Thirteen

I’m back.

I’m (mostly) awake.

In the daytime.

I would apologise profusely for the type-y hiatus but I think I did mention that minor matter of the case of the dreaded nightshift. This particular case of the dreaded nightshift did, as usual, knock the circadian stuffing clean out of me along with my type-y inclinations. It’s jolly hard to type, even to moan about my lot in life (something that we all know motivates me greatly), when all I would rather be doing is lying blearly eyed on the couch in approximately my second best dressing gown sans the dried up child snot on the trim eating, well, anything that didn’t run away fast enough.

Don’t ask how I ended up with snot on the trim of my favourite dressing gown.

I start nightshift again in two days.

Also, on the matter of eating things that only move slowly or not at all, well, I think I should by rights be making a small beeping noise whenever I move backwards and should from now on avoid all beaches even in the middle of winter as it is here because otherwise the local whale-helpers would probably try to roll me back on in.

Did I mention that my thighs seem to have made rather intimate and rubb-ey acquaintance with one another of late? Dignity prevents me from describing what has gone and happened to my bottom but I think it needs it’s own postcode.

I do know I am waffling and have yet to mention the titular reference of my last run of nightshift at Hospital Small and Peripheral but that is mostly because the inevitable Small and Peripheral Obstetric Hospital nightmare finally happened. To me. At 3am. You see, to speak slightly obliquely, in Whizz Bang Big Hospital somebody’s baby would not have a prolonged and non-recovering bradycardia of thirteen terrifying minutes duration because we could have chop-choppey-ed the asphyxiating mite out by about the seven minute mark. Less at a push.

Instead, if there isn’t a theatre short of a thirty to forty’ish minute call out available, well, you call. And wait. That’s how I know the bradycardia lasted a full thirteen minutes before starting to recover and that’s also how I know the baby was born with lungs full of meconium from gasping away in utero. It’s also how I know that the best start in for an otherwise stone cold bloody normal child in life is not all acidotic, fitting, intubated and cooled to minimise brain damage.

Helpless does not begin to cover how that wait felt.

The way I see it, that sort of shite can go on in all the small private hospitals all they like and if anybody wants to choose that small risk for a glass of red with dinner and a private room, so be it, but in the public system where women are not given a choice on where they deliver we should simply be doing better than that.

More nightshift it is,

G

Amnio.

From the files of I can’t flipping believe it.

It turns out that my combined testing way back at twelve bleeping weeks when I was told there was noting to worry about wasn’t quite as low risk as I was quoted.

It turns out that my blood markers are, not to put too fine a point on it, shit. Very pretty if you are looking for trisomy 21 but otherwise rather unattractive.

The ultrasound was questionable, or at least I have little faith in that component of the screen. Regrettably, with those blood result, that was the ONLY thing bringing my risk back down to anything approaching normal. Otherwise, um.

Ergo, I either have faith in something called soft markers for a reason on two further scans now planned to look for trisomy 21 and hang my hat and future on those (as well as worrying about spina bifida because, well, can’t be sure about that yet, either), or I have an amnio.

Can something just go right for ONCE?

 

Creepy.

In brief, for it has been a long and trying week Chez MII and associated multiple employment endeavours:

• Random creeps who don’t put their headlights on when they are driving at night categorically do NOT have the right to beep and carry on like raw prawns when a random tired driver like your truly hasn’t turned their invisible car ESP on and cuts them off. Random creeps do not glow in the dark. Random creeps who then proceed to tailgate me up to the secure gate of my work carpark before driving off when they seen the boom/swipe entry will have their registration documented and phone calls made (pointless thereof, but anyway). To be honest, I still think that this particular random creep thinks that they were in the right but unless the sun shines out of their arse in ways that failed to illuminate their presence for me, I’m sticking to my point of view. Turn your fucking lights on at night. The end.
• The local newspapers will still write articles about various people being saved by the miracle of the good old ‘resuscitation machine’. I prefer to think of it as fifty bloody tired residents and some things that go beep when they need attention but my world view lacks romance.
• I am officially certified to dart the vague of contraceptive recollection with implanons at 3 yearly intervals. I can’t decide if this is funny, ironic or just one of those things. I mean, I can also stick my fingers halfway up to somebody’s tonsils and touch their baby’s head before I rudely break an amniotic sack and, as a parting gift, screw a small probe into the scalp that can’t escape all in order to track a heart rate better. I am assuming that these sort of things count as a life skill on some level. Mostly it just makes you wish the gloves were longer. At least I usually don’t get covered in poo doing it.
• Watching 16 week pPROM trainwrecks arrive and fall to pieces after almost half a dozen weeks never gets any easier. The ones who tell me devoutly that NOTHING will go wrong scare me the most because, unfortunately, I can tell you from experience that wrongness probability isn’t inversely related to strength of conviction. It’s a bloody scary place to be and the universe is a very even fan sprayer. We do get the odd good outcome, but we also get stories I don’t think should be retold far far more often.
• On a slightly different note, losing a first baby at full term unexpectedly is fucking awful but it’s worse when it is followed by nearly bleeding to death and then last-ditch uterus-ey conservative things that somehow end up a day later in the land of a necrotic uterus, fallopian tubes and, um, ovaries. The lot. At least the pPROM lady with faith plus a tiny growth restricted baby with abnormal dopplers and a tiny thorax minus functional lungs can potentially have another baby if it all goes Bad as signs suggest it shall. Someday. Hopefully. Losing your bun and then losing the whole oven, stove top and damn kitchen? Actually, it’s all horrific, isn’t it?
• I think it’s bedtime, I’m going to vomit if I don’t go to sleep because I’ve just worked fourteen days straight and many of them have co-incidentally been fourteen hours long. Seventeen weeks tomorrow and I was sprung by a consultant today. Fuck. That sound I think I just heard was my job next year whizzing away to the owner of an empty uterus.

G

PS. Pardon ze swear.

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..and then my brain exploded.

On my list of things I never want to have to do for a parent, the only parent I know:

1. Tell them it was not absolutely their fault for unceremoniously moving countries with two young babies and zero assets nearly thirty years ago as  because their twenty year old partner was off getting drunk and shagging someone else and said young babies were a bit on the severely grotty and hungry side on accounts of Pub and Shag were more appealing.

2. Make an appointment to see an independent medical practitioner because of severe reactive depression linked to whole recent sea-change far away retirement fiasco. There are some things in life I need to make sure that somebody Not Me handles and this is one of them.

Nobody likes to see somebody who has started again from nothing in a new country with two babies and done a bloody good job (if four university degree programmes and the study debt from hell are anything to go by) of it a weeping apologising mess for, well, everything from breakfast up.

Also, he loves my cooking and wants my recipes and we all know that is a flashing neon sign of serious mental unbalance because clearly I cannot cook for shite.

G

PS. Am working on my day off this week purely for the love of the dirty, dirty money because fixing this mess means I now own over a million dollars of real estate. If I don’t vomit at least once an hour, I think you better check I still have a pulse.

PSS. Um, next IVF cycle? Ah, well, why the hell not? Nothing like a nearly multi million dollar debt to sharpen the reflexes with clinic appointments.

