Thalia's fertility journey

This just in: Some doctors can communicate! And answer questions!

I heard back from Dr Candour. Why he can't train the people in his clinic to speak like this, I don't know. Here is his email, verbatim, as I thought it was clear, to the point, and told me something I didn't already know:

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A day 21 start really means a mid-luteal start ie in between ovulation and a period. Our nurses are advised to keep it as day 21 as this will cover the vast majority of patients. Strictly speaking the doctor's advice was more 'accurate' although with the average length of suppression being around 14 days my honest opinion is that it would not make a significant difference. Time issues with IVF only become critical around the time that hCG is given.

My advice would be to start as midway between ovulation and your 'expected period' as you can best estimate. Should we get this wrong and you begin on the cusp of a period then this is not problematic, about 30% of my patients have an 'early follicular or' day 2 start. The pregnancy rates are identical, a day 21 start is associated with a lower incidence of cyst formation, which is the reason we are currently favoring it.

I hope this answers your questions. I'm in XX at present giving a talk, but will be back on Sunday night.

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I think I'm quite lucky to have found Dr Candour.

I think I will start on day 19, just not to tempt the fates too much. That's Tuesday.

I have a question for you all. How long did you stim for? I'm trying to do some planning (yes, so the powers that be can laugh at me) for this and don't know if I should be estimating 10 days or 14 days or somewhere in between. My clinic says 14 days maximum, but I have no idea how much less than that is possible. Any help much appreciated as always.

Misc again

Just spoke to the drug company. £436.78. Yaay for them! Now it may go up later as this assumes I only need 150mIU of Puregon a day for 14 days, but still, it's a much more manageable cost than I thought. I guess there are some advantages to doing this in the UK.

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Which don't include my fun doctors at my clinic. I called today to check on when I should start Buserelin, given that I ovulated on day 11, and usually have 10-11 day luteal phases. The doctor (same one who sensitively finally cancelled our IUI cycle) asked what my usual cycle length was. About 25 days I replied. "Then," she said, "you should start buserelin on day 19 rather than day 21." I asked why, given it seems this cycle will be even shorter, I should only start the drug 2 days early. Because apparently I am an ignorant native who doesn't have a clue. Or, in her words, a combination of temperature shift, cervical mucous and OPKs don't actually signal ovulation. Oh, great. All that time and now she tells me. According to her all that indicates is that you ovulate a couple of days after that. Umm, what about the temperature rising because of the progesterone, which comes after ovulation? No, not according to her highness. She's right and I (and the rest of you and Toni Wechsler and everyone who ever wrote anything about this) am (are) wrong.

I pointed out that this cycle didn't look ordinary, and I guessed it was due to stopping the B6. She pooh-poohed that idea too and stuck to her guns. She said it's better to take an average cycle since I really didn't know that this one wasn't average. I pointed out that I've been monitoring cycles for 18 months and have never ovulated on day 11 before, so I didn't see why my average cycle was a good guide. Eventually I had to give up.

I tried a different tack, and asked if it would be a problem if my period was about to start the day I started Buserelin. She never answered that question, but kept telling me to start on day 19. I'm going to start on day 18, since at least that's logical (my average cycle is 3 days shorter than the standard 28 day one). I think I'm also going to take Dr Candour up on his offer and check with him. I so don't want to screw this up.

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Faffing. Not sure it's in the dictionary but it means something like "farting around" - i.e. lots of activity for not much output. Somewhat, but not entirely, pointless activity. Extra energy expenditure than is needed to achieve level of output.

Feel free to incorporate into the American tongue as you see fit.

********

And I have to finally own up to having exaggerated my classmates' profiles somewhat. Other than the first one, which was almost verbatim (ok I added the bit about the teapots). I took elements of the others and jazzed them up a bit. But you enjoyed it, right? And I made my point, admittedly in a hyperbolic fashion. So I feel ok about having had a bit of fun writing those.

Perhaps I could use these skills of exaggeration and write some sketches on clinic characters? Perhaps for television? Only you'd have to make them really absurd before they'd be funny, right? No. Wait. I think they already did that.

