The Uncertainty of it All

It’s funny how life works.  When you get to the point in your life when you’re ready to have a family you go down that road with high hopes and dreams, and even a few “what on earth am I doing?!” fears.  After about 8 - 9 months you decide to get serious and start taking your basal body temperature, using ovulation tests and checking CM.  When 11 months comes and go you panic because statistics say that 98% of couples will conceive within one year.  The 12 month mark flies by and you find yourself in a waiting room somewhere wondering what you’re going to do next.

And if you’re like us, the tests come back showing practically nothing wrong with either of you and your official diagnosis comes down as “unexplained infertility” and an expected 1 - 2% chance of conceiving in any given cycle instead of the 20 - 25% that normal people have.  The Really Great Thing about unexplained infertility (/sarcasm) is that there isn’t really a known treatment — they just poke and prod and try things, hoping that something will work.  We chose IUI, and it bumps us up to a 15% chance.  Don’t read that wrong; it doesn’t give us a 15% chance on a platter; it gives us an unknown chance up to 15%.  As John likes to say, we’re spending X thousands of dollars for a spin on a roulette wheel; and he’s completely right.

One of the hardest parts of this whole thing is not knowing how it will turn out.  If someone could show up at my front door and guarantee me that we would have a child in May of 2013, I could be patient and live with that.  But we’re going down this road never knowing for a second if anything we’re doing will work.  It’s a complete gamble.  Wait.  Actually, we’d probably have a better chance at gambling because at least we could choose a game that we’d have an advantage at.

Another hard part is knowing that with enough IUIs, we would probably succeed eventually but even as much as we’ve been blessed we would probably run out of money before we’d be successful.  When you’re in the unexplained infertility category, it’s all about what insurance you have and how much you can spend; because for the right price, anyone (even a 52-year old who has gone through menopause) can have a baby.

I’ve been doing Follistim injections for four days; number five will be tonight and then I go in for more monitoring tomorrow.  For all I know, they’ll tell me to trigger tomorrow night and schedule the IUI for Friday.  And as quick as that it may be over for us since we’re seriously (90% sure?) considering stopping after this one.  It would be insane and irresponsible for us to keep throwing our hard-earned cash at a broken roulette wheel, right?

We went to Disney World for our 5th anniversary in 2007.  That was a pretty special trip.  In 2008, we went back because it would probably be our last chance to go alone as a couple.  This year we went because we needed a stress break, and who knows — it might have really been our last chance to go as a couple.  Somehow I just know that next month when this IUI fails we’ll start planning our next trip, this time maybe as our last chance to go alone as a couple before bringing home an adopted child.

When we started this, I was so happy that John was “finally” (in my mind) ready.  I was excited and had so much hope.  I planned birthday parties and Christmases in my head.  I picked out nursery furniture.  I thought about what schools my kids would go to.  I started rearranging my house to be more kid-safe and to make my life a little more organized for the whirlwind that is parentdom.

I thought lots of things. But I never, ever, thought I’d be here.

Well, the nightly injection is calling…

Weekend in Charlotte, NC

You can see all of my photos from our race weekend here.

Our neighbor, Tim, had two extra tickets to the Coca-Cola 600, so we piled in the truck with him and his brother, Jack, for a Memorial Day-weekend in Charlotte.  We left our house around 8am on Friday morning (May 22nd) and stopped for breakfast in New Market, VA at a little mom & pop restaurant.  Saltiest country ham I’ve ever had in my life.  Tim and Jack call it “heart attack ham” and can’t get enough of it.  It was a long drive, but we made it around 5pm or so.  We checked in at the hotel then headed the next exit up to J&R because Jack wanted to buy some cigars for a friend’s birthday.  That place is HUGE.  After cigar shopping we went to Sagebrush for dinner.  Sagebrush was pretty decent when we were there with Tim and our friend Brian back in the fall of 2005, but man has that place gone down hill.  There was almost no one in there.  The food was mediocre and the margaritas were seriously watered down.  After dinner we headed back to the hotel for the night.

We got up bright and early on Saturday morning to go visit the Victory Junction Gang Camp and had breakfast at a Cracker Barrel along the way.  Victory Junction is amazing; that’s the only way to describe it.  We got a personal tour, courtesy  of one of the volunteers.  You need to go see it if you’re ever in the area.  After visiting the Victory Junction camp, we weren’t quite sure what to do next.

