New house, mixed feelings

We have finally moved. We moved over Mother’s day weekend, so I got to miss all of that mommy stuff. I finally unpacked my china this past weekend. It felt really good. The sink in the new house has a garbage disposal. It has been years since I had a garbage disposal. I love it! There are a couple of problems with the new house, though. The house does not have a fence, and the colors on the interior of the house are too dark. I like the colors, but the tones are too dark for my taste. We also have this horridly red room. This red is just terrible. It is almost orange. I may have to paint over it really soon. (At least a primer coat.) Until I can paint it, I think I am trying to avoid it the best I can. Hubby is working on the fence, He finally called for an estimate today, and hopefully someone will come out to give us an estimate by the end of the week.

I feel really disconnected from infertility stuff lately. I think it is because we are not pursuing anything right now. I have been reading some other IF blogs, and many of them deal with IVF. I do not think we are going to do IVF, so I have a hard time relating to that. The child-free blogs I sort of identify with because we do not have children, and there is not really a possibility of children right now. We are not doing donor eggs, and the donor sperm blogs are not easy to find. (I know they are out there, but I have not come across many of them.)

I am starting to feel like I am being left behind. I am thirty-four and our family consists of Hubby, me, our two Danes, and two cats. I feel like the stereo typical infertile who takes out all the mothering desires on our animals. Our Danes are our babies right now. That is all I have to mother. I am even taking one of our Danes to an obedience class this week. I want to do agility with her and we need to brush up on our obedience training. I think it is good to have extracurricular activities.

I am tired of waiting. That seems to be all I can do with the IF stuff right now. I am tired of feeling like I am the only married woman without children. I am tired of always getting my period and never being pregnant. I am tired of other people telling me about their children, and all I have to talk about is my dogs. Somehow it is not the same.

I wanted to have children by now. As things stand now, with the best case scenario, I will be a new mother when I am thirty five or thirty six. That is a decade after when I expected to be a mother. It is more difficult to get pregnant the older you get. After thirty five, fertility declines sharply. After 35, you end up in the high risk pregnancy category simply because of age. I feel like I missed my prime fertility years because I was always waiting for something else to happen, or waiting for it to happen naturally. Now I have to wait until the time is right to pursue fertility treatment. (When I think about all the money I wasted on birth control pills…)
Until someday comes, I distract myself the best I can.

Moving On

I am taking some time in the calm before the storm. I cannot believe we will actually be moving next weekend. We started packing today and it started to feel real to me. I get to do a walk through the new house on Monday. I am very excited. I plan on measuring for a fridge while I am there. Hubby promised to replace the fridge I gave up from the Tappahannock house. We close on Wednesday, as far as we know. I think we may end up taking a few loads of more fragile things over on Thursday and Friday. The movers come Saturday at 8 AM. It will be nice not to have to do any of the manual labor on this move.

Hubby surprised me this weekend. Apparently, he mentioned our infertility situation to his dad. Hubby said his dad seemed excited about the possibility of our child, no matter the source. Hubby said his dad may be willing to help us financially, if we need it. I think it made Hubby feel better about our options for starting a family. Right now, Hubby is trying to figure out how much time and energy he wants to put into starting a family. He knows about IVF with ICSI, but he is not sure if he wants to put that much time and energy and money into starting a family. It is also not a sure thing. I think the only reason we would try IVF is if he decides that having his own child is very important to him. He has no problems with adoption, but he deals with social services every day with his job. He says he does not want to deal with them on his off time, too. I am willing to go along with that. I think he knows more about that process than I do. He does guardian ad lidem cases at work. Hubby is also looking at donor insemination. He says he is open to adoption, where the child is not his DNA, so he feels like there should not be an issue with donor insemination for the same reasons. I sort of get the feeling he is still wrestling with the idea. I am trying to give him the space he needs to deal with all of this. We also have a lot of other things going, so it is easy for me not to pester him all the time.

There is hope out there for me. Things seem to be brighter every day.

Musings....

I really do not know what to say this week, so here are a few random thoughts… I apologize for the disjointed composition.

I just finished cleaning my house, and I have to say that I really like my Dyson Vacuum. We have a lot of animals, and this vacuum gets up a whole lot of pet hair. I love the fact that it is easy to use. The user manual shows you how to take the whole thing apart and clean it. Very cool. A vacuum that actually works.

Scrubbing ortho cases is very different than anything I have done before. You have to work differently and think differently. I am trying to get it, because I have to know it, but I think I am a general girl at heart, and miss general surgery. Then there are the power tools. I do not know what to think about that.

I started AF today. Just spotting right now, but I know the full flow is on its way. I may start the Midol tonight so that hopefully I can stay on top of the cramps. I just have a day or two of really bad cramping at the start of the period, but that is all. I did not get as depressed as I usually do around my period. I am not sure why. Maybe it is the fact that we are moving in a week, and that is more on my mind than my fertility, or lack thereof.

I just realized we are moving in a week. I think this means we need to start packing. I saved boxes from when we moved from Tappahannock, but I am afraid we may need more. I guess we will see. We hired movers this time. So all we have to do is pack everything, and they will do the rest. That should be really nice. I may take the dogs to playgroup in the morning so that the movers can get started, at least, without big dogs getting in the way. I am really excited to finally settle.

