Decisions, decisions...

And now the big decisions start: how many eggs will we fertilize? How many will we attempt to implant? If we implant three and all three take, will we carry triplets? Will we want to attempt selective reduction? How many will we reduce to? What about the risk of spontaneous miscarriage after a reduction? Will we be willing to risk that after all we’ve been through?

And with the decisions, the worry: What if I don’t ovulate when on the new drugs? What if the side effects are worse than what I’m having now? What if my estrogen doesn’t respond the way it should and my lining stays thin? What if my eggs are bad quality and they don’t fertilize?

Did I mention that one of the side effects of the progesterone was ‘worry’. I’m not kidding; it actually lists that among the known side effects. Gee, I wonder why.

I was talking to my Dad last night about moving forward with a new treatment and he was so non-committal about the whole conversation that it bugged me. Usually my Dad is the talk-your-ear-off kind of guy, especially if it’s a subject he’s not familiar with (i.e., asks a tons of questions to learn more sort of thing) but this is just a subject he doesn’t seem to want to know about. I told him how I was feeling about not going to Thanksgiving dinner at R’s family’s house and he actually said “You know, it’s too bad you can’t get in a better frame of mind about this.” And then it hit me. I really am truly, utterly, fantastically alone in all of this. There is no one, save this blog, that I can talk to about what is happening to me. This is such a sensitive subject, such a personal issue that if you’re experiencing it, you’re basically alone. No one really wants to talk to you about it. They only do it because you force them to communicate about the subject. There are only two people that I know (‘real’ face-to-face people) that actually ask me about my treatment, about how I’m doing what I’m doing. Maybe that’s why I cling to this blog so much. It’s the only place where people will ask me about my treatment or how I’m feeling or where others can see the hell that I’m going through. The blunt realization after talking to my Dad was just yet another layer of isolation in the infertility world.

Anyways, someone was asking me for another E story, so to lighten the mood, here you go. Last Friday E was being Mr. Fuss-about-the-potty for the Nanny and when I got home, she told me the whole horror story that was their day. She ended up putting E in time-out for an hour at the end of the day because he threw a fit about going on the potty. A little while after he got out of time-out, she said that she was in the kitchen getting something and she could hear him in the bathroom, setting up the potty seat so that he could go. All by himself. That night, after the Nanny left, I reminded E that he needed to go potty before dinner and to call me if he needed help. “I don’t need help, Momma. I need privacy,” he tells me. How can you not laugh out loud at a comment like that?