PSS. It’s family. You don’t drop family in the turd. Just call me a property tycoon and could somebody for the love of all that you hold holy please help the real estate fairy relieve me for about 400K worth of house? Soon? Eep. Etc.

..and then I effed up.

What’s funnier than a tired Doctor giving herself her DoNotForgeYouIdiotTimeCritical trigger shot a full forty minutes late after a hellacious hour spent attempting to get Saag and Naan to sleep?

I think it would be the bit where aforementioned medical practitioner manages to lose about a third of aforementioned ovulatory gold on the kitchen bench.

No, wait.

The truly hilarious bit is where, since the trigger is only a borderline OHSS-minimising 5000IU, this means I am stuck between investing several thousand dollars and the produce of two bloated gonads on a mere 3000IU or pulling the pin on the whole thing.

No, that’s not it either.

Perhaps it was the bit where it turns out that the clinic has a refreshing AMF-YOYO* approach to what must be a not-uncommon conundrum has no emergency contact person to desperately plea for help from or after hours pharmacy to dispense further sweet, sweet hCG.

Oh, I know.

It’s the part where neither does a local pharmacy and the voicemail option on the frantically re-dialled clinic answering machine unhelpfully suggests calling one’s local emergency department for help. Hint: ED’s do not stock hCG. They stock many drugs, but hCG is not one of them. Bandaids, check. Bandaids and panadol aplenty for the never ending stream of banged knees. Endone? If you don’t look dodgy, Double Check. But not even the most derailed-looking hand-wringing infertility patient in the WORLD is going to obtain hCG from them unless they first plan to purify the urine of one of the newly confirmed pregnant teenagers already there.

Nah, that’s not it either.

Perhaps it’s the bit where LS asks if he can get some tomorrow and I could just give the rest of the trigger dose THEN and I mentally implode and proceed to initiate a blazing row.

Yes, that bit was really funny.

Internet, I effed up.

I’m not really sure what Monday shall bring but I have a very bad feeling.

*aka: Adios MotherF**er-You’re On Your Own. Well your ovaries and credit card are, anyway.

G

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Thirty six hours I would rather forget.

Because, ladies and gentleman of the Internet, the last day and a half have been what I can only colorfully describe as shit on a stick.

Progressively worsening shit on a stick. I just haven’t felt like writing anything other than uncreative combinations involving the word ‘fuck’ and that is hardly helpful right now in explaing just how broken I feel.

1. Arrogant anaesthetist knocked me out with enough propofol to fell a circus elephant with the predictable small adult  result that I spent the rest of the day lurching drunkenly at walls and falling asleep whenever I stopped moving.

2. At least it helped temporarily cushion the blow that from over twenty something follicles on vaginal harpoon day, only twelve yielded eggs. Twelve isn’t bad, right? Well it sucks when you’ve compromised on trigger to avoid OHSS, only to end up with the polar opposite problem of a 50% follicle yield rate. That’s plain crap. (okay, or more shit on a stick).

3. The cake taker, however, was my RE actually calling me from her personal phone today to gently let me down and in doing so breaking the notoriously waterproof don’t-tell-anything mushroom treatment protocol of my clinic. Because, the fert rate? Um, 25 percent. With ICSI. That to put it politely is an ‘I am so sorry I just don’t know what went wrong’ profuse RE apology because 25% with ICSI suggests nothing less than a royal fuck up in egg competency.

4. In other words, I am right royally fucked. If any of the three even make it to day 2 (and hold me while I laugh about the day five conversation my RE and I were having several happier days ago before everything went to shit) I am vanishingly unlikely to become pregnant even if they look pretty. Study after study shows that the general quality of the cohort is the most useful predictive factor and unfortunately I am heavily blaming the antagonist protocol for generating a bunch of useless eggs. If only one in four even fertilise, things are positively schizen. Genetically scrambled. Antagonists and PCOS = well, more schizen on a stick it would seem.

5. I get a call tomorrow to confirm if I even have a transfer at all and quite frankly I think I am going to refuse either way because I don’t really want to waste my time. I’d rather just finished getting drunk and miserable and then get on with a proper long down regulation protocol, i.e what I should have been doing five weeks and over seven fucking thousand dollar ago because on THAT protocol I had 17 eggs, 15 ferts, 12 embryos and, well, a live birth.

6. Fuck this shit. I just want to be DONE and I am not going to piss about with a trashed cycle.

Kind of broken here right now because I don’t think I can do this again.

G

Really not this time.

There’s nothing like doubled-over in white faced misery cramps from hell plus hourly lady-stuff changes that do not prevent ruined underwear plus repeated looking down to see a bright red loo bowl filled and STILL filling with streaming blood and clots and the gore-y like to bring it all home that this time ain’t THE time.

Unless terminal anaemia was the goal.

Now just watch me work the next six days straight (including two 14 hour covershifts) without telling a damn soul I’m actually busy becoming very much unpregnant in a physically and emotionally untidy way.

I must be an utter masochist.

G

PS. Effing OUCH.

Stressout.

Oh but my holy gad I am a ball of irritable tension right now, and it isn’t just the nightshift, because as far as THAT goes, a heady combination of pissing rain and some rather unjustified negative media about my current workplace meaneth that people decide that a three week cold does not warrant a trip in the dark to annoy the shite out of me at 3am anywhere nearly as often as is their wont.

See? I told you I’m kind of cranky and hard to live with right now, but Honest to Betsy I really did only see five patients all night AND I diagnosed the common cold twice.

That’s actually less than usual.

I do not hesitate to point out that I think most people should be able to work that one out for themselves without six years of med school doing it for them. Very Patiently and oh so politely, but if their daft ears were not ringing with all the derisive gossip afterwards about common sense levels I would be very surprised.

Anyway, LS and I are getting on like a literal house on flaming fire, i.e. Not Well, I am working with the good Dr Shaggable and am thus daily reminded of how perhaps I fecked that relationship up years ago to my ultimate detriment and LS’s police check?

Still not back.

Something is Up and this really sucks because even the best case scenario (they idly glanced at the triplicate signed documents painfully obtained over bleeding WEEKS and then used it for loo paper) I don’t have time to resubmit it all before my opportunity window for another cycle this year vanishes.

Can I swear now?

Well, fuck.

Can I even swear in a title?

Do forgive the profanity but quite frankly my verbal output in the last 24 hours has been far worse than a public f-bomb or ten.

This week has been particularly shitty and I note that it is only Monday thus far. Talk to me again on Friday and you might find I’ve taken up professional alcoholism.

TODAY I found out that on my cover shift yesterday, the weekend-special-cover-from hell I do every third weekend, the one that has me working twelve nauseatingly tired days straight, well on THAT shift I managed to cleverly prescribe a penicillin containing antibiotic to somebody with a documented penicillin allergy.

Then the nurse who presumably checked and read the bright red allergy wristband gave it to her.

Clever, huh?

Please don’t dob me in, because while I’m confessing sins of omission I also need to tell you about the actually rather odious patient with the fever who I completely failed to notice in a haze of blue-arsed-fly-work was worryingly neutropaenic and consequently vulnerable to all sorts of fun infections in a kind of overwhelming-could-die kind of way.

