My jaw dropped open in surprised delight when I heard yesterday that the province of Ontario is considering funding up to three attempts of in vitro fertilization (IVF) through OHIP. Hello (Ontario Premier) Dalton McGuinty? Between this and the all-day kindergarten thing, I think I love you.

I haven’t had time to read through the entire report yet, but I will and I’ll write an informed summary and analysis when I do. (Um, I still owe you that second post on the Senate Child Care report too, don’t I? It’s on my list, I swear!)

Anyway, here’s what I think of the recommendation at first glance: yippee!!!, with a healthy side of “It’s about farking time!” As most of you know, my first son Tristan was conceived through IVF in 2001, so I admit to a strong bias on this. But you know what? Given the horrible amount of misinformation and misconceptions (snicker) that swirl around the issues of reproductive technologies, people who have been there and done that truly are in a better position to evaluate the proposals.

I find it rather ironic, in fact, that (assuming the recommendations are implemented) our reproductive years will have fallen smack dab in the middle of the decade and a half during which IVF was not funded through medicare. Up until 1994, IVF was funded in Ontario, and continued to be funded for women with two blocked fallopian tubes. I’m quite happy with how things turned out for us, though, and wouldn’t change a thing — but I sure would love to know that other families don’t have to abandon their dreams of having a family simply because they can’t afford to spend tens of thousands of dollars on fertility treatments.

Here’s why I think IVF should be funded not just in Ontario, but in all provinces and territories.

As the media has noted, one of the driving forces behind the recommendation to fund IVF is the idea of reducing multiple births. Multiple births are expensive on the health care system — there are higher incidences of premature births, c-sections, and intensive neo-natal care. One of the conditions of public funding would be that Ontario’s 14 fertility clinics would have to agree to stricter controls on the number of multiple births, which they would do by making more stringent the rules about the number of embryos that are transfered during an IVF cycle.

(I’m a bit removed from the latest clinic culture these days, but in 2001 when I was 32 years old, they would not allow me to transfer all three of our surviving embryos. We were allowed to transfer two and elected to have the third one frozen. So the clinics haven’t exactly been irresponsible to this point in time anyway. I’ve always been a little bit shocked to hear stories of clinics – largely in the US – that would allow the transfer of up to five or more embryos for a woman undergoing her first cycle, who is young and otherwise healthy.)

The idea, then, is that the amount that would be spent to fund up to three attempts of IVF would be offset by the reducing the costs to the system that result from currently high percentages of multiple births. What’s not mentioned, IMHO, is the value to the system of us creating all these little future taxpayers. Aren’t we all wringing our hands about declining fertility rates?

One other argument that I don’t see in the current media coverage is this: currently, Ontario does provide funding for other fertility treatments like Clomid and intrauterine insemination (IUI). I’ve never used Clomid (a drug that essentially causes you to ovulate more than one egg, thus increasing both your chances of conception and your chances of multiple births) but we did try two cycles of IUIs with superovulation, meaning they used drugs to torque my reproductive system into producing multiple eggs, took a sample of Beloved’s junk and ran it through a gyroscope-thingee (really!) to filter out all the poor swimmers, and had the surviving sperm squirted into my uterus.

The difference between IUI and IVF, then, is a much higher rate of control of the number of conceptions that occur. With (currently funded) IUI, multiple rates are much higher and completely out of the clinic’s control — millions of frisky sperm seek out up to half a dozen fertile eggs. With IVF, the conception occurs in the labratory instead of the uterus, and the doctors place one or two embryos into the uterus, hoping they will implant and grow. It’s the difference between using a calligraphy pen or a bucket of paint to dot your i, if I can make up an analogy.

As an aside, as many of you know, though Tristan was conceived through IVF, Simon and Lucas (and the babies we lost in 2000 and 2006) were conceived naturally. Beloved had an OHIP-funded surgery on his bits in 2001, while I was pregnant with Tristan, because he was in considerable discomfort. (You have to be in a lot of discomfort, I think, to have elective surgery down there — spoken as someone who will never know!) As a consequence, his fertility improved dramatically and obviously. So we might have been able to avoid the whole cost of the infertility treatments had the fertility doctors recommended this OHIP-funded surgery before the IVF.

You know what I would even consider as a reasonable compromise, for those of you who feel that taxpayer dollars should not be funding fertility treatments? Fund unsuccessful treatment cycles. Including two IUIs, a cycle of IVF with ICSI, four years of frozen embryo storage, and the costs to thaw and transfer Frostie, we easily spent $10,000 or $12,000 to overcome our infertility. I think you’ll agree that my darling Tristan is worth every penny times a thousand. We’re lucky that we never had to face the unimaginable agony of an unsuccessful round of IVF treatments compounded by the idea of spending all that money for naught — just try to imagine spending everything you have, financially and emotionally, and coming away empty-handed.

At the very least, this proposal levels the playing field just a little bit for people facing infertility. This editorial, written by a couple who have filed a discrimination complaint at the Human Rights Tribunal of Ontario, outlines some of the ways in which the current system of funding for reproductive technologies in Ontario are discriminatory. Two blocked fallopian tubes? You get three funded IVF attempts. Testicles fried from the radiation to treat Hodgkins disease? You’re out of luck. PCOS? So sorry. Low ovarian reserve? Too bad. Poor sperm motility or mobility or count? Yer on yer own, buddy.

Anyway, I’m all over the place here. As you can see, even after all this time I still react passionately to stories about infertility and reproductive technologies. (Hal, if you’re reading, now you know why infertility is one of the metatags on my blog!) I am beyond delighted to see that Ontario is considering funding up to three cycles of IVF for eligible families, and applaud the province of Quebec for its forward-thinking policies in this area. Once I read the report, I’ll come back with another post and try for a more detached tone. (Anybody want to take bets on how long I’m able to maintain that illusion of detachment?)

What do you think? (And yes, I’m open to dissenting opinions, so long as they are expressed with respect. And you realize that there’s nothing you can say that might change my opinion on this one!)

Related posts (automatically generated):

1. 3.. 2.. 1.. GO!
2. Frostie update
3. An open letter to John Tory

Remember Dr Zap? Apparently he’s celebrating his 25,000th vasectomy today. He’s the most prolific infertilizer in Canada! Amusing article, worth the read. (Sheesh, had I known there’d be champagne we could have held out another couple of months!)

Related posts (automatically generated):

1. Laughter Yoga on Parliament Hill this Sunday
2. Ottawa At Home magazine features local bloggers
3. When your child gets the flu…

This morning’s Globe and Mail had an interesting article about uterine biopsies improving IVF success rates. Even though I’m a long time removed from our infertility days, I can still taste the desperation we felt. I would have totally pushed to have this done, back in the day, even though the director of the Ottawa Fertility Centre is quoted as saying he doesn’t yet do the procedure.

Related posts (automatically generated):

1. "Your mucous is lovely!"
2. Ottawa At Home magazine features local bloggers
3. When your child gets the flu…

Poor Beloved. Not bad enough I have no shame in blogging about my life, but now I’m blogging about his most personal bits. Good thing we’ve got a lot of family freebies out of blog over the years to compensate for my appalling lack of respect for his private parts.

