Redux: cycle 2, lost-count-of-the-days

Here we go again.

Another cycle, another “two week wait.” Another 14 (or so) days during which time I am carefree, relaxed and happily enjoying other pursuits that don’t involve scheduled sex wondering if every last twinge, itch, and strange dream is surely the earliest sign of pregnancy.

Helpful as always, C has already taken to teasing me about my upcoming role as insufferable-patient-with-pseudocyesis[1]. Truthfully, it will be a dazzling role reprisal as my one loyal reader (hi mom!) may remember my previous forays into I’m-so-tired-with-shades-of-nausea-that-i-must-be-pregnant-even-though-i-haven’t-ovulated-in-six-months bat-shit crazy reasoning. What can I say – I’m a lawyer, I think logically.

Anyway, I’m trying my best to maintain some semblance of sanity. It certainly helps that my bitchiness has all but disappeared – shock: it was totally correlated to Clomid-taking! – and the crippling ovary pain (it arrived!) has since faded.

If you’re keeping score at home, here’s the low down on the next steps: In the next two weeks, I’ll meet with the reproductive endocrinologist and put a plan[2] in place should my subsequent pregnancy test reveal that I’m not of the knocked-up variety. Then, a few days later, faint-fest a blood draw confirms whether or not I won the golden ticket. Until then, I’ll probably have to be physically restrained from taking seventy-bajillion home pregnancy tests whose inscrutable test-reading-windows leave me certain that I’m the rare pregnant lady for whom a home pregnancy test always provides a false negative.

For now, please excuse me while I pick out baby names pace the halls.

Forthcoming: the second installment of the ever-popular recipe-post, things-I-cooked-while-trying. This time with slightly less chocolate <jumps back on treadmill>.

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[1] What, you don’t… live with a doctor yet obtain all of your substantive medical advice from webmd?

[2] Which will go something like… take more birth control, then take more Clomid, maybe a round of OVIDREL as an aperitif. For full effect, this plan will be implemented without even the slightest hint of irony.

acronym gymnastics: cycle day 11

Woe is me. Infertility is socially isolating. There. I said it. And now I come to find out that on top of not being able to ovulate all by myself like a big girl and not being able to really talk to anyone about not being able to ovulate all by myself like a big girl, I also have to learn a whole new language of inscrutable acronyms. TWW? OPK? BFP? And don’t even get me started on “BD.” Seriously. Really. We’re all adults here.

For the uninitiated still googling this bizarre pseudo-patois of dubious wordplay, let me break the news to you:

TWW = two week wait (the interminable wait, pre-pregnancy-test. during which time you might, hypothetically speaking, decide to start a blog. just an idea.)

OPK = ovulation predictor kit (an overpriced box full of tiny strips that lie, and lie and lie to you and say you never ovulated when you totally did a boisterous early morning activity!)

BFP = big fat positive (as in, the golden ticket. the not big, or fat, but tiny and small and almost indiscernible, little pink line on the drugstore pregnancy test you bought in a frenzy, along with Skittles you didn’t really want, but felt oddly comforting, and a People Magazine that you so did because honestly, what kind of person buys just a pregnancy test?)

And now, BD. I can barely stand to type this. BD is (cringe) “baby dance.” BD is SEX. Straight up. Sometimes my doctor calls it intercourse. Sometimes the nurse says “have relations” (still cringing). I call it sex. Superfluously not infrequently. As in, “So doc, when can I have SEX?” and, to the nurse, who is looking unhinged because it clearly makes her so uncomfortable when I utter such HEATHEN words “so, does that [test result/FSH level/weather report] mean we can have SEX?” Because honestly. Baby dance? If I am old enough to make the decision to voluntarily inject myself with Chinese hamster ovaries (seriously though, I feel like an adult should have signed off on that?), then I am totally old enough to say SEX in front of a medical professional AND in a pseudo-anonymous online forum. Thankyouverymuch.