Hosting a Baby Shower

Thanks to a heads-up from KC, it has just come to my attention that my sister-in-law (ie CSIL, ie The One Who Got Pregnant With Twins On Her Second Try and Is Already Ginormous) is planning to at some point ask me whether I would be comfortable hosting her baby shower.

My first response?

I WOULD RATHER GOUGE MY EYES OUT WITH A RUSTY SPOON AND THEN EAT THE RUST-COVERED, SLIMY BALLS WITH A SIDE DISH OF BARBED WIRE DIPPED IN RAT POISON.

Because, actually, I was trying to think of a way to ask her if I could just not come altogether.  Ship her a thoughtful gift and just skip out on the festivities.  Being in a crowd of people excited about babies and talking about how wonderful it will be and how cute they'll be in all the widdle outfits sounds like hell.  HELL.  So, at first, I was medium furious that she would even think of asking me.  In fact, I started angry/depressed/confused/possibly-Clomid-induced crying immediately.

But... then I thought about it...

And this is something that I would have loved doing Before.  And there's only one opportunity for me to throw her a baby shower EVER because if she has any more kids after this they will probably be adopted and even if they're not it's unlikely she'd throw a baby shower for a second (or I guess technically third?) child because who does that?  And if I weren't all barren and depressed, planning this for her would be a really meaningful and special process, so it just sucks that PCOS would take another significant thing from me.  I don't want to let it.

But then back on the other hand, planning a baby shower for someone else while I continue to play host to a barren wasteland of shattered dreams sounds ill-advised.  If I go, I know that I will cry.  Probably in the middle of things.  DEFINITELY in the middle of things if I'm on Clomid.  And if I'm hosting it's going to be a lot harder to sneak off to do that.  Should I invite that pain?  Can I withstand it?  Would it be worth it?

I'm looking for advice here.  If you've attended or hosted a baby shower while struggling with infertility please share your experience and advice.  She hasn't asked me yet, so I have time to formulate a response.

In the meantime, my backup plan is to throw an over-the-top Venetian Masquerade Ball themed baby shower where masks are required and everything is so grand and distracting that no one notices the girl behind my mask is a stunt double and I'm in the bathroom crying.

Christmas: A Recap

So I drove home for Christmas (about two hours from where I live now).  And I forgot to bring my Clomid.

I FORGOT TO BRING MY CLOMID.

Sooooo here is how my Christmas morning went down.

I got up early and called my gynecologist.  Turns out he does not work on Christmas.  Wonderful.

I called the office and asked for the on-call nurse.  She did not want to help me.  She also clearly did not want to be working on Christmas.  I am not her biggest fan.

I called again and asked for a different on-call nurse.  She was very helpful and told me that she could tell a local pharmacy to page my gynecologist and ask him to authorize filling my prescription there.  I said, "Excellent.  How long will that take?"  She said (basically), "I dunno.  Some amount of time.  Have fun not being able to do anything with your Christmas while you wait!"

I called the pharmacy, and I got put on hold.  FOR HALF AN HOUR.  Finally, someone answered and I quickly explained my situation and asked whether they had been able to page Dr. Angry Eyebrows yet.  Silence.  Turns out the call was dropped as soon as someone answered.

I broke some things.

I called the pharmacy again, and the cheery automated voice let me know that there were about six callers in front of me.  Last time I called there were only three.

I rage-screamed, "SCREW THIS!" and drove to the store to give them a piece of my mind in person.

It is very important to me at this time that you know that I looked like this:

I didn't get to have any Christmas spirit the entire month of December thanks to finals, so when it was actually Christmas Day I may have overcompensated a bit.

But anyway, I'm waiting in line, looking like that, FOR AN HOUR, and I finally get to the front.  I explain my story for about the sixteenth time that day to the nice man behind the counter, and he looked up my information for me.  They did not have my Clomid ready yet.  Not even close.  Also I am fairly sure that he looked at me and thought, "Really?  YOU want to procreate?  You look like you are 14.  Also an insane person."  I tried to act as mature and child-ready as possible, but in pigtails and an ugly Christmas sweater it's pretty tricky.  He told me to come back in an hour.  I told him to go die.

No, I did not.  He was very nice.

But I did get right back in line again and wait for another hour.  When I finally got to the front for Will You Give Me Drugs Now: The Sequel, I was rather grumpy.  But I was not as grumpy as Miss I'd-rather-be-home-drinking-eggnog-than-anywhere-near-this-waiting-hoard-of-sick-people behind the counter.  She gave me attitude.  But she also gave me drugs.

