"Come one, come all!" But not you.

I wish I was making this up:

Attention Preggos: Fun Event Tomorrow!
Once again MOFAS is hosting their Pregnant Pause event. This is a fun, free event where pregnant women can win some great door prizes! The event includes a non-alcoholic drink making competition, where “mixologists” competed for prizes and the recognition of having made the best drink. Pregnant women will serve as judges and drawings will be held to award door prizes to the pregnant women attending the event.

I found this in the online version of my local paper. To be fair, it was part of a parenting blog which I read from time to time because they once had a guest blogger who was going through an IVF cycle. When my eyes landed on this announcement I felt like a lonely kid in a dorm who had just walked past a big party while on the way to the library on a Friday night. If someone who knew my situation asked me to sum up feelings toward the pregnant women of the world, I would simply refer them to this event. It says way more than I ever could about the “outside looking in” pangs I get far too often living as an infertile in a fertile world. We are having a party and you aren’t invited. To comfort myself I imagined a room full of us infertiles (who I picture as much more fun and interesting people) drinking real drinks and not complaining about swollen ankles and daycare costs. My defense mechanisms are predictable but they serve me well.

Now for a confession of sorts. If I’m completely honest, I also read the aforementioned parenting blog sometimes due to simple, morbid curiosity. The women who write this blog have made it to a place I long to go and I wonder what the scenery is like. They are mothers juggling children, work, friends, social lives, and marital relationships. As an infertile woman and a sufferer of recurrent pregnancy loss, sometimes I think I focus so much on attaining the pregnancy part that I forget about what would come after. Hypothetically speaking of course, I would have a real live baby and I would be a parent. How would I contend with this? What would it look like? Could I handle it? What is my capacity for multitasking while sleep deprived? Sometimes in the middle of this whole IF battle I think I forget that two lines on a pregnancy test sometimes mean that the arrival of a human being is imminent. Just because it has never meant that for me I think I discount it (and damn it who can blame me?!). If at the end of all the heartache, the spent money, the invasive procedures, and the wellsprings of pent-up angst I end up with “a baby in the basket” (as my RE puts it), what then? The answer, of course, is I have no idea. The only thing I do know is that it turns out I am a lot stronger than I thought I ever could be and I have the battle scars to prove it. If the day comes, I will do the best I can, just like I’m doing now. We all rise to the occasions put forth before us in our own way. Sometimes that might involve throwing imaginary darts at a room full of celebratory pregnant women judging non-alcoholic frou frou drinks. Sometimes it means knowing when you have enough on your plate to deal with right now and turning away from the “what ifs” of the future.

Denied But Still Fighting

As I write this, someone somewhere in an office probably far away is deciding my reproductive fate. Husband and I having recently completed the requisite tests for a shared risk IVF program, our clinic faxed in the paperwork and the waiting began. I got a call from our clinic coordinator this morning with what turned out to be an update. We were denied. They were scared off by our six early losses and wanted to shut the door. Our RE, however, has gone to bat for us and appealed to some higher authority within the shared risk company (which we are hoping involves a physician). Our losses have all been very early and two were ectopic. This means that we have never had a confirmed intrauterine pregnancy. Our RE feels this is a horse of different color (picturing the painted horse scene in The Wizard of Oz) and has told them as much. In recurrent pregnancy loss, as in real estate, location is everything. If given the chance to take up residence in the legal dwelling rather than in the air shafts of my proverbial home, it is possible that our microscopic offspring could thrive. That’s the idea anyway. Whether that would happen is anyone’s guess but we were/are hoping to be given the opportunity to try. We know that we can still attempt IVF on a pay per shot basis but none of this is covered by insurance (unless by some miracle husband’s new job has a spectacular benefits package) so we really wanted to have that financial net under us before descending into more debt. Perhaps it’s not too late to pull up stakes and move to Europe or at least one of the few states in this country where coverage is assured. I keep repeating my catch phrase/mantra/sanity saving sentence in my head: “control what you can and let the rest go.” We have done what we could do, our RE and our clinic are doing what they can do, and the rest is totally and completely outside of our control. All that is left to lament are the conditions which exist that have brought us to this point. Should we have somehow known to rein ourselves in after say, three losses and take a stab at IVF? Really not financially feasible at that time. Should we have been on birth control to prevent the spontaneous pregnancies that started occurring in the last two years? The way we saw it, each one was a very real chance at having a child. The only silver lining in the way they turned out was that they provided another clue to our situation – ectopic is now in our vocabulary. I know, I know, lamenting the past (or pointing out its irony or injustices) isn’t letting go. I guess I had to get a little of it off my chest before I can exhale and attempt to truly relinquish my inadequately human hold on this whole situation. Exercises in futility have always been my cardio of choice. I’m trying to be better about that.