Barren Mare

Happy Steaming New Year

I have a terrible cold. It started out by setting up base camp in my lungs, then making a summit bid to my right middle ear before a disastrous avalance of mucus blocked off the escape route in my Eustachian tube. Having toodled my hacking and spluttering self down to the local pharmacy on Boxing Day to see what over the counter relief might be available to a breastfeeding mother, I was somewhat nonplussed to discover the answer is: none. No cough syrup, no decongestant. Nada.

You could try steam, the pharmicist advised merrily. Lots of steam! Happy holidays!

Great. Steam. So I gamely spent a day or so with my head over a pot of water on the hob, but with the ear pain getting steadily worse. Finally I made an appointment to see my GP, with my mother's dire mutterings of words like "bronchitis" and "pnuemonia" literally ringing in my ears. The doctor's view was: lungs not so bad, ear not so good. And while the relative severity could "go either way", he went ahead and prescribed antibiotics.

"You can hold off on taking these," he suggested, "to see if it gets worse. And try steam!"

Great. Steam. The pot of water technique was wearing a bit thin by this point, so I dispatched E. to buy a facial sauna, figuring I might be gacking up lurgy but I might as well have good skin while we're at it. Meanwhile, I decided that the whole "wait to see if it gets a lot worse" approach was sort of dumb, and started taking the antibiotics at once. Which is good because the alternate escape route in my left middle ear then suffered a similar landslide, making my whole head feel like an overstuffed sausage. What's worse is the nasty phlegmy cough- aside from the fact I can tell my hacking drives E. nuts, it is veritable torture trying to nurse down the baby for the night- and just as she has fallen asleep, having the sensation of having my lungs tickle tickle tickled with a feather duster and being unable to suppress the explosion. 

I need to go to bed for about a week and do nothing but lie in my jimjams, eating mangos and reading trashy magazines. But obviously, that is not going to happen. I'd settle at this point for a couple of nights of four hours of unbroken sleep but that's not looking like it's on the cards either. Botany's nap routine has mercifully settled back down (at least insofar as she has a nap albeit still only 45 minutes at a time). I guess it might have something to do with the fact that we don't really leave the house much at the moment. However, her night time sleep is still a little bit all over the place- usually waking up at 3 am, feed for half an hour and then awake again at 4.30 or 5am. Any nights of halfway decent sleep don't begin to make up for the exhaustion of the rest- and the result is I feel like I can't shake this cold monkey off my back.

Anyway. A year ago today I was puking my innards up on a ferry en route to France, so I suppose ringing in the new year with some sort of physical discomfort might just be an ongoing tradition. At least I am on solid ground this time, with a surfeit of holiday telly to numb the brain if not the pain.   

Happy 2008 everyone!

A little spell of blue

Brrrr..shivering in the sudden Arctic cold snap which has swept the country. Things had briefly seemed there as if we were heading for a mild and pleasant Spring, but now the grim hand of winter has yanked us all by our collars right back into chillyvilles.  As I trudge to work, I feel the icy blasts of wind even more acutely, since I am now too bumped-out to button my warm winter coat properly.

We were advised this weekend that our new house will probably now not be completed until sometime in May- our original move-in date was early April.  And we have to be out of the place we are in by the first week in May.  All of which makes me say: oh poo and merde.

Slippage with new build houses is inevitable, and I knew this from the outset- even started mentally planning ahead for what we would do in the event that we had an overlap between moving out of here and getting into the new place.  But now that I am confronted by the reality, it's come as more a bummer than I had anticipated.  There's absolutely nothing we can do about it- I don't know what it's like in the States, but when you sign the contract for a off-plan property here, the developers retains an insane amount of control over completion dates- in other words, they can finish whenever they like. In one case I know of, they were two years late.  That was exceptional, of course, and I don't think we are looking at anything like that sort of delay, especially since we know for a fact that at least the exterior is largely finished.  But it could be longer than we are currently expecting.  Either way, we are going to almost certainly have an overlap.  So this means everything we own will go into storage while we rent somewhere in the interim.

It's not the end of the world, but I confess I really wish we could just get in and get on with settling in. I mean, I have nesting to do! I have loads of baby crap to buy, for crying out loud!  Well. I've decided that if it drags on into summer, I am going to start wandering back and forth in front of the not yet finished house, clutching my belly and wailing like a fishwife.  Think that might spur the builders on?