Random things

I finally bit the bullet and ordered the drugs for our cycle yesterday. It didn't feel too scary. No idea how much it will cost yet - that joy is still to come. What's the really expensive thing? Is it the stims or the buserilin? Because surely they can't charge me that much for antibiotics or progesterone suppositories?

Is anyone else sick of taking prenatal vitamins? I'm really starting to resent that neat foil sheet with the 12 carefully placed big red shiny pills. And to resent in particular the nice rotund pregnant woman on the front of the packet. Don't they know they're missing a big marketing opportunity by selling only to those who can imagine themselves with that kind of stomach? We could establish a new brand, characterised by a hot chick in a cocktail dress and pointy-toed-shoes, washing down her dose with what is clearly her 5th martini of the evening - the aspirational infertile (because we all know that we sit around in yoga pants with unwashed hair and unshaven legs and  eat cake and drink the nearest bottle of wine).

I stopped taking the mega doses of B6 that I started over a year ago to regulate my luteal phase. Didn't seem to be any point this cycle given the whole suppression thing that's going to start in 9 days time. But then I ovulated on day 10, which seems a little early. And my nails have started to split a bit, which they haven't done for ages, since, oh, probably around the time I started dosing myself up. And I had (sorry for sharing) gobs and gobs of the good CM for three days running. Now, this cycle, I get nice and (potentially) fertile. Anyway, I wouldn't have taken advantage of it even if I could, given the fact that presumably we'd kill off any little spawn through the buserilin, but H was away walking this weekend so no chance. Please feel free to laugh at me for even idly musing that that might have been a possibility this cycle.

As I mentioned, H went away walking this weekend. We had tremendous faffing the night before he left. One of the friends he was going with came over and they had all their equipment laid out all over the floor of our sitting room. I went downstairs to watch television, and just caught mumbled phrases like: "Damn, I forgot to wrap the sleeping bag in plastic, now I'll have to start again," and "this shovel will really come in handy," and "So if we eat the stuff in this pile on Saturday, that leaves us with the dried mince for Sunday," and "I hope the meths got delivered ok to the pub in D-----y". It was fun. They faffed for hours, I fed them curry, they faffed some more, I went to bed, they faffed even more. They left the house at 4am on Friday, and got back last night. They were very smelly and very bearded, and looked all pleased with themselves for having done something so manly. I didn't point out to them that the whole faffing thing was really pretty girly.

July 26. ish. That's all I'll say on that point.

23/5

Jenn tagged me with this.

THE RULES:
1. Go into your archive.
2. Find your 23rd post.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the text of the sentence in your blog along with these instructions.
5. Tag five people to do the same.

So the fifth sentence of my twenty-third post, was:

I said I wanted to schedule an IUI for the next cycle if it doesn't work this cycle, and started to figure out when the baby would be due if the IUI worked (I know, I know).

I do that every time. Don't you? I know the expected due dates of each month that we've had any chance of success. The one just passed would have been due on 23 May. What a strange numerical coincidence. I always wanted a May birthday when I was little. The ability to have a party in the garden, as my September-birthday-ed brother did, seemed exciting, almost exotic. Instead of the snow that usually marked my birthday. And it's nice and far away from any family birthdays. And it's far enough before June that it's unlikely the child would have to suffer exams on their birthday, or even if they did, they could have a great post-exam party and get lots of presents at the same time.

My fantasies really are running amok, aren't they? I know that, yet every month I do the calculation, and every month I mourn that lost birthday.

If the IVF works, the baby would be born sometime towards the end of July I think. I haven't calculated it yet (and I refuse to do so now), but it must be there or thereabouts. Kind of sucks, as everyone will be on holiday and so all their friends will forget their birthday, and it will be hard to have a party because no one will be around. Although the weather will probably be pretty good.

I said this to H a few days ago. "Whenever our baby is born," he said, "will be the perfect birthday."

How did he get to be so smart?

