Friday, February 29, 2008

If my body had worked like a normal person's, I would never have to pay attention to it.  But now that my natural hormones and I are so intimate with each other, I've been able to sharpen my self-reading skills to astrophysics-like levels of accuracy. Yesterday my husband seemed more appealing to me than normal.  I don't want to say I felt libidinous - God forbid! - but I was very interested in snuggling and took great pleasure in the smell of his hair.  This morning I woke up to find three pimples on my chin.  Of course!  I'm coming up on ovulation!  My totally unmedicated cycle is plugging along.  Maybe it doesn't realize that normal-person-copulation doesn't work.  It's still trying to entice me with the delicious dirty man hair smell to sleep with my own husband. Once I go to bed, though, my dreams are always the same, hormones or not.  I always dream about fertility in one way or another.  At the very least there are always friends' and relatives' children in my dreams, if not my brother and me when we were children.  Usually there is at least one pregnant woman, either someone who is pregnant in the dream but not in real life, or vice versa.  And the other constant is anxiety: fear, urgency, anticipation of loss and loneliness, with lots of relatives having to go to war in Iraq - the deadliest metaphor I can think of. Now I've got a new component in the dreams: money.  As you know, we've been trying to scrounge up $22K by next week so we can turn it over to the doctors and they can put it in escrow while we work through our 4 chances at IVF.  So the figure of $22,000 comes up in the dreams a lot.  And in real life our money machinations have taken on a dream-like quality.  In fact, we had a funny episode last night.   James called the credit card company to ask them to transfer $22K into our bank account, and to charge it to our existing credit card at their advertised good APR.  While he talked to the bank operator, he was cooking a cabbage side-dish for dinner.  TSSSSS.  The cabbage hit the hot frying pan and created a cloud of smoke, a bizarre smell, and a loud noise.  Around that time our cat, who has been feeling very needy ever since our trip to Texas, finally flipped out.  Her cries of "ooooowwwwuuuuuuu!  ooooowwwwwuuuuuu!" were getting louder and more insistent, and she was increasingly underfoot in the small kitchen.  I don't know what the last straw was, but the upshot was that James could not handle all these things happening at once.  He swore and hung up the phone, saying that he'd call the credit card people back later.  As I arrived in the kitchen he calmly suggested that I go lie down on the couch.  He needed some alone time with the cabbage and the cat.  Some time to cool down in that loud, smoky cabbage and cat cave. He had plugged his phone into its charger back in the living room in "vibrate" mode, and as I lay on the couch watching TV, I heard it buzz several times, then stop.  Buzz several times, then stop.  I looked at the readout on the screen and it had a phone number with an unrecognizeable area code.  Buzz several times then stop.  On the fourth incoming call, I decided to pick up, because whoever they were, they really wanted to reach James.   The person on the phone was the operator from the bank and she was frantic!  Apparently James announced that he'd call the bank back AFTER he had already hung up.  All she heard was a sudden frying sound, some cursing, and the crying howl of the cat.  As she tried calling back once, twice, three times, she got panicked.  She thought something terrible had happened.  I'm glad I picked up.  I think in a few minutes she would have called the police to come check on us.   They would have shown up at the door and we could have said, "Thanks for stopping by.  No, everything is NOT alright.  You see, I can't get pregnant, and we need $22,000 FAST to do the risk-sharing IVF plan at Dominion Fertility.  And the cat is feeling very neglected because we went to see my grandmother last weekend and haven't had a chance to make up the attention we didn't give her.  And there is the matter of the frying cabbage: do you know the proper temperature for cooking cabbage on the stove?  The smell of scortched cabbage, as you can tell, is intolerable!   "Gosh, we're so glad you're here!  Do you know how Shady Grove Fertility compares to Dominion?  Its statistics seem too good to be true.  Hey, are you picking up some kind of pheromone thing coming from me?  Because I think I'm about to ovulate.  Of course we can never know exactly when ovulation will take place, unless I pee on a stick, well, and when we give me the trigger shot -- that's what that blood on the couch is from, from a few months back before we knew to hold a cotton ball close to the injection site..." "Uh, okay, ma'am.  Well, we'll just be going now.  You have a good night..." The policeman would back up towards the street. I'd call out the open door, "After the shot you have to wait 30 hours and then be ready to get some washed sperm in you, or at least have your eggs taken out to be fertilized in vitro.  That means 'in glass' in Latin.  We did in vitro the first time because we thought both my husband and I were screwed up, reproductively speaking.  Hey, is that a pun?  Anyway, it turns out my husband's sperm count was up to 26 million last time.  That's well within the normal range, well, it's a little on the low side, but the important thing is that it's not UNDER the normal range.  See, the doctors thought my fallopian tubes were blocked but when they did their second HSG -- that's hysterosalpingogram -- it turns out I had just been having a spasm..." And the cops would put on their sirens and drive away as fast as possible. Then despite the lack of public understanding of infertility issues, and the lack of social/police support for those of us going through it, James, Serendipity, and I would muddle through with our cabbage, kitchen smell, and togetherness time.  In fact, that's what we did, without the hypothetical police visit.  And I did end up speaking to the bank representative long enough to get the credit card loan shored up and destined for our bank account.  She wished us a good evening, and in spite of it all, that's what we had.