Where did they get the expression "pain in the ass"?  I've developed a new appreciation for it. I now understand why they consider butt pain to be the ultimate pain to use in metaphors; it's so much worse than pains in the belly fat.  And it's way worse than when they take your blood for testing or put in an IV.  I should know: the other night we counted up something like 60 pokings in the last 6 weeks, from the subcutaneous shots at the beginning, all the bloodlettings and IVs, and now the intramuscular progesterone shots in the butt.  So what's the difference?  The butt shots are the only ones where my water-based body has to play hostess to oil-based medicine.The butt shots involve shooting progesterone in oil -- SESAME OIL -- into the middle of my hip muscles and leaving it there.  The oil is very hard to suck from the vial into the syringe, even though the 1.5 inch needle has the diameter of a garden hose.  It's just thick and slow and takes major finger muscles.  It's the only part of IVF so far that has involved any manual wrestling.  So then when the shot is ready, we inject this molasses-like substance as far as it will go into my right or left hip, trying to avoid the red spots where previous injections or previous band-aid-removal-flesh-rips have occurred.The hormone part of the concoction, as the nurse explained to me, gets absorbed into the bloodstream, but the oil just sticks around.  Where does it go?  What could it possibly do in my body of water?  It's not going to be diluted; remember the "like oil and water" addage?  Maybe it will just end up hanging out with my butt fat like a lipid cousin who was raised in a foreign country (Sesame) and then just moved in one day, trying to act like cellulite but not quite getting it right.    Thinking of it another way, when I imagine little pockets of oil in the midst of layers of muscles, I think of cooking meat.  Sesame oil is edible, and human muscle is edible, according to some large animals and psychopath humans.  I imagine cross sections of my butt muscles in a frying pan.  Oh, I can’t go there.  Pregnant or not, I don’t want to be eaten.  But if I were, I know the meat would not be too dry.Back to real life.  While the site of the injections and the band-aid-rips stays red, bruised, and sometimes a little itchy, the main pain travels around.  After about 10 days of progesterone, my skin started to be sore on outside tops of my thighs and on my lowest lower back around my coccyx (a.k.a. tailbone; the only time in my life I’ll get to use the word “coccyx”).  On patches here and there it also started to lose feeling, like the nerves were on strike or had been so irreparably damaged that they’d just conked out.  In previous journal entries I’ve mentioned my fear of frostbite.  I’m not ruling it out.The general region hurts so much that waking up in the morning was starting to get really onerous.  This is how it went: James would see the clock and say, “fuck!” indicating that he’d overslept again.  That would wake me up and I’d go get the shot ready while I iced my butt.  I’d bring the operation upstairs, newly-showered James would stab me in the butt, pull the plunger out a little to see if he’d struck a vein, and then squeeze the oil into me after he confirmed that the spot was good.  One morning when I showed up in the bedroom again, syringe and alcohol wipes in hand, he was spread eagle on the bed, laughing to himself.  I asked what was so funny and he said, “This must be a great way for you to wake up.  I say ‘fuck’ then you have to get a shot!”  Since then he has stopped cursing as his first greeting to the day.  It helps significantly.The last time I went to acupuncture, my acupuncturist (the wonderful Barbara) asked if anything was feeling different in my body.  What I’d love to have told her was, “I feel a sixth sense that there are two twin babies attached to my uterine lining right now,” but all I could say was, “My butt hurts” in a kind of a whine.  She flipped me over to check to see if I had any hematomas – clumps of internal bleeding around the injection sites – or major bruises that she could try to break up by getting the blood flowing.  She said that my rear looked remarkably good for the hell it was going through; most people have lots of bruises, she said.  Then she saw my other hip, and the bruise to end all bruises, from that time that I was the human blood volcano erupting onto the couch.  You know, the time that taught us to have cotton balls and band-aids at the ready.  Yeah.  And then she gave me a little credit!Part of my treatment involved tiny little acupuncture pins around the hips to shock the little cells and blood vessels into a little more activity.  That was nothing compared to the biggest shock of all.  