For two whole days. But I had other things occupying my attention, you see, or you will by the end of this missive.

If it helps, the lady with the penicillin sensitivity very fortunately for ME only got a very itchy rash and I do not feel NEARLY as bad as the other cover doctor who ironically enough did the exactly the same thing to a chap who went into anaphylactic shock and cardiac arrest on the ward, but I am still not very happy with myself for failing to read the allergy box before scribbling in the chart.

I could defend myself by pointing out I was covering sixty patients, the ward round gives me approximately ten seconds to enact all instructions while at the bedside and I was drowning in jobs to do already and if I didn’t write something THEN the lady in question wouldn’t have got antibiotics all damn day and she needed them.

However, I still feel like shit about it.

The only thing that has stopped me from ruminating excessively over my invigorating dumb assed-ness is that fact that I now have a lot more pressing worries to wake up over at 3am courtesy of the poor old grieving non-eating or drinking biddy with the dodgy-late-night-special extreme constipation admission from ED on Friday night who went and died in the middle of the day Saturday.

When I was on cover. Trying to organise her de-constipation.

It turns out that her gut was so distended her entire bowel had quietly infarcted over ten hours of nightshift while nobody was watching. When she finally coded and was rushed to theatre, metres and metres of dead gut oozed out under pressure and wouldn’t go back for love nor money. It wasn’t even really a peek and shriek operation on accounts of she was never even closed. She died right on the table.

The shit upon the shit is that now I’m going to have to appear before the coroner and explain why I merrily charted the deceased’s regular medications at the ward desk and fucked off only an hour before she died and it doesn’t help much to say that it was because I was asked to and nobody TOLD me she was so fucking sick.

If I had known that her lips were blue and her feet were kind of a mottled purple, I like to think I might have done things differently.  I suspect it wouldn’t have made a difference to the outcome, but still.

I guess the take home point is you should try very hard not to  turn up with ischaemic bowel after hours and on the weekend.

Also, another one of my patients has end stage renal failure, isn’t suitable for dialysis and inconveniently now has an infection that is only treatable with an antibiotic that will almost certainly finish him off on accounts of renal toxicity. Oh, and another one for whom Infectious Diseases wanted a particular combination of antibiotics now has no white blood cells at all as a nasty and particularly unfortunate side effect.

I wrote the prescription on the drug shart for that one, too and he’s likely to cark it.

Happy days.

Bar the Shouting.

Apologies if this one is brief, but I’m not really in the best position to type much in the way of sense right now.

I’ve snotted my way though about fifty bazillion tissues in the last half an hour as it is and it’s kind of hard to type when my eyes are swollen shut from crying. Also, Naan is starting her 3am teething ritual whine in the next room a little early.

I Have Obligations and Am Really Farking Tired.

Since I finished work after dark today it’s rapidly approaching midnight and I am clearly Not Sleeping on accounts of I finally Had Enough and told my husband I want a divorce and therefore am busy duly bawling my stupid eyes out into a tissue over the whole mess, I don’t think I’ll be in much of a better position to fill you in tomorrow after I finish yet another shitty shift in a crappy job on the back of no sleep with red eyes and, you know, no wedding ring.

Because, screw that for a lark.

Did I mention the part I finally told LS to go jump?

I think the final straw was the clear, crystal clear realisation that for all of his talk about life and a crack at another live birth, he actually has zero plans to follow through. Zero. Because it’s all my fault if all the preconditions are not exactly met and so on. It’s a recurring theme and I am sick of living re-runs.

Argh.

Along with all the other rubbish I realised that it just isn’t worth it.

Not any more.

Never again.

I simply can’t bear to string myself along for another ten years working aforementioned shitty jobs and never actually raise my hard-earned children and THEN be dumped for the receptionist.

I’ve been truly stupid, and a sap and I can’t believe I put up with so many things for so long. The sad reality is that other than the financial loss, my workload will actually go down with one less giant child to clean up after.

Now I just have to get used to the concept.

 Fifty dollars to the person who comments they never saw THAT one coming and means it,

G

PS. Now, how do I quit this hellacious job? I guess not turning up in the morning would be one method, albeit an ill-advised one.

Three years

If you can graciously allow me the artistic licence of giving or taking a small amount of time, three years ago was probably one of the very lowest points in my life to date. I was bleeding, alone, and sad beyond belief.

In the space of one short week I went from increasingly optimistic about my nursery colour scheme  to having my world crash around my feet in about a million ugly pieces. I’d just terminated my pregnancy, a pregnancy  fiercely wanted, because my baby had a particular form of lethal prognosis birth defect known as anencephaly.

I’m not the only person to have ever been faced with the choice of what to do when you find out your baby has no chance of survival whatsoever and doesn’t even have the potential to achieve awareness, however brief, bittersweet and short-lived, and I’m not the first infertile blogger to terminate a much wanted baby.

I’m not competing here, not in the least.

Many of you have much more harrowing stories to tell, stories that make me almost lose my shit just reading them. I categorically cannot and would not compare my experience to another, ever, but I can say without a doubt that for ME choosing between a termination and a stillbirth  was the  worst choice I ever had to make. It isn’t even really relevant to the point I’m making WHICH choice I made. I’m not talking about the abotion issue here, either.

I hope never to have to make it again and I wish even harder that nobody else ever has to make a similar decision, but sadly that isn’t the case. Life is not always kind to us.

This isn’t a post about sympathy, or one about grief. I don’t need condolences on my loss, it was three years ago now and I have been lucky enough to be blessed with two rudely and robustly healthy children since that time. You know all about their exploits and this post is not about them, either.

What I DO want to do is make sure that ALL of you, whatever your situation, are taking folate.

I don’t actually care whether you’re still actively trying to become pregnant, pretending to ignore the possibility and hoping for the best, have given it all up in despair, or have moved on to other pastures entirely. It doesn’t matter here. Even infertile women get pregnant spontaneously.

Take your folate.

Taking folate BEFORE you become pregnant is one of the simplest and most powerful things you can do for your someday-baby, it’s really that simple. If you’re in a higher risk group either by dint of having an affected baby, taking certain antiepileptics or with an affected close relative then take the higher dose.

Do it, please.

Don’t piss about with fancy lubricants, headstanding and pre-conception Scandinavian hot sauna fish-whacking to maximise your odds of pregnancy, invest your money where it matters. You don’t even have to fork out for the fancy prenatals, although you can if you like. 

Generic folate is dead cheap. Dead babies are just dead.

No, it won’t completely eradicate the possibility of something bad and sad happening, but it is extremely clear cut that for the majority of women it does enormously reduce that risk.

 The end.

Badness.

Sometimes work and my personal life jumble up on me in unexpected hard, depressing, wrist-slashing lumps of pain.

A few days ago was one of them.

The reason?

A 16 week pregnant woman came into MY ED with something or other unimportant, but we needed to have a quick look at the baby just in case.

The baby?

Had anencephaly.