He’s going today for his first consult with the vasectomy doctor. Could it be any more ironic? Seven years ago when I was pregnant with Tristan, the poor man went under the knife to have his bits repaired (he had a varicocele, which is basically a varicose vein in the scrotum, and it can cause pain and infertility) and three boys later he’s going back under the knife (well, laser) to turn off the faucet. From infertile to abundantly fertile and back to infertile in one decade.

I’m extremely grateful that he’s willing to undergo this procedure so I don’t have to undergo the much more invasive and risky tubal ligation, and birth control pills are not an option for me as they make me horribly sick.

There’s no doubt (well, very little doubt) (no, really, no doubt) (almost 99.9% doubt-free) that we’re done with this baby-making thing, and yet I still can’t help but feel sad and a little bit anxious about taking such irrevocable action. We just couldn’t afford the daycare or the education of four kids, and our house is already bursting at the seams with love and stinky running shoes. And if we won the lottery tomorrow? Tough call. My first thought is that I’d consider it again, but then I’m 39 now and the last pregnancy was hard on me. Not sure how well I’d handle another, let alone the possibility of losing another one. And the idea of going back to “trying” again? Ugh. That’s one chapter of my life I’m quite happy to leave behind, thank you.

It’s been such a huge relief knowing that Lucas is the last baby. I’ve been savouring each stage, each moment, each milestone, knowing that we won’t go down this road again. And I’ve been ditching my baby and maternity stuff like a madwoman. So really, we’re done. It’s taken me two paragraphs to reconvince myself after the finality of seeing it all in print in front of me, but really, we’re done.

You know what really gobsmacked me, though? When Beloved went to our GP and asked for the referral to Dr Zap (they cauterize the vas deferens. Eep.) she asked him if he had discussed the idea of the vasectomy with me and if I was in agreement.

Can you believe it? Can you imagine the hue and cry if a woman needed a man’s approval or agreement (tacit or otherwise) to get her tubes tied or an abortion? Now, I absolutely agree that a husband and wife should be in complete agreement when such drastic action is taken, but this just seems wrong to me. They’re his bits, and much as I claim ownership over the rest of him, in the end it’s his choice to end his fertile years — short and blissful though they have been.

And on a not-quite-completely unrelated topic, I must tip my bloggy hat to Kate, who has come up with what I think is by far the most pithy and succinct commentary on Sarah Palin, a saga I have been watching with amazed disbelief: “Why is it that women should be trusted with the Vice Presidency, but not with their own reproductive decisions?”

Related posts (automatically generated):

1. Dr Zap and 25,000 vasectomies
2. The big reveal
3. Free 10-issue digital Pregnancy mag

I peed on a stick yesterday morning. One line. Sigh.

I’m not terribly surprised. I knew I had ovulated fairly late in my cycle, if at all. (Funny, I spent all of our infertile years being mystified by my body, using a microscope to read its inscrutable signs. Now it sends me fertility signals in 72-point font, and yet I still can’t force it to succumb to my will. I am truly my own worst enemy.) I would have been expecting day one last Friday given an ordinary cycle, but I might have ovulated up to five days or a week late, so I really shouldn’t have been expecting my period any time before this weekend.

I got sucked in by hope, though. Damn optimism. There was nothing I could put my finger on, but I simply felt like I might be pregnant. Part of that might have been the absence of the injustices my body usually offers in the week before my period arrives either. I’ll save you the gory details, but we’re mostly talking about minor mood swings, bloat, and an inability to stop eating – especially eating junk food.

By Monday, pregnancy watch had officially commenced with the scrutinizing of the toilet paper. You know how it is, where you begin wondering if you are peeing all the time because you are pregnant, or because you just want the chance to check the toilet paper again to stave off doubt and denial. And there’s that brief suspended moment just before you examine the tissue where you are braced for the tell-tale smudge of blood, but holding out hope for a pristine smudge-free wipe.

While making dinner Tuesday, I had begun thinking about home pregnancy tests and when I might be able to test without feeling foolishly premature. I’d been idly thinking about a possible leftover (unused!) test from last summer, and when I rooted through the bathroom cupboard and found one, it seemed like a postcard from fate. It was a freebie; I could test and be sure of the answer and stop what had become a near-constant cacophony of “what-ifs” in my mind with one quick trip to the bathroom.

To test or not to test. This is the question of women the world over. So much hope, so much fear, so much possibility, so much dread, all imbued into one little chemical strip. There is widespread agreement in the infertility community that “pee sticks” are evil. Assuming you are trying to conceive, the positive test is the best possible outcome. However, the negative test doesn’t allow much closure. We’ve all heard the stories of people who have negative hpts and go on to have lovely babies nine months later.

I’ve had a rocky relationship with the pee sticks myself. Three positives, one of which was Simon (I never got that far in to the two week wait with Tristan; I had a positive blood test when I started showing signs of OHSS nine days after the embryo transfer.) I can’t even count how many negative ones. Dozens, probably.

So in the gloaming of an early morning, before anybody else in the house is awake, I pee on a stick. Every single time I’ve taken a pregnancy test, I am swept up by the swell of possiblity and the suspension of disbelief in that breathless moment where the urine surges up the little stick. I’m almost afraid to look, afraid to give up the hope of speculation to the harsh reality of fact. The moment seems endless, my optimism champing at the bit, my mind already formulating announcements and due dates and nursery colour schemes.

One line. With an exhalation of breath, I take an embarrassed moment to reign in my rampant optimism. Of course it wasn’t positive. How silly of me to think so. I never really thought I was pregnant. I was just, you know, making sure.

Later that afternoon, I can’t help myself. I pull the test back out of its nest of tissues in the bathroom garbage bin. I peer carefully at the used test, trying by sheer force of will to conjure a ghostly pink line in the hopelessly blank space beside ruby-red test line. I step to the window and turn the test back and forth, squinting at the test from various angles until I am nearly cross-eyed. Despite my best efforts, the test remains stubbornly negative. I move to toss it back into the waste bin, but stop and lay it carefully on the counter. I’ll check one more time, later.

You never know. Hope springs eternal.

Related posts (automatically generated):

1. I have no idea what to call this post
2. Details, details
3. The joys of May

Thanks to my colleague Rebecca, who was the first to realize that the Chatelaine article I mentioned is already posted online! No more skulking around the magazine racks at every grocery store and news stand in town, waiting for the paper copy to arrive. Er, not that I was doing that, of course.

Anyway, it’s with great pleasure and excitement (and a certain lack of subtlety) that I happily point you toward the article in the online May edition of Chatelaine magazine, In vitro we trust – coming soon to a paper edition near you! In my humble opinion, even past the bits that feature me, it’s a well balanced and informative article about the state of reproductive technologies in Canada. It’s quite long, though – nine screens’ worth – so grab a cup of your beverage of choice before you settle in if you want to read the whole thing.

There’s nothing about our story that you haven’t already read here, and here, and here, and here, and here, and here, and here (shameless, aren’t I?) but it still tickles me to see it all laid out like that in somebody else’s words. I was pleased to see that the article manages to shout out both boys and blog by name (sadly, without a direct link. Oh well.)