Anyway, not to sound all moany-whingey but the combination of bad weather and the whole moving fandango and some ongoing irritants on the work front has conspired to bring on a small fit of the blues. I tell myself daily that in compensation for the apparent good fortune I have recently enjoyed, I am not allowed to feel bad about anything again, ever- and certainly not small trivialities like these. But in all honesty, I do admit to being just a trifle low. Or perhaps that is just hormones talking; I found myself having a little weep over a TV advert to raise funds in aid for abused animals the other day while simultaneously rolling my eyes at what a cliche that is.

Now, where are my mittens?

Snarly snarly

I don't know what's gotten into me lately, but I feel cranky, a continual bubbling underlay of rabid pissiness that won't quit.

Part of it is, I suspect, that I feel tired and overwhelmed a lot of the time. The dog, while still a delight in many ways, is currently driving us both crackers. He's entered that itchy teenage phase where he can be really, really hard work. He has lots of toys, gets plenty of exercise and attention, not to mention a regular routine that should give him some semblance of structure in his daily puppy life.  But it still seems like it's not enough. If I play with him for two hours when I get home, he wants four hours.  If I give him a chewy toy, he will discard it in moments to snack on the plants/table legs/my arm.  His favourite trick is feverishly scrabbling at the living room rug with his little claws. And God help you if you accidentally drop something- anything- in his vicinity- kiss it goodbye or else prepare for a tug with the jaws of death. Plus, the housebreaking (which I thought we had mastered) suddenly seems to be going in reverse, to my considerable dismay. He still quite often wakes me up in the middle of the night to go out, or at an ungodly hour in the morning, and consquently it feels like a long time since I have had an unbroken night's sleep.

I know he'll grow out of it, but some days he is very, very bad indeed. Bad. Baaaaad. Inevitably those are the days when I have been most stressed out at work and most under pressure to get things organised for moving house. And I catch sight of myself in the mirror with a sort of snarling bug-eyed frustrated look on my face. Then all I can think is: he's just a puppy- what would it be like if we had a baby as well?   

Aside from the dog, it seems like everything gets on my nerves.  For example, why can't the grocery store, with their much ballyhooed delivery service, get it right?  Every week I have to email them with a complaint. This week they charged me for nine tubs of butter rather than one. I know it's coming up for Christmas and all, but did it not cross the checker's mind to note that perhaps that much hydrogenated fat in one go was a little odd? The answer, of course, might be not to use the online service, but given we still don't have our shitheap of a car back (oh, don't get me started), it's just about the only way to get food into the house.   

Oh, and we're embarking on the second wave of women at my office who are just back from maternity leave but are already pregnant again. I don't know why this continues to bug the living crap out of me, but it does. At the rate we are going, every woman of childbearing age in my immediate vicinity will have completed a family unit of two or three kids before I even get around to deciding if we're going to do IVF again.

It's possible that some of the incessant grouchiness is due to a slight thyroid imbalance. I had my levels checked when having some other blood tests, and the doctor phoned me up to tell me that it appears I have slipped a bit too far the other way- that is, in the hyper rather than hypo mode. Odd, given that I've been on this dosage for well over a year now with no such effect. But on her instructions, I'm reducing the total dosage of meds for the time being to see if it lmoves back to the proper range.  But at this point I'd just like my buggy eyes to revert back into their sockets.    

As for the treatment thing- oh, nothing gets past you people, does it?  Let's just say we're still at the point of talking about it, albeit that includes discussing it with someone at an IVF clinic.  We have an appointment next week for a consultation- and then we'll see what they say. I'll wager next month's paypacket that it's something along the lines of, "Do IVF again if you want a baby."

Since it doesn't look like we'll have the car back from the garage, it will mean having to trudge to the other side of the country on Scottish public transport. No doubt will give me something else to whinge about it.

Week of Poo

Friends, it has been a Week of Poo, and for once I am talking literally and not metaphorically.  I figure this being a (primarily) infertility blog, y'all are quite comfy with talk of more a graphic nature and don't quiver and throw up yer dainty hands in horror at the mention of certain bodily functions. I mean, once you've discussed the finer points of your uterus with the Internets at large, I reckon a little chat about poo is not going to upset anyone.  Right?  Right.  Read on.