Hooray!  Crisis averted!  And it only took me about four and a half hours to get it sorted!  I could have driven home and back in that time, and I would have had an extra half hour.  Additionally, I had to pay full price because the store didn't have my insurance information and I didn't have it on me.  AND thanks to the time-consuming nature of all the hassle, I had to take it like three hours later than I was supposed to.  I hear that taking it at inconsistent times increases your side effects.  So.  I'm looking forward to that.

Merry Christmas!!

Clomid v. Finals: the Clash of the Titans

Whose freaking idea was it for me to start Clomid the month of finals?  WHOSE?  I would like to have some words with that person.

Because finals are stressful.  And a law school final is a very special kind of stressful that requires full attention, full commitment, full dedication, and approximately half of your soul.  Per final.  If you have more than two finals (as most people do) then you are beyond soulless.  I am very sorry.

It's nice to not be a 1L anymore (meaning in my first year of law school), because 1L finals take like 150% of your soul and also all of your joy and your tears and your will to live.  I am not exaggerating when I tell you that every single day I went to the law school last year during finals I walked in on someone crying.  In the bathroom.  In an empty classroom.  In the middle of the hallway.  Crying everywhere!  Dreams shattering!  Sanity crumbling to bits!

Due to support from Husband and family and my own willpower, I was not one of The Criers and I did pretty well through the process mentally, emotionally, and academically.  So I didn't really think much about taking Clomid right before finals, because if I can handle 1L year, I can basically handle anything.  It did not even occur to me that there would be an issue.

But even if I had thought about it, I might have taken it anyway because I was completely sure that I would fall in the weepy camp of Clomid takers, and then worst case scenario I could just pretend to be a 1L again and not a single person would question my tears.

But I do not fall into the weepy camp.  I am firmly in Camp Rage, and if I cry they are tears of fury mixed with blood and I drown you with them while I laugh.

So when you take finals, which are already very stressful and frustrating and soul-killing, and you add in my new habit of reacting to every little thing that annoys me with PURE AND UNADULTERATED FURY, what you get is me on a month-long wrathful rampage.

So yesterday, my boss said something very disrespectful to me, my clinic didn't come through for me on something my client NEEDED, and I didn't have time to address either of them because I had to start studying for Evidence which I am not at all prepared for and which I need to GET prepared for in, oh, two days (one of which has 7 hours of church commitments already carved out of it).  I can't even tell you how many times I punched my pillow or screamed or angry cried.  Husband literally backed away from me slowly at one point.

Basically, I am a fire-breathing Godzilla and I am barely leashed and at the slightest provocation I WILL BURN THIS ENTIRE CITY DOWN SO THAT NO ONE HAS TO TAKE FINALS.  NO ONE.  Heaven help me if I'm still this rage-y when my period comes.  Who knows what I'll do.

Symptoms Part 2

So now my symptoms have just gotten weird.  Mood swings I was prepared for.  Even hot flashes.  But today I just got a bunch of random things.

Nausea/vomiting!

Cramps in my lady parts!

A really weird and intense pain on half of my face that extends from just below my jaw to my brain bits!

That last one doesn't even make sense, but I Googled it and a bunch of people have jawline pain on Clomid.  WHY!?  What reason could there possibly be?  Is jaw pain hormonal?  Does making me feel like my brains are going to burst out of my skull somehow prepare my uterus for fertility?

But whatever.  I'll take whatever I have to take, because the ol' ovulation kit says today is a flashing smiley face day, and that means that I ovulate soon.  So husband and I are having our scheduled sexytimes and hoping to make a baby in this weirdo, symptomatic, drugged-out body of mine.  Wish us luck.

'Cuz it's going to take some willpower to down these pills next month if they don't work now.

Symptoms

Goodness gracious.  For the first few days of Clomid I had basically no symptoms at all.  Kind of a headache but that's really it.  And then, all of a sudden, last night I had ALL THE SYMPTOMS.

Let me narrate for you what went down.

I came back from dinner, wrote out my blog post, and then settled in to relax for a bit before I went to bed.  Only instead of doing that I just started crying.  All of a sudden I was totally overwhelmed with the things I'd been through that evening and my own infertility and the amount of work I have to do this week and all the people I have to see and how little time there is to do everything.  It all just hit me at once and I started crying.  Not interested in crying alone, I called my husband and asked him to come up and snuggle.  He asked me what was wrong and as I was telling him, instead of sad I started to feel mad.  Why did I have to deal with all these things!?  It wasn't fair!  I just suddenly got randomly furious at nothing.