We all piled in the truck and then someone got the great idea to go find the RCR museum.  I picked up directions in the Victory Junction gift shop; It should be pretty straight-forward, right?  For the most part, it was — until we got to the last two turns.  We spent nearly an hour driving around town getting lost until John stopped and asked a kid for directions.  We got there at 3:15pm, 45 minutes before closing, and weren’t sure if they would even let us in since their sign said that they didn’t sell tickets after 3pm.  But they did.  The four of us cruised through looking at everything mostly individually.  Tim and Jack were way ahead of me, and John was well behind me until I got to Richard Childress’ collection of mounted game.  Some of the highlights of the museum were Dale Earnhardt’s 1998 Daytona car, still in original condition with the penny glued to the dash, and Clint Boyer’s “crossed the finish line upside down and on fire” car.  And I got a picture of John with one of Jeff Burton’s cars.

We headed back toward Statesville and had dinner at Outback then shopped for burgers and dogs for the cooler before heading back to the hotel.  We watched the Busch … ooops…. Nationwide race with Jack and Tim for a bit before heading back to our room.  I wasn’t going to, but I ended up watching the whole thing before finally turning in.  We were back up bright and early to head down to Charlotte on Sunday for the race.  It was pouring and we had breakfast at another Cracker Barrel.  Cracker Barrel is amzing; no matter where in the country you are, there is one there and the food at all of them is consistently the same.

The rain stopped by the time we got to our parking lot of choice.  We made a quick trip to the souvenier trailers (where it started raining again) before unpacking the truck and putting up the tent.  We hung out under the tent reading, napping and crosstitching (LOL) until lunch time when we fired up the two propane grills that we had brought.  We had a feeling that the race was going to get rained out, but at 4pm we headed over to the track anyway.  We sat through all of the pre-race hoopla and it kept raining again.  The track never dried off enough to get things under way.  Around 6pm we left and headed back to the track; MRN was staying that they’d have another update on the weather at 6:30.  By the time we got back to the truck they were reporting that it was rained-out and that they would try to run it the next day.  We headed back to the hotel; I can’t even remember if we had dinner that night or not.  Probably not.

Monday morning we got up bright and early and had breakfast at the Waffle House next door to the hotel, and checked out of our rooms.  We headed back to our favorite parking lot then walked over to the souvenier trailers for one last pass before heading to our seats.  The weather definitely wasn’t looking good.  It rained several times for a total of 6 weather cautions.  Around 5pm we just knew that it wasn’t going to get any better so we all left and headed back to the truck.  The rain was coming down pretty good so we decided to just leave — we had seen 227 laps of racing and Jack needed to be back to work on Tuesday.  Around an hour and a half later while we were eating dinner at Chilis around 60 miles from the track they finally called it.  I’m not sure why they took so long; anyone could see that the rain wasn’t going to stop that last time.

Pretty Light Show

A few weeks ago I decided to buy myself a little toy.  It’s an infa-red remote for my Nikon D70 camera.  I should have bought this thing a long time ago!  Not only are my daytime pictures a bit sharper because I’m not shaking the camera by pressing the shutter button, but now I can get nice little beauties like this one:

This evening there was a lot of cloud-to-cloud lightning.  No thunder; just lightning.  It was very frequent for about 30 minutes and has now trailed off.  This sortof reminds me of some of the pictures that I took in Capitol Reef, Utah on our honeymoon.  We spent about an hour blowing through rolls of film with a cable shutter release at the end of our hotel’s driveway.  There was cloud-to-ground lightning everywhere; it was amazing.  I might have to dig those out and look at them again sometime.

I’m Waiting on You, Lord

Today was “Celebration Sunday” at our church.  I submitted an entry for the Celebration Sunday blog.  Just thought I’d share:

I waited several years before my husband was ready to have children, and naively went into it thinking that we would conceive immediately and life would be a big happy ending. But the months ticked by faster than I had thought they would and before I knew it a full year and then 18 months had passed. We started going through testing and while my doctor got a couple of “maybe” ideas, no real problem presented itself. Grasping at the only odd test result that came back, my doctor told me that we had a slim chance of conceiving naturally. Our only hope would be IUI or IVF. Our insurance doesn’t cover infertility treatment or procedures, so everything that we do has to be paid for out-of-pocket.

