One Year Later

I'm really bad at this. I thought I would post more often, perhaps even with every doctor's appointment, but I just haven't been able to write stuff down.

Well, today marks the one year mark from when we started trying to conceive. Ben has kindly let me know this is the definition of infertility, not being able to conceive within 1 year.

Looking back, I don't know why something like this would take so long. Sperm has not met with egg, despite all the things we are doing where that would be the most logical thing to happen. My uterus is "perfect", my eggs are young, and sperm is normal and plentiful. And the medicine is helping me ovulate regularly. It's so weird to me that the jury is still out on this kind of science. There's still so much mystery about what's actually happening.

As I think about this past year, I surprisingly don't focus on how much time I've spent trying to conceive. So let me force myself to think through how it went. Don't get me wrong, it was crazy in the beginning months, thinking of the possibility we would have a baby by the end of the year, reading everything like I was cramming for an exam, taking my temperature, changing my habits. And it's weird now to think of all the babies I know that are due or becoming due soon, how I might've been one of those women expecting right now.

I also think about the 5 months I didn't have a period, while I waited for the 6 month mark to see a Fertility doctor. I wonder if that was a waste of time. If I had seen the doctor earlier than July, would that have bought me some more cycles and would that have been beneficial.

The doctors appointments all blur together, and I barely remember how each of them went or what happened. I guess essentially if it resulted in nothing, it's not really that memorable. I fear that once I actually have a positive pregnancy test, I'll be caught off guard and won't remember how the cycle was. I guess it's kind of like scientists who do research and try the same thing over and over again, hoping for a breakthrough.

So where are we right now?
I'd been taking Clomid to help tell my body make the hormones necessary for the eggs to grow. But its been a little spastic with effectiveness. This cycle the doctor has now moved me to the next medicine we can try, Letrozole, which essentially does the same thing. The significance of this for me is that we're continuing to move along the various things you can try in increasing invasiveness, ending in IVF. I guess the feeling is I just want off this train, but I have no choice but to keep riding it.

What's been weird is planning things in advance. If I plan anything in 5 months, 6 months, more? I keep needing to say in my head, "Ok, now imagine you're pregnant, is this still going to work?" It's a little weird, but after that negative pregnancy test, we tend to book travel.

Included in planning is looking at my career. I get pinged at times for other jobs, and it's a weird thing for me that for the first time in my career, I don't even want to consider it. I plan on staying home when we have our first child. I'm also comfortable where I'm at, and I don't think it would be fun to move jobs, re-learn as a new person AGAIN, just to leave them hanging in less than a year....or maybe not. Maybe I won't become pregnant in so many years or at all. These are realities I'm able to consider as a possibility personally. But in planning my career, I'm a little bit in a holding pattern until I'm sure what's going to happen.

So goes this extra curricular activity of trying to conceive.