And then I got my first ever hot flash.  It was soooo weird.  Kentucky Cousin ("KC") told me that the first time she had a hot flash she initially thought it was a panic attack.  I can now totally see why.  Because at first is just felt like overwhelming pressure in my chest.  It was heavy the way that guilt is heavy.  Or panic.  But I didn't have anything to feel guilty or panicked about.  And then all of a sudden my entire body was just really freaking hot.

And, you guys, listen.  It is FREEZING in my mom's house (where I am currently staying).  All year.  No matter what.  She refuses to ever use heat and her house just traps cold air inside of it like an arctic tomb.  She walks around in multiple coats and considers such an action to be totally normal, even though she lives in California.  So I KNOW that I was not hot because it was actually hot.

So at that point I realized that all the things happening were hormonal and I calmed down.

But then I got hit with another fun Clomid side effect - insomnia.  I usually fall asleep almost immediately, and I was really, really tired.  And yet I couldn't fall asleep for hours.  I was just tossing and turning, never comfortable.  My cat (who likes to sleep on me) got pissed that I wouldn't stay still and gave up on me.  I think she slept on my husband, who was totally out for most of this.

When I finally did fall asleep, I had weird and scary dreams/hallucinations that creatures that looked like the Minotaur were in my bedroom and on my balcony.  Just screeching at me.  I say hallucinations because I actually sat up in bed and looked over my husband's sleeping body to try to speak to one of them.  He was right there.  But as I stared at him he gradually disappeared.

IT WAS SO WEIRD.

I did a quick Google search this morning and apparently out of a study of 656 people on Clomid, 4 had the side effect of hallucinations.  So it's really rare.  Lucky me!

I felt fine this morning, but man.  Last night was a trial.  And now I feel like any of those things could just hit me at any time.  Hopefully tomorrow I see a Minotaur passing me the gravy and I freak out.  That would be the perfect way to give people something other than babies to discuss.

It Has Begun

Today is CD 5, which means it's Clomid time.

I decided that I didn't want to pop a new drug with unknown side effects right before teaching Sunday School, so I didn't take it this morning.  Also I forgot to bring it with me when I left for church.  So there was that.

Actually, I was a little disappointed that I didn't bring it.  I wanted to carry it on me all day, nice and close, like a pirate always keeps poison on their person in case they are captured.  I thought that I would carry it around and then somehow spontaneously know the exact right moment to take it.  Instead I just took when I got home from church / hanging out with California Cousin ("CC").

It was weird taking it.  Because I anticipated the whole thing being a lot more dramatic than it actually turned out to be.  In my mind, I guess I thought there would be an instantaneous Jekyll/Hyde transformation.  I'd put the pill in my mouth and the second it touched my tongue I would double over in pain as it coursed through my veins, rapidly turning me into a monster.  Suddenly, I'd be a crazed banshee, shrieking and clawing the faces off of any pregnant women I saw.  Instead, when I put it on my tongue, all that happened was that the pill was really bitter and I had to choke it down and then eat a bunch of grapes to get the taste out of my mouth.  And since then I've just been chilling on my bed.  I haven't clawed anyone's face off at all.

Although, to be fair, I haven't seen any pregnant women yet.  So we'll see how I handle it in the next week's worth of baby announcements and family gatherings.  Potentially not as well as I am handling it while laying on my bed doing nothing.

Drag it out, will you?

The last couple of days have been really frustrating.  I know I said I got AF two days ago, but what I really got two days ago was gross-o brown gunky stuff that led me to believe that my period was coming imminently because sometimes I get that before my actual period starts.  As in, like, an hour before.  But then I got it for like a day and a half before it just stopped completely, which has never happened.  So I was like "Whaaaat is going on?"  I even tested again (negative, because obviously).  And then I asked Dr. Angry Eyebrows, who was just as unhelpful as ever.  And then I screamed at the skies, "WHY CAN'T MY BODY BE NORMAL!?"

Well today my body said, "YOU WANT A PERIOD!?  FINE.  HERE.  BLOOD FOR DAYS AND CRAMPS SO BAD YOU WILL FEEL LIKE YOU ARE DYING."  Freaking ow, body.  Why are you doing this?  I have an oral argument today!  You can't ever just give me the blood without the pain?  It always has to come with a giant "screw you; I want you to feel how not pregnant you are"?  Uuuugggghhhhh, I hate you so much.