So without any warning whatsoever I had the pleasure of looking right in the face of a woman who has just been told that her baby is missing half of it’s head, most of it’s brain and is inevitably going to die either after a probable traumatic post-term birth or,  you know, by act of curette now.

And there wasn’t a damn thing I could say to her about the fact that I’d been exactly where she is now, not that long ago, because THIS was work and I might have totally lost my shit instead of doing something practical like calling the gynae registrar.

The buzz at the doctor’s station, by the way, was all ‘anencephaly?’ and ‘what’s that?’, followed by a consultant led explanation (while I tried not to vomit or look branded with the scarlet letter A for Abortion) that ended in a cheery chorus of ‘badness!’.

You’re not wrong there, sweetheart.

Turning over a new leaf.

For about the billionth time.

Okay, as a person who comprehensively sucks at giving significant holidays their due respect and has been known to completely forget that the date after December 31 happens to be January one THE NEXT YEAR, well, you’re on incredibly safe ground if you guessed I didn’t do much last night in the way of celebration.

After all, it has not escaped my memory that being as it is Jan 1 now (even if I’ll in all probability get the name of the year wrong until about March or so), a deadline has been passed. I’d quote Douglas Adams at this point, but the whooshing sound was actually kind of distressing in light of events I shall outline further below.

To be blunt, I’m not especially sure what marital status I shall have to go with my mind like a leaky colander when it comes to orientation in time by the point I work out what year it is and write it down all reliably properly like on forms.

I may be terminally vague, but I am damn sure that recently enough a certain threat was made with regards to a certain relationship if certain things did not improve by ‘next year’.

Guess what? Next year, nice to meet you. No discernible improvement THIS end.

We seemed to be getting on fairly well yesterday, although I have to confess that these days ‘fairly well’ means that I haven’t mentally wanted to disembowel a certain somebody with contents of the knife drawer after I’ve rearranged their oral anatomy such that they’re brushing teeth trans-rectally by necessity.

It’s not great round these parts but when you have two children together and a lot of debt it’s not like upping and leaving your high-school boyfriend for someone hotter that you met at the bus stop. It’s a much bigger call than that. Besides, there’s no one, hot or otherwise and I don’t think the dating market is precisely flooded with men looking for saggy-gutted bony-assed women with multiple kids, a masculine haircut and ever-present debt.

Anyway, I spent last night happily wrapped up in my duvet by an earth-shatteringly dull 9pm. Okay, I might have been a bit piddled, but ’tis the season.

LS, on the other hand, set todays events in motion with some truly unnerving aim. He managed to knock a full glass of red wine right down a white painted wall, and in typical domestically clueless fashion just rubbed at the surface of the stain a bit with a tea-towel and then toddled off to bed, leaving it to marinade overnight.

Accordingly THIS morning, I woke up to my new future in loungeroom decor- a big, fat, ruby coloured mess soaked indelibly into the paint smack-bang on the only vacant wall in the room.

To say the mood has been tense since that clanger of an introduction to 2010 would be missing the opportunity to ask if I can gain employment as a bomb disarmament specialist just for the chance to relax a bit.

The words ‘separate’ and ‘divorce’ have been getting a bit of an airing again.

Is it just me that is finding all of this exhausting more than anything else?

Happy new year.

PS. At the good Shannon’s polite prompting, I have updated my blogroll after an inexcusably long hiatus. If your name isn’t on it and you would like me to rectify the matter, do nag me in the comments section. Just don’t threaten divorce, because the way I’m feeling right now I might just say ‘what the heck’ to that one.

Also, if you lurk, say ‘hi’?

Just for me? I could really bloody do with the positive news I still have readers and all that ‘ooh, stuff in my INBOX!’ jazz.

Why DO you read, anyways? Should I be whining more or less about the following items A: infertility B: no sex, C: marriage status updates (suck it facebook), D: twins, E: crazy thoughts of child number three in this untidy situation, F: even crazier thoughts of an FET since intermittent shagging has now failed for 17 months (okay, only about six periods) and counting?

Just wondering.

So, tell me.

On the subject of doom and gloom, since I appear to be positively wallowing in figurative sh!t these days (and really should do something about that damn fan because I can’t resist throwing it in that general metaphorical direction), I have a question for you, oh wise Internet.

Well, a question for those of you who have had the misfortune to have joined the big club of poor thirty somethings with twins minus assets and minus spouses. Oh, and with a mortgage one can’t possibly pay solo.

It’s not if I will ever have s.e.x again should the current delicate state of affairs go tits up, because right now that sounds positively divine to me.

It’s not if I really will enjoy finding the toilet seat in the position I left it as much as I anticipate I would, because clearly I will be quietly delighted not to nearly fall down the blasted thing while stepping in a puddle of misdirected pee at 3am ever again.

It’s not if I shall ever regain my sense of humour, because that seems relatively intact, too.

It’s THIS.

Just how does this sort of thing actually go, anyway? Gory detail, please.

Will I be homeless, assetless, single and likely to stay that way on the grounds that, well, there ain’t no way in heck I am allowing anybody new to see my heavily used abdomen?

WIll I really have to crawl back to a parent’s house with my tail between my legs and in debt since the alternative shall truly be living in a box under some bridge somewhere? I love my folks, but pride dictates I plump for option ‘box’. When winter rolls around  that could be rather problematic.

Do I really have to bloody share the Indian Takeaways? I am not good at sharing things I hold dear to my heart with people that I am Not Getting On With, as mean-spirited and horrible as that makes me sound.

Also, should I feel as ashamed as I do, simply because this is the first time in my coddled life I have ever come close to properly screwing up and seriously belly-flopping failing at something?

I am pathetic and idle minds want to know.

I also want to know if anybody else would do me the honour of cross-pollinating in December? I can be persistant to the point of irritation about that sort of thing. Also, if you haven’t emailed me back when I emailed YOU, why I shall have to start stalking your blogs and gently checking.

I’m good at threats.

MRWhy?

Because it isn’t always all about me, no matter how blithely I assume the universe revolves neatly around goings on JungleChez CrazyMII when I post various predictable whinges about:

1. The complete and utter inability of LS to suck it up and stop pretending he’s dying over a mere sniffle.

He can’t, and it seems he won’t until the very, very lastest cold virion has turned up it’s metaphorical tooties in disgust and has literally been bored to death by all the bleeping whining.

The man is currently completely, utterly annoying in that eye-rolling, fist-twitching way that only a whining pansy with a backbone composed of runny jelly can provoke. Especially when one of our communal assorted one year olds has vomited six times overnight and two times today, leaving pretty fermented yogurt patterns on my no-time-to-change-them sweatpants and little lumps of puke curdling between my toes.

I am THIS close to performing a violent anatomical rearrangement armed solely with blunt spoons that shall have him searching for his dentition with the aid of a colonoscope, needless to say.

2. Children, and how on earth they fit so very much snot and puke in such little bodies. See point #1 above for clarification.

No, this post is a blast to those who think it is a good idea to give somebody who happens to be a good friend of mine their abnormal MRI brain films, with no report, no discussion of what the great big white thing inside their brain might be (because nobody would cheat before the appointment by peeking, surely?) and pat them on the head and let them go on the metaphorical merry way.