Trying to think about who hasn't been tagged already, I'm tagging: Reprogirl, Mellie, Millie, Megan, and Mare.

Validation

I went to a speech last night by an academic who studies organisational energy. We were discussing whether it was easier for an organisation to regain energy it had lost, or to build energy from scratch. Ah, she said. It's about belief in success. If you've never been successful, it's hard to believe that you ever will be. Sound familiar?

But I think it's worse than that for us. We are mostly women who are used to being successful, and to being able to influence that success. Here we are, powerless to make ourselves successful in this miserable endeavour at which we all keep failing, and we also don't have the coping tools to deal with the fact that we keep failing. Low energy from the fact we've never been successful, and negative energy from the frustration at not being able to control our fate. A bad combination.

In other news, it's been a hard week to not be pregnant in my little corner of planet earth. First, and I readily admit I did this to myself, was the documentary on the Discovery channel about Jackie Clune. I'm not going to post a link to the discovery home and health site as all it gets you is a large picture of a naked pregnant woman, nothing to do with the documentary, that I imagine at least some of you aren't really in the mood for.

Anyway, Jackie Clune, for you ignorant non-brits, is a comedian. A reasonably famous one in the UK. One reason she's famous is that she spent 12 years being an out and proud lesbian. Then, as she puts it, she decided to give men another go, fell violently in love with a very handsome man, got accidentally pregnant at the age of 37, and had a daughter. Then, just 8 months after her daughter was born, she got accidentally pregnant again. At the 12 week scan they found out it was triplets.

Triplets. Accidentally. At 39. Now I'm not hoping for triplets but couldn't I have just a little tiny bit of her fertility? A smidge? She does seem like a nice woman - unassuming and terrified - but it was still hard to watch due to the usual blast of overwhelming jealousy at someone else's good fortune that I now seem to be unable to quench.

Second event was my high school reunion. Which I avoided, but I did get to read the newsletter. Let me offer you a sample of what my erstwhile schoolmates have been up to.

Juliette Fertile (nee Party Animal): Well, after getting my MA in Chinese at Oxford, and my PhD in international relations at Yale, I've spent 10 years travelling around the world to various trouble spots, working first with the Red Cross and now with the UN, helping set up crisis centres and saving people from certain death in areas like Biafra, the Sudan, Croatia, and Afghanistan. My latest posting in Iraq has forced me to finally become fluent in Arabic and in my spare time I'm helping a small women's cooperative develop their business in making and selling teapots. I'm also incredibly lucky to be married to the most gorgeous man in the world, Ollie (yes, Fiona, it's true, I promised you I'd marry him and I did!) and we have two lovely children: Joe and Amelia who are 7 and 4 respectively. Looking forward to hearing all your news!

Selena Really-Really-Fertile (nee Artypants): Having won an Oscar for my documentary: Up the Amazon in 2001, I've spent the last three years focusing on writing while being a mother to my adorable twins, Sophie and Madeleine. I hope at least some of you saw my first novel, I still can't believe - which made it onto the Waterstones top 10 list last October - it was very well received. Meanwhile my husband, Jurgen, has continued to wow the Art world with his creative video installations. Thank goodness Charles Saatchi is such a fan! I'm now expecting a little brother for the twins, who will be born around the time my second novel, Having it all, is published in the Spring. So excited to see you all!

Francesca I'm-so-bloody-fertile-I-get-pregnant-just-walking-down-the-street (nee Maths-Wizz): My First in maths at Cambridge soon turned into a PhD on option theory from MIT, at which point I went into banking. After becoming a senior vice president at Goldman Sachs five years ago, I left to set up my own company, which manufactures and markets the product I invented - the QuTiClean - that (we hope!) will change housework forever. Turnover finally hit the millions last year so now I can relax a little and enjoy life with my husband, Jamie, and our children Hamish (10), Freddy (7), Barty and Eloise (5) and little Jessamy (2). It's been an amazing few years and I can't wait to share more news with all of you!

Bitter? Moi? And honestly, I'm not exaggerating. These are truly superwomen.

