Monday, December 13, 2010

Barely holding it together now

Another 4 AI treatments followed after this….all unsuccessful. The doctor suggested that we move on to IVF. This is a MUCH more expensive treatment and a MUCH more intensive treatment. The dosage of medication and the frequency of injections increase enormously. In addition to this, you have to take time off work to go into hospital and have the eggs extracted when they are ready. The eggs and the sperm then meet in the lab where humans help them to do their job! Once fertilization has taken place, the strongest ones are put back in and another long wait begins. We had 5 good eggs and decided to put 2 back in and freeze the other 3 for later. I am going to digress here and say that by this stage, we had spent so much money, so much energy, so much emotional stress on falling pregnant that we were both ready to scream. For some strange reason, we still hadn’t told anyone what we were dealing with. My sister-in-law asked me later on why we chose to keep it all so secret and I really didn’t know the answer. I think maybe we were scared of all the questions, worried about adding more pressure with people calling to see how each treatment had gone and whether we had received good news yet. Probably the main reason was that we were barely holding it together and if anyone close to us had offered any sympathy at all, we would have crumbled. You know how it is when you are feeling sad and someone hugs you? That’s it! All composure goes out the window and you are reduced to a sniveling wreck. We thought handling it alone would be best. It was probably the wrong decision as I now realize that everyone would have done their best to help us out. The problem is that sometimes help comes in the form of unwanted advice from well-meaning people and when you are full of hormone drugs, you don’t have the ability to process correctly! You want to bite people’s heads off and run screaming into the distance. On the other hand, keeping it secret was really tough on us. 
It was becoming increasingly difficult to spend time with my closest friends.  They had all started to have babies and I seemed to be surrounded by glowing mums and dads who wanted to tell me every detail about their precious bundle.  Book club was the worst!  It seemed like each month there was yet another announcement of a pregnancy.  By the time most of the members had had one baby, the first lady was on her 2nd pregnancy and the cycle started all over again!  I thought I would scream.  The conversation turned less and less to books and more and more to baby or pregnancy-related things.  Sometimes I smiled and nodded and could pretend I was having a good time.  Sometimes I went to the bathroom and cried or screamed into the soft, fluffy towels.  Numerous times, I went home in tears and told my husband that I was going to resign from book club.  Why didn't I?  Each month I thought it would get better.  I couldn't think of a good enough reason to resign without telling the truth.  I needed to keep up my social life because if I stopped book club, next would be supper club, dinner parties and then braais at friends’ houses.  I had already made excuses for 3 or 4 baby showers and kids’ birthday parties and I started to imagine myself as a total recluse with no friends at all.  Sometimes that idea sounded so tempting but on some level I knew that it would not be good and it certainly wouldn't get me a baby.

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