I don’t know a person alive who isn’t going to rip open the packet and have a look-see while waiting for their follow-up appointment, duly freak the fuck right out, and call somebody who might know something helpful.

After all, it hardly takes a medical degree to work out that (to get all technical)  Big W.hite T2 Hyperintense, Vasoge.nic O.edema Surrounded Intra-axial masses, better known as ’what the FUCK is that Big White Thing in my brain?’ simply shouldn’t be there.

Also, the list of causes is predictably both Short and Nasty, and mostly involves cheering terms like, say, ’cancer’.

I object to having my heart sink to a geographical location more commonly associated with movement of tectonic plates when I see aforementioned films combined with anxious faces of my friends, hoping for something reassuring.

I intensely dislike having to tell my heavily pregnant very good friend that they need to get the formal report TODAY, and not wait for their appointment in a week because, well, I can’t reassure them, I can’t fudge it. I think the film looks bad. Yes, as in ‘cancer’ bad.

In other words, I’ve told a good friend her partner has a brain tumour, simply because nobody else thought it might be a good idea  to discuss it with them before giving them the bloody films. The formal report, antisocially late to the ‘Oh Fuck’ party almost to the point of irrelevance, belatedly says the same thing.

Cue fallout.

That’s what I’ve been doing with my last few days, and while it is not about me, it BLOWS.

Arragh.

Furthermore, grr.

I’m just a teeny tiny bit on the seeing red mist side of bloody annoyed in full knicker-twist mode today.

Why, you quite reasonably ask?

Bills.

Not any kind of bills, either, but the extra fun type that actually belong to somebody else (i.e. the developer that built the current Chez MII) which I seem to mysteriously somehow have the fun of being  held liable. All apparently due to a screw up between two energy companies in handing all the red tape over when we moved six bleeping months ago.

It did not help my mood any at all, but additionally those stupid automated phone message systems where my query never neatly fits any of the available options bit me in the arse.

That’s why I got hung up on by a machine the first two times. I was mashing the hash button repeatedly in frustration as I didn’t have an account number to enter on accounts that it wasn’t my bloody bill already and I just had a nasty looking emailed copy (from a lawyer, no less) of the cover page of a ‘threat to disconnect’ notice over less than twenty bleeping dollars.

Breathe in.

The third disconnect I must accept fault for as I pressed ’9′ when I shouldn’t have.

The fourth time I got through to a human who handled residential gas enquiries, only to find out that for the purposes of this bill my perfectly residential-looking to me house wasn’t residential at all. The operator kindly offered to transfer me to the business section, but omitted to mention the half an hour wait.

I think you get the gist of it now.

Busy morning spent on phone fighting all things automated literally single-handedly (Naan in the other and jammed on maternal hip on accounts of being bloody sorry for herself) trying to avoid black mark on credit rating AND having my precious gas disconnected.

All of this daft charade for a NINETEEN dollar blasted bill that reached up like a rake left carelessly in long grass, smacking me painfully in the forehead out of the blue when I checked my email first thing.

Oh, and did I mention that both spawn could get a job in a goober manufacturing plant on accounts of we are all still drowning in the stuff? Disgustingly enough, I must admit to having Naan’s snot still drying on my cheek from where I was trying to sooth her while having a most entertaining discussion with Energy Company Representative about how due to privacy regulations that even though I was the one left holding the unpaid virtual hot potato, she couldn’t actually tell me anything about the contents of the bill. Because it wasn’t addressed to me. But could I pay it, please (or else) NOW?

Say it with me please, yaaaaarrrgh.

Given the choice of quite reasonably not paying on grounds that I couldn’t really sanely be expected to if they wouldn’t tell me what it was for as such (and getting in deep kimchee over a paltry nineteen bucks), or paying a mysterious account for items that would remain forever unclear and making it all go away already, I paid.

Normally I’d probably kick up more of a stink on the grounds of Screw That For A Sodding Lark, but Naan was screaming the entire time. That does tend to make one waver somewhat in one’s righteous indignation.

But I am most emphatically Not Amused about it.

Also, before I go and scream just a bit a bit to feel better about things, may I share another minor disaster?

I am not bragging in any way, I promise, but up until three nights’ish ago Saag and Naan would sleep from 8pm until 6.30am and additionally to that had three 1 to 1.5 hour naps a day. I do not know if it is the Snot Factor or not, but it is sadly the end of an era. For the last few days neither child has been at all inclined to take that third precious nap.

Sob.

Generally speaking, if the Terrible Twosome do something once it’s a fluke, twice is luck and three times is a habit and it sticks.

Accordingly, I now have to make dinner and eat it while juggling two rather cranky Little People who know all about Grown Up food and want it right off my bleeping plate. They’re quite clear in their opinions regarding Baby Food as being for losers and stuff.

Little seagulls, the pair of ‘em.

Also, I now have sixty to ninety minutes less time in my day to Get Stuff Done unmolested by ankle-biters.

Sigh.

If you’ll excuse me I have to go wipe snot off my cheek.

Still with the bum references.

This post may, if you prefer your language on the slightly saltier side, be alternatively entitled ‘I do not give a hemorrhoidal rats rectum how you think you feel LS, I’m REALLY tired. You know, the kind of tired you get when you’ve had a total of six hours sleep in the last two days and counting’.

Except that’s a bit too long, isn’t it?

Perhaps ‘When the Hershey Highway encounters unexpected (pointy) angered northbound traffic’ would not be out of the question?

Or, even, ‘Kitchens: A veritable treasure trove of hitherto-undiscovered torture implements just begging for their own Explanatory Infomercial’. You could get a free set of steak knives with every thumbscrew. Buy an Iron Maiden, get one free. Special offer!

In other words, dear reader, my own personal ass-hol-eh continues to drive me moderately insane with his ongoing protests of dying fatigue when he doth finally emerge from the bed he’s been slothfully lying in all damn day to ‘catch up’ after a busy night spent prodding and poking his poor damn wife in the face, boobs, upper body and (once) even nostrils when she has the temerity to roll onto her back and, you know, snore just a little because she is so bloody goddamned tired already.

My airway patencey becomes borderline when I’m utterly shagged out, yes, and I may as a result make a noise like only a teeny-tiny truck or a petite jet-engine coasting through the bedroom, but for feck’s sake, the man has earplugs in and he’s been married to the sonorous yours truly for several years now.

It isn’t a new development, but the Bloody Prodfest is.

I don’t like that sort of behavior when I’ve spent a Fuzzy Brained day downing coffee like a thirsty desert rescuee in a failed bid to stop the godawful yawning and feel remotely human, complete with Extreme Solo Twin Wrangling. Especially when the Solo aspect of the Wrangling comes courtesy of a certain person on annual leave, no less, pissing about in bed all day and glued to the pay TV once awake.

In case you were curious as to the extreme element, I spent much of the day chasing a naked Saag AND  Naan around the house and oftentimes futilely trying to stop them crawling through each other’s wee, or worse, poo.