Even though we knew it was coming and discussed it in advance, I still cringed just a bit when I saw the bit outing Beloved’s low sperm count. We’ve come a long way from the days immediately after our diagnosis, when we could barely discuss it between ourselves. By now, of course, he has become rather acclimatized to me discussing our most intimate moments with the widest possible audience – in blog, on national TV (not once, but twice!) and now in a national magazine as well. He took it in stride, and in fact insists I correct the record by clarifying that it’s not so much that his sperm are not copious, but that (in his words, not mine) they are “stupid”. The fertility doctors used the slightly more clinical term, “of impaired morphology”, but you get the point.

All this to say, in my usual belaboured and roundabout way, that I’m terribly proud to be featured in the article. In case you hadn’t gleaned that from my oh-so-understated neon billboard of a post about it.

Related posts (automatically generated):

1. Ottawa At Home magazine features local bloggers
2. On vaccinations
3. It’s official: I’m a writer!

The forecast called for a mild day with drizzle, a nice change from the month-long deep freeze we had been enduring. I happily dug my long spring coat from the back of the closet where it had been languishing behind our heavy winter gear. I shrugged into it and ran out the door, late as usual for the bus that was just pulling up to the curb. It was only when I got off the bus downtown and was walking with my face turned up to the newly softened spring breeze that I shoved my hands into my pockets and encountered the cardboard box. I pulled out my hand and opened my fingers. A small green box of organic raisins. In a heartbeat, my upbeat mood turned melancholy.

Of course, I thought to myself. I haven’t worn this coat since last fall. Last fall, when I was pregnant, I never went anywhere without a stash of granola bars and raisins to stave off that sudden lurch of nausea brought on by an empty stomach. I would have been switching to my winter gear just about the time we lost the baby. The last time I wore this coat, I was pregnant.

It’s only been four months. Amazing to think that if I hadn’t lost the baby, I’d still be pregnant right now, not even all that close to my May 8 due date. I’d be huge and uncomfortable and obviously pregnant, able to feel even the smallest of the baby’s movements. I’d be having trouble finding a comfortable way to sit, let alone sleep, and would be deep into preparing the boys for the impending arrival of chaos. I’d be pulling out the old cartons of baby clothes again, picking through to find sentimental favourites and reminiscing about how my giant boys used to practically swim in the tiny sleepers. I’d be hating my maternity clothes and missing my old favourites that no longer came close to stretching across the vast expanse of my stomach. I’d have forgotten what my feet look like. I’d be uncomfortable and crabby and glowing, all at the same time.

But, that’s not how it turned out. Instead, on the weekend that would have been baby’s first weekend at home, by a coincidence of timing we’ll be enjoying the company of my extended family on the free camping weekend. It’s taken a very long time for me to be able to consider the month of May without a sharp constriction of my throat. May finally no longer means the birthday that won’t happen. It means the month with the fun getaway, the month before our big vacation, the month when the boys switch to their new (sshhhhh!) caregiver.

Even though the shock and pain and immediate grief of the miscarriage have faded to a gentle melancholy, it only takes a little box of stale raisins to bring it to the fore again. And every month, the red tide of disappointment spills forth, dashing once again my hopes for another chance to be pregnant.

My feelings on getting pregnant again are complex, not clear even to me. I would like to be pregnant, love the mechanics by which one gets pregnant, but am so very afraid to become embroiled in the emotional maelstrom that is Trying. And every month since January, when we officially started Trying again, I’ve been heartbroken to find myself not pregnant again, even as I wonder in the bright light of day whether I am ready or able to risk going through it all again.

How ironic it all is. When I was speaking to the writer for the upcoming Chatelaine article, she seemed intrigued by my statement that I still consider myself in the camp of the infertile, even having conceived three babies naturally and Tristan and his twin through IVF. (I was still pregnant at the time.) For someone who considered herself infertile, we had really only spent that one year trying to conceive – and then a bunch of other stuff happened.

Sure, it took us more than a year and more than $10,000 of medical intervention (including the IVF and two IUIs) to conceive Tristan, but both Simon and the baby lost in November were conceived without concerted effort on our part. We weren’t really even Trying with Simon – in fact, we were celebrating the sign-off of waivers on our new house. Oops! We didn’t Try before Frostie either, because we had high hopes for that to work out, and when it didn’t I became pregnant the very next month anyway.

And now, so ironically, for the first time since before Tristan was born, seven long years after we tumbled into the land of the infertile, here we are again. We are Trying and it’s Not Working.

It’s different, of course. Back in those dark, lonely, scary days when we were first struggling with infertility, I was wracked with fear that we would never have the family we so dearly wanted. Now, the cruel and abrupt arrival of the monthly red messenger is disappointing, but not crushing.

With each month, as we drift further and further away from the last pregnancy, the urgency to replace and restore my pregnant condition subsides. All things being equal, I think I’d like to have that third child some day, and so we’ll keep trying for a while. Keep trying, without Trying, maybe.

That’s a whole lot of emotional detritus to stuff into one little box of raisins.

Related posts (automatically generated):

1. Beloved visits Dr Zap
2. Milestones
3. Seven things that suck about the third trimester

A couple of weeks ago, I posted my 10-pages-in book review of PD James’ Children of Men. At the time, I mentioned I’d read the book to be a part of today’s Barren Bitches Book Club tour. The idea is that each person who participates in the book club submits a question to the group, and then everyone answers five of the questions on his or her own blog.

With the birthday festivities of the weekend, I didn’t get the chance to devote much time to this, so I’m going to cop out and answer only three questions. It was hard to choose only three!

1. Some of the most memorable passages were those that described how dolls and even kittens came to take the place of babies for people after Omega. In all of these scenes, it is women who are pushing dolls in their strollers or taking kittens to be christened. Why do you think P.D. James chose to only portray women in these scenes? How does this fit with your own experiences of how men and women cope with infertility in similar or different ways?

One of the things I found striking about this book is the detachment of the protagonist, Theo, through the first half of the book. (Especially in contrast to the second half.) He seems detached not only from the global tragedy of the crisis of infertility, but from his own life. It’s especially obvious when he talks of the accidental death of his daughter Natalie, beginning with the horribly abrupt way he introduces the subject: “Today is my daughter’s birthday, would have been my daughter’s birthday if I hadn’t run her over and killed her.”

Back to the point, I do think this detachment is reasonably representative of men coping with infertility. While there’s no doubt infertility is equally painful and difficult for men and for women, I think men are much more stoic. I think that women internalize the infertility and make it a part of their identity, of who they are, to a much greater extent than do men. Maybe this has to do with the fact that women tend (sorry, painting with very broad strokes here) to identify themselves as a mother first, when men tend to identify themselves based on their accomplishments or employment. Finally, I think it has to do with the fact that infertility is such an emotional issue, and women are simply more open (again, generally speaking) to expressing their emotions than are men.

2. In describing the world’s “universal bereavement” over it’s lack of children, the narrator tells us, “Only on tape and records do we now hear the voices of children, only on film or on television programmes do we see the bright, moving images of the young. Some find them unbearable to watch but most feed on them as they might a drug.” How is this like your life dealing with infertility? How do you cope when you are confronted with images or reminders that are painful to you?