It began with a jolly walk in the park with Little Guy. I was a bit frazzled after a long day at work, and looking forward to burning off some steam romping in the park with the tiny puppy. Rompity romp romp. As we merrily scampered headlong toward the direction of the Scary Swan Pond (aieeee! Swan rage!), I felt a sharp *thwock* at the back of my head.  I paused.  E. and LG carried on apace, while I paused to  collect myself in the manner of "thefuckwasthat?"

I confess I momentarily blamed the blow to the head on the group of loitering tracksuit ambassadors ahead of us on the path. Until logic reasserted itself- as in , they are ahead of us and I have been whomped on the back of the head, Q.E.D.  Reaching up to assess the damage, my hand came away all sticky and covered in oobleck.  Of the bird poo variety. A bird had crapped all over my head. Yeah, I've heard it's good luck. To which I say, sure, you bet. It's also sticky, nasty and frankly, unpleasant.  Gee thanks, Jonathan Livingston Seagull!

Far from being good luck, I think it was actually a dark portend of things to come. Two days later, after eating nothing particularly out of the ordinary, I began to experience some rather weird gastro-intestinal phenomenon. It goes something like this: I eat food, and then about four hours later I am doubled over in crippling pain, with an almighty wind blowing through the toilet area and the passing of sound and fury. It's all wrong, wrong, wrong.

Unfortunately, it's one of those situations where I don't feel quite unwell enough for long enough periods of time to really justify staying home from work. I mean, the couple hours in between the eating and the horror are generally OK.  However, on the whole, it's become quite wearing.  Experiencing sudden urgent energy-sapping bouts of discomfort is one thing- but having to go through it in one of the office toilet cubicles?  Disaster. I can usually make it to the one private stand-alone loos down the hall, but there has been more than one occasion when I found myself trapped in the main bathroom, a steady stream of traffic coming in and out the neighbouring stall.  Cue knuckle-biting, sphinter-clenching agony while I tried to restrain the blaring of the foghorns until I am alone. 

And then of course, there is the issue of dealing with a still-not-quite-housebroken puppy. When I get home from work, I've managed to hold it together long enough to take him outside to do his busybusy before I sprint for the bog to deal with my own gastro-trauma. But inevitably, he wants to hang out with me, playplayplay, chewychewy on everything, notwithstanding the fact I am trapped on the toilet, Trying. to. Cope. with. Unspeakable. Emissions.  Plus, the other night it was absolutely pouring it down with rain, and he refused to do anything outside, other than huddle under the umbrella with me, whining and pawing the door. Finally, I couldn't wait any longer, so we came in, and while I was otherwise engaged, he snuck off and pooped, massively, in the corner of the hall.  Poo-o-rama. CIearly I am an idiot for not putting him staight back into his crate but at the time, my priorities were, uh, elsewhere.

On the upside, E. has more pro-active with puppy duty this weekend, leaving me free to lock myself in the bathroom in relative peace & privacy whenever the need comes upon me.  Also, the affliction shows signs of ceasing any time soon; failing which l will go see the doctor as soon as possible. Huh. That should add a little sparkle and colour to my burgeoning medical notes-rounding things out, as it were. 

Equations of healing

To demonstrate what a "changed" person I've become, I met my pregnant friend for a drink the other night. Well, I had a "drink" in the sense of the alcoholic beverage while she sipped a dainty ginger beer. But since the no-smoking ban came into force in Scotland, there is really no excuse for knocked up women to avoid the pub/bar. This is great for those of us who want to ease the discomfort of such social engagements with a double vodka.  Works for everyone. 

The last time I saw this friend was in October at a party. There we both enjoyed a number of "drinks" in the alcoholic sense, and I didn't get home until 5am. Unheard of for me, but delightful all the same. During the festivities, she confessed over a couple of glasses of wine, she and her husband were "trying". Oh, I said, I can give you lots of tips. Or, at least theoretical tips, since as we know, not a single one worked for me.

As it turns out, my little pearls of conception wisdom were not needed, because she must have already been a couple of weeks along by that point.  The next I heard from her she was going for her scan, just before Christmas.