 The poor buggers both have some nasty Spotty Botty, the prescription for which Chez MII is a Good Airing (never fails me but is damn hard on the reflexes, needless to say), but oh how my carpets do suffer the consequences when I’m tired and Slow On The Uptake.

In other words, my beloved sh!t woke me up about six times an hour last night between those heady hours of midnight and three am when I personally like to indulge in a little REM mixed in with some slow wave sleep, just for kicks.

Oh, and then if that wasn’t enough, I’ve gone and acquired a nasty urinary tract infection.

Hands up those who were also up three times an hour since three am with the burning desire to urinate, only to pass a pointless teaspoon of widdle on each occasion with a sensation not un-akin to as if some nasty sod had filled one’s bladder with razor blades while you weren’t looking?

See, kids, I told you se.x was a bad idea. Stuff pregnancy as the thing to be afeared of, it’s the pissing barbed wire I find most terrifying.

Fortunately, given my current fatigue and mood, I don’t think I’m going to be having much of the provoking activity in the near future so here’s hoping the gods of ur.al do their thing today and I sleep tonight.

Wish me luck.

PS. New pictures up at Terrible Twosome. One of you very politely nudged me that it had indeed been some time and small people do tend to change over nearly half a year.

PSS. Spellchecker is doing the ‘ing’ thing again and glueing words together. I may have missed a few in the Swear-ey Unsticking that followed. Ass-hol-eh to THAT, too.

PSSS. Next up. BOTW. Much belated, again.

Orange you glad to see me?

Dear Internet, oh-most-wise Computer residents,

Why did I not ask you before attempting to colour my hair?

Why did I not seek guidance that any attempts conducted on impulse by an inexperienced operator (to put it politely rather than calling myself an utter idiot), armed solely with the deadly combination of Dutch Courage and three glasses of wine and limited to the entirely ignorance-based inappropriate use of a de-colourant, for streaky bit insertion thereof, was going to go horridly pear.

Internet, dear, sweet, Internet, I actually had no issue with my hair the way it was.

I liked my hair, really I did.

I just thought some streaky bits sounded all, you know, fun and a bit daring and trendy. Like the young folk do, Internet.

But I couldn’t be bothered with all that cap applying and strand pulling and I just massaged the lot in. Yes, all at once. I do not do many things by half measures. I then proceded to spend a merry twenty minutes chasing Saag and Naan around my bathroom before stopping to carefully uncover a strand (as the packet said to, Internet, I note with some indignation) only to find to my horror that the texture had gone to that scary place where the next step is unequivocally ‘dissove’. Even I could spot that one coming, Internet.

Oh, and I was orange.

Yes, I’m not beating about the bush with such niceties as ‘strawberry blonde’ or ‘redhead’ because I currently look like Ronald McDonald’s slightly unfortunate long-lost cousin. I could easily double as an extra for the Straw Man in the Wizard of Oz. Or the lion, for that matter.

I’m really, very, hat-wearing-ly, next-stop-is-a-shaved-head orange.

LS, bless his heart, got home from work, took one look at me (in the darkened-in-disgrace house, so I wouldn’t have to witness the effects of my ill-thought through experimentation with pigment stripper), exclaimed ‘You’re blonde!’, then quizzically repeated ‘You’re blonde?’.

Then he flipped on the light and just about widdled himself laughing at my predicament, Internet.

Between gasps for air he snorted ‘You’re ORANGE! Ha!’. Then he doth skip a merry jig of amusement around the room, Internet, despite the increasing risk to life and limb posed by such unfettered merriment at the woes of another.

When I pointed out that this was hardly a sympathetic way to console me, he took me lovingly by the shoulders and uttered thusly:

‘Don’t worry, plenty of people with a disability live full and active lives in the community these days. We WILL get through this, I promise.’

Then he laughed some more, the prick.

Now if you’ll excuse me, Clariol and I have a hot date to try and repair the damage. I do not hold out overmuch hope.

I LIKED my hair the way it was.

Help! Any suggestions?

Protected: On this day.

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Be careful what you wish for.

Or, on how I feel like a total b!tch for ever, even briefly, wishing bad fortune on another.

Let me explain.

I don’t believe in magical thinking, really I don’t.

But.

A while back, I was reading the story of a woman on her first cycle of trying to conceive. In the manner of many carefree fertile types, her writing was chock full of optimistic references to the planned nursery, baby clothes, names etc etc. All the stuff that gets taken for granted by so many women, because for so many women the act of trying to get pregnant actually leads to pregnancy. Often quickly. In their bedroom. Without thousands of dollars in expense or, g-d forbid, having anybody other than their spouse put anything remotely near their cervix. Let alone a catheter right through it. Or blood test after blood test, injections, inseminations, ultrasounds, public exposure of one’s genitals, living life via reference to ‘cycle day’, loss and heartache.

It kind of rankled that this woman was taking her fertility for granted, even though she had every right to. After all, my experience, like those of most women in this community is (whilst more common that publicly acknowledged) not how the majority of people make their babies. It seems surreal, but for many, many couples their high school biology teachers were right.

To be brutally honest, it pissed me off.

Rather than doing the smart thing and stopping reading, I was drawn to her journal like onlookers to a particularly nasty car crash. I just had to keep picking at the scab that remains over the scar infertility and loss leaves, even after finally having children.

Pick. Talk of baby names.

Pick. Talk of which room the nursery will be.

Pick. Talk of gender. Talk of her husband as a father. Talk of lots of baby related stuff.

…….and she’d only JUST started trying….

and, of course, wouldn’t you know it but bammo, pregnant. First bloody go. Talk about bile in the back of the throat.

PIck. Pick. Bloody PICK.

Here is the bit I’m so dreadfully ashamed of.

My first reaction was to wish that something bad would happen, just so this woman would learn that you shouldn’t assume. That life isn’t that easy for some of us. That it’s somehow wrong to buy baby clothes before you’re even pregnant. That many of us suffer loss and heartache after heartache and that it isn’t always as easy as she’d had it.

Not nice, huh?

Then I stopped reading, because I was ashamed of just how uncharitably I reacted to the happy news of a stranger.

Recently, I started reading again.

She lost the baby, late in the second trimester.

Now, intellectually, I know that nothing I thought had anything to do with it, but boy do I feel like shit about even ever thinking it. Because now that it’s happened and this poor woman has had her world turned upside down I am mortified that I would ever ever think anybody deserved loss and pain like that, just because they took their fertility for granted.

Sigh. Not nice at all.

Twisted.

Many apologies for the lack of recent chit-chat about such inconsequential things as vomitus, nappies, feeding woes, baby snot and the like.

Incidentally, I HAVE noticed that lately many of my posts are simply created by picking a bodily secretion/excretion of my children from the usual cast of characters that babies can produce and then lamenting as fluently as possible along that theme. It’s probably revolting and I apologise profusely. Fortunately, other than urine I think I’ve just about covered it all, and since I have no real idea on how one would wax lyrical about wee (unless one has a boy, because then clearly there’s whole posts about how scoring pee in the face at changing time is Not Fun) , the bodily fluid infested writing shall cease. I hope.

But I digress.

