Promises I Can't Keep

The holidays are coming up quickly.  Because of all the stuff going on with moving and my husband's training schedule, I barely even noticed it sneaking up on me.  But all of a sudden, it's nearly Thanksgiving!  And I know that I'll blink and it will be Christmas.

There is an awful lot I am thankful for this year, but it is a struggle to not let infertility overshadow all the wonderful things in my life sometimes.  I've got a wonderful marriage, have made some great friends in the last year, got a new car (well, new to me!) late last year and we're about to buy a fabulous house.  We've got a great dog who we love spoiling, our families are generally quite healthy overall.  We've been able to save money.  My brother got engaged to a fabulous girl.  Our nephew was born.

Overall, it's been a good year!  Except this time last year, I was still hoping to get pregnant before Christmas.  And I remember that I took a pregnancy test on the morning of Christmas Eve, which was disappointing.  And I had to deal with period cramps all night on Christmas Eve into Christmas morning, barely sleeping.  I remember promising myself that it would all be okay, because by next Christmas, I would probably be a Mom or at the very least be pregnant.

Yeah, right.

So it's not just that I'm not pregnant - it's that I broke a promise to myself.  I believed so fully that by this time, I'd have a baby or be pregnant.  Because of course, why wouldn't I be?  We're healthy, we're young, my cycles are clockwork regular, we've got a healthy sex life.

And yet, here we are, 12 cycles since last Christmas and 16 cycles total, and no pregnancies.  And a bunch of testing, about $500 in co-insurance costs towards a variety of tests that showed very little in the way of explaining our lack of success.  Sure, we've got some slow swimmers, and they're mostly a bit odd shaped, but there's quite a few of them!  And surely in the past 16 months, one of them would have found an egg?

That broken promise hurts.  I feel like I let myself down.  I got my hopes and expectations up, and now I'm just miserably disappointed.

So this Christmas, I get to deal with infertility.  I have to struggle with the knowledge that I can't so blindly promise myself that by next Christmas, we'll either have a baby or be pregnant.  Because I just don't know.  I don't know exactly what's wrong, I don't know what it will take to fix it, I'm not positive that we can fix it, and I definitely don't know if we can afford to continue trying indefinitely.

Keeping Busy and Getting Lucky

For anyone who has been checking to see if I updated, I apologize for the gap in posting.  I took a few months away from focusing about infertility - we have had a plan to try vitamins, which take awhile to see any potential effect.  Also, we have been in the process of moving, so there was a lot of things to do!

In case anyone needs a distraction from fertility issues, moving is a good option.  Holy cow, does that take up every inch of brain space and physical energy!  Thankfully, this was a military move, so we didn't really have to do much in terms of packing or lifting or carrying.  Which is super good, because my husband wasn't able to help at all.  He was working about 100 hours per week up until a Friday, then had to drive 10 hours up to a temporary duty station for a 9-week training program that started that very next Monday.  I stayed behind to supervise the movers packing and moving our things, then packing up the car with items they wouldn't take (mostly liquids), cleaning up the townhouse and turning the keys over to the landlord (full deposit back - score!).

If that wasn't enough, on that Sunday (two days after he left, the day before he started his training program), I then drove 10 hours away to our new permanent duty station where we'll live for approximately 3 years, starting in late December.  I met with our realtor on Monday - we had spoken on the phone for a few weeks.  We looked at 12 houses on Monday, 7 on Tuesday, and Tuesday evening we put in a competitive offer for our favorite house.  The sellers accepted on Wednesday.

Our Realtor and Lender both told me that they cannot remember anyone ever having it quite this easy.  It all happened so quickly and so easily!  Sometimes people search for months to find something that suits them this well, sometimes people can't find something they like in their budget, sometimes they put offers on several homes before one is accepted.

But we got lucky the first try. Very, very lucky!

So that means....

THIS IS OUR NEW HOME!!!!!

If you thought the buying process stopped when you got an accepted offer, then you're as naive as I was going into this process.  I've been swimming in paperwork ever since!  I flew to meet up with my husband at his temporary duty station on that Friday, and immediately got to work in assembling our loan documentation, setting up the inspection, requesting a septic inspection, arranging the VA appraisal, repair negotiation, etc.  Phew, that's WORK!