I pulled that quote out in my book review, too, because it resonated with me. I’d say I’ve passed through both points on that spectrum, both needy for the companionship of the children of my friends and acquaintances, and unable to tolerate them. In the darkest times, I remember being unable to visit our friends in their child-filled house in a child-friendly neighbourhood simply because I was too full of fear that it would never happen for me. There were times when strangers holding babies and pushing strollers in the mall made me cry just by virtue of being there.

For me, though, the hardest part was not the children but the pregnant bellies. Actually having a child was a mythical thing that I may or may not have been able to achieve and that I yearned for in a vaguely abstract way, but I ached to be that woman with the beautiful round belly. It was especially hard because a very good friend was pregnant at the same time we lost our first baby and went through the unsuccessful IUIs and made the decision to finally pursue IVF.

Even now, two beautiful boys later, I still find myself on a bad day with an unsettled sense of resentment when I see strangers with new babies. I think of the baby we lost in November, the baby I expected to arrive in May, and I feel a tug of regret.

3. The Omegas are portrayed as cruel, self-obsesssed and cold. Do you suppose that’s a function of the way they were raised (as the last generation of children) or something inherent in them? Do you think that infertility has an effect on parenting?

To answer the second question first, I used to think about the effect infertility had on me as a parent a lot more than I do now. I don’t think it has affected things like discipline or how I treat the kids, but I do think it had, especially back in the earliest days, a huge impact on the guilt factor. On the very worst days, deep in the dark of night when my nipples were bleeding from a poor latch and Tristan wasn’t gaining weight and I was exhausted and terrified and my life was suddenly inside out, I keenly remember being wracked with guilt about not being beautific with joy after finally having the baby I wanted so badly.

And to the first question, I do think the author intended to insinuate that the Omegas were a product of an indulgent upbringing. Theo observes,

Perhaps we have made our Omegas what they are by our own folly; a regime which combines perpetual surveillance with total indulgence is hardly conduicive to healthy development. If from infancy you treat children as gods they are liable in adulthood to act as devils.

I think this is an interesting reflection on how central to our lives our children have become, and how parenting in the 21st century seems to be largely about overscheduling children with activities to make sure they are challenged and engaged for the maximum number of hours possible each week. While I’m quite guilty of making the boys the centre of our family, rather than equal partners, I hope that as they get older we’ll be able to restore a bit of equillibrium so that everything is not entirely about them. (Some day I’ll get around to writing a whole post about this, instead of flying past it in one quick paragraph, as I’ve been thinking a lot about it.)

And now, a message from the Barren Bitches Book Club organizers: Intrigued by this book tour and want to read more about Children of Men? Hop along to more stops on the Barren Bitches Book Tour by visiting the master list at Stirrup Queens . Want to come along for the next tour? Sign up begins today for tour #3 ( The Time Traveler’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger) and all are welcome to join along. All you need is a book and blog.

Coincidentally, The Time Traveler’s Wife was the book that was the genesis of my 10-pages-in book reviews, and one of my favourite books of 2005 – perhaps even of all time. Highly recommended reading, and if you’re reading it, why not join the book club tour?

Related posts (automatically generated):

1. Ten-pages-in book review: Children of Men
2. Baby jones
3. Blog Book Tour: It’s A Girl – Women Writers on Raising Daughters

This was supposed to be a 10-pages-in book review of PD James’ Children of Men. But the book was really good and I accidentally read the whole thing on the train going to and from my conference in Kingston last week before I could write the review. Oops, sorry about that.

I was surprised at what a great book this is. I had heard vaguely of the movie, but my life lately hasn’t permitted me a lot of time for cinematic indulgence, and the book and the movie only really tripped onto my radar screen when I read about the Barren Bitches Book Brigade Tour hosted by Stirrup Queens and Sperm Palace Jesters. (Do they know how to write a catchy title or what?)

A bit of a caveat before I begin. (You know it’s going to be a long ramble when I’m making preamble-ish caveats in the third paragraph.) I’m not much of a sci-fi reader, and I’m especially not a huge consumer of dystopian fiction. I’m far too optimistic, some might even say simplistic, to submit myself to the fatalistic outlook of dystopia. So I’m not overly familiar or comfortable with the conventions of the genre, outside of what I learned from Margaret Atwood, but as soon as I read the premise of this book, I knew I had to read it and talk about it with you.

Ah yes, the book. It’s set in the year 2021, and is told in the alternating first and third person perspective of Theo Fallon, an Oxford professor and historian. The future in which he lives is not so different from the world of 2007, nor the world of 1992 (when the book was written) insomuch as there are no flying cars, no outposts of civilization on the moon, not even any mention of computers that I can recall. But it is the world of a doomed society, because it has been more than 25 years since a baby has been born. In the year 1995, all of humanity has been struck, completely inexplicably, infertile.

The book opens on a note of futulity and fatalism, many years past the panicked shock of the initial realization of infertility. Theo notes in his diary, “We are outraged and demoralized less by the impending end of our species, less even by our inability to prevent it, then by our failure to discover the cause.” Their spirits have been defeated not by the ‘what’, but by the unanswerable ‘why?’

I found a lot of resonance with my own struggle with infertility in this book. The last generation of children, born in the year 1995, are known as Omega. As they become adults, society moves to erase the painful reminder that there will be no more children: “The children’s playgrounds in our parks have been dismantled. [...] The toys have been burnt, except for the dolls, which have become for some half-demented women a substitute for children. The schools, long closed, have been boarded up or used as centres for adult education. The children’s books have been systematically removed from our libraries. Only on tape and records do we hear the voices of children, only on film or television programs do we see the bright, moving images of the young. Some find them unbearable to watch but most feed on them as they would a drug.”

I was haunted by this idea, by a world without children. I think I found the concept entirely more chilling than the idea of humanity’s ultimate expiration. Theo describes in a few scenes how pets have become substitute children, as in one scene where a kitten is christened in an abandoned church. In another, he alludes to the acrimony of custodial agreements for pets: “As the registered part owner on the fecund-domestic-animal licence, I could, of course, have applied to the Animal Custody Court for joint custody or an access order, but I had no wish to submit myself to the humiliation.” (I remember joking back in the dark days, in the tight way one jokes about something that might not be so funny after all, that if we didn’t have a baby soon, one might soon find me at the mall pushing our lovely golden-shepherd mix Katie in a pram with a bonnet on her head.)

But the book isn’t entirely about infertility; it’s more of an exploration of what would happen to humanity deprived of a future and forced to live through a slow and considered extinction. Really, not the most cheerful book I ever read, but fascinating and compelling all the same.

Theo’s cousin, Xan, is the Warden of England, a benevolent dictator who gives the people what he thinks they want: protection, comfort, and pleasure. When Theo, who had previously served on Xan’s advisory council, is approached by a small group of revolutionaries who want to use Theo as a conduit to his powerful cousin, Theo is reluctant to get involved in anything that might disrupt his ordered life. When he does acquiesce in the end, it is for completely unaltruistic reasons.

The second half of the book becomes, rather unexpectedly after the thoughtful if plodding narrative of the first part of the book, a page-turning adventure that makes me glad I was too far committed to write a review before I reached the end of the story. It’s a fascinating, insightful book that left me considering the issues it raises long after I turned the last page. I’d like to go see the movie now, although I’ve heard that it’s only loosely based on the book, if only to have the excuse to re-immerse myself in the story again.