I simply haven’t felt the least bit like posting, mostly because I’ve been feeling pretty darn awful about something I completely forgot about while I was happily chirping away to the internet about all that poop, vomit, screaming and snot.

In the great scheme of things maybe it’s no big deal. After all, others have had losses far more traumatic. Others have lost even harder won pregnancies. Just because I am infertile did not mean I automatically deserved to get a take-home baby the first time around.

Anencephaly happens. It happens to some people whether they take their folate or not (and for the record, I took mine). It happens even if the conception was a joyous piece of great good luck. It happens no matter how desperately the baby was wanted. It’s such a sick feeling of horror, a visceral twist in the guts to know that your child has an open skull and almost no brain, the rudimentary remainder bathed in amniotic fluid when you see it on the scan. Because there is no way your child is ever going to survive. Anencephaly is an absolutely, unquestionably lethal condition.

Everybody wants the best for their child, and heartbreakingly, sometimes the best that can be done is to make a choice to help a life that can never survive end.

I’ll never be the same person I was before it happened, and yet things change. Life happens. Things move on, and something that used to occupy my every waking minute has now become an occasional sad remembrance. Bringing guilt along with it.

What I’m trying to avoid saying is that I completely forgot about the due date of my first child.

I missed it.

Completely.

I should, had things gone normally with the pregnancy (as they almost always do), now have a healthy one year old. Just learning to walk. Learning to talk.

And it’s so bittersweet. Horribly mixed up.

Because not only did I forget, how could I not want the two babies I have?

They wouldn’t exist at all if it were not for the death of their older sister. And I love them fiercely.

She won’t remember this.

Naan won’t. I’ll never forget.

The crashing silence around this blog in the last few days comes courtesy of yet another minor disaster. Perhaps, if you strain hard enough, you may still be able to hear the ‘thwack’ of the enthusiastic rebound that Naan made when she was readmitted to hospital a mere seven hours after triumphantly leaving the place.

The reason?

As shall, I promise, be more fully elucidated in ‘Not Without My A.nus’ (the yet to come post about her stormy first two weeks of life spent in hospital) I judgmentally and enthusiastically heap blame upon a rather cavalier paediatrician. Who, quite frankly, I could have beat the living snot out of when he came by and insisted that there was ‘absolutely nothing wrong’ with her when he discharged her seven hours earlier.

Oh, yes there was, and I am heavily pissed at myself for agreeing to take her home in the first place. Tiny babies with a history of poor feeding who have only just had their nasogastric tubes out who proceed to vomit up several feeds and lose weight should not be sent home. If only because their ecstatic mother, so happy to have her babies together at last, will ball her eyes out (yes, again) when the infant concerned refuses to eat, vomits some more and becomes increasingly lethargic and dehydrated.

Seven hours at home. Seven hours. Most of it spent trying to get her to feed and waking her up. Just awful.

Unfortunately, when tiny babies drop their metaphorical bundle they can’t say why, so poor Naan scored:

• a lumbar puncture (two attempts to succeed)

• Blood cultures and a bunch of other tests (one heel prick).
• A suprapubic aspirate of her urine.

• A nasogastric tube

• TEN sticks to get an IV into her tiny veins, to giver her antibiotics, and
• One terrifyingly horrid breath holding attack prompted by the hours and hours of sharp awfullness where she alternately screamed her poor head off then went blue and fitted for the best part of an hour, completely inconsolable.

She’s less worryingly lethargic now, and beginning to eat thank goodness, but is pretty comprehensively cranky about everything from the ground up. As is her mother. I don’t feel it’s really necessary to go into detail about just how traitor-terrible it feels to curl your precious tiny two week old into a ball and let someone shove needles in her spine, or hold her screaming form still while the resident spends forty minutes digging all over both tiny arms leaving big bruises as vein after vein blows or can’t take it any more and sob as you hand her over to let others pincushion a needle and syringe through the skin of her abdomen into her defenceless bladder out of your sight.

Oh boy have the last few days been awful.

She won’t remember, but how can I ever forget? I think I need another cry, I haven’t slept in nearly 48 hours.

Contemplation

Alternatively entitled how to render oneself completely unemployable as a female doctor in one’s current health system in one easy step:

1. Get pregnant.

The multistep version:

1. Lose a baby to a lethal birth defect.
2. Pursue fertility treatments cycling back-to-back without a break for a year.
3. Get pregnant, just when you were about to pack it in for a while.
4. Spend twelve scary weeks worrying about miscarriage and increasingly about foetal malformation.
5. Have a blessedly normal 12 week scan, knowing that spina bifida is still a possibility but cannot be ruled out until much later in the pregnancy.
6. Do the right thing and tell your employer that you are 12 weeks pregnant with a potentially high-risk multiple pregnancy after IVF and with a history of lethal anomaly.
7. Receive the most thin lipped ‘congratulations’ in history.
8. ….followed by ten minutes of abuse about how you should have told them as soon as you got two lines on the wee stick, or even better that you were thinking of weeing on a stick, or even better again, that you had purchased said stick, or best of all don’t take the job you are now in if you were planning to breed at all, despite said poor reproductive history.
9. Point out that you are giving them six weeks notice about your departure, which is actually several weeks more than legally required.
10. Be informed that your job will  not be held and that you will have to reapply fresh when ready to return and ‘compete’ to get it back with no regard for terms already completed. You then smell the obvious rat that they will find some excuse not to re-employ you (despite the plain fact that you were an overqualified candidate in the first place) when the time comes because you had the temerity to put something other than an IUD in your uterus. Even though it’s illegal to discriminate against a woman on grounds of pregnancy.
11. Go directly to representation at your union.
12. ……wait for the explosions to begin.

I’m currently at step 12, it’s been a rough week.

Mushroom.

Mushrooms?

Have I, finally, gone completely bonkers?

Mushrooms don’t have much to do with the average infertile woman, surely?

Except of course that eerily similar to my fungal nemesis I often feel like I’ve been kept in the dark and fed bullsh!t.

Today is probably do-or-die as far as this cycle goes, and not only because I’m going to need iron supplements and a Healthy Diet to keep up with all these blood draws at this rate.

The reason?

It turns out that those delightful words that took me all day to hear ‘Well, you haven’t ovulated’ was not precisely the entirety of the story with regards to my last set of bloods two days ago (a.k.a the day that Geohde was Very Pissed Off that no arrangements to trigger a rather hopefully mature-looking follicle were made).

Well about that suspiciously mature looking ovarian resident, sitting there in the follicular equivalent of a full face warpaint of slap and a short skirt? Heck, compared to anything else I’ve had lately, it looked old enough for my spouse to buy it dinner, get it drunk and have his wicked way with it. But it might just have been playing dress up.

You see, at my blood test today I interrogated the current possessor of my file and discovered that I had already had a progesterone rise to an underwhelming three point something crap. They’re concerned (I gather from my conversation this morning) that this is as close to ‘ovulation’ as I shall get. Hence the decision to simply sit of it for two more days and see what happens.