Another old friend called in conjunction with the reunion. She and I have been out of touch for a while but she wanted to call and say thank you for the sympathy letter I sent her when her father died earlier this year. She's also been very successful - she's married to an actor, has two children and is a child psychologist with a weekly column in a national newspaper and two regular television programmes on mainstream channels. In the course of her work she met Sir RW, the uber-doc of UK fertility. She mentioned this after I told her about where we are on the fertility front. And good news, she passed on the maestro's advice! Now we'll all be pregnant soon! Are you ready for this advice? Because given the source, it's clearly going to be fab, right?

Ready?

Are you sure?

Ok because you know I'm going to tell you.

So, Sir RW says that what we need to do is...

JUST RELAX! Can you believe it? How can no one have told us this before! Seriously, he told my friend that you need to do two things. 1. Go on holiday, relax and have lots of sex. 2. Have an orgasm after the deposit has been made.

I can hardly speak I feel so enlightened.*edited to add that I am well aware that SirRW's comments were being relayed to me by an unreliable witness - I'm sure anything he had to say was more nuanced than this.

To add insult to injury, last night over dinner a colleague was discussing having found, on the JP Morgan women's initiative page, a policy saying that they supported adoption with various benefits. She was joking that of course JP Morgan had to offer those benefits since all the women who worked there would "have to adopt" since they'd be too old to have children by the time they got round to it. I thought about a suitable retort, and then just stayed silent. Coward.

And another colleague just started showing. Her third. Oh well.

Onward and upward.

All set

Day 2 results look ok:

FSH: 6.5
LH: 3.78
E2: 172 (46.87 US)

The FSH is exactly what it was last cycle, although the LH is lower. Should I worry about that? According to Dr ICU (for it was he), I am good to take Buserelin starting on day 21, i.e., 17 days from now, then come in for a scan 14 days later. [Ignore the next bit about E2. It is only interesting as an artefact of how focused on worrying I am. It took Nico to point out that I had read the page wrong. I saw the upper limit as 50, when it clearly says 75. I guess I'm looking for problems!!]. The E2 seems to me to be on the high side, although it's just below what would constitute a problem. Although note the voice of gloom on that page: "Levels on the low end tend to be better for stimulating". Sheesh. I'm hoping that since that site measures day 3 levels, and mine are day 2, that partially explains why they are a little high. That's reasonable, right?

Because otherwise this would be a really boring post, and in a desparate attempt to stop myself from obsessing about those numbers, I decided to respond to Larisa's tag (by the way, I was ridiculously flattered by this. I nearly didn't notice as I always assume no one would be interested in what I have to say on any meme, but my name just popped out at me as I scanned the blog. Thank you!). I have to admit to pinching one or two verbatim from Larisa. Seems we have quite a bit in common!

7 things I plan to do before I die...
1) Be a mother
2) Weigh 140 pounds, at least for a few months, just to see what it feels like to be really slim
3) Make a difference at an important charity
4) See Australia and New Zealand
5) Work for love, rather than money (see number 3)
6) Get my husband to watch all seven seasons of Buffy with me
7) See every Shakespeare play live on stage

7 things I CAN do...
1) Get people to tell me things they didn't originally want to tell me
2) Understand what other people are feeling
3) Remember every single thing that was said during a conversation or an argument, even years later, and play it back, much to the annoyance of the other person
4) Cook - healthy and unhealthy, I always make plenty and it's usually delicious
5) Recite Jabberwocky. Word perfect, with lots of sound and action. I once seduced a guy this way
6) Recall phone numbers, or indeed any numbers, eerily well
7) Read at the speed of light, and retain what I read

7 things I CANNOT do...
1) Play sports that require hand-eye coordination
2) Stay patient
3) Do a swan dive (in yoga - I don't bend at the waist easily)
4) Paint or draw
5) Complete things *before* a deadline (I meet deadlines, but just)
6) Go a day without eating some kind of chocolate
7) Stop buying books

7 things that attract me to the opposite sex...
1) Height
2) Wit
3) Kindness
4) Thoughtfulness
5) Sense of humour
6) Intelligence
7) Twinkly eyes when he smiles

7 things I say most often...
1) Do you like me? (irritating schtick I do with H)
2) I'm so pissed off I got fat again
3) I can't believe we don't have a baby already
4) I love you
5) Tell me more about that...
6) It would be fabulous if... (usually to one of my teams)
7) Does that make sense to you?

