Well, that's done.

Accomplished in the past week:

1) Re-elect President Obama;
2) Pass marriage equality legislation in my state;
3) Transfer embryos to uterus.


As you can see, I've been busy.

All kidding aside, it's been an odd few weeks. I've been tied up in knots upon knots about the election. It's not something I like to think about, but for the past 15 (fifteen. FIFTEEN) years we've been coping with the fact that Her Indoors is not an American citizen. We've patched temporary visas together legally so far, but with very little sense of security. If Obama manages to do something about DOMA during his second term, things could change for us in an earth-shattering way. I knew there was a zero percent chance of anything like that happening under a President Romney, so... I was pinning a lot of hope on this election. Not to mention the whole marriage equality thing which was/is incredibly important to me. So between one thing and another, the past few weeks have been a blur of anxiety and hopefulness.

On that subject: I have had major lining-related setbacks in the past, so I was pretty nervous about my lining check on Nov 5. I was delighted when they found my lining to be 8.79mm -- this is not rockstarish (back before Asherman's, I used to produce 11-14mm) but it's comfortably above the 8mm cutoff that my clinic uses. Previous cycles had settled down around 6.5mm. I know there are a couple of others out there struggling with lining issues, so here's a summary of what might have made a difference for me. There are details regarding vaginas below, but I figure anyone grossed out by that probably isn't reading my blog.

What I did

• Delestrogen shots instead of estrogen pills. I think this made a big difference for me. With my last two FETs we piled on the pills in hope of fattening my lining. This gave me a pounding headache, constant nausea, and a skimpy lining, though my E2 was >1000. Delestrogen, on the other hand, has given me physiologically reasonable level of 294, no side effects, and a decent lining. Totes worth the butt-shot every third night.
  
• Viagra. The doctor at Big Shiny Fertility Factory doesn't believe in Viagra to improve lining. I do. Rather than attempting to argue the point, I just quietly procured a passel of off-brand 25mg pills from an obliging Indian pharmacy and tucked one Up There four times a day from the start of estrogen to the first day of progesterone. Since the relevant study was done using suppositories, I first tried an elaborate scheme to construct suppositories with a pill-crusher, microwave, and cocoa butter inserts. This was tremendously messy and tremendously tedious. The next thing I tried was simply stuffing one into the relevant tract. Worked beautifully, with minimal muss or fuss. A tip to anyone trying this at home: it worked even better when I inserted it with 1ml of Preseed, the kind that comes in the tube with the applicator. Most effective method was to draw up 1ml of the Preseed, turn the applicator with the open end facing the ceiling, draw the plunger back a bit more, and balance the pill on top of the lube.
  
  Incidentally, I chose the Preseed not because I was afraid of some other lube damaging embryos or whatever, but because Preseed is pH-neutral, has no glycerin, and (most importantly) had just the right applicator to fit a Viagra pill into. $20 at Target.
  
• Vitamin E. For this I didn't actually follow the study protocol of 600 mg/day; I used Dr. Marsh's protocol of 1000 mg/day. Dr. Marsh is an Asherman's expert who's seen a lot of scrawny linings. I really believe this made a difference for me, maybe as much as the Viagra -- when I had my post-surgery hysteroscopy during an unmedicated cycle I had a pretty great lining (9 mm) and I wasn't taking anything but the Vitamin E then. But I typically do worse on exogenous estrogen, so I am glad I did both the Viagra and Vit E.

What I didn't do

• Acupuncture. I totally believe it can be helpful, but I was so busy that I just didn't get to this time round.
  
• L-arginine. I started out taking 6g a day (12 pills!). After 4 days I had rotten heartburn and decided to just give it up. Plus, its mechanism is basically the same as Viagra's (although it's taken orally), and I was afraid of Overdoing It.

Transfer was smooth. The receptionist said "Good luck, ladies!" as we walked in, which pleased me. We may be lesbians, but we're still ladies, dammit. Gauged the water/bladder fullness pretty well; I was uncomfortable, but not in agony. Was not offered a picture of the embryos, which was a bit disappointing, but which I have to admit is sensible. Blastocysts were fair quality upon thaw; I've not too fazed, though, considering the fact that my only take-home baby has come from the worst-quality embryo I ever transferred. Pretty is as pretty does, you know?