I’m not convinced I’ve adequately conveyed how much I enjoyed this book, how thought-provoking it was, and how I lingered over the last page, wondering what happened next. I’m typing this late at night, though, and rather than fuss over this and try to get the words just right, I’ll just tell you that it’s a really great book, one of the best I’ve read in a long time, and I’d love to talk about it with you.

I’ll be revisiting this book next month as part of the Barren Bitches Book Brigade Tour, and you still have time to join in if you’re interested. Read the book by the end of February and we can host our own conversation about the book on March 5.

Related posts (automatically generated):

1. Children of Men book club
2. 10-pages-in book review: The Ruins
3. Ten-pages-in book review: The Unwritten Girl

How do you know your family is complete? How did you decide? Did you always know? Did you just stop? Were you forced to stop by circumstance, or forced to accept more than you expected?

What’s it like for families who don’t have the spectres of infertility and loss lurking in the shadows of their hearts? How different would all this be if we hadn’t struggled so hard to earn the two precious boys we have?

In one minute, I’m perfectly content to stop. Two beautiful boys is a lifetime of blessings. And then the pendulum swings, and with entirely the same amount of conviction, I know that we’ll have another child. Know it in my bones. It’s a truth, a certainty. That lasts about an hour, and then I don’t know again.

When I look at Tristan and Simon and how truly wonderful they are, I can’t help but think that having another child – boy or girl – would be more of the same, therefore wonderful. How can I say no to the idea of more of the most amazing thing that ever happened to me?

And then the fear kicks in. The fear of pain, the fear of loss, but mostly the fear of really fucking things up. It’s not the idea of the third child that scares me. It’s the risk. The what-ifs.

What if we decide to try, we commit to the idea of that third child, and then we can’t conceive? How long do we try? How do we decide to stop trying? Can I face month after month of not conceiving – again? Can Beloved?

And if we can get past the fear of trying (and let me tell you, even after Tristan and Simon, the struggle with infertility has left deep and painful scars on my heart. Mine, and Beloved’s too)… even if we get past the fear of trying, there are so very many things that can go wrong.

If we are lucky enough to conceive again, I’m now 37 years old and officially of advanced maternal age – and with a history of infertility and miscarriage. Can I deal with nine months of paranoia? What if I have another miscarriage? What if I don’t have another miscarriage, but something is wrong with the baby and we have to face a horrible decision? What if the baby is born, but that baby has needs beyond our ability to cope? Do I even have the right to risk my family’s collective future simply because I selfishly want that which was denied to me?

And these are beyond the more pedestrian worries of whether the boys will be content with another sibling, whether Simon be okay as a middle child, whether I’ll have enough time and energy for a whole other person in the family, how we’ll cope with the logistics of five in a world that favours families of four. All these things seem trivial now, but just six weeks ago seemed like epic problems.

I need closure, trite as that expression may be. I need to know that I can give away my maternity clothes, get rid of the crib, and pack up the baby gear for good. I need to be able to pick out a few favourite things that I’ll keep for sentimental sake, and get rid of the rest of it. I have boxes on boxes of baby and toddler clothes, toys, bottles and spoons and bowls, a baby tub and a cradle and a playpen. I have baby gates and booster seats, stacks of bibs and blankets and towels, and shoes in every size. I have three strollers and three car seats and a beautiful pine crib – and I just to know whether I’ll ever need them again.

That’s a lot of clutter in my house, but mostly it’s a lot of clutter in my heart. I need to know. I can’t just let the idea of my next child drift away like the sunlight fades out of a summer day, dragging on for months or years. I don’t want to feel this sad yearning uncertainty forever. I need to know.

Related posts (automatically generated):

1. A call to action for my American friends
2. On helping a friend through a miscarriage
3. A box of raisins

I’ve always believed in a greater order to the universe, if not in an actual higher power. Not exactly fate, because I believe we do control our own destinies. But I strongly believe that everything happens for a reason.

That makes it only marginally easier to say goodbye to frostie. No need to pee on a stick this morning, because nature informed me in her own bloody way last night that the cycle didn’t work, that toastie never did become stickie, and that I’m not pregnant.

I think the strangest, saddest part of the whole thing is saying goodbye to the idea of frostie. For five years, as long as we’ve had Tristan in my life, we’ve also had frostie. Frostie was like an empty chair at the table, a place-holder for the child that might someday be. It was our back-up plan, our big ‘what-if”. It was also the twin of Tristan. For five years, we paid a couple hundred dollars to keep it in frozen slumber, and it seems incredibly sad to me to go through all the effort of re-energizing it, only to have the cycle fail.

But everything happens for a reason, right?

You only had to read a post or two in the past couple of months to know I was occasionally ambivalent about the idea of having three kids. And yet, typically, now that I’ve been told I can’t have something I want it more than ever. I’m such a Leo.

And heck, Simon taught us that we don’t need a lab and a dozen specialists and a couple thousand dollars to make a baby. There’s an easier, much more fun and FREE way to go about it, and you know how I feel about free. I love free.

So yes, today we are sad to say goodbye to frostie. To have a dream end this way is always sad, but we are so very blessed in so many ways. I never, ever want to be that person who reaches past what she has trying to grasp what she wants. Never.

So long, frostie. I’m sorry it didn’t work out for us.

Related posts (automatically generated):

1. Day one!
2. Fertility watch
3. 730 days, 762 posts, too many words to count

I’ve spent a lot of this past week and a half pretty much obsessed with my breasts. They’ve always been the canary in the coal mine, my first indicator of pregnancy. As such, I must have groped myself several thousand times since frostie became toastie. There are entire freshman classes at large universities who have experienced less groping that I have groped my own breasts this week.

Despite the fact that they should have been bruised from all the groping, my breasts were sending some pretty strong ‘not pregnant’ unsignals up until Sunday afternoon.

Here’s a nickle’s worth of free advice for you. In the middle of the two week wait, during a fertility treatment cycle, do NOT randomly choose to wear a bra that you haven’t worn in three months. You will be driven to the brink of insanity trying to figure out if the change in the consistency of your breasts is due to the hormone fluctuations of early pregnancy, or a too-small cup size of an ill-fitting bra.

So I broke down Monday morning and peed on a stick. And despite my best efforts to conjure a second line out of the urine-soaked ether, it was quite obviously negative. I peered at it until I was cross-eyed, looking at it flat on, at an angle, and under four kinds of light – the only thing I lacked was a black light – before finally accepting the fact that the second line was simply not going to appear.

I threw it in the garbage, crawled back into bed (did I mention this was all at 4:30 in the morning?) then stumbled back to the bathroom and checked it yet again. Still negative. I laid it carefully on the bathroom counter, remembering tales of seemingly-negative tests left to ferment on the counter for hours that magically materialized as positive later in the day. But it didn’t.

But I was still feeling pretty hopeful, because Day 11 of a cycle is still on the early side. And when you’re an infernal optimist, you don’t give up that easily. Besides, my breasts remained convinced I was pregnant, and who can argue with a breast?

So I peed on a stick in the wee hours of this morning, too. No big finish here – it was negative, too. And while it’s only 24 hours later, this one has the weight of finality for me. This is the one that made a few tears of regret slide down my cheeks, because now I believe it. I think it’s done.