Celebrity crushes...
1) Sam Shepherd
2) Simon Schama (ugly but oh so smart)
3) Patrick Stewart (alt.fan.sexybaldmen veteran!)
4) Rupert Everett (yes, I know he doesn't want to sleep with me but he's so gorgeous, and this is a fantasy list anyway, let's face it)
5) Cary Grant (it doesn't matter that he's dead, right?)
6) Dar Williams
7) Liam Neeson

Leaps of faith

A couple of weeks ago I noticed that, at my usual posting rate, my 100th post would be just in time to announce that I was pregnant. Or not, I kept reminding myself. Still, I kept thinking about how cool that would be. Every time, I'm so damned optimistic! Since I realised on Thursday that this was not the case, I've still been thinking hard about what to post to mark such an anniversary. But I got nothing, so I'm just posting.

Posting to say thank you for all your comments on the last post. Mellie was right, we do have plan A, and Plan A is still good. I went in yesterday for the day 2 bloods, and will get the results tomorrow. Right now I'm not obsessing about them, because so far they've always been fine so there's no reason to believe my FSH will have risen dramatically in just 2 months since the last test. Of course, typing that last sentence has now made me start panicking, but there you go, that's just me obsessing again. I went straight from the blood test to my kickboxing session, which probably wasn't the best idea. The bandage flew off a few minutes in, but luckily I didn't start bleeding again. I just managed to gross out my trainer.

She's used to the IVF shenanigans, though. Yesterday she shared with me what another couple she is working with are going through with their IVF. Their first ended in miscarriage. The reason they are doing IVF is that the husband has no vas deferens, so the sperm aren't going anywhere. Unfortunately the drugs are making the wife really really angry, so she left home on Friday after haranguing her husband about how she was going through all of this for him, and how he had made her do this and now she was ill and miserable and it was all his fault. That he wasn't a real man and that he was broken. She then got very drunk in a local bar and called my trainer to try to get help to calm down. It made me feel so very lucky to have H. Now I know I've never taken the suppressors before, so I don't know how loopy I will get, but I do know that H will never say anything like that to me. Not because he thinks it but doesn't say it, but because he doesn't even think it. And I have no sense that this is his fault. Through a combination of my endometriosis and age, we just can't get pregnant together, or at least not without help (please! please let this work!).

Amusing best friend incident number 476: On the phone on Friday. I called to tell her that I wasn't going to go to our 20th anniversary high school reunion today, Sunday. I just couldn't cope with all the: "And how many children do you have?" conversations. She asked why I was so down. I tried to explain. The next few sentences are verbatim (although as with everything else, subject to the vagueries of memory):

Thalia:  Well, I just have no faith that IVF will work. Nothing else has worked, why should this?
BF:       You must have some faith it will work, or you wouldn't be doing it
Thalia:  Yeah, I guess you're right
BF:        Because, if you really don't think it's going to work, for goodness sake, just go have a holiday or something
Thalia:  Stunned silence

Unusually for me, I did call her back later in the day and call her on it, and she apologised. She means well, but she doesn't get it. Her other friends who've done IVF seem to have done it with every faith that it will work, and it has worked first time for all of them. She herself has had three girls, the last one an 'accident', conceived when she was 38, earlier this year. She does care about me, but she doesn't know how to help me right now.

The truth is, of course she is right, I must believe it might work or why put myself through this. And no doubt, with the usual cyclicality of my emotions, no doubt at some point I will start to believe that this might work. Right now, I am doing ok. I wasn't doing ok on Thursday and Friday but having H home (he was gone all week), and doing very little over the last two days other than working out,  getting myself maintained (manicure, pedicure, leg and underarm wax, facial), and reading the paper, has led to a bit of an easier mood.

