Yesterday I went to the doctor’s and not a single soul looked at my vagina.  Not once.  Not to mention not putting their hands in it or anything else that would fit.  The only violation I was subjected to at all was a little blood letting.  I didn't even notice the needle going in because I was busy telling my favorite nurse, Sam, about how I'd thrown up my 64 ounces of water the last time I was there.  She told me next time I could just go to the bathroom.  I told her yeah, that had been my INTENTION, but sometimes I just like to do it publicly because I like to see how it looks on the carpet in the common areas.  Since it was the fourth day after the embryo transfer, the two little guys had had enough chance to make themselves at home, and the nurses wanted to check the environment, like checking to make sure the air conditioning was the right temperature.  Apparently my blood needed a bit more estrogen, as is common, apparently, for women undergoing IVF.  So the doctor prescribed two tiny pills, three times a day.  That’s six pills.  That goes along with my one orange-flavored chewable baby aspirin (boy, I miss my old bottle of the cherry flavor), one prenatal vitamin, one antidepressant that coaxes me out of bed in the morning, a different antidepressant that counteracts the first one’s tendency to make me not want to have sex with my husband (actually played a bigger role earlier in the TTC process) and sometimes two antibiotics, to ward off infection after the egg retrieval.  But I’ve finished the antibiotics now.  Of course, this is all in addition to the 1 cc of progesterone in sesame oil, which I still think I should stir-fry rather than inject into my gluteus extremely maximus, and the bullet-shaped progesterone suppository that I stick into my “birth canal” every night, to have it become inner thigh-lubrication by the next morning.  I took the first two estrogen pills at 6:00 yesterday evening, and then James came home and we took a walk to get my chi – I mean, “qi” – moving around and to see some examples of neighboring walkways, to inspire James about what he wants to construct in our front yard.  During the walk I felt twinges of dizziness, like what I feel if I forget to take an antidepressant.  But I knew for a scientific fact that I’d taken the antidepressants.  (The ONLY thing I know is what medicine I’ve taken).  Then, as I was making dinner, the dizziness waves came more frequently, and my fingers sprung into their crossed position – a new reflex – and my desperately hopeful self thought, “Dizziness could be a sign of pregnancy.”  My unfortunately logical self replied, “Dizziness could also be a side effect of the new hormone that you just put into your body 90 minutes ago.”  The unfortunately logical self is often right, and was in this case, too.  The first item under the Side Effect subtitle was “Dizziness.”  Doh!  My desperately hopeful side sighed.  The rest of me sighed as I kept reading.  Here are the first two lines of side effects: “Dizziness, lightheadedness, headache, stomach upset, bloating, nausea, weight changes, increased/decreased interest in sex, or breast tenderness may occur.”  I don’t know about you – wait, I DO know about you – but we don’t really need those side effects because we already have them.  I’d rather not have a doubling of those side effects, because I like standing up and wearing my own clothes and being tempted but not quite inspired to have my ultra-miserable nipples surgically removed, or at least placed in storage.  And if you have two sets of the same side effects, do you then have to proceed to front effects and back effects?  I don’t know if I’m ready for that.  The rest of the long warning paragraph just got funnier.  If I begin to experience memory loss, breast lumps, yellowing eyes or skin, worsening of seizures (which I didn’t realize I had in the first place), loss of vision, coughing up blood, chest/jaw/left arm pain, confusion, and slurred speech, I am to seek medical help immediately.  I don’t think these medical label writers knew who they were dealing with.  First of all, I know a lot more about medicine than I used to, and I happen to know that I will laugh in the face of a heart attack if it comes, and just jingle my bottle of orange chewable baby aspirin in its face.  Then I’ll go out and water the yard, of course using the arm that does not have the shooting pain in it.  I’ll be more careful about the stroke thing; if I have a stroke, I’m only alerting the doctor if I feel like I’m losing a part of my brain that I want.  Like, if the stroke is affecting the part of the brain that directly corresponds to fallopian tube function, I might as well stay home, since mine don’t work anyway.  And if the part of the brain that corresponds to me getting out of bed is what’s at stake, I won’t bother, since the estrogen will have given me such an enormous headache that I’m not going to want that either.  Antidepressants be damned.  We had been warned about the last point of concern from the label.  It says pregnant women are not supposed to take this.  Technically, at least until the embryos opt out, that's me.  The nurse told us that estrogen was originally approved for use in menopausal women, and the pregnancy warning was put on there because they didn't want the women who didn't have periods to start treatment for menopause when they were just pregnant.  In the IVF context, it's fine.  In fact, they pile it on.  The pharmacist told me the doctors had explained their rationale for giving me such a high dosage, to make him consent to fulfill the prescription; otherwise he would have thought it was such a mistake, since nobody takes this much estrogen.  No 50-year-old women, I guess he means.But this got me thinking.  What if the nurses and doctors felt soooo bad telling women that our IVF cycles had not worked, that they let us work it out on our own?  Like we'd think, "The doctor prescribed me estrogen.  Estrogen is not to be taken by pregnant women, and the doctor knows this fact.  But the doctor prescribed it to me.  Therefore, the doctor must know that I'm not pregnant.  Good thing I figured this out by my careful reading of the label and sleuth-like deductive reasoning skills, because I just saved myself an $8 home pregnancy test and/or a $10 co-pay.  That's a value of between $8 and $18 dollars."  But as I said, my medical knowledge has increased azillionfold, and if there's one thing IVF destroys, it's the ability to think linearly and process thoughts in anything other than emotional spirals.  It's much more likely that I'd think, "The doctor prescribed me estrogen.  Estrogen is not to be taken by pregnant women, and the doctor knows this fact.  But the doctor does not know that my hands have developed a finger-crossing reflex.  He also does not know that I dream at night that my husband and I are guarding glass vials of embryos between our two bellies as we hold each other like the fossilized lovers they found in the Pompeii ruins.  He doesn't know how much hope I vomited out onto his floor amidst the 64 ounces of water.  And he doesn't know about the way my inner-upper-arm tingled ten years ago as I suddenly felt the absence of a baby's head cradled near my chest.  So I probably need to write all that in the margins of the medical label, then take it to his office without an appointment, and make him read that and then say, 'so this doesn't mean I'm not pregnant, right?' And he'll say, 'Oh, gosh, I'm sorry; I didn't realize how much you wanted this.  Stop taking the estrogen.  You're pregnant.  You can get dizzy on your own!'"  If that happened, I'd cry "woo-hoo" for the team and then for the next six weeks, I'd throw up every day, not because of morning sickness, but because I could finally get all this fatigue, sadness, despair, depression, and yearning out of my system.  And it would be the happiest vomiting there ever was.