I did it. I made
it past day 19. And here we are. The illusive day 22. Just 6 grueling days until
the doctor-sanctioned blood work that will confirm that I am once and for
all barren whether or not I’m
with child.
My long time
readers (har, har) may recall that it was on day 19, two cycles ago, that I squatted, dumbstruck, shouting expletives in a rest stop bathroom started a’bleedin’.
It was early. Real early. Mathematically bonkers early. But it was all I needed
to know: I wasn’t pregnant.
So here we are,
nice and smug on day 22, still period-free and pretending like it means
something when I know full well that it doesn’t. As anticipated, my eerie calm
of last weekend has quickly evaporated, supplanted by a trembling, porous anxiety
just beneath the surface: at any moment
you could find out you’re not pregnant, which is why if you just avoid going to
the bathroom, YOU WILL NEVER KNOW.[1]
I guess it goes
back to this – I still barely know
how my body works and what I do know, I don’t trust. I didn’t ovulate for nine
months and now I’m supposed to rely on one medically induced cycle in December
to provide clues about this cycle’s possible success?[2]
Thanksbutnothanks.
In any case, I
met with the reproductive endocrinologist this afternoon and put the plan in
place for the next round[3]
– Clomid, Ovidrel, intrauterine insemination (IUI). Though I’m sure that my 8
regular readers in Qatar are old pros at IUI by now, for the uninitiated,
here’s the deal: prevailing medical wisdom is that after three rounds of
Clomid, your cervical mucus begins to become some kind of
sperm-hostile-double-agent, making it more difficult to conceive. There isn’t
good hard data but because it’s a plausible, if not scientifically demonstrable,
theory and because my insurance won’t let me graduate to IVF without first
stopping the train at the IUI station, we’re going to give it a go. Which means
that in cycle four, instead of several days of post-Ovidrel romance, we’ll have
one very early morning threesome (that’s me, C and one lucky infertility clinic
tech. *regrettable mental image*.). On that morning, within 90 minutes of,
ahem, C producing a sample, we’ll speed recklessly to the infertility clinic,
wait an hour for magic science
to do its thing[4] after which
I get to lay back, relax, and have a mystery nurse shoot a syringe full of
sperm (hopefully C’s) into my cervix.