Thankfully everything seems to be all set and we should close early next month.  We'll move in as soon as my husband finishes his training program here.  So very excited!

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Now that you're up to date on why I haven't been around in the past two months, I should also say that I've been in a really good mind space about infertility recently.  Some of that is the distraction of all that's been going on, some is exercising and keeping my body healthy, and I think knowing what the problem seems to be (or at the least, what issues we shouldn't have to worry about since we ruled them out by testing) has helped me immensely have greater peace of mind.  I like our vitamin plan for now, as I really still want that unmedicated cycle where we just had sex at the right time and resulting in a positive pregnancy test, and am just not quite ready emotionally to move on to treatment and spend all that money.

As my husband has been on vitamins a bit more than 3 months, I kind of got my hopes up about this cycle.  I know rationally that even if it beefed up his swimmers to Olympic-level from his JV-squad test from August, we'd have at best a 20% chance any given cycle, so it's entirely possible it is helping but just hasn't helped enough yet, or we just didn't get lucky.  But I cried this cycle, and I haven't cried in several months.

I cried too early, too.  I tested on 9 DPO, knowing it wasn't definitive, that there was still a chance even if I got a BFN, but when I saw it, I just kind of broke.  I had gotten my hopes up, and it hurts.  I really wish I would have made a fool of myself by crying too soon and getting a positive HPT a few days later, but really, I'm 13 DPO now and still getting a stark BFN, so we're almost definitely out this cycle.  My period should be here within a day or so.

Now that we've got our home set and we know where we'll be, and I've finished most of the process of buying the house and organizing the move, I have time to research our potential treatment plan.  We've decided to that I should change to the HMO version of the military health insurance on January 1st to maximize our chances of getting infertility treatment mostly paid by the military.  The PPO version is great because I can pick my own doctors and never need a referral, but it seems to have less opportunity to use military treatment facilities for infertility treatment, which is at a significantly reduced cost compared to civilian providers.

What is frustrating to me is that we're getting to the point of spending potentially a lot of money at simply a chance to get pregnant.  With my husband's low motility and borderline morphology being our only issue that has been discovered, IUI or IVF are really our best chances.  And because it doesn't seem to be a significant issue, IUI might be all we need.  And because I'm ovulating normally it seems, we'd really like to do an unmedicated IUI cycle with monitoring to see what my body does throughout a normal cycle without meds, and to minimize our chances of twins (or triplets!).  However, the military policy is to cover any infertility treatment except IUI or IVF.  Meaning, basically, that anything that would potentially help us is going to likely be 100% out of pocket.

And as we're facing spending several thousand at the simple chance of getting pregnant, I'm finding myself getting more mad at others who had it easier.  Not everyone, but there were a few girls in particular who have struck me as mean, nasty people have gotten pregnant very easily.  Often they got lucky on their first cycle of trying.  Why them and not me?!

I can't help but think that maybe we just can't "get lucky" at everything in life.  We've got so many great things going on in our life - we found each other fairly young, we're incredibly happy together and have such a firm foundation of trust and communication, we have our health, we've got fabulous friends, our families are supportive and generally very healthy.  We both have college degrees, my husband has his law degree, he passed the bar exam, he's a Marine Corps Officer, we've got a very comfortable savings, we've got a great financial plan, and we're just about to close on our first home!

I'm going to try to remind myself when I get frustrated and think, "Why them and not me?!" that I have other things going on right now.  And that those women who had it so easy getting pregnant might look at me and think, "Why her and not me?!" for some of the other wonderful things in my life - like my fabulous sexy intelligent badass husband, our supportive and healthy families, our lack of debt (well, except law school debt), our ability to buy a nice home.  And that if this is the biggest challenge I have, I should consider myself lucky in the long run.  Because even if this becomes a much bigger issue, at least I know that my husband and I are on the same page about alternatives (namely, we are both open to all options to have a child).  I know that we'll somehow become parents someday.  And aren't I lucky that I am in that situation?

Trying to remember why I'm lucky (and even why others might envy me - because heck, we infertiles all envy fertiles once in awhile! I'm just going to admit I'm petty sometimes) has helped me feel less distraught that this just simply has not been easy for us.