17

Cycle #17, which means next month will be a year and a half. That feels significant; somehow every 6 months feels like some kind of marker. It’s a sad marker, because I’m still here not pregnant, and not any closer to being so. And it’s a “legitimately IF” marker too.

I’m sure a lot of you can relate to this, but when I first started to realize something was wrong I had a really hard time getting anyone to believe me. It was after only about 6 months, and I just had this feeling. Obviously, 6 months trying to conceive is hard for anyone. But it doesn’t mean you’re infertile. I understood that then and I understand it now, but that didn’t change how I felt at the time. After I had started temping and confirmed by theory that my luteal phase is too short, I knew for sure. 8 months in I felt like I was broken and just waiting until anyone would believe me, until I could get help. I was going crazy. My mom would tell me I just needed to give it time, everyone else was telling me to relax. Now I want to scream

“IT’S BEEN A YEAR AND A HALF, DO YOU BELIEVE ME NOW?!”

“I’VE BEEN PRESCRIBED MEDICATION, BY A REAL DOCTOR, DO YOU BELIEVE THERE’S A PROBLEM?!”

“I’VE HAD TWO IUI’S THAT DIDN’T WORK, DOES THAT SOUND NORMAL TO YOU?!”

As sad as I am to still be here, no one can ever try to tell me that I was just impatient, that I was always okay and it just took awhile. I don’t want to be broken, but if I am, goddammit I want people to acknowledge it and not claim I’m fine. The only thing worse than being infertile, is being infertile while well-meaning people try to tell you you’re not. So I am finding the silver lining in this 17th cycle, in that I am REALLY infertile, thank you very fucking much. Don’t tell me what I am and am not.

When I called my nurse at the clinic to let her know when I was CD 1 and talk about the plan, her voice mail said she was on “extended leave.” If I hadn’t had her do my last IUI and seen that she was pregnant, I wouldn’t have realized that she is on maternity leave. I facebook stalked her and saw that she had a baby girl on January 20 and named her Alexandria. Bitch.

I’m CD 3 today and starting Clomid. I haven’t had any symptoms with Clomid since the very first cycle I took it. It’s weird how some people get horrible side effects every time with meds and others get none. I hope this means that if we do IVF I won’t have as many mood swings and hot flashes from all the injectables, but that wouldn’t really be fair now would it?

Speaking of IVF, I actually looked a little bit at our clinic’s shared risk programs to see what our options will be. I don’t have any fantasies that we would get pregnant on the first try, so I am only willing to look into it if we can afford at least 3 cycles of IVF AND still adopt if they don’t work. My clinic uses the Attain program for IVF, and has two plans. One is open to anyone who is using their own eggs and you don’t have to pass any tests or meet certain criteria. You get four cycles, two fresh and two FETs. The other is a refund program, which you have to qualify for. Since I respond to clomid and our fertility is otherwise unexplained, I see no reason why we wouldn’t qualify. my understanding is usually people who don’t qualify either have really severe male issues, really bad endo or are poor responders. With the refund program you get 6 cycles, three fresh and 3 FETs, and if you don’t get pregnant you can get a refund of up to 70%. Of course they don’t list prices on their site, but I think they are about 25-30k which doesn’t include meds.

For anyone not familiar with shared risk programs, this is how I explained it to The Husband. We pay, upfront, the equivalent of about 3 cycles. We are taking the risk that we get pregnant on the first or second cycle, and paid more than we would have if we had paid for each cycle individually. We risk that our baby will cost more than it could have. The clinic is taking the risk that we don’t get pregnant within 2-3 cycles and they lose money because they have to give us more treatment than we paid for. And in the case of the refund program, they risk that they will actually have to give us our money back if it doesn’t work. Not that they need more motivation, but this does motivate the clinic to want to get you pregnant fast!

After this cycle, if it’s another BFN, we are taking a break on cycle #18 and meeting with the RE to talk about what to do next. I already know she is going to suggest IVF, so we just need to talk about what she thinks our chances are of it working how much it will cost. I have no idea whether she would suggest assisted hatching or ICSI. That’s really why the first cycle doesn’t usually work, right? They have to see how things go, if you need AH or ICSI. Maybe it turns out we aren’t getting pregnant because the swimmers and get into the egg. Who knows. Once we know how much it will cost, we can start to look at how we could pay for this. My thought is to take a second mortgage out on our house, but I have no clue how much equity we have. We only bought it a couple years ago and owe about 10k less than what we paid for it. Home values have gone up since then, but I don’t know how much. Borrowing money from The Husband’s parents could be an option, but we already borrowed money from them when we bought the house that we haven’t even started repaying yet. I don’t like the idea of owing them more. I’m already worried about how we will ever pay them back now that we are looking at paying for IVF, adoption, or both.

But I’ll worry about that another day.

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