Later I'm going to cook the embaras de pommes that have arrived in our house, the fruit of an English autumn that is just getting going, go to the gym again, and tell my husband I love him a lot. Oh, and do that piece of work that's hanging over my head. But just for now, I'm going to keep forgetting about work and try and stay with my equanimity and sense that in H, I have something that makes me lucky, no matter what.

No pregnancy symptoms here

Just a white expanse of test. It's 13dpo and it was a FRER, so don't tell me it still might be ok. I know it's over.

I'll write about First class next time. It doesn't really seem the point right now.

Is this a pregnancy symptom? What about this? And this?

I didn't test. Just didn't feel right. Although temp was still up, it was lower than yesterday, and I think the majority on the last post got it right (thank you for all taking the time to respond!). If the test was positive, then of course YAAY and all that, but most likely it would be negative and that would tell me nothing, so testing seemed a bit pointless. Since my testing experience has been uniformly bad, I decided to put it off until Thursday - or potentially not at all because in all likelihood I'll start bleeding before that.

So of course today I'm running around trying to spot symptoms. Nipple soreness? No. Peeing all the time? Not so much. Slight nausea? Yes. Tiredness? Yes (but I'm always tired). Constipation? Not really.

It's not a very convincing list, is it? So right now I'm guessing not pregnant and feeling depressed. Pathetic. At least in a few hours I'll be flying off to a hopefully quite interesting meeting where I'll be all day tomorrow so that should take my mind off it. And I've used some of my extraordinary number of frequent flyer miles to upgrade myself to First. Well, I'm worth it.

$5 consultation needed

So, I'm trying not to do this. In fact, I was giving myself a talking to so loudly this afternoon that H heard me from 2 floors up and came down to see what was wrong. But I'm having this thing about needing to pee all the time. Usually I have this anyway, because I drink so much water. But today I haven't been drinking much, and I'm running to the loo every hour or so. My temperatures are quite high (although I've also been using a dab once a day of that 'natural progesterone cream', so that might explain it), and right now I'm feeling slightly nauseous and very tired. It's 9dpo.

So the advice I require, is test or don't test tomorrow. I've been vowing not to test as I've never had a good experience with it. I'm getting on a plane tomorrow and am not back in the UK til Wednesday evening. So I was planning to test on Thursday, which would be 13dpo and my longest luteal phase ever, if I still hadn't bled by then (although again, likely to be affected by the progesterone cream?). However, H is also away this week and isn't back til Friday so I'm tempted to test tomorrow and...

...that's where my plan falls down. Because I can't help thinking that it will most likely be negative, and then I'll be miserable, and he'll be miserable, and we'll both be miserable apart all week.

*Sigh*. I think I'll remember my vows to myself, and just not test. It's not going to help much either way. What would you do?

Prepping the big guns

We had our IVF consultation on Wednesday. It must be so frustrating for these nurses to deal with those of us who've done lots of research. She kept looking quite stunned when I asked a question, e.g., why suppositories rather than PIO? Why Buserelin rather than Synarel?

She kept her cool though, and could mostly answer the questions. They are a lot more low key here than they seem to be with all of you in the US. There was no stabbing an orange, she just showed me how to get liquid out of the Buserelin vial, and gave me some advice about what needles to use. It was all quite straightforward, particularly since I'm no longer scared of injections. I know the volume will be a lot higher than I was using on the last cycle, but it can't be that different. She did advise that I don't keep the Buserelin in the fridge, as if it's cold it can really sting and I need to inject 0.5ml at a time.

The deadlines just keep moving out, though. I'm expecting (but hoping not to get) my period sometime in the middle of next week. Then it's three weeks til I start Buserelin (all being well), then 2 weeks before I start stimming (another difference to other protocols I've read about - why 2 full weeks rather than 2-3 days after a period or 10 days after starting suppression?), then 12-14 days of stimms (starting at 150mIU of Puregon) before taking the trigger shot. That takes us to, wait for it, retrieval in the FIRST WEEK OF NOVEMBER. They transfer after 2 days, unless they can't tell which embryos are in the lead at that stage, in which case they wait til day 3. Anyone else's clinic do 2 day transfer?

