Coasting

I admit, my focus hasn't been where it should be. The rest of this month may or may not be the same. Essentially, here is what is going on:

If you read my story at MDA, you know that SG and I have wanted to have children- basically from the beginning. 10 years later, we still don't have any. A huge part of our reasoning to moving to the Bay Area was that some of the best fertility specialists in the world are here, and SG would be in a position to make more money. So we would be able to afford any necessary, expensive, not covered by insurance procedures that would arise.

Three years later, we have enough savings to dive in and do this. And I totally panicked.

Ironically, now that I am more careful about what food I consume, I was now a LOT more leery about shooting myself full of chemicals.  Wanting to become a healthy parent was the main reason I began eating Paleo. I felt like going to a reproductive endocrinologist was "giving up", in a sense- going backwards. It's against just about everything I believe. My acupuncturist felt certain that I would be able to get pregnant without intervention, and over two years I have watched my window of opportunity shrink more and more, until I finally did preliminary testing a few months ago, and realized the horrible truth: if I wanted a conventional pregnancy, with my own DNA, I couldn't afford to wait any longer- and may have waited too long as it was. 

Using science to get pregnant, as it turns out, requires a lot more thought than just drinking too many margaritas and forgetting to take a pill- at least in my case. I've been poked, prodded, given up samples of just about any bodily fluid they could come up with, screened for pretty much everything under the sun, and spent enough time in the stirrups to potentially qualify as a cowgirl. Yeehaw!

I don't even want to talk about the stress. Money and emotions and stress are a REALLY crappy mix. Your self-image takes a horrible beating. In dark moments, you wonder if you even qualify as a woman.

People say amazingly awful things to you. I mean yeah: we could adopt. But the truth of the matter is, people typically have the need to want to reproduce. They want to further THEIR genes. It's a trait we share with pretty much every other species on this Earth, and logic has little or nothing to do with it. Otherwise, emperor penguins would not be huddling on a glacier in a blizzard, balancing an egg on their feet while losing half their body weight, and getting eaten by seals. They'd be all, "SCREW this, I am going to Starbucks!"

So anyway. I wanted to keep this separate, (and I will spare you the gory details) but I can't seem to focus on anything else. If you want the deets, they are on my other blog (I mentioned it a few posts ago. :)

 This is a huge part of my life right now, and I am actually shocked at how much it ties in. Because 5 years ago, I followed the same drug protocol. And it made me CRAZY.  Like suicidally, unable to get out of bed, can only eat cookies, screaming at my husband over the inferior way he folded the underwear, crying incessantly CRAZY. It also made me gain tons and tons of weight- which yes, may have had something to do with the cookies, but also probably the fact that my hormones were completely out of control, and I was injecting even more of them into myself daily. At one point, I developed so much cystic acne under my jawline and chin that I was in unbelievable pain- to the point that I didn't want to leave the house, and just sat around with an ice pack under my chin. Sound super-attractive? Oh yeah. 

Now imagine that you are married to that person. And that it is taking all your disposable income to make this happen, for something that has a 30% chance (or lower) of working. So not only do you have the emotional stress of infertility, you have financial stress as well.  And it all turned out not to work. That's a lot of hell to go through- for nothing.

Understandably, I was not anxious to do that again. Neither was SG. But we decided the risk was worth it- and that if we didn't take it, we would have the rest of our lives to regret it.

So here we are. I am pleased to say that my current experience has been immeasurably better- my doctor and his crew are awesome- not the case last time. AND I am emotionally stable- occasional highs and lows, but nothing like last time on the emo front. SG is happy to confirm this- I have been somewhat irritable and weepy, but not too crazy- and while I have moments, they are only temporary. Thank God (and Paleo!) for that.

So: if you're wondering what happened to all the shiny-happy posts about bicycling and making iced tea, that's what's going on. Hopefully I will be back to my old self and focused enough to write about something else soon. I am squirreling away pics of my culinary exploits and book and product reviews, so I'll have material- as soon as I get my head above water!