We would never look down on anyone to turning to IVF, but decided that IVF just isn’t for us, so it is IUI or bust. It’s just a personal decision for us. Knowing that IVF will give us a 75% chance of success and IUI will only give us only a 15% chance makes this a day-by-day struggle to stand firm in my convictions; but if I believe what I believe, then we only have one choice. With fear and even new-found hope, we prepared for our first IUI procedure in April. After taking lots of medications and even giving myself an injection, the day finally came. When I opened my Franklin planner that morning the quote at the top of that day’s page said:

“Being defeated is often a temporary condition,
Giving up is what makes it permenant.” — Marilyn vos Savant

With the IUI procedure done, there was nothing left to do but wait. I had lots of ups and downs. Towards the end of the wait I was very emotional. We found out two days after Mother’s Day that the procedure had not worked. I was crushed. I spent three hours out in my vegetable garden crying in a way that I can only describe as violent. I wanted to shake my fist at God and demand to know what I had done that was so wrong. Why, when in a world where drug addicts become accidental mothers every day, could I not have a family of my own. I kept hearing Mark’s words from a sermon earlier in the year, over and over in my head:

“If your god isn’t big enough to do ______, then you need a bigger God.”

But what do you do when your God is big enough, but just doesn’t? It’s an amazing horrible lonely feeling, when after you’ve spent so much time praying and reaching out in your time of need, the response is nothing but silence. And then, I stopped crying. I’m not sure why; maybe there were just no tears left. After that first failed cycle we decided that we would do a maximum of four IUI procedures before moving on to adoption because the money we use to pay for those cycles is money that we could be saving up for adoption, and I just don’t know how long I can go on with the pills, injections and emotional roller coaster that characterizes infertility.

And slowly, God started to do something in me. I woke up on May 15th, 3 days after the negative result and crying fest, just like any other day. It was my day off of work so I busied myself with laundry and cleaning house. And then it happened. Those of you who are a friend of mine on Facebook saw it. I don’t know what made me do it, but I posted the following status message:

“…wonders why people just don’t talk about infertility — like it’s shameful or something. I had no clue how many people
I know who went through it (some successful and others not) until I had no other choice but to start venting my feelings.”

And with that simple statement, I had announced to Facebook and the whole world that we were INFERTILE. The only people who have known that we were struggling with infertility were our family and a few close friends that I confided in. Most of our circle of friends and co-workers didn’t know a thing. In fact, most of them were still going through life assuming we weren’t going to have or didn’t want children at all. It was like a big secret that I was afraid to talk to in front of anyone else because people who aren’t dealing with it don’t understand why it would be so hard to come to church on Mother’s Day (so hard, in fact, that we didn’t) or why a Pampers commercial or a baby dedication can send you flying out of a room in tears. I was amazed at the number of private messages and emails I got from others who were struggling and just wanted to be able to talk to someone else about it. Like me, they had kept it secret as well.

But God has given me the courage to finally stand up and loudly announce my presence to SCCC (and the rest of the world):

My name is Patti Spicer, and I’m struggling with infertility.

And ya know what? Talking about it hasn’t fixed it, but it’s made me feel better. I don’t feel like I have so much anger and sadness bottled up. I don’t know where my journey will end, whether through the birth of our natural child or a plane ride home from a foreign land with our “forever family” in tow, but I know that in a congregation of this size there have to be others out there who either have or are struggling just like I am. I think that’s why God gave me the strength to “come out of the closet” and post that message. It’s time to reach out to others who are feeling the same loss, loneliness and struggles that I am. I’d love it if you would join me out here in the nice warm sunshine.

“I’m waiting
I’m waiting on You Lord, And I am hopeful
I’m waiting on You Lord, Though it is painful
But patiently I will wait.

I will move ahead, bold and confident
Taking every step in obedience

While I’m waiting, I will serve You
While I’m waiting, I will worship
While I’m waiting, I will not faint
I’ll be running the race
Even while I wait”

– John Waller “While I’m Waiting”

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