We'd find out our beta just before a major big deal presentation I have to do on 18 November. I can't believe it's that far away.

I know what you all said is true, it will go pretty fast, but you can surely empathise with how far away it feels right now. I'm actually feeling pretty good as I'm holding onto my optimism about this cycle (and by the way, thank you for a particularly thoughtful set of comments on that last post), and I think that having a plan lifts even that optimism onto a new level. It may be a very long winded plan, but it's a plan. Now, according to many of you, I need a plan B. No idea what that is!

Optimism

I want to be one of those women we all hate. One of those women that our families and friends hold against us. Yes, I want to be the woman who gets pregnant on a 'natural' cycle before we start IVF next cycle. It's 3DPO and I'm feeling optimistic.

How is it that I have these vast stores of optimism? I've written something similar on at least six occasions previously. Then I post something miserable and self-pitying just over a week later. Is this a chronic inability to learn? A wonderful piece of self-delusion that allows me to keep functioning? Just plain normal? I know many others do the same. Perhaps it's like that thing that we don't understand that women who've given birth say - that they remember that the pain was really bad, but they don't remember what it's like. Nature can't cope with us all being permanently depressed or freaked out about childbirth, so it makes us natural optimists instead. How do we manage to stay so optimistic despite all the evidence to the contrary?

A brief diversion if I may, then I'll get back to the point.

I forgot last time to update on the dream post. The quote was from Hamlet, so Reprogirl wins that one. It's the scene where Hamlet meets Rosencrantz and Guildenstern for the first time in the play. Got to love that witty repartee.

HAMLET
Then is doomsday near: but your news is not true.
Let me question more in particular: what have you,
my good friends, deserved at the hands of fortune,
that she sends you to prison hither?

GUILDENSTERN
Prison, my lord!

HAMLET
Denmark's a prison.

ROSENCRANTZ
Then is the world one.

HAMLET
A goodly one; in which there are many confines,
wards and dungeons, Denmark being one o' the worst.

ROSENCRANTZ
We think not so, my lord.

HAMLET
Why, then, 'tis none to you; for there is nothing
either good or bad, but thinking makes it so: to me
it is a prison.

ROSENCRANTZ
Why then, your ambition makes it one; 'tis too
narrow for your mind.

HAMLET
O God, I could be bounded in a nut shell and count
myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I
have bad dreams.

GUILDENSTERN
Which dreams indeed are ambition, for the very
substance of the ambitious is merely the shadow of a dream.

HAMLET
A dream itself is but a shadow.

ROSENCRANTZ
Truly, and I hold ambition of so airy and light a
quality that it is but a shadow's shadow.

HAMLET
Then are our beggars bodies, and our monarchs and
outstretched heroes the beggars' shadows. Shall we
to the court? for, by my fay, I cannot reason.

There's something in there I wanted to talk about, hence why I've pasted quite so much text. It's the "there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so". I've been thinking on that since I read the scene when I was writing the original post last week. Oh, no. was my original reaction. Even Shakespeare is out to tell me it's all in my mind. Do I really buy that? It seems as if it's proposing the ultimate Pollyanna complex - you can put whatever interpretation you like on anything that happens, and make it good or bad at your will. I've always struggled with this (even while loving Pollyanna as a child). Some things just are bad, right? What's good about Katrina if you're someone whose just lost your home or your family? What's good about the bad things I cited in my last post?

Ah, my Christian friends say. G-d doesn't send us what he knows we can't handle. It's all happening for a reason. You're supposed to learn something from this.

What exactly am I supposed to learn? Why did I have to learn it this way, so that H has to learn it (and suffer while learning it) at the same time?