I’ll still pee on my remaining sticks, at least until tomorrow, but no matter how hard I try, I can’t will even the faintest hint of a positive out of those evil pee sticks, and it seems to have been enough to convince my breasts that they’re not pregnant, either.

Don’t console me now, because I’m still holding out until the blood test on Friday. Hey, you never know. But if you want to post a comment, wish me a happy birthday instead. Thirty seven years ago today, I started out on this crazy trip, despite my best efforts to the contrary. (I was late, and breech, and they had to come in and get me. Stubborn from the day I was born.) I love birthdays, and don’t know why people don’t like to celebrate them. Today of all days is my day, and that’s worth celebrating.

Related posts (automatically generated):

1. The one where I’m not pregnant
2. The one with too much information
3. Six week update

It’s been a week since frostie became toastie – or, as Beloved has christened it, “Stickie”. We’re half way to resolution and I’m finding the wait much harder than I expected.

I know, I’m not exactly famous for my patience in the first place, but I kind of figured that I would have less emotional investment this time around. I mean, either outcome is wonderful – on one hand, we have a gorgeous family with just the four of us. On the other hand, we have a gorgeous family that is 25 per cent more – therefore 25 per cent more gorgeous – than before. I can’t lose.

And yet, I have spent a lot of time fretting. And flying. And fretting. And flying. Lather, rinse, repeat.

I’m developing a theory on the two-week wait, because I’ve had a little bit too much time in my head to think about it. The two-week wait allows you to experience every single possible emotion on the spectrum, from elation to desolation, just to prepare you for any possible eventuality when you take that pregnancy test.

I started out pretty confident that Frostie>Toastie>Stickie had implanted, and I was pregnant. I had nothing to base it on but my own instincts, which have been pretty good about predicting actual pregnancies, but not so good at predicting gender. (I was gobsmacked to find out my babies were boys both times – I had been sure they were each a girl when I was pregnant.) I spent most of the weekend blissfully imagining how the next nine months might pass with me pregnant, and passed idle time considering how we’d arrange Tristan’s room into a shared room for the boys, and checked out other people’s mini-vans every time we drove somewhere.

I’ve slowly slid down the confidence scale to the point where I’m now fairly sure that it didn’t work. Why? Because I’ve spent WAY too much time in my head, that’s why. I don’t feel any pregnancy symptoms yet, although the deeply repressed logical part of my brain keeps insisting that at a full week before my period is due, there simply aren’t any symptoms to be felt.

Every couple of hours, I’ll have a random surge of confidence, and the gyroscope in my brain will announce it worked and I am pregnant. The alignment of dust motes in Namibia will cause a ripple in the Force a few hours later, and my emotional barometer will plummet, convincing me that the cycle has failed and menstruation is imminent.

It’s all becoming rather tiresome, to be honest.

At least it’s not as bad as the two-week wait with the IVF that resulted in Tristan. I had a toxic reaction to the estradiol level in my blood from the follicle stimulating hormones, and developed Ovarian Hyperstimulation Syndrome, a potentially serious condition that causes fluid to gather in your ovaries. Pregnancy excerbates the condition, and when my OHSS symptoms started to abate about five days after we transferred two embryos, I was so sure that the cycle failed I cried for days – including a rather embarrassing breakdown at the clinic when they told me my OHSS had cleared up enough that I didn’t need to come in for daily monitoring any more. In my hormone-addled brain, no OHSS = no pregnancy.

That was around six days after transfer, pretty close to where I am now. And then, three days after that at nine days post transfer, I started to feel sick and bloated, and when late in the day I started having trouble drawing a breath, I called the doctor on call to check in. He ordered me to the ER and to make a long story short, we found out that night that I was pregnant. (We found out two weeks later it was twins, and lost one of the twins two weeks after that. The whole story is here, if you haven’t read it yet.)

And all that means pretty much nothing. I just have to wait. And wait. And wait. Did I mention I’m not so good with the waiting?

I’m thinking of buying some bulk home pregnancy tests from the Extraordinary Baby Shoppe – they’re only four for five dollars, plus the freebie from my great OPK adventure. I could start testing on Monday, but I’m just not sure if I could handle a full week of negative HPTs. I saw enough negatives in our years of infertility, thank you.

But hey, was that a twinge in my left breast? Maybe it’s a little tender? Or, maybe not. Maybe it’s tender because I keep groping it, trying to see if it’s tender.

Argh. I really hate waiting.

Related posts (automatically generated):

1. Milestones
2. Six week update
3. The memo

So I didn’t get the artistic blog photo I wanted, but I can at least share this picture of the transfer. You’re looking at an ultrasound of my interior plumbing – isn’t it exciting? The big dark ‘sea’ at the top of the picture is my very, very full bladder, and the bottom half shows my uterus, with the cervix on the far right. You can see the catheter in the centre, and three or four bright white spots that are the fertility goo that surrounded the embryo in the catheter. (Ya, I know, what it really looks like a big grey smudge. But humour me… )

I had asked Beloved to scan the ultrasound picture for me the night of the transfer, but the editorial comments were an unexpected addition.

Related posts (automatically generated):

1. "Your mucous is lovely!"
2. Frostie update
3. Wheeeeeeee!

It’s not every day you get a compliment like, “Your mucous is lovely” but being the affirmation-junkie that I am, I’ll take it!

That’s what one of the two (two!) reproductive endocrinologists (RE) who helped turn frostie into a toastie yesterday told me. He also said I have an ideal uterus, and I’m filing that one away for a day when my self-image is feeling particularly low. “Yah, I may be pudgy and dull today, but at least I have an ideal uterus and lovely mucous.”

So yes, everything went extremely well yesterday, and frostie is now officially a toastie, snug in my womb. He/she came out of the five-year deep-freeze extremely well. They look for an embryo to be six to eight cells, and this one was seven cells – bang on average. And they grade them in quality on a scale of one to five, five being the best quality – but, the nurse assured me, they almost never see a grade four or five quality- and frostie was a grade three plus. I am absurdly proud of this, as if I had anything to do with it. I’m as proud as when Tristan passed his first year of swimming lessons, which again, had basically nothing to do with me.

Jojo, I did ask about the placement of the embryo in the uterus (that, and about a hundred other questions – it was like Curious George goes to the Fertility Clinic) and one of the REs said that yes, there is in fact an ideal place, high up in the uterus. A few minutes later, the nurses, REs and lab technicians clustered around the ultrasound monitor gasped appreciatively, in much the same way you ooh and aah over a particularly vivid fireworks display, when the RE skillfully launched the embryo and a small amount of fertility goo into exactly the place the RE had just indicated on the monitor. One of the nurses later said that the fertility goo drifted placidly out of the catheter in the most ideal way, and again I was absurdly proud.

The whole procedure only took 15 or 20 minutes, and then I was free to empty my way, way, WAY overfull bladder. Oh yes, and the RE also complimented me on my bladder capacity. He said, “You must be great on a road trip.” Why is it that I attract comedians wherever I go? (Cool aside – you know why they want you to have a full bladder? Because it presses on the normally curved uterus, making it straighten out and providing a much more direct path for the catheter. The RE said they have a statistically improved success rate with a full bladder during transfer. I am endlessly fascinated by this stuff.) I had already gone three times in the half hour leading up to the procedure to let off a bit of pressure, and by the time they had launched toastie out of the catheter and then sent the catheter back to the embryologist to verify that it was empty, I was just about cross-eyed with the need to relieve myself. And let me tell you, no amount of kegels will prepare you for the exercise of trying to empty your bursting-to-capacity bladder as quickly and efficiently as possible while simultaneously contracting your cervix snuggly and tightly closed around a microscopic embryo.