Just like that. So simple, isn't it, for some.  You want a baby, you have sex with your partner, and hey presto. The thing is, this friend is one of those people who always seems to effortlessly achieve whatever she wants; great job, great house, great man.  I wasn't in the least surprised that the baby came along, on schedule, as intended, exactly at the right time.

I've known this woman a long time. We went to university together, she shared my flat for about six months, we danced at her wedding. I like her; she is kind, funny, bright and beautiful. And I knew that unless I could bring myself to make some gesture now to acknowledge, indeed to embrace and celebrate her pregnancy, then I wasn't putting my money where my mouth is as far as getting over this whole infertile-bitter thing.  Or for that matter, being much of a good friend.

So I emailed her, arranged to meet her.  They don't go in for baby showers here, and this was my only opportunity to give her something for the impending arrival. And as it happens, I had something to hand. Because, you see, when you are learning to knit, baby things are quite easy to churn out- small, not too time consuming or soul-destroying when you fuck up and have to frog the whole project.  I had whipped up a little hat and matching booties with some lovely yarn that Anna H. had sent me for my birthday.  Cute baby gear sitting at the bottom of my knitting bag, going nowhere.

I fished it out, and wrapped it in some nice paper. As I did so, I came over all funny. I found myself clutching the hat in my hand, unwilling to let it go. Come on, I told myself, reaching for the tape, get over it.  Get over it get over it getoveritgetoverit.  It's just stuff.  You can always knit another set if you ever have a kid. Oh wait, right, you're not going to. But if you do. If you did. If... Oh shut up and stick the package in your handbag.   

I was early, as always, and standing outside the bar was afforded an excellent view of her bump (surprisingly pert, considering she is eight months along) as she walked down the road toward me.  As she approached, I suddenly had the old horror.  Shit, I thought.  This was a really, really bad idea.

We had a nice enough time, I suppose. She was pleased and touched with the present, which made me feel a little better about being able to give it. And the talk was fairly evenly balanced for the most part (my tales of woe over the last months versus antenatal classes. Career ambitions verses decorating the nursery). As I left, I congratulated myself for not once revealing there were moments when sitting there with her felt exactly like a hot poker was being driven through my heart.

I walked home feeling troubled.  Guess I haven't changed so much, after all.  Guess there are certain days and certain spaces when this is still so very hard. But the worst thing was the mental battering I gave myself for days afterward for not being over it yet, for not being all OK about it, for not being able to effortlessly celebrate my friend's seemingly effortlessly obtained happiness. I went out and asked the slowly budding bay tree: how long is it going to take?  How much longer until I can honestly, truly say it doesn't bother me anymore? What if I can never say it? 

What I realised today was this:  the amount of time it will take for me to feel better about not being able to get pregnant and have children is directly proportionate to the amount of time it will take for me to start feeling better about the life I have, or can have.

Such a simple equation, and yet so very hard to calculate.

Dragged backwards

Oh yikes, I am crankalicious. Chalk it up to hormones, boredom, or the unceasing grim, grubby weather; my former good mood is somewhat squelched. Instead it seems I must contend with a long series of grumpy-making events. And where better than to have a right good whinge but in my pajamas and furry slippers in front of the internets.

Firstly there are the minor annoyances- not one but two buttons on my coat suddenly came off during yesterday’s walk, leaving my delicate flesh at the mercy of the biting wind, and looking sloppy besides. The prices in my favourite lunch place were raised today, and my carefully calculated change was not
enough. How dare they? Despite a futile scrabble in my wallet for additional change, I had to beg the extra 7p off my companion.

After which I managed to dump half my coffee down my front. Huzzah.

Then there is the recent electricity bill. Oh, I wish to weep. It would seem that for the past year or so we have been somehow underpaying. The reckoning is a vast, ghastly invoice. I am now completely horrified at how much it is costing to heat our flat, and spent the weekend running around after E. turning off all the lights in his wake.

Also, can I just say: South Dakota. Um, what the fucking fuck is going on?

