Saturday, August 17, 2013

Three

Last night I dreamed that I was pregnant with triplets. I gave birth and as each one came out, I found out that it was dead. I kept thinking "surely the next one will be okay" and at the end I was sobbing with grief and anger and disbelief.

Three means a lot of things. My family as it is right now is three. This is my third FET at Big Shiny Fertility Factory. My insurance allows three attempts per live birth. I have had three miscarriages. When I was little, I always thought I'd have three children. I wanted to have my children three years apart. Small Boy has three donor siblings currently in utereo.

It's just a number. My fave bit from Foucault's Pendulum -- actually the only bit I remember much -- is when the protagonist's girlfriend, mother of his child, gives him the big ol' eye-roll for his numerological conspiracy theories.

We move on to the magic numbers your authors are so fond of. You are one and not two, your cock is one and my cunt is one, and we have one nose and one heart; so you see how many important things come in ones. But we have two eyes, two ears, two nostrils, my breasts, your balls, legs, arms, buttocks. Three is the most magical of all, because our body doesn’t know that number; we don’t have three of anything, and it should be a very mysterious number that we attribute to God, wherever we live. But if you think about it, I have one cunt and you have one cock, shut up and don’t joke and if we put these two together, a new thing is made, and we become three. So you don’t have to be a university professor or use a computer to discover that all cultures on earth have ternary structures, trinities.
She moves through all the numbers, the point being: all and none of them are sacred.

I'm on the NuvaRing now, getting ready for FET#5. It's all happening quickly, so quickly that all the bills from FET#4 haven't rolled in (and been disputed by the insurance company) yet. High, high marks for the NuvaRing so far. Only side effects are mild nausea and sore breasts, and vague irritability. Birth control pills give me severe nausea, migraines, and constant blinding rage towards the universe. It's better this way.

Friday, August 2, 2013

This round officially over

Official negative beta. It's not like I didn't know it was coming.

I was -- amused? -- to realized why I was so sure I was pregnant. It's because, prior this, I have had six transfers. For those six transfers, only one of them was an outright negative. One was a chemical, and the other four were positives.

Furthermore, my frank negative cycle was in 2008. So I basically have no idea what the side effects of progesterone are like in the absence of pregnancy. I mean everyone told me that "progesterone makes you feel like you're pregnant", but I rather poo-pooed that -- I mean by now I surely can tell the difference, right? Those heavy cramps and heartburn, that's totally a pregnant thing.

Yeahno. Everyone's right. It's just progesterone. Good thing to remember for the future, I guess.