A date with Mr. Stabby

Today's scan showed 7-8 follicles (it looked like 8 to me, but that may have been just wishful thinking), all close to the same size. I trigger tomorrow, and retrieval is Friday.

Part of my brain remembers clearly that retrievals really hurt (my clinic doesn't give you a general anaesthetic for retrieval, just light sedation). I remember being quite surprised both times about how much being stabbed with a big giant needle really hurt. The other part of my brain, though, is looking forward to it. It's partly curiosity. I want to know how many eggs the old ovaries can produce. I have a bad feeling that there may also be little bits of hope around the edges too, though. I wish there weren't. BFN's are hard enough without coming by surprise.

So far so good

Scan yesterday showed at least seven follicles, all about the same size. And my ovaries also ache, which I'm taking as a good sign that something is going on. Now I just have to hope that it's something good. Next scan is Tuesday.

Nervous

I have been in such denial about this IVF cycle that even though I've got a belly full of needle tracks, I hadn't really thought about it much beyond the logistics until today, when I realized that if my ovaries have given up in the last two years, I'll probably find that out tomorrow at the first scan. I remember being incredibly nervous before each scan the first time around, and much less worked up about the scans the second time (it's hard to get worked up about scans with a failed cycle under your belt--I had learned the hard way that there isn't any easy equation that converts x follicles to y babies), but I realized just today that it's all totally different this time, because, well, I'm 40 now. I mean I knew that the odds weren't great, but I hadn't thought through the fact that in one of possible bad scenarios, my ovaries don't respond to the meds at all, and that if that's going on, I'll find out tomorrow.

I guess I'm starting to feel a little invested. I suppose it was inevitable. Sigh.

To distract myself, I thought I'd tell you about our recent trip to the land of Mystery.

In a nutshell, it was a bit of a debacle. We have taken Mystery to her other homeland before, and she had a great time, but during that trip, we stayed at Mystery's brother's houses the whole time, except when we were in hotels (of our choosing). Mystery's brothers live in very nice villages near major urban areas, so we had short drives and relatively easy access to consumer goods and medical care. Not that we needed them. On that trip, the Egg was still breastfeeding almost exclusively, and anything worked as a toy, so she was pretty much all set as long as she had me.

This trip was different. Mystery was aching to take her to his parents' house (she did see her grandparents last year, but they had traveled to his brother's house for the occasion). I was reluctant, both because there is malaria in the area (not much, but more than none), and because it's a much longer drive, which makes a short trip far less pleasant. Oh, and then there's the no electricity thing. It's never been a problem for me, but it does make things a bit more complicated with a toddler.

But off we went. It seemed only fair. Or something like that. Anyway, we went. And within three days, Eggbert had developed a horrible case of diarrhea, had the worst heat rash ever, and had been bitten by some mystery insect that left a welt the width of her entire (not insubstantial) thigh. She had also gone on a hunger strike, accepting only water as sustenance. She wouldn't even drink milk! (Admittedly, this might have been due in part to the fact that only powdered milk or milk in those little UHT boxes was available, and Mysterious milk in boxes tends to have strange flavors added to it, for no reason that I can discern).

That was all just background, though. The real source of stress for me was that Eggbert's grandparents' house is a the exact opposite of childproof. (What on earth would the word for that be? Child-eating?) I spent every moment trying to keep her from running out the door into the busy street, to keep her out of the woodburning stove, to keep her away from the collection of knives and machetes, to keep her from knocking over the flimsy rack on the floor on which all of the (glass) dishes were carefully stacked, and to keep her out of the big jugs of cooking oil, motor oil, and other various and sundry forms of oil that were stored in corners of the house for no good reason that I could discern. There were also human hazards. Neighborhood "aunties" repeatedly came over to meet her, and then tried to take her home for a while, presumably to show her to their friends and families in the comfort of their own home. They were surprisingly hard to dissuade. Mystery once told one of them that Eggbert couldn't go out because she hadn't had her breakfast, and the auntie said "no problem, I can feed her!" By the time Eggbert got her first ever mystery fever (39 degrees C in her armpit, so probably about 39.5 orally), and I realized that the baby ibuprofin had spilled in our luggage and we had only one dose left, and were a three-hour drive from the nearest pharmacy (luckily, the baby tylenol hadn't spilled), I nearly lost my mind.

It was hard, dear reader. It was hard. We all made it home alive, and none the worse for wear, but I definitely have some new frown lines to show for the trip.

I realized after we got back to Korea (once I had stopped kissing the ground) that the reason that I found it so hard related in part to a difference in philosophy about the role of children. In the USA, and in Korea, adults shape their spaces and their habits around their children. We childproof, we clean, we plan our days around naptimes, etc. In the Land of Mystery, children live in the same world as adults. They learn to avoid hazards by experiencing them from very early in life. Nothing is hidden or sugar-coated for kids. They are cherished and adored, but adults don't reorganize their lives around kids. I can see the merits of living like that in theory, but in practice, I couldn't hack it. I am so glad to be "home."

Bilingual

Eggbert has been learning to talk for a while now, but over the last few weeks, the new words have been coming fast and furious. We planned all along to raise her bilingual, so Mystery only (usually) speaks to her in Mysterious, and I only (usually) speak to her in English. We do have linguistic "accidents" from time to time, because some words just sound or feel so much better in one language or the other that it's hard not to slip them into a sentence of the other language, but we are working on it, and get things right at least 95% of the time. The one place where we're not terribly consistent is in our conversations with each other in front of her. We tend not to pay attention, and to either mix languages, change languages in midstream, or each speak in our "own" language in the same conversation (i.e., Mystery asks a question in Mysterious, I answer him in English, he asks a follow-up question in Mysterious, and so on.) We were really curious to see what would happen when the Egg started to talk.