Then there is my grand plan, which has hit a minor snag. I shall almost certainly find a way around the problem, but to go my desired route will now entail a certain amount of extra work- writing letters, compiling various documents, firing off pleading emails into the void. Needless to say, I am good at this sort of palaver, but it’s tiresome. The only bright side is that I have found an ally, a friend of mine who is
also interested in doing this…thing. Together we have vowed to scale the barricades and make it work. Viva Project Possibly Possible!

Even with all this moving on, there is still the occasional sullen backwards stumble. Today, for instance, I spied yet another colleague sporting a modest bump. My eyes bugged out, since I had had a ten minute conversation with her last week and had noticed nothing. She was standing in the corridor talking to someone else, and I actually made a round-about detour so I could get a second covert look- was it really a bump or was she just having a bad posture/wardrobe day? Mmm, definitely looks like a bump.

Cue plunge into sudden, abject depression. With possibly one or two exceptions, every female under 40 working in my immediate vicinity has gotten pregnant at least once or twice in the last couple years. The parade of pregnancy is unceasing. Every time I believe the torment is finally finished, a new one springs out of the woodwork. And every time, I have the same urge to run screaming out of the office, rendered.

Which sometimes makes me think that, all the good plans aside, I may never really shake off this sadness completely. That time will never be a complete healer on this one. With all my best intentions, I still find myself feeling like a freak, the odd one out, the one that is always left behind, the only one who can’t do this. The only one who can’t have this.

Against the Ropes

When something bad happens to one of my favourite bloggers, I read in horror from the sidelines. It's a bit like watching a boxing match, where an unwilling combatant endures pummel after pummel. When they finally go down, I sit there biting my fist, wondering how long they will lie there motionless. Whispering under my breath, "Get up. You have to get up. Oh, please, can you get up?"

I know some of you are very worried about me, for which again, *mwah* with the kisses on your smooshy cheeks. If I am being quite honest, I am also worried about me, which in the circumstances is rather understandable. So this is just to let you know that I am not down for the count, but rather, reeling against the ropes.

Honestly, this could not suck more. And it has all come at possibly the worst time in what has to be the shittest year of my life. Everyone else is scurrying around buying presents, arranging time with friends and family, decking the halls; meanwhile I am wondering whether to stick that bough of holly in my eye now or later.

I feel like the big black cloud in everyone else's winter wonderland. It's so unseasonally glum that people are eyeing me with the wariness usually reserved for rabid dogs and the criminally insane. I went to my office Christmas lunch yesterday and it was like a vortex of doom whereever I sat, until folks eventually gave me a halfhearted pat on the shoulder and sidled away. Only my boss was oblivious, but that meant he rabbited on for half an hour about the monumental crisis of Biblical proportions in his house; namely, that the wallpapering might not be done in time for the houseguest's arrival. Fuck me, the wallpapering. Yes, that puts it all in perspective!

Finally, I was forced to throttle him with the paper hat from my Christmas cracker and stash his body under the table. Such hijinks go on at these events, so nobody really noticed. He may even still be there, for all I know.

Bloggus Interuptus

I may be at the end of my tether.

The thing about writing an infertility blog is that when the movement toward to a resolution- be it pregnancy, adoption, or living child free- grinds to a halt for some reason, it suddenly becomes very hard to talk about anything at all. I personally am not very fond of discussing the ways in which my wheels are spinning- how I am trapped, stuck, and do not see a way out. Or, to be blunt, I do see a way out, but it is a harsh and undesirable solution, and means the end of any possibility of having a family for the foreseeable future.

I know I have mentioned subtly and perhaps not so subtly that things were not going very well here. In the face of this, I have been soldiering on, but I have to tell you, I am exhausted. I am absolutely exhausted. It is very hard to write about thwarted motherhood, plans for further treatment, or indeed what my future life will look like, when at this point I don't even know if E. wants to spend Christmas with me. The life I knew and loved is turning to ashes and dust right before my eyes, and I don't know what to do about it. I can barely bring myself to talk about it, even to people who I know love and care about me. My heart is sorely bruised, perhaps broken, and it is all I can do to keep the rest of me from shattering into a million tiny pieces.

For now I will simply keep staggering on and hope that things will either get better, or that I will have the strength to do what I have to do to get myself out of this mess. But it looks like it won't be terribly pretty in the meantime.