If it:

• A: Goes up today, enough (please g-d), I was in the process of oh-so-cleverly releasing an ovum by stealth at the time of the last test, and a transfer will need to be pulled out of thin air at short notice,

Or, more likely given they chose to leave my veins unmolested for two days:

• B: Fails to go up, I’m cancelled. Three is not precisely a P4 compatible with transfer, whilst cleverly also being just enough to thoroughly fuck things up.

I’m putting my money on option ‘B’.

In an open plea to the Clinic Nurses who shall get my results in a few short hours, I make the following points:

• You know and I know that the results will, barring some sort of laboratory nuclear accident or natural disaster, be available by midday or so.
• Ergo, daft though I may be, I quickly work out that the news is not good if I fail to hear anything by that time.
• Furthermore, I also rapidly conclude that the delay is a direct result of waiting for official word from my RE about what to do with my crap bloods.
• I do not do well in an information vacuum imagining cancellation of my cycle for nine hours on a daily basis when I hear nothing back and finally chase down the results myself after 5pm.
• Just because the results require further input from my RE does NOT preclude you calling me in a timely fashion to tell me what they are, even if you plan to disclaim any and all responsibility for the absence of a decision about the result. I can’t fault you for that. Just tell me the numbers, please.
• Yes, I shall in all probability draw my own conclusion about the big ‘Cancellation’ word when you call, and this does technically make you the bearer of bad news. But..
• I’d rather work it out on my own at midday than wait another five hours imagining how the conversation will go since (as I point out above) I’ve already worked out that it’s not Good News some time ago.

In conclusion, all I ask is that you have mercy and do not treat me like a mushroom today.

Thank you.

And for my next trick….

I shall pull a LH of 17 and P4 of 2 out of my venous system.

Ta daa!

Impressed?

I don’t know whether to be mildly pleased that I still allegedly have a largely theoretical grasping-at-straws chance at transfer if my body actually gets it together before Christmas, or horrified that my baseline LH truly hovers around 20.

I think I’ll go for the horrified option since a glass-half-full strategy has never been my style. I mean, eek. It should be in rather more petite single digits.

Indulging in some misty-eyed reminiscence, to think that I was told by the first medical practitioner that I saw in regards to the very-irregular-periods-?connected-in-any-way-to-no-baby-business that there was no way I had PCOS and to just keep on shagging. I distinctly recall looking at the man like he’d caught the short bus to school, and with good reason.

Just think that if I’d listened to that rubbish I’d have missed out on all the fun times infertility treatment and a single disastrous pregnancy has brought me. That is not precisely a happy sentence, but I hope the point I was trying to make is clear even if the corrosive bitterness is getting to me. 

I’m glad that I did persist in obtaining an accurate diagnosis but all this time despite the evidence, I must admit to the odd twinge of ‘surely not’. After all:

• I’m not the typical PCOS body type, being such a weedy thing. Heck, I still remember a teacher in primary school commenting that she’d seen bigger legs under a seagull, thus setting me neatly up for a lifetime complex about my calves.
• My skin is not too bad these days (although truth be told you couldn’t see a square inch of skin for the plague of pustulant pimples back when I was a miserable adolescent not being invited to the cool parties), and
• As far as I know I’m not diabetic or officially insulin resistant (please, please don’t tell my RE that I’ve self-tested random BSL’s of nearly eleven on occasion, for sweet Christ’s sake. I don’t need any more problems dragged out from my biological closet).

Well, unfortunately, there is no real wiggle room having endured five blood draws in a row which have all slapped me in the face with numbers I’d prefer to ignore in my best head in the sand style. Who am I fooling, really? I don’t ovulate and I’ve never been the owner of a regular cycle in my life. I honestly thought that pregnant women in my obstetrics term must have been making up their 28 day cycles, because they all seem to have them and it’s so far removed from my experience.

I guess the modified adage that one shouldn’t judge an infertile book by its cover is a good one. I really, actually, seriously have a bit of a problem with the old PCOS.

Do you think that if I do something mature like pull a blanket over my head it will all go away?

Urgh.

For those of you who haven’t had the pleasure of such an extended visit to Suckville, I’ll make my current miserable situation crystal clear. Odds of transfer are truly up to the indifferent waitress in the Last Chance Saloon when the nurses tell you they’re giving up on cycle tracking.

It’s like saying ‘cancelled until 2008 sometime’, but without the tears down the phone.

Neat trick.

If you know that damn waitresses’ number, can you give her a call for me? My very last scan before my RE officially gives up is tomorrow, and wouldn’t you know it I’ve got a positive ovulation predictor. I’d be more excited if it wasn’t for the fact that I’ve had positive ovulation predictors before the last four scans this cycle too, and nothing over 12mm on either ovary each time.

At least (on the plus side) I’ve got five scans and five blood draws out of this ?cancellation, I think that does leave me financially ahead, if a little psychiatrically flattened. 

Here’s hoping. Off I go to spin that glitzy wheel of ovulation, again.

Protected: Anyone for a game of LH?

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Protected: When no news is good news.

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Welcome to Suckville.

Population, moi.

Or am I actually in Shit City? I’ve been to so many bad destinations in the last two years that they’re all beginning to look awfully similar.

In the interests of my newly self-appointed Tour Guide duties, I state the following before you leave the bus from Somewhere Else to explore:

Please feel free to take a brochure detailing the limited facilities.

Grab a tour map.

Heck, be my guest and piss in the fountain if you need to go. The toilets are broken, it’s dry anyway and could probably do with the water.

Finally, fercrissakes, when you get the chance RUN. Far away. Anywhere but HERE.

In case the above title was not warning enough, I do apologise for the abundant negative tone. Complaints can be made out in writing, marked c/o my (rooted) reproductive system.

What follows is some scheduled self-flagellation…

This morning the Ultrasound Probe of Truth smoked out my ovaries for total failures they are. Complete lazy, useless, backasswards glands. Does Clomid mean nothing to them now they’ve had the Good Stuff (FSH)?

A reasonable person would have thought that the last six days since crap scan number one (for this cycle anyway) should have been devoted to, say, happy ongoing folliculogenesis and estradiol production, but no. Not my gonads. I think they’re out the back, smoking, and totally forgot that follicles should get bigger with time. Clearly it slipped their tiny minds.

Those hopeful three follicles at the last scan, you ask? I’ve been rather careless with them it would seem, or victim to a rather cruel now-you-see-them-now-you-don’t disappearing act. I fail to find this new ovarian coyness cute or amusing in the least, especially since my endometrium staunchly remains a determinedly hypo-oestrogenic wafer thin. Heck, even if I do by some miracle get it together hormonally enough to ovulate it’s not a picture that in any way spells Paint Thy Nursery.

Sigh.

Having just had another vein blown with an inexpert blood draw, I await a truly delicious phone call with the likely options of:

1. Cancellation.
2. Conversion to a HRT cycle delayed cancellation.

In conclusion, if the total shiteness of a cycle is inversely related to the probability of gestation (see cycle # Really Bad SA and Surprise Pregnancy back in December ’06 an example of this principle) I’m having Quin-flippin-tuplets.

Edited to add: Phone call says keep going another week in Suckville (sounds like option two will be the winner). Fun times strictly optional, worried angst mandatory.