Getting to know all about you....

I have worked on a lot of projects over the past 4 and a half years – since I started this blog. You have all been thrilled by my accounts of things like planning our wedding, making shelving in the back room, the annual vegetable garden, terracing my front perennial beds, the cider-making, renovating the trailer, building a new deck, the siding on our house, purchasing and developing our waterfront land, getting a puppy, raising said puppy into a very nice (yet still crazy) two-year-old dog, and various knitting projects here and there. I am a project person, and have enjoyed the varied successes that have come along with each of these.

There remains one project that we have been working on for the past four years, which I’ve alluded to yet never described in any great detail. This involves something that we’ve attempted to build, but can never really get off the ground. It’s been in the planning stages for four years, and sacks of money have been invested into it, but still we haven’t met with any success. I will attempt to go into some detail without getting maudlin, but this project has been to build a family, and so far it’s the one thing that we’ve been completely unsuccessful at. Turns out it’s way easier to build a deck.

We’ve always wanted kids. I’m a kid-person who can often be found in the kid room at a party, being entertained by the under-3-foot set. When I was young I babysat, and man did I babysit; one summer there were 20 families in my area whose kids I babysat. Those kids are all driving and going to university now, and here I am with grey streaks in my hair, wondering how the heck it happened that my kid-friendly house hasn’t got any kids in it.

Lots of people that I read about start families in their mid-thirties, and they’re all like “I wanted to be sure that I was established in my career before I started my family.” Fair enough. I was the opposite. Until a year ago, I had jobs that made me crave a one-year slate-wiping maternity leave. I couldn’t wait to announce to someone “I’m pregnant, and I’ll be leaving for a year. Let somebody else have fun at my desk.” I can’t really account for why we waited so long, just that it took us 7 years to get established enough to be married: in the first year hubby moved to Thailand for six months. In the second, we were getting used to co-habiting and working out the kinks of job, bills, lifestyle, etc. In the third, we bought a house. In the fourth I guess we just sat around, and in the 5th I got a new job. It wasn’t until the 6th that we got engaged, and in the 7th we got married. I was never curious as to why I’d never even had a pregnancy scare in those 7 years, but that has since explained itself.

We started trying to have kids right away. I remember the anticipation and assuredness that I felt, that yes, we’d timed this one right and we’ve been married for two months and we are going to have a baby! How exciting! But life doesn’t work that way. I learned that if you wait that long to find out if you can get pregnant, you’re already a few years behind the eight ball if you find out that you can’t get pregnant.

After a year and a half of timing things just right and taking my temperature every day, and spitting on an ovulation ferning kit predictor thingy every morning and peeing on sticks of all kinds, with no results, my doctor referred us to the fertility clinic. So in our 9th year we met with the nice doctor there, who is a young asian man with an ok sense of humour. He subjected us to rounds and rounds of testing and more months of recording my temperatures before he decided that I don’t ovulate very consistently and hubby’s swimmers aren’t in peak condition. We just miss each other every time. It kind of figures. When asked what causes the lack of top-drawer sperm, he said that the only cause they have found so far is environmental pollutants, which build up in a body, emulate estrogen and do all kinds of other wacky things (and it's on the rise). Needless to say, hubby now uses herbal shampoo, soap, and doesn’t put his food in plastic containers. We have recently seen some improvement.

We went on a few rounds of Clomid, the second of which stimulated my ovaries so much I couldn’t walk comfortably or do my pants up all the way. Clomid was easy to take but tough to deal with. That was two summers ago - I think I wrote about it. After about 5 months (not consecutive) of Clomid, Dr. determined that that wasn’t likely to work either. I then took a break, as my resentment towards the clinic and the process had built up and my stress levels had risen – being told one appointment that I likely had PCOS and the next appointment that I did not, over and over again, made me beyond frustrated – so in our 10th year, I had to step back.