Like a good blogger, I had wanted to bring my camera into the clinic with me. I had visions of a particularly amusing photo taken from my perspective on the table, looking down past my stirruped legs to the accumulated medical personnel at the business end of my anatomy, but the nurse and Beloved disabused me of the idea.

The good news is – I have pictures! The bad news is, Blogger won’t let me post them. I’ll try to put them up later. Evil, wicked Blogger – how you vex me!

The rest of the day was entirely uneventful, in a mildly hedonistic sort of way. We went to the movie (just average, but I’d happily fork over $10 to watch Johnny Depp read from the telephone directory, so it was a pleasant afternoon) and by coincidence of timing, I had a previously scheduled appointment to get my hair cut yesterday, too. The only thing I lacked was a massage, or maybe a pedicure, to make it the perfect “all about me” day.

But of course, it isn’t entirely all about me. For those of you wondering how Beloved is faring through all of this, I have to tell you I’ve been a little concerned about that myself. He has a few more reservations than me about the whole ‘third child’ thing, and he didn’t seem nearly as invested in the whole idea of frostie as I was – but then, that seems par for the course in many male-female relationships in these types of circumstances. I think it takes a little longer for guys to be able to give themselves over to hope, and a little bit longer for them to internalize a pregnancy, or even a potential pregnancy, as a reality.

Any concerns I might have had about his reaction evaporated last night when he performed what I can only describe as an impromptu interpretive dance of the embryo gaining cells and implanting in the uterine wall. Oh, how I wished I had a camera nearby, because it was a thing of beauty!

It’s all good. It’s all very, very good! And now, I think I’ll consider myself pregnant until I find out otherwise. (You should see the grin on my face!) My blood test is two weeks today, on August 4.

*glances at watch*
*taps watch face*
*glances away*
*looks at watch again*

It’s gonna be a long two weeks!

Related posts (automatically generated):

1. Baby pictures!
2. 3.. 2.. 1.. GO!
3. Saying goodbye to frostie

Oh look, it’s yet another post in the ongoing saga of “oh for the love of god, will you either get pregnant or shut up about it already”.

Well, we’re almost there. And when I say”we” I mean “we” as in all of us, because I’m really enjoying having a couple hundred of you along for the ride. I like knowing that a lot of you have been there (and been there, and been there) but I also hope that this has been an informative little peek into the world of infertility for some of you.

And now, on with the show, because tomorrow’s the big day! After an epic amount of waffling and no small amount of coaxing from my colleagues, I finally decided to take the whole day off. We have to show up at the clinic for 10:30, and I have to have a ‘very full’ bladder. The nurse suggested I drink a litre or more of water starting around 10:00. (Do you think a litre of Tim’s coffee would be an acceptable subsitute?)

Around the time we show up at the clinic, we’ll know whether frostie has survived the thaw, about an 80 per cent probability. The actual procedure will be at 11:30. (Are you squirming at thinking of sitting on a ‘very full’ bladder in a waiting room for an hour? Because I sure am.) I think they encourage me to have a little rest for another 20 minutes or so after the transfer – and who am I to say no to the rare opportunity for a daytime nap? – and then we should be out of there by 12:30 at the latest. We arranged for the caregiver to take the boys on Thursday instead of Wednesday this week, so Beloved will be there for the whole thing, and then we’re going out to an afternoon matinee after that.

The only decision that remains is whether to see Pirates of the Carribean, Superman, or You, Me and Dupree. I’m leaning toward a little Johnny Depp action, if only I can claim later in life that he had some impact on my fertility and reproductive capability.

Don’t you love it when a plan comes together despite a complete absence of planning on your part? Yet another sign from the universe that we’re on the right track!

I wish I had something more coherent for you today. I don’t even have a cute anecdote from the boys to apologize for this week’s relentlessly self-obsessed drivel. Bear with me, we’re almost done, and soon I will get my head out of my reproductive tract and turn my gaze back to the rest of the world. But, although it’s a tight call, my reproductive tract is still marginally less scary than the rest of the world just now.

I’m floundering for a way to end this that doesn’t seem like I’m fishing for a sea of “good luck!” comments (hey, lookit that – flounder, fishing, sea – and I didn’t even do that on purpose!!) but other than my newly discovered marine theme, I got nothing.

Um, so – how’s life with you these days? Oh wait, here’s another idea – we could play “Infertility Questions”. As in, if you have any questions about infertility treatments or the emotional rollercoaster or any of that stuff, me and my panel of experts will answer them for you. Or, you could tell me about your dog, or your goldfish, or just about anything to distract me from tomorrow.

(And if you think this is bad, you ain’t seen nothing until you’ve seen the new low in neurotic obsession that is the ‘two week wait’. Stay tuned, it’s likely to get ugly.)

Related posts (automatically generated):

1. "Your mucous is lovely!"
2. Frostie update
3. Ontario proposes IVF funding

I’ve been promising an update for a couple of days, but I’ve been holding off for two reasons. One, I don’t really have anything of substance to report, and two, I wanted to be able to capture some of my thoughts and impressions on being back in the world of the infertile again. Whatever thoughts might have been floating around won’t float close enough for me to capture them in writing, so you’ll have to make due with a bare-bones update.

The ultrasound on Thursday showed that my lining is around 6.5 mm, which I think is right about bang-on average. The nurse to whom I spoke certainly seemed satisfied with it, anyway. (I’d appreciate any comparisons from those of you who have been through FETs before and are as neurotically obsessive about remembering and noting these things as I am!)

As of yesterday morning, I’m paying daily visits to the clinic to have them draw a vial of blood, which they analyze for the surge in luteinizing hormone (LH) that will precede ovulation by about 48 hours. There’s no way of knowing exactly when that will happen, but based on my fairly regular cycles, I expect the surge to occur Monday or Tuesday, with transfer two days after that.

Each morning, I get to the clinic between 7:30 and 8:00, and wait only 10 or 15 minutes for my turn with the phlebotomist. I have small, rolling veins, and getting a blood draw is always a pain in the arm. They’ve resorted to taking it from the back of my hand, which is slightly more uncomfortable but better than having them dig around the inside of my elbow with the needle, which is what they did the first two times. Youch! After four or five hours, the nurse calls me with an update, telling me (so far) simply that I have to show up to do it all over again the next day.

I’m still on the fence about how to go about the transfer itself. Actually, it’s how to accomodate the transfer that I’m waffling about. The wisdom on the subject of the amount of bedrest required after the embryo transfer runs the gamut from “you can leave the clinic on a pogo stick after transfer and not pose any risk to the embryos or implantation” (a favourite saying of the head of my clinic) to a week of absolute bedrest, as advoated by a lot of American clinics.