I realized this week that I love living in the mountains. I love looking up and seeing mountains around me. I think it makes me feel safe. I love the area we are living in. There is stuff to do, things to get involved in. I love it. I am happier out here than I ever was in Tappahannock. It feels good.

Pediatric surgery

This past week I circulated pediatric cases in the OR. For some reason, it surprised me how much surgery is done on children as the result of premature birth. Preemies are very tiny, and very fragile. It made me nervous. I think it makes everyone in the OR a little nervous. When a baby goes down, it can happen quickly, and without a lot of warning. Not a good feeling. Some things are done differently with premature babies and infants, to help them get through the surgery. The room has to be kept warm because babies lose heat very quickly. And everything is tiny. Instruments need to be scaled down to fit the baby’s anatomy.

I feel a lot more comfortable working with adults. Even the really sick patients. Give me a nice bloody abdominal case, an adult laparoscopic case, or an eye case, and I am fine. No problems. I love those cases. For me, those are sort of fun. But put me in a room where they are operating on a baby, and I get grumpy. I just do not want to deal with it. I know I will have to, at least sometimes. I will eventually take call, and our hospital gets pediatric cases and even pediatric traumas. I know I will have to work on those cases if I am assigned to them. When I am in those cases, I want do the best I can to make the case go smoothly, and hopefully have a good outcome.

Do not get me wrong. I like children. At one time, I even considered going into peds nursing. But children in the OR are a whole different ball game. For me, it is a lot easier to see a sick child on the floor, than it is to see a child in the OR. I want to see them whine and complain and cry because they feel miserable. Most of the time in the OR we work with the child while they are asleep. When we take them to PACU, they are usually still asleep. We may need to call the parents to let them know what is happening in the OR, if the case is really long. Parents are usually worried about their children, and not at their best.

Maybe I am just jealous. I felt surrounded by babies and mothers this week. It felt like everyone I worked with on these peds cases had children, or they were pregnant. I felt out of place, like I was imposing. I do not have children, and there feels like no possibility of children or babies, at least in the near future. It felt awkward handling babies this past week. I have not had a lot of experience holding children, and we would usually carry the babies into the OR. My infertility was very apparent to me during those moments. I want a baby of my own, but I am unable to have one. I found that caring for other people’s children does not give me a lot of comfort, and only makes my childlessness more apparent, at least to me.

Next week I do not have to deal with children. I am off on different adventure in OR land. I start my ortho rotation. I get to learn about operating on bones and joints. I am trying to keep an open mind, but it can be difficult. My previous experiences with ortho were not good. I also like my pathophysiology. I think you see more of that in the general cases. Ortho seems to be mostly repairing structure, using a lot of tools. We will see what happens.

Losing It...

I had a breakdown on Friday. I think there is no other word for it. I came home from work and all I could do was cry. I tried to do a blog entry on what I was feeling, but I was incoherent. I could barely put two words together, or even see the computer screen through my tears.

I do not know what set me off. Maybe it was the fact I had my period that day. Maybe it was seeing the crowd around the baby set me off. Maybe it is the fact I turn 34 in a couple of weeks, and I feel my biological clock ticking. Maybe it was fatigue. I do not know. All I know is that I had to come home and cry because I felt the lack of a child so keenly.

I just feel empty and hopeless right now. I feel like I may never get the experience of holding my own child. I may never experience childbirth. I may never get to raise a child of my own. I may never get to be a parent at all. All of that seemed to hit me on Friday.

I know that Hubby and I cannot get pregnant without medical help. I understand this. I know that we need $20,000 just to have a shot at getting pregnant with his DNA, and that is not possible at this point. We do not have the money or the resources. From where I am sitting right now, I feel like we may never get the money to have our chance at getting pregnant with our child. It may take us about a decade to get to a point where we feel comfortable gambling with that much money. I will be in my 40s at that point. Seems a little late, but who knows? Not sure how I feel about trying for a child at that age. Not something that was even on my radar screen. (Not that infertility was in my life plan, either. I think I got screwed.)

I think I realized on Friday that we are not going to do IVF. At least not right now, and probably never. That means that we may not ever have a child with Hubby’s DNA. That upsets me. When you love someone enough to marry them, I feel like having a child with them is an extension of that love. I know we will love any child who becomes a part of our family, no matter the source. But right now I am mourning the loss of a child from the two of us.

Hubby has a hard time talking about infertility stuff because he feels most of the problem right now is the male factor. I think he is just starting to work through how it feels to be infertile, and he does not want to talk about it because it makes him feel bad. Men seem to like avoiding unpleasant subjects. I have had a little longer to deal with being infertile, but I still get upset about it. We did discuss infertility for a little bit on Friday. It sometimes feels like it is the elephant in the room with us. We both know it is there, but no one wants to acknowledge it. We talked about how we could not afford IVF, and how it means that we would hot have a child with his genetic legacy. He is still working through how he feels about donor sperm. I think he feels better about donor sperm than adoption. He said with donor sperm, at least the child would be mine. We both agreed that now is not the time to pursue it. Maybe in the fall, when we are a bit more settled, we can look into it. Until then, we can mourn the loss of conceiving our child.