Which brings us to the present reality: we returned to the clinic early in 2009, and decided to give the Dr. the ‘go’ to do whatever it takes to have a kid. Tickety tock, in our 11th year. By May we were signing consent forms for IUI and IVF, and in July I was on my first round of injectible fertility drugs. They are a trip. Being a kind of science nerd (secretly), the process of giving myself the injections doesn’t bother me a bit. I got a kit containing a fun little pen-like syringe thing, and it comes with lots of needle heads, and alcohol pads, and I crank it to the right dose and just pop it right into my belly. That first month it sent me for a loop – I was tired all the time, cranky, woozy about an hour after the shot, and kind of forgetful, like I was in a fog. When in early August I went to the washroom and found out that it didn’t work, I was distraught.

The process isn’t really fun, for any of you who haven’t had the pleasure: for about two weeks, you inject every day, into your stomach or your thighs. Every other day, you go into the clinic in the morning for blood tests and an ultrasound (not the on-top-of-the-belly one you see in movies, either). They count and measure your egg follicles, and then you meet with the Doctor, who tells you what dose to continue with and when to come back. Towards the end, you go in for bloodwork every day. You have to wake up early because you live an hour away, and you are generally late for work each time. Also, the medication has to stay refrigerated so it’s really fun up at the lake, and you can’t travel anywhere because you have to go to the clinic every damn day. Oh and the medication is really expensive and my drug plan doesn't cover it. When you’re ready (meaning your follicles are big enough your estrogen levels have risen), they tell you to ‘trigger’, which means you use a different injectible medication to make you ovulate. Then you wait a day (phew, a day of respite, where you wake up at a normal time and don’t have to inject anything into yourself). Then you go into the clinic (hubby goes at 8am, I go at 11), his little guys get spun in a centrifuge so only the very best survive, and they use a catheter to put them inside your uterus. You wait 15 minutes then go back to work. You stop drinking wine and start making lots of jokes about 'eating for two.'

I’ve done this twice now (number two gave me nothing either), and am close to the ‘trigger’ of my third as I write this. My stomach is covered in bruises as I think I’ve been a bit more cavalier with the injections this cycle. It’s really pretty. I've had 16 needles in 10 days. They added a new step this round, which is apparently now common practice: progesterone suppositories, which sound superfun. I am to take those twice a day for two weeks once the procedure’s done. The bottle has to be disguised or stay hidden in the back of the drawer, as it says “INSERT INTO VAGINA TWICE DAILY” in big black letters and I don't want company finding it. Is that TMI? I am kind of blind to TMI these days, sorry. Also, it has a fun sticker on it that says ‘may cause dizziness’, illustrated with a fun confused-looking little character. This will be my excuse for doing a lot of sitting down over the next two weeks.

I have high hopes for this round ‘cause if it doesn’t work, we’re on to the big bad IVF in the new year. This whole thing has been a bit disruptive to the new job that I love and don’t really want to leave (a strange sensation I am experiencing for the first time), as nobody at work can have any idea what I’m cooking up in the background. I don’t exactly work at a daycare, and this beloved job is a contract.

All in all, it’s not something that brings me sadness on a daily basis. I am pretty matter-of-fact about it. I suppose that if this one doesn’t work and then IVF were to fail, then I would be despondent, but I’d probably just pull a Madonna and steal a kid from somewhere. I am at the point in my life that I could bond to a hot water bottle wrapped in a towel. I make jokes about it, and will discuss the process with anyone who’s interested. I just don’t want anyone waiting on tenterhooks for me. I want it all to be a surprise when it finally happens, a miracle of life. There are many blogs dedicated to the fertility treatments and exploits of women who’ve been through much much more than I have, so if you’re really interested and want to hear more about this, then I advise you go to explore over there, because I don’t intend to talk about it much more in this blog.

In the meantime, Christmas is coming, and I wish I could tell you all about the knitting projects I’m working on, but THEN I’D HAVE TO KILL YOU!