When we went through the IVF that resulted in Tristan, I took nearly three weeks off work to encompass the last few days of stims, the unexpected coasting, the retrieval and transfer (three days apart) and a few days after. The actual day of the transfer, we left the clinic and went out for lunch on the patio of our favourite restaurant, then went to the video store where I rented three movies and spent the rest of the day lying on the couch. It seemed like enough. Oh, and I ate about three pounds of fresh pineapple, shredding the inside of my mouth in the process.

This time around, I am considering working the morning of the transfer, or going back to work afterward, depending on the time of day of the transfer. I have a hell of a lot of work to get through and two weeks of vacation starting on Friday, and I’d like to get some stuff off my desk. Quite frankly, it would probably be more restfull to sit in my quiet, air-conditioned cube and work at my computer for an afternoon than be at home with the whirling dervishes that are the sunshine of my life. I dunno… I keep waffling about this. I’ll play it by ear, I guess.

I’m not even sure if Beloved will be able to accompany me to the clinic the day of the transfer. There’s no official reason for him to be there – he made his, ahem, contribution to the process five years ago, when the embryos were created. The transfer doesn’t involve any medication for me, so there’s no reason I might need assistance after the transfer. That leaves only the more intangible fact that it would be nice to have him there, but we’d have to arrange for someone to mind the boys, no easy feat on a weekday. Only a few days remain, so I guess we’ll play this one by ear, too.

If I seem a little detached about this whole process, it feels the same from here. If I really stop to think about what we’re doing, my stomach fills with butterflies – but I try my best not to think about it too much. Whatever happens happens, right? If I don’t invest too much up front, there is less to lose – and everything to gain.

Now I have to go do some laundry so I can wash my new skort and take a picture to post so Marla will quit pestering me about it, and I can settle once and for all the debate raging about how far above my knees the hem actually falls…

Related posts (automatically generated):

1. Wheeeeeeee!
2. 3.. 2.. 1.. GO!
3. "Your mucous is lovely!"

I’ve got nothing to say today, folks. I’ve got an ultrasound appointment at 7:30 this morning, followed by four hours of French class. (Ugh.) And yesterday, which is actually right now because I’m frantically typing this Wednesday night – see how I put myself out for you? – isn’t going to work because I have two boys who have decided sleep is optional and a husband who is out teaching and there’s just no muse to be found anywhere, let alone a few minutes to string some thoughts together. So it’s not so much as I’ve got nothing to say as I’ve got no time to say it.

And it’s a crying shame, because we’ve been having some great conversations this week!

So forgive me for not having something more interesting tposted today. If anything exciting comes out of the ultrasound, I’ll post later, but I think all they will do is check to see if there is a decent-sized follicle that will give then an indication that I’m getting ready to ovulate, and then we’ll start the daily blood tests to check for the LH surge that I used to OPKs to detect last month.

But if you’re desperate for a diversion, have you seen “ask metafilter“? I’ve been flipping through it on and off for a couple of months now, and every time I open the page, I find something that sucks me in. Then again, I have the same problem when I open a dictionary. And sometimes the phone book.

It’s late, my brain stopped working about an hour ago (hell, more like about four hours ago) and for some reason my fingers are still typing… it’s really time to shut this down…

Related posts (automatically generated):

1. Wheeeeeeee!
2. The Great OPK Adventure
3. The "science" of predicting gender

Because I know my reproductive workings have you on the edge of your seat, I felt it necessary to broadcast to the entire interweb that it is, in fact, day one of my cycle. The cycle. The cycle that will lead, in approximately two weeks, to my wee Frostie finally coming out of its deep freeze, at which point I think I will begin to refer to it as my little Toastie instead.

Next stop, an ultrasound on July 13. Stay tuned!

Related posts (automatically generated):

1. Saying goodbye to frostie
2. Wheeeeeeee!
3. Fertility watch

You, my bloggy friends, have been wonderful thing week. Thank you for your jokes, all of which I will file away to later torture friends, colleagues and strangers on the street. Thank you for your support, and your kind words, and your suggestions on how to brush my kids’ teeth. Y’all are rockstars in my book – for this week, at least!

But hey, it’s Friday, and the Friday before I have ten whole days of vacation, nonetheless. So forgive me if we ramble just a bit, because I have the attention span of a firefly today.

For those of you keeping score on the frostie thing, I had my ultrasound yesterday and everything looks great. I have a blood test on Monday, and if the progesterone levels are within range, we’re good to go next month. After this week’s leaky ambivalence, I’m feeling excited and enthused again. I was gobsmacked by how nice the new Ottawa Fertility Centre is, especially compared to the facilities before. The ladies’ room had granite counters and flowers – I can only imagine how nice the sperm-gathering room must be! The whole place has an air of cool calmness, just what you want when you are at your most vulnerable.

It’s been such a busy week, and there have been tonnes of stuff I meant to talk to you about. For example, did you see that new show “America’s Got Talent“? We were instantly hooked; it’s perfect summer brain candy. It’s like the Gong Show, which I’ve always loved, but with David Hasselhoff, for whom I have developed a latent affection after seeing this video. Go ahead, click on it – I dare you, and then I double dog dare you to not be humming that song all day (right, Andrea?) What with this, and that new Gameshow Marathon, it’s all my favourite childhood TV shows all over again. Nothing reminds me of the endless summers of my childhood like The Match Game, the Price is Right and Card Sharks.

And speaking of childhood TV, did you hear that CBC is finally retiring the old Mr Dressup episodes? Even though I didn’t realize they were still on any more (Ernie Coombs died in 2001, after all) it does make me feel a little sad, and a little old, that they won’t be running those old episodes in perpetuity.

One more note on seminal children’s programming – I don’t think I ever told you that I finally got my Electric Company DVD set as a Mother’s Day gift. It so rocks! Now I just have to get a couple of Muppet Show DVDs and The Littlest Hobo and I’ll be set! Simon’s current favourite movie is Beloved’s copy of the old Batman and Robin movie from the 1960s, so with a little luck and a good stock of 1970s TV DVDs, we many never have to watch an episode of Dragon Tales or Arthur again.

And now, finally, my contribution to the joke-fest yesterday – to which you should feel free to continue to contribute, by the way. If you know me IRL, chances are you’ve heard this one; it’s one of my favourites!

When Beethoven passed away, he was buried in a churchyard. A few days later, the town drunk was walking through the cemetery and heard some strange noise coming from the area where Beethoven was buried.

Terrified, the drunk ran and got the priest to come and listen to it. The priest bent close to the grave and heard some faint, unrecognizable music coming from the grave. Frightened, the priest ran and got the town magistrate.

When the magistrate arrived, he bent his ear to the grave, listened for a moment, and said, “Hmm, interesting, that seems to be Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony being played – backwards.”
He listened a while longer and then said, “There’s the Eighth Symphony, and it’s backwards, too. Most puzzling.” So the magistrate kept listening. “There’s the Seventh… the Sixth… the Fifth…”

Suddenly the realization of what was happening dawned on the magistrate; he stood up and announced to the crowd that had gathered in the cemetery, “My fellow citizens, there’s nothing to worry about. That’s just Beethoven decomposing.”

Related posts (automatically generated):

1. My dufus-savants
2. Contracting out
3. H1n1 vaccines, Canadian babies denied Baby Einstein refund, and other miscellany