So now... we wait. And I eat pineapple, out of a sense of tradition and ritual. And bathe in the knowledge that, positive or negative, BFN or BFP, come Jan 1 we can get freaking married, and come Jan 20 we'll be watching President Obama up there on the podium. I've gotten two out of my three wishes for November. I'm hoping for a hat-trick, but no matter what happens, it's been a stonking good month.

CD21: Warning, this post is so long that it has footnotes.

Today's subject: Why I Blame Republicans for my Infertility¹


I recently had a long and heated conversation with a dear friend, a a Democrat who is deeply committed to social justice. Distressed by the divide in our country, she called for a ratcheting down of the rhetoric of evil. Quit thinking of the Republicans as evil. They're just people like us who were raised with a different set of values. If we think of them as evil we'll never be able to talk to them.

Eminently reasonable, right? A fairly mild call to lay down arms. Who could object to that?

It turns out that I do. I know I can't have reasonable conversations with Republicans about their views. I can certainly have reasonable conversations with them about other subjects, and do every day -- but the party affiliation is an absolute conversation-killer for me.

The problem is that I take it all very personally. The Republicans are, to me, the party of institutionalized homophobia. They use the hatred of gays as a lever in the culture wars in order to advance their economic interests.²

I'm sure that as a femmey white bourgie I've suffered less than many from homophobia. But the path that led me to this blog is paved with homophobia.

I'm part of a binational gay couple. This has had a massive effect on my life: my partner of 11 years has no immigration rights on the strength of our relationship.

We were crazy in love from the moment we met, and probably would have been married within the year.³ I can't help but imagine how things could have gone differently had we lived somewhere that recognized our relationship.

Because of our immigration status, we've never had more than a few years of knowing for sure that we were going to be in the same place. I crave security like Palin craves ANWAR drilling. For the past 11 years we've shifted from one short term solution to another. I really cannot overstate how much this freaks me out. I never felt like things were stable enough to start to try to conceive. Finally, at age 33, I realized that stable or not I could put it off no longer, and that I would just have to deal with the strong possibility of moving to a strange country with a small child.

Or, as it turns out, not. I'm turning 35 soon. This has been harder than I ever imagined, and I'm fully aware that the hardest times may yet be ahead of me.

So yes. I blame homophobia for denying us the social and legal support that is so important to young families. Of course it's not totally the fault of homophobia. I could have been better and braver and bolder. If I had had that courage to start this at a younger age, uncertainty be damned, I might well be pregnant by now, like the many young lesbians I have seen zoom by me over the past few years. I save most of my blame for myself. But I reserve a portion of blame for homophobia and, by extension, for the party that has chosen to wave the homophobia flag.

SO yes. I take it personally, too personally. I take it very personally that we may soon have to sell our house (in an increasingly terrifying market) and leave the country that I love⁴. I take it personally that if I have an aneurysm in Florida, I might not be able to spend my dying minutes with the person I love the most. I take it personally that the Republicans actively oppose my creating, nurturing, or protecting my family.

I hate that homophobia has made so much of this wide, vibrant country seem small and threatening to me. Again, if I were bolder, more of a risk-taker, probably it wouldn't be so. Or if I didn't have or want a family, it'd hardly matter. Rugged individualism works great when you've only got your rugged self to protect.

And that is why I fail at civil discourse. I can't talk Republican matters without being overcome with a wave of you either think I shouldn't exist or you don't care that the rest of your party thinks I shouldn't exist. I have a special place of impatience for gay-friendly Republicans. I get it, you care about my civil liberties, you just don't care enough to quit supporting your homophobic party.

Of course, if I had my way and everyone who was gay-friendly quit the Republican party, then who would exist to change the party from within? The Log Cabin Republicans claim they're doing just that.

After having puzzled over the dilemma, I've come to the conclusion that the moral thing for those people to do would be to join the Republican party, advocate as hard as they can for Teh Gays, and then when they get to the voting booth, vote Democratic.

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¹I've gone back and forth about whether to identify myself as "infertile" when it doesn't really describe the state of being a lesbian who has so far been unable to conceive. But in the end I've decided that "infertile" describes my experience even if it doesn't describe my physical state.

²To be fair, at least some of them hate gays sincerely and not as a cynical cultural ploy.

³ After we'd been together for a week, I went away for a week. She's said that she would have applied for a marriage license during that week. I don't think I would have put up with that, though. I want a big dress.

⁴ Even though I am a Democrat.