of your life, without which everything else functions, is arguably more important. To that extent, he doesn't care, and he doesn't have to care. Sometimes I think that the second half of the month is tougher, because as the cycle drags on and I think about all the people around me, I realize how much I care.