But Hamlet doesn't mean this. Look at the next line - "to me, it is a prison". The point of the "there is nothing either good or bad" line is not that we have a choice with our thought, it's that objects and events are not meaningful in themselves. We experience them and think about them and in doing so we ascribe to them the meaning that makes sense for us. Every other event we've experienced has led us to this point and is therefore a contributor to that shaping. We don't have a choice in ascribing meaning - or at least Hamlet doesn't feel as if he has a choice. He's recognising that Denmark may not be a prison to others, but it is to him, this is his reality.

I'm going to hold on to this next time someone tells me to look for the lessons in my infertility when I'm feeling down. How I'm feeling about the situation is my feeling - my meaning. Perhaps in some instances I can chose that meaning by carefully considering what I'm feeling and examining to what extent I can shape how I'm feeling. But I am not going to look across this whole experience and decide that it's all teaching me something, and I need to find that meaning - to chose specifically a positive meaning - in order to cope. I think that searching for the good side in all of this would instead drive me insane. I'll enjoy the good moments of optimism when they come, not beat myself up about being happy for a few short days, even if I know that it's likely to end in tears. I'll let myself feel whatever feels right when the bad things happen. In the end, either way, we'll (all) be ok.

You may remind me of this next time I'm all about the floor cake.

Cycles

It feels like there are cycles in our little infertility blogosphere. Positive, up cycles, and then downturns. Now I know there are many infertility blogs out there that I don't read - I imagine each of us having our own circle in one big Venn diagram. We all have our own list of blogs we read, and all of those overlap in some way. Maybe right out on the western spiral arm of this massive venn diagram, there's someone where no one is reading their blog...but that won't be the case for long. Sooner or later, it will get googled or they'll find someone else's blog and read it, and comment, and that will be that. They'll be folded into our blogosphere via someone's blogroll. And their world will be a little tiny bit easier because of it.

Just did a little research while finding that picture (my first picture, yay!) and discovered that it's pretty much impossible to draw Venn diagrams when the number of variables (in this instance, the number of blogs) is greater than 11. So we're a hell of a complex set of interelated stories!

Anyway, this was supposed to be about cycles. There was a positive cycle a few months ago. Suz, Bugs, Jen, Tania, Dramalish, T, Susie, PJ, Panda and Mudbug, are all now between 10 and 17 weeks pregnant. Then we had a downturn. Bad things happened to Danae, Katie's first and Julianna's fourth IVF cycles were a bust, Liana's egg donor got pregnant, Mare's cycle resulted in a BFN, Nico, Mellie, Ms Pru and I all got BFNs from our IUI cycles (or in my case, a no-bloody-IUI cycle), Megan had a miscarriage. Then just last week Pamplemousse's second IVF cycle got cancelled even before transfer, Amanda had a miscarriage after her fourth IVF had for a few short weeks looked like it had worked, and it became increasingly likely that Julia was about to have her ninth miscarriage. Or an ectopic. Take your pick. That's a lot of pain.

I'm sure I've missed people out here, even in my own bit of the big Venn diagram. And I know that the human brain is programmed to recognise patterns, so that we constantly search for them - and find them - regardless of whether or not they are real. And I'm well aware that even while my so-called-negative cycle has been going on, there has been good news. Soper has finally met her Moonpie, Figlet has met her Jillian, Jen is DTC, BrooklynGirl and Grrl have both had their lovely boys, and EnoughAlready has had her girls. But somehow, perhaps because all of those are about mothers meeting babies that they already knew about, or perhaps in my own ego-centric world I'm focused on the getting pregnant side of things right now, it still seems like a downturn. (I'm conveniently and un-scientifically ignoring the good news from T and Anna during the same period) 

Do you think it's like the stockmarket? We could plot movements in different stories and thereby classify the infertilityblogosphere as in a bull or a bear cycle? How handy would that be? We could then all time our cycles for the bull market. Oh. Wait. That would really skew the market, so then it would be in a downturn, then we'd be back to square one.

So I guess there's nothing for it but to persevere at the time that we and our doctors think it's right for us. So those of us who are launching into IVF or IUI cycles during September and October, we just have to take our luck in both hands. And jump.