2003-06-27
Boo Hoo For Me
I love games. I know a good one called Fun With Infertility. Let's play.
Here's how it works: You get your period when you're 12. In junior high and high school, you make sure you bring a sweater of sorts to school with you every day of Aunt Flo's visit so you can tie it around your waist to hide the huge red stain on your ass. While you're at university, you hold yourself up on the walls as you make your way through the throngs of people walking the halls so you don't collapse from the pain. Other players are allowed to join in, like the ones who kindly and knowingly tell you that your raincoat has some sort of stain on the back.
Then when you're 21, your gynecologist sends you for an ultrasound where they find a grapefruit-sized cyst growing on your right ovary. They cut you open from hip to hip and take that sucker out and burn off all the endometriosis that's invading your peritoneum and cementing your organs together with scar tissue. For the next two months, you wait for your abdominal muscles to regain their strength and watch The Kennedy-Blue Dot Lady trial on CNN. You go on the pill and wait to see what the future holds.
You get married when you're 30 and start trying right away to get pregnant. Every day for a year you take your temperature the minute you wake up. A few times a month you pee on a stick to see if those fricking eggs are ripe, already. You pray and pray and pray for two weeks straight, making all kinds of promises to God, if only...and then Aunt Flo brings her unwelcome ass and all her suitcases back over for her monthly visit.
At this point, you think it might be fun to start seeing a doctor. After all, they warned you that they might need to see you again when that maternal itch started to need a scratch. So you go. You give blood, urine, tissue samples. You know which nurses are compassionate with the ultrasound probe and which ones make you clutch the side of the examining table and wince.
You take pills. Lots of 'em. Pills that make your abdomen feel like you just ate and drank the contents of the dairy aisle at the grocery store. Pills that make your ovaries feel like rocks. Huge giant painful rocks. All this time, remember, you go to work and out with your family and friends and try to act like everything's normal. You pee on some more of those fricking sticks and Aunt Flo keeps coming around to see you. She just loves you so much.
One time after you take the Happy Fun Time Pills, you go try to get pregnant right there at the doctor's office. Isn't that neat? They put those little swimmers in a tube, and right before they put the tube in you, they check to see if the little eggies are at home and ready for some company. But uh oh, guess what? Your little eggies already have visitors. And their names are Another Cyst and Blocked Fallopian Tube (nickname Hydrosalpinx). So they cancel your little rendezvous with the tube and tell you it's time to see the surgeon again.
This time you have a nice little surgery called a laparoscopy. They just stick a little scope in your bellybutton and poke around for a while, cauterizing this and ligating that. They clip off Hydrosalpinx so it doesn't leak toxic fluid into your uterus and kill off any chance that an embryo might one day implant itself there. They drain Another Cyst and leave it alone because you have so much scarring inside that they can't do anything else.
That's when you can have in vitro fertilization. This is when it gets REALLY fun. First you take the pill for a month. Then you start stabbing yourself in the leg twice a day with a little needle filled with drugs that basically put you in menopause. You have hot flashes and turn into a wicked bitch. You keep enjoying that daily routine, and you add to it two more shots a day, but this time with a needle the size of your finger that someone else has to stick in your ass. Every morning before work you drive to the doctor's office and give them some of your blood. After about three weeks of this you pretty much look like Courtney Love. You have to wear long sleeves at all times so people don't look at you funny. You have an ultrasound just about every day so everyone can play Count the Eggs and How Big Are They Getting? Those games are, like, totally fun! By the way, during this time, one of your cats will get really sick and die on your ass.
Here comes the part where you get to PAR-TAY! When your eggies are just so, you go in to the doctor's office for a super special treatment. It's called egg retrieval. First they hook your ass up to an IV. Then they give you some nice drugs that makes you feel the need to tell the doctor, nurse and anaesthesiologist that you never dropped acid, but if you did, you'd bet this is what it might be like. You are in La La Land while the doctor sticks a needle in your crotch and pulls out your eggies. When you wake up, you sing James Brown's "I Feel Good" at the top of your lungs and scream that the doctor "ROCKS" when he tells you they extracted 8 eggies. (You have to make sure you call and apologize for this behavior the next day. It's my game and those are the rules.)
