August 24, 2012

35 AND NOT A GAMBLER

I will be 35 in six weeks.  35 is a dreaded number in the fertility world.

A few weeks ago, I was re-reading the book How We Know What Isn't So and discovered that I have fallen for the clustering illusion. Consider the following passage:

We showed basketball fans sequences of X's and O's that we told them represented a player's hits and misses in a basketball game. [...] One of the sequences was OXXXOXXXOXXOOOXOOXXOO, a sequence in which the order of hits and misses is perfectly random. Nevertheless, 62% of our subjects thought that it constituted streak shooting.
Note that although these judgments are wrong, it is easy to see why they were made. The sequence above does look like streak shooting. Six of the first eight shots were hits, as were eight of the first eleven! Thus, players and fans are not mistaken in what they see: Basketball players do shoot in streaks. But the length and frequency of such streaks do not exceed the laws of chance and this do not warrant an explanation involving factors like confidence and relaxation that comprise the mythical concept of the hot hand. Chance works in strange ways, and the mistake made by players and fans lies in how they interpret what they see.

Replace basketball with dead babies and I have a newfound sense of peace about the whole thing. I am terribly unlucky, but not unpredictably so.  I just really haven't had a large enough sample size yet to make statistical predictions...though Lord knows that a sample size of seven is plenty big when it comes to first trimesters.

And I thought reading that passage had given me the peace I needed to take chance out of the equation and use science to help get some better odds.  So I started researching IVF options.

Unfortunately, I am an all-or-nothing person.

I have long marveled at people who could "not try to get pregnant but just not prevent it."  The day after I had this conversation, I was all in.  Basal temps and charting and the whole shebang.  And I have lived this way, in building-a-family mode, for 5 1/2 years.  It's been exhausting...but I really don't know any other way to do it.  I yam who I yam.

I told people I was going to get the IVF ball rolling, just in case I needed it.  But the truth is, once I had considered it as a serious option, I was all in.  Again.

After researching options and having a local consultation, I discovered that the best option -- both financially and success-rate-wise -- for us is to apply to the ART Institute of Washington, the IVF program associated with Walter Reed.  (Heh, there's a reason their website URL is bestivf.org.)  So I have an application in and am hoping I get accepted into the cycle that starts in January.

January.

This is torture for me.

The couple of people I've told about this already have all asked me if going forward has brought me a sense of peace.  Now I can stop babymaking at home and just relax until January, when science will take over.

Not even close.

I hope it gets better with passing months, but this month has been agony, to skip the babymaking days on purpose.  I am consumed with wondering if this egg might be a good one and I am intentionally passing it by.  I cannot stop thinking about the potential-$15,000 egg traversing my body right now.  And we are just letting it go.  So we can PAY to make a baby.  In January.

Can you tell I'm a little hung up on the money?

I keep trying to tell myself that this money that we have saved up, we have it for our future...and our future is a lot less bright if we don't try to have another child.  So it's an investment in our future, made today, that will hopefully bring happy returns.

But I am not a gambler.  (Our favorite vacation destination is Las Vegas and we never gamble there.)  It kills me to think that we will fork over $15,000 just for the chance to get a 30% success rate.

January will be the most expensive and most stressful month of my life.

That is, if I make it to January without the stress of waiting until January killing me.

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August 11, 2012

RESTREPO

The husband and I watched Restrepo the other night.  I sat there numb with a choke in my throat the whole time.  From the moment the captain said, "When they told me I was going to the Korengal Valley, I didn't read anything up on it, I didn't want to, I wanted to go in there with an open mind..." until I fell asleep that night.

I thought about how many units this has happened to.  The willfully ignorant -- purposefully ignorant -- commander comes into an area, tells the "elders" to forget how things were done under the old unit and that this time, this time I will fix things.  And we will have cooperation and harmony and win your hearts and minds.  So we use whoever we can get to translate important policies -- my husband made the analogy that it would be like if the Germans invaded backwater Alabama and used Quebecois translators to talk to the natives --and hope that our message is being accurately conveyed.  Which it's absolutely not, because there is way too much cultural baggage that gets in the way of the words.  So some of them die, and some of us die, a year later the remaining guys breathe a sigh of relief and go home, and a new group of guys shows up, tells the "elders" to forget how things were done last year, and this year, this year it will work.


For a decade, we have been reinventing the wheel.  Led by people who decided not to study wheel-building because they thought their good intentions and gut feelings could guide them better than centuries of history and anthropology could.  

And the men under them died defending a valley that a few years later the US decided wasn't really worth the effort anymore and ceded it back to the Afghans.  Those grizzled old crypt-keeper, henna-bearded ingrates who care more about dead cows than dead humans.

I am jaded and broken.

I will never forget sitting on the arm of the sofa in my hotel room on Fort Knox, cheering as the Iraqis pulled down the statue of Saddam Hussein.  Back when I thought everyone in this world deep down wanted to live in freedom.  That the world deserved liberty.  That all men were endowed with the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

I just didn't realize that what makes many Afghans happy is to be left alone to bugger little boys and honor-kill their daughters.

A decade later, what I see is that most Americans don't even want liberty.  Not true liberty.  They will trade liberty for security nearly every time.  And if we can't get more than 15% of Americans to vote for personal liberty and responsibility, how in the hell did we think we could export that desire to the Middle East?

I really believed that what my country and Army was doing was noble.  But I was willfully ignorant too, ignorant that the task was monumentally too difficult to ever succeed.

And not worth it.

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August 09, 2012

SUMMERTIME WITH BABYGROK


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August 05, 2012

COUNTING MY LIFE IN WEEKS

For half a decade, my life has been lived on hold.


Five and a half years ago, I saw a help wanted sign in the window of a doggy bakery.  I thought that job would be so fun, but I was trying to get pregnant and thought it was a bad idea to take a job and then turn around and quit.

It would be nine months before I even got pregnant...and three years before I ever had a baby.  The doggy bakery was out of business before my pregnancy would've ever made a difference.

So many things are like that when you're trying to build a family.  You can't see a dentist when you're pregnant...and when you're trying to get pregnant every month for five years, you put off calling the dentist's office and scheduling an appointment.  I've been having some other minor pains and health issues, but I've put off seeing a doctor because I can't really take medication.  Heck, when I have a cold, I avoid taking cold meds just in case. For years.

If it hadn't been for the deployment, I would still be waiting to do Lasik.

I'm reaching the end of my ability to be patient, and I started the steps towards seeing a fertility doctor and potentially doing IVF with PGD.  (That's that fancy IVF where they pre-screen for the bum DNA.)  But insurance won't cover a dime of it, so I keep putting it off and hoping we'll just make another BabyGrok at home like we did three years ago.

But I wish it were as simple as "putting it off."  The truth is, I think about it every single day.  Contemplate picking up the phone.  Lie in bed deciding when I should give up and call.  And looking at the calendar over and over again, counting how many days remain before I can take another pregnancy test and see if the problem's been solved on its own.

And then that day comes, and the pregnancy test is negative, and all that's happened is that we've wasted another month.

But it's not like doctor appointments materialize on command.  So if I call tomorrow to make an appointment, it will likely take two or three weeks to be seen.  Which means I will have already tried again at home to make another baby before I even get in to the doctor...which means another month of death by hope that this might work on its own without having to fork over twenty thousand dollars.

I cannot wait to be done with this.  To stop looking at the calendar and counting my life in weeks.

Posted by: Sarah at 01:21 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment
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