The good news is now that actual AF took her sweet freaking time showing up after her gross and unwelcome entourage, I will be taking my last day of Clomid on freaking Thanksgiving.  Hooraaay!  I'll be sneaking pills in the bathroom like a REAL druggie!  Who here would like to take bets that Crying Clomid causes me to have a meltdown right in the middle of the holiday?  I can see it now.  Someone will ask me to pass the gravy and I will just start sobbing.  And it will be hilarious.  Because, you guys, my family is SUPER NICE.  We've got our problems and whatever, but they are all hidden and unnoticeable.  Like my struggle with infertility.  A good chunk of my family probably still doesn't know about it, or if they do it has been discussed in soft whispers with a lot of compassionate head nodding in the dark of night.  At holidays such things are never discussed.  No one fights.  Everyone is agreeable.  If there is a disagreement at all, it is probably regarding whose pie is better, and both pie-makers will insist that the pie they did not make was far superior than their own.  That's the kind of environment I'm talking about here.  So if in the midst of the smiles and the compliments and the small talk and the copious hugging I start sobbing, one of two things will happen.  Either everyone will be so shocked that they don't know how to cope and will shut down so that the only sound in the room is my wailing, OR every single person in the room and, before long, the adjoining rooms will immediately flock to the trouble and I will be smothered by affection and compassion.  And those closest to the sobbing will give a play-by-play to those on the outskirts so that they do not feel left out.  "Yes, she's still crying.  Apparently there is no baby in her.  Even now.  Oh, when I said the word baby it got much worse.  Now she is sinking to the floor and making squeaking noises.  Do you think she needs water?  Could you get her some?  I'll catch you up on what you miss; don't worry.  Please hurry!  For some reason now she is getting enraged!"

There's just going to be SO MUCH to be thankful for.

The Day the Drug Deal Went Down

I made a drug deal today, you guys.  That is the only thing that I will ever call fertility treatments, because the three or four times today that I said the word "drugs" my ob-gyn corrected me and said, "Call them medications, please" with increasing annoyance.  And that amuses me.  Because he was really upset by the end.  And he has really big eyebrows, and I think that they were upset, too.  They were quivering.  So henceforth I will call my prescriptions "drug deals" and I will call my ob-gyn "Dr. Angry Eyebrows".

Because screw him.  He's a nice guy and whatever, but he does not have time for me and he made that very clear every time I asked a question and he literally threw his hands up in the air instead of answering.  Or made really vague comments about how "well, some diets say one thing and other diets say another and they all think they're right".  Yes, but you are a medical professional.  And I am asking YOU.

He gave me basically no information about drugs.  (THAT'S RIGHT, I CALLED THEM DRUGS AGAIN, YOU DRUG DEALER.)  I was like, "Listen, everyone I know who has used Metformin has been successful and everyone who uses Clomid is still trying, but I understand that my sample size is small, so, in your experience, which is more likely to yield results?  And do you have any hard data on the average amount of months it takes to achieve pregnancy for your patients on each drug, or anything like that?  Or just a general idea?"

And he was like, "I read an article a couple months ago that said they're pretty much the same."  And he thought that answered my question.  No, it did not.  You read a freaking article?  I can read articles.  You have actual patients.  I was asking about them.  Did you not understand the question, or can you really just not remember whether or not these drugs (YES, DRUGS) have worked for any of the people who come into your office and pay a couple hundred dollars so that you can not answer any of their questions?

Then he printed out a three page article about what PCOS is for me as if I don't know how to use Google and haven't spent months reading ALL the articles in the universe on the myriad of problems with the disappointment machine I keep where my baby-grower should be.

And then he was like, "So are we done here?  I'm done."  Thanks, Dr. Angry Eyebrows.  You have a nice day, too.

And, look.  I get it.  This is the thirty-millionth time he has had this conversation and written this prescription.  But it's the first time that I have had this conversation, and it is his freaking job to answer my freaking questions about it!

Whatever.  It's fine.  I got a prescription for Clomid because the one and only thing that he actually told me was that Clomid is better if you don't need to lose weight and Metformin is better if you do.  Thanks to my 20 pound weight loss extravaganza, my weight is not at all an issue.  Soooo Clomid.

And on the 10th I'm going to get my progesterone checked to see if I ovulated this month.

And sometime in the next couple weeks, Husband is going to get his sperm checked.  Which he has feelings about.  But maybe I'll talk about that in another post.  Just know for now that his feelings amuse me, because I have been having feelings for, like, ever.  Your turn, sucker!  Mwahaha.