In order to get the blood and energy unstuck from the butt area, Barbara put some pins in my ankles and feet to draw it all down to the bottom of my body.  Creating a diversion, I like to think of it.  The worst part of the diversion – the bomb going off in the market, you could say – involved a microscopic needle stuck into my little toe.  Yowzah!  Oh, it hurt so much!  It was very much like the time I stepped on a thumbtack when I was little.  You know, with the tack side up?  It also reminded me of the “joke” that my dad used to always say if I complained that something hurt.  He’d suggest we cut off some other part of my body (my hand, my nose, etc.) so that I didn’t notice the original pain.  That’s what happened when my little toe took one for the team.The next day I had my check up at the doctor’s office and they took a little blood from my arm.  You know – barely noticeable.  Then I put on my puppy dog eyes and told the nurse, “My butt hurts so badly from the shots.”  She turned and looked at me and said, “Okay, well, why don’t you stop the shots and just use three suppositories a day instead.”  What the--?  “We do it all the time.  I’ll just put a note in your file.”  She took out a paper towel and wrote “3 suppositories instead of shot” on it and stuck it in the folder.  It was like when you’re having a terrible dream and then you realize it’s a dream and you don’t really have to jump out of the airplane; you can just lie in bed instead.  What relaxation.  What a relief!  How do you spell relief?  S-U-P-P-O-S-I-T-O-R-I-E-S.  Relief is messy, but it’s not sharp.For all this talk of my pain in the ass, much worse have been the emotional side-effects of pain and hormones.  I am completely convinced that this has been the worst part of IVF.  The shots feel unrelenting, morning after morning after morning and remind me of the ache and self-pity I’ll feel later in the day.  The notorious “girl” hormones tear down your last wall of emotional resistance.  Tons of estrogen and progesterone make you into the most stereotypical female anyone has ever made fun of.  I like to think that my propensity to cry just comes from the different chemicals in my body.  But maybe it has to do – deep down – with knowing that I’ll get an answer soon.  Soon this IVF cycle will be over, one way or another.  And how will it turn out?  Will it be bad news AGAIN?  It makes me so fragile.  Fragile and tired.Here, for the record, in chronological order, is stuff I’ve cried about recently:1.       My best friend pointed out that I had never tried to set her up with anyone.  I cried and tried to eek out, “But the only person I know that’s like you is me.  I can’t help it if you’re too good for everybody else.”  That was in McDonalds.  I laughed as I cried, because it was so ridiculous, but the sobs just kept popping out of my throat like hiccups.2.       On “The 4400” TV show, a guy who was trying to clean up the neighborhood park died, so all his friends gathered to clean up the park in his memory.  I sobbed into James’s arms, “They – loved – him – so – much – that – they – all – came – together – to – clean – up – the  - the -  the -- park!!!!  Waaaaaa!”3.       I got a shot that hurt one morning and couldn’t take any more.  I was so tired of IVF, so tired of feeling terrible, so tired of such a terrible, intrusive, painful process that was making me into a crazy person.  The “I can’t take this, I can’t take this; not another day, not another day” job-search commercial ran on a loop in my head.  I really felt that I couldn’t take it, not another day.  I rolled onto my back and pulled the covers over my head and wailed.  Poor James hated to leave for work that morning, with me at the heights and depths of sadness.4.       I was watching the movie “28 Days” on TV, and the main character’s roommate in rehab overdosed and died.  James came downstairs when he heard me sobbing, and he told me I was not allowed to watch the Oxygen channel any more.So you see, it’s a 3:1 unnecessary-to-necessary crying ratio.  If my mind were able to grasp the enormity of what’s looming on Thursday – my pregnancy test – I might start crying about that for real.  But I’ve gotten so good at denying that Thursday will even exist, and beyond that just fatalistically “knowing” that it’s not going to work out because why would it? – that all I can do is think and write about my symptoms, sleep as much as possible from hormone-induced-fatigue and avoidance, and keep popping in those suppositories.  And DailySupport.org lets me think of my friends’ lives instead of my own.  Today my focus is on my friend AshleyPenelope.  She finds out her results today.  Everybody close their eyes and cross their fingers.