Wrung out

This nine months thing is kicking my butt. I am wiped out, wrung out, and sad through and through. Lori the Wise said in her comment on my last post that 3 months intervals in that first year felt to her almost like the trimesters, and I think she is right. When you've been carrying something for that long you expect to birth it at some point, traditionally right around that nine months mark. You expect relief, even if you don't know that you expect it. And for me, it hasn't come. Not yet.

Honestly, I don't know whether this is grief or infertility. Both are unpredictable and exhausting at this point. And they seem to be compounding each other. Contemplating getting to our one year anniversary not just not pregnant, but having not started treatments takes my breath away, makes me feel like the world-class looser, like there is absolutely nothing in life I can actually plan on. It's not like I don't know that to be true, I just could do without daily reminders. It is already clear that I will get to ski for most if not all of this season, and that thought makes me want to cry, to bawl my eyes out, to howl at the moon. I love my skis, high-performance women all-terrain racers that they are, and I love my boots more, the first ones I ever had that are actually comfortable on my short wide feet, the ones that allowed me to tackle much more difficult slopes with confidence. But thinking of putting them on and going out on the mountain? Instead of sucking on lemons to keep that nausea at bay? Profoundly sad.

We went trick or treating last night to the same neighborhood we went last year-- Monkey's best boy friend's house and thereabouts. I was afraid the ghosts of last year when I was waddling around there visibly pregnant would be hard on me, but it was ok. I only saw one dressed up baby, and I flinched, but other than that it was fine. After the kids finished collecting their loot, they played in the basement, and we talked with the parents who are our very close friends. Some wine was imbued, which certainly made things easier. Today five friends who work close by came to my house for lunch. We talked and laughed so much that it hurt. Afterwards, as I was driving to get Monkey from school, I realized that while it was very good to see them and to talk like that, bantering and laughing, with just the right amount of dead-pan and needling, it did exhaust me. Again. What the hell?

Dr.YoungGun called this morning. Apparently the nurse was very upset after talking to me and thought I was rude. Well, shit. I did tell her, made sure to tell her, that I was very upset, but at the situation, not at her. I guess she took it more personally. Fine, whatever. I wonder whether the RE would've called if she wasn't upset. Or maybe he was supposed to have been the one calling me with the ultrasound results in the first place, seeing as he said that he was away at a conference and couldn't call me himself then, and she didn't know exactly how to read the report. Anyway, the radiologist thinks that Immanuel is a hemorrhagic cyst, meaning some blood has leaked into it from a ruptured vessel. Dr.YoungGun gives it a 50-50 chance to resolve itself, and wants to do that repeat ultrasound in close to the six weeks the radiologist recommended. I am far less optimistic, but I agreed to wait out the almost six weeks because he agreed to schedule JD to see the urologist now for after the repeat test, as opposed to waiting for the results of that test to schedule the appointment. Of course tired and sad and unprepared as I was for his phone call, I forgot to ask whether they saw a corpus luteum on that ultrasound, since at CD32 today and with almost no symptoms until now, I suspect it's not there. I could be wrong-- I had some transient pre-ovulation like symptoms about a week ago, but they were more like the ones this past summer that turned out to not have been actual ovulation symptoms. I guess I will know in another week. I also forgot to mention to him that since after I talked to the nurse and told her that Immanuel wasn't causing me much pain, just some discomfort, the pain actually increased. It's still not terrible, and very manageable, and certainly not at the level that the internets describe these suckers causing if they burst, so oh well.

He is also sending us to see genetics counselors because he looked up JD's genetic tests from when I was pregnant with Monkey and realized that the mutation he is a carrier for has been associated with some likelihood of having congenital lack of vas deferens. This is not for JD, obviously, as he doesn't have that problem, but for any boy we might have. I spent some time on PubMed and decided not to worry about it for now. If I tell you why, most people's eyes are likely to glaze over, so I won't for now, but if you want to know, ask, and I will type that part up too.

So all of this is my long way of saying I am wiped out, wrung out, and sad through and through. And I start a new job in about ten days.