Jul
30

Needles and Pins.

I feel bleary-eyed and disoriented, having emerged from the least-relaxing weekend ever. It began with a 24-hour migraine, the worst I have had in several years, the sort where you are in too much pain to sleep, and even the darkest room is too bright to be borne. The cats were delighted, as I spent the entire evening in bed with ice on my forehead and my hands over my eyes, allowing them to amuse themselves by crawling over me, attacking my feet when they poked out of the covers, and licking my icepack. I managed a feeble “No!” once in a while, but I was too weak to swat them away and they knew it. I don’t start Lupron for three days, and yet I worry that Friday’s migraine was a harbinger of things to come, sort of as if Lupron had engraved a bullet with my name and left it in my mailbox.

My drugs arrived on Friday as well—fittingly, as it was the first day of Blogher and I paid for them by canceling my trip to the conference—and they were, as expected, in a box the size of Kentucky. What I had not been expecting was a second Kentucky-sized box, this one filled with nothing but bags and bags of needles and syringes. When I opened it, Scott started laughing. YES, IT’S ALL VERY FUNNY WHEN YOU AREN’T THE ONE BEING POKED. He shouldn’t have laughed. He’ll regret it someday, when he wakes up to find I’ve glued his lips together. Try laughing now, hotshot.

Obviously I knew there would be many needles involved, but the volume was alarming. On the opposite end of the spectrum were the drugs themselves. Each vial is about an inch tall and the width of my pinkie. I was expecting the vials to be larger, especially as they cost $60 apiece. Couldn’t they be encrusted with precious jewels, or wrapped in mink pelts, at least? I managed to fit $1200 worth of stimulation drugs in my refrigerator’s butter compartment, which hardly seems right. The syringes, on the other hand, displaced my hand mixer and food processor to get their own large drawer. Which reminds me: Do used syringes have to go in the (tiny) sharps container, or is that just the needles? (I’m assuming that disposing of the container, when full, will be a simple affair of driving to the city dump under cover of darkness and burying it under the sign of the cross, am I right?)

Scott has begun referring to to our yet-to-be-conceived child as “Science Baby.” As in, “We should get this book for Science Baby,” or “I hope Science Baby likes the cats.” I cannot help but notice that he expects this cycle to work, and it makes me nervous. Everyone seems to expect this cycle to work, except me. Both his family and mine are acting as if it is a foregone conclusion, despite my increasingly desperate reminders that there is a greater chance of failure than of success. My mother asked me the other day whether I have a pregnancy exercise plan. Eventually I was able to recover sufficiently to remind her that I do not have even a regular exercise plan. Though if pressed, I would say my pregnancy exercise plan involves lifting various items to my mouth, and carrying the occasional heavy bowl of pasta.

I have gained three pounds since the wedding, and have been eating like…something that eats a lot. It is stress, mostly, and I am having a hard time getting back to my healthy eating habits without the spectre of fitting into a wedding dress to motivate me. I have a lot of days that I get through only by thinking of whatever delicious and comforting thing I will have for dinner, and to take that away from me would be cruel, don’t you think?
I know people do continue to work stressful jobs during IVF, I just don’t know how—I haven’t even begun and I am already tearfully fantasizing about a mysterious benefactor who would enable me to work part time, or at the very least stop spending Sundays at the office. I want desperately to take the next few weeks off to spend time with my mother before she leaves on the 13th and, you know, attend both to my ovaries and the dozens of unpacked boxes littering the hallway, but I have no legitimate medical reason to do so, unless my supreme annoyance at having to drive 30 minutes to the clinic and then 45 minutes to work every other morning (returning home at the end of the day just in time for my evening injections) counts as some sort of disability.

Before I end this already over-long epistle, let me ask: do you have any advice for the upcoming emo-ovarian carnival that is IVF? You were all so helpful when it came to planning my wedding, and perhaps you have an injection tip, or a book-to-read-during-the-long-wait recommendation, or some small tidbit of IVF lore you would like to share with the class?

Here is mine: Don’t count the syringes. Trust me on this.

By Alexa | Posted in Ceci N'est Pas Une Ecrivaine |