Opening Up

I have been thinking about reactions to infertility. I am in a new place, and people are curious about me. The first questions they ask are, “Are you married” and, “Do you have children?” This is especially true if the person asking is female. I am all right with the married part. I am married, and Hubby and I are very happy. The question about children bothers me. I usually will distract the asker with my dogs. (People always seem to have questions about Great Danes.) Recently I started telling people we are infertile. I am sort of tired of hiding it and feeling uncomfortable about the fact that I am infertile. Why not tell people? I have lived with this for a long time. If it makes people uncomfortable, so be it.
What I have found, so far, is that the other person will usually tell me a story about someone else they knew who dealt with infertility. The conversation sort of dies after that. It is like the people who have children can only talk about children. If you are not part of that club, then you are out in the cold. There seems to be nothing else to talk about if you do not have children. I think it is a sign of how focused our society is on family. It is very frustrating if you are childless. People do not seem to know what to do with you.

I guess infertility is outside the norm, and because it is outside the norm, some people have a hard time dealing with it. I think we maybe getting better at it. No one that I have come across has rejected me or treated me differently because I do not have children. (I think.) Infertility treatment is becoming more common, too. I think we have at least one doc at our hospital who deals with infertility patients. (No RE in Roanoke, unfortunately.) During a procedure I was assisting with, the doc got a page about a patient who was in ovarian hyperstimulation syndrome (OHSS). The nurse I was with asked what it was, and I knew, so I told her. She seemed surprised I knew what it was. She asked if I had ever worked in OB nursing. I told her I had never worked in OB nursing, but I was infertile. It seemed natural for me to know about OHSS because I am thinking about IVF, and I like to understand the procedure and the possible effects of treatment.

I suspect infertility treatment is more common now, and slowly attitudes are changing. Most of the people I have told have been understanding. But I have mostly only told other OR nurses and my Quaker friends. Time will tell how things turn out. It feels good to be honest about being infertile, for the most part. I still get uncomfortable with too much baby talk, and I am not going to attend baby showers any time soon. Hopefully by being honest about my infertility people will understand why I am not comfortable around babies and baby talk.

Spring has Sprung

I think spring has sprung. The weather is beautiful. It just feels like spring. The following post is randomish thoughts on spring and Easter. I tried to make it as coherent as possible.

Spring is sort of weird for me. I love the renewal, the new growth. But, my birthday is in April, so spring means that another year of my life has passed. Another year of living with infertility. Spring should be a time of hope and new life, but for us there is no hope of new life within our family. The coming of spring is now bittersweet for me because of my infertility. It makes me feel empty and sad
.
Waiting is harder in spring. In winter it was all right to be dormant, and waiting for things to happen. Things start to grow in the spring. It is a beginning. In meeting this morning, someone mentioned that March used to be the first month of the year. To an agrarian society, this makes sense. The farmer can start farming again as the weather warms up. In an agrarian society, fertility and growth are very important. March is a time for beginnings

Easter comes along in spring. I am always surprised at how difficult Easter is for me. I guess it should not be too surprising. There is a celebration of youth and mothers and fertility. I have started wanting to skip Easter celebrations and services because there is the large focus on children and family. I get tired of feeling left out, of having in-laws shove babies at me, of feeling jealous because they have what I want so badly.

To me, there seem to be two parts to Easter. There is the Easter the Church celebrates, and there is the Easter people celebrate outside of church. The church celebrates Christ dying for us, suffering for us, thus allowing all of our sins to be forgiven. (I grew up Presbyterian, so there is a likely a Calvinist slant to this.) We take communion to remind us of that promise and Christ’s love for us. I like this part of it. To know no matter what I do, I will be loved. Taking communion and the rituals involved in celebrating the resurrection are meaningful to me.

The other part of Easter celebrations centers around fertility, family and new growth. I think I read somewhere that the church took over a pagan celebration of fertility. (The church took over many pagan celebrations, and just put their rituals over top of the pagan ones. If you can’t beat them, join them.) The focus on fertility could be why there is such a big focus on babies, young children, and mothers on Easter. This is the part that is difficult for me. I really want to be a part of this, but I cannot. I want to be a mother, with a child, and celebrate Easter fully. Thanks to whatever higher power is up there, that is not possible right now, and I think only a miracle will make it possible in the near future. As far as I can tell, miracles are hard to come by for me. As I see it, until we can afford IVF, there is no hope for any kind of miracle at all.

Spring is here and I am tired of waiting. I know I should try to be patient, because we have a lot of things going on. Adding IVF to that would be even more stress. Hubby’s practice is not even off the ground, we have not closed on our house in Tappahannock, we have not bought a house here in Roanoke. I have only been in my job a month. This is a transitional time for us. I understand that. But I really want a family. I have been infertile for a little under a decade. It hurts knowing that we do not have hope of getting pregnant this spring. I cannot do anything other than wait. I just feel like I have been waiting a long time.