Much as I love you all, I need some time to think things through, out of the glare of the Internets. So I am taking a brief blog hiatus to collect my thoughts, seek some clarity and regroup. I expect to be spending a great deal of time in the bath, on the treadmill and under the duvet. Hopefully when I come back, I will be feeling much better or else (temporarily) much worse.

Either way, I plan to be firmly on the road to something wholer and saner.

Update: My peoples, I adore your sweet comments and thank you for all your good wishes. In return, please rest assured that when I said "brief hiatus", I meant more of a refreshing pausing for breath in this conversation we are having, and not a permanent parting of the ways. I may be some time, but not quite in the meaning of poor brave Captain Oates.

Cheers for tears

There was a recent new blurb here about a C-list model/actress/fitness guru woman. She announced her pregnancy just before she ran a marathon. Like, literally broke the news to the world on the starting line. Personally, I would have waited until afterwards to have everyone judge me about the wisdom of doing the run in such a delicate, delicate state. But hey, to each her own.

Sadly, she lost the baby; I hasten to add it had nothing whatsoever to do with the marathon, but rather, another complication. What struck me as strange about it was the comment she made in the news blurb. It stuck with me for days.

She said something like, "Yes, I was very upset, and yes, I did cry."

Now, I appreciate that sometimes, sound bytes can come across differently in print. But I felt there was something a little bit odd about the way this statement was framed. It was not: " I was upset, and I cried." Rather, "Yes, I did cry", as if to do otherwise was an option. As if she were confessing to eating the last cookie instead of admitting to being emotional. As if she somehow had to justify the fact she cried after a miscarriage! Call the Crazy Woman Patrol! We have a crier over here! Crier alert!

Me, I cry all the time at the moment. Alice over at finslippy has beaten me to creating the best possible analogy ever ever ever as to how it currently feels behind my eyes. Not that I am as clever as she in the analogy department, but I savour a good one when I see it.

I cry in the morning before I go to work, I cry in the bathroom at work, and yesterday, I went hog wild and full-on broke down right at my desk in the middle of the open plan office. And I am not talking sweet little flowery tears, lightly spackling my face with tender womanly grief. Ahem, no. I am talking about wild wracking animal sobs, the kind usually reserved for under the duvet or the bathtub. It's not even cathartic, it's just kind of...unseemly. It sends colleagues nervously quivering about with offers of cups of water? tea? coffee? Kleenex? straitjacket?

So, I woke up this morning and felt like a tit about my behaviour. And then I realised: what the hell am I apologising for? Things are horrible, frankly. I am having a terrible, terrible time, and goddamnit, I am going to fucking well cry sometimes, if I must. Because worrying about whether or not I am going to cry inevitably makes me cry harder. Some people may write me off as an emotional loon for the time being, but who am I kidding? I am an emotional loon right now! I think most people in my shoes would be.

Funnily enough, I felt a little better after I gave myself the permission to feel awful. Within reason. The thing at the desk may have been a wee bit, you know, much.

Shadow puppets

Oh my friends, do you know how cute and amusing you all are? Your reaction to the word "secret" is very endearing indeed.

"Secret!" you gasp, bouncing gently in your seats, waving your tiny paws in the air. "She said secret! What could it be? What oh what?" And I imagine you conjuring up all sorts of delicious possibilities. Cotton candy! A box of puppies! A positive peestick! The explanation of what is going on in that hatch on Lost!

Sadly, I fear it is none of those things. I hate to dampen such sweet and uplifting enthusiasm, but in fact, the secret is nothing nice at all- quite the opposite. I was not mentioning it to tease as much as I was trying to allude to the fact that all is not completely well here, but I can't- and won't- go into the specifics right now.

Let's just say I have looked up from the path to find that somehow I have wandered into a very, very dark and scary part of the island. I expect to be stumbling around in the blackness for awhile (literally, since the power in my building keeps cutting out for no apparent reason, causing me to scramble for candles).

Perhaps to ward off the darkness, we could all hold hands; maybe sing a few Cheering and Rambunctious tunes. Perhaps although things keep getting worse and worse, we could dream of something better. Not to go all Julie Andrews on you, but it would comfort me if you could tell me something nice. Tell me three things that make you happy- little and inconsequential things or grand and awe-inspiring.

I'll be over here, striking a match, and trying to remember how to make a shadow puppet.