They call you every day and tell you how your little embryos are doing at Embryo Camp, and after a few days, they'll be ready to come home. So you go back into the room where you had your little James Brown concert only without the cape, and they will unceremoniously put 2 of your embryos in your uterus. The rest of them will stay at Camp until they are big enough to get shoved in the freezer. You lay flat on your back and not move for an hour and then you'll go home. At home, you're only allowed to get up to pee for the next 24 hours, so you better make sure you've got that fricking clicker by your side at all times, because there won't be any reading going on, I can tell you that.
In 2 weeks you go back for a blood test. Oh, wait, but before that, you get violently ill and have such bad pains in your pelvis that you're stuck in bed for the fortnight. You think you have ovarian hyperstimulation (but how can that be when they only got 8 eggs?) and you're treated as such. Bed rest, lots of liquids, don't exert yourself. (You won't know it wasn't hyperstimulation until many months later, but don't get ahead of yourself here, okay?) Oh, and yeah, don't forget to have someone shoot you in the ass every morning with one of those big fricking needles filled with progesterone in oil. You want that uterine lining to be nice and thick, now, you hear?
During this time, your brother will get married, and you're in the wedding. You go to the out of town event holding a pillow to yourself the entire car ride there and praying you don't hit a bump or pothole. At the wedding, you turn many shades of green as you try to hold yourself up for pictures and smile when you're spoken to, because no one knows that you're pregnant.
Only you're not sick because of normal pregnancy hormones. No, not you. You don't know it yet, but you have a raging infection in your body which will kick your ass later on.
You lay in bed for two months because you have no choice. You watch a lot of soap operas and daytime television because you don't have cable in the bedroom. You finally read some books.
At the end of two months, you're really excited because you're going to the doctor to have an ultrasound and hear a heartbeat. Then you can go to a regular old obstetrician and have regular old pregnancy checkups, just like all the books describe. You'll eat a lot of cottage cheese and watch your skin turn flawless and beautiful. You'll be a goddess.
Oh, wait, no you won't. That's not YOU. YOU go to the doctor's office and see an empty sac. The nurse says I Have to Go Get The Doctor to Look At This and you know that means no more baby. The doctor doesn't need to confirm that for you. You just know it.
In a couple of days, you go back to the hospital so they can knock you out and do some housekeeping. You go home and walk around in a daze for a week or so, then take a little vacation so you don't have a nervous breakdown.
When you come back from vacation, you return to work. Everyone is nice to you. People send you cards. Some people say things you don't want to hear but that's only because they don't know what else to say. You smile and say thank you and I really appreciate your thoughts and prayers. You mean it, too. But still, you're pissed.
After two months you start puking all the time. You puke through the movie Chicago. You puke in the bathroom at work. You puke at home in the sink. You think you have the flu. But then one morning you wake up and you can't get out of bed. You take your temperature and it is over 102. You call your doctor and he admits you to the hospital that very day.
You stay there for a week. Hooked up to an IV that pumps you full of some hardcore antibiotics. You feel sorry for yourself, but that's tempered with the shit going on behind the curtain in the bed next to you. A woman five years your junior and the mother of 5 young boys is recovering from surgery to treat her cervical cancer. She is getting ready to undergo chemo and radiation therapy while you sit in your chair and read InStyle. You wonder if there's any fricking justice in this world.
After a week, they send you home with a needle stuck in your arm so you can get these bad ass drugs for another month. A nurse comes and changes the needle every few days and you're never so grateful in your life as you are the night before her visit when you can pull that mother out of your vein and take a shower. Once the needle hurts so much that you have to take it out. The other nurses who come aren't able to get a new needle in your tiny veins which keep collapsing, so you have to go to the emergency room and have Noah Wyle's lookalike stick you anew. Again, you look like Courtney Love.
After 4 weeks of IV bliss, you start taking oral antibiotics. You get ready for more surgery. The night before, you drink some nasty concoction that empties your body of everything but your soul. The next morning, the surgeon cuts you wide open again and takes out a whole bunch of your parts. He takes pictures of this because you are one for the medical books, maybe. He leaves you with enough parts to attempt this foolishness again if you choose. That night, you force yourself to stay awake just to watch American Idol (I know what you're thinking, so just keep it to yourself - this is MY sob story, remember?) but you don't really remember anything. You go home after a few days and lay in bed for two more months pondering your place in the universe. You're Drew Fricking Barrymore in your head.
That brings you up to the present.
In October, you'll be able to unfreeze the two little embryos who stayed at camp. You'll hope they survive the winter thaw. If they do, you'll send them back home and wait to see if they'll be staying inside for a while.
If they do, you win the game.
joeparadox at 12:11 a.m.