Her first word was the Mysterious equivalent to "uh-oh", and her second, as I have discussed elsewhere, was "boobie." Since that time, it has been about 50/50, although some weeks are more English, and others more Mysterious. One thing that we noticed with interest was that she seemed to only learn each word in one language. So, for example, things are cold in English, but can only be hot in Mysterious. She had never given any sign that she knew which language "belonged" to which parent until yesterday, when for the first time, she added a word in English that she already knew in Mysterious. She has been saying "kiss" in Mysterious for a couple of months now. Last night, though, at bedtime, she was stalling about going to sleep (as is typical). She sat up in bed (we cosleep), crawled over to me, kissed me on the cheek, and said, very clearly "kiss" (in English). When I smiled, she did it again. And again. And again. Thus delaying bedtime by at least ten minutes, and making her mommy very very happy.

So little time

I have so much to blog about, but can't seem to find the time to write a proper post. Therefore, in lieu of such a post, I'm just here to give a quick update so y'all will at least know that I'm still alive.

For the first two weeks in April, we were visiting Mystery's family in the Land Of. It was a long, hard, thought-provoking trip. There's definitely a post about that coming up, so I'll just leave that topic for now. Just mentioning it now, because that's the reason for the long silence (well, other than the whole no-time issue).

Yesterday my period finally arrived, so today I trudged off to the RE, despite the Worst Migraine Ever. Had to wait for three hours because she had a series of emergencies (I could see that was true, since she kept getting called out of her office and running to various parts of the clinic). Luckily, I had already phoned in sick to work, due to the WME, so I just sat there in the clinic with one eye shut and fingers pressed hard into my temples, and tried not to vomit or die. Doc was apologetic and kind, which I appreciated, and has changed my protocol from last time. Even less suppression now (only three days of Suprefact, which is great news to me, since the injections tend to cause an itchy rash), and a dose of stims big enough for an elderly horse. Hopefully if there's any life left in my ovaries, this will cause them to spring to attention. Next scan is on Friday.

The die is cast

After yet another cycle in which I managed to foolishly get my hopes up (or at least not to assume that there was no hope, which is pretty much the same thing these days) that I might just get pregnant without intervention (I know, I know), my period arrived yesterday, a full three days ahead of schedule.

So, today I trundled off dutifully to the RE. I hadn't actually seen her in person since Eggbert was born, and it was surprisingly nice to get the chance to thank her in person for the incredible gift that she helped to give Mystery and me.

After conferring frantically with the calendar, she confirmed what I had suspected--that I will only have time to do one IVF cycle before leaving Korea in June. If my period had arrived three days ago, we could have squeezed in a second, but now it is truly out of the question. So, that's where I stand. One chance. I really don't know yet how I feel about that. On the one hand, Eggbert took two tries, and I was two years younger then, so obviously the odds are not on my side. On the other hand, the odds wouldn't be on my side in two cycles either, or even three. We will have to call it quits sometime, so at least this draws a pretty sharp line in the sand for us. Once we are back in the US, I will have infertility coverage, but with a lifetime maximum of $5000, which means that the out-of-pocket costs would be about $10,000 for one more cycle, and with odds of success of only about 20%, that is not a terribly appealing proposition. I guess we'll see how we feel if/when it comes to that, but right now, it's looking like this will be my last IVF cycle.

I'll start BCP tomorrow for one month, and then the fun will begin.

Baby steps

This isn't a confession that I am proud to make, but before I started trying to get pregnant, there was a part of me that was dreading the first few weeks of my baby's life. I figured that spewing forth a live human being from my loins (or a big old incision, if it turned out that way), and then being subjected to an intense sleep-deprivation experience all while bleeding from my chewed-on nipples and having a hormone-storm the size of Katrina raging in my body would be fairly unpleasant. It seemed that this was just something that I'd have to endure to get to the good part, which would come later.

As my pregnancy progressed, and it eventually became clear that an actual baby was likely, I realized that I was already not sleeping, and somehow had remained alive, so I thought that if I survived the whole huge head meets small vagina event, all that I really had to fear was post-partum depression. After the great long depression that was infertility, I expected that PPD would happen, and thought that the only real question was how bad it would be.

Boy was I wrong. Birthing was indeed as painful as I had imagined, and it's true that I didn't sleep for more than three hours in a row for the next ten months or so, but Eggbert's first days were absolutely glorious for me. I remember in the days, weeks, and months after her birth wondering if there was such a thing as hormone-induced post-partum Euphoria, and praying that if that's what I had, I would never be cured.

A lot of things were hard in her first year, but they were a good kind of hard. The kind of hard that made me feel strong and empowered and even perhaps a bit proud. She was a needy little things, but as it turned out, her wish was not only my command, but also my wish. There was nothing that made me happier than meeting her needs. And her needs were fairly simple--food, warmth, comfort, and about a gajillion diaper changes/day. Not necessarily easy, but at least straightforward.

As she's grown older, I have struggled a lot more with the whole meeting her needs thing, because sometimes it is very unclear what she actually needs. Despite her fairly limited vocabulary, she is fantastic at communicating her wants, but since her wants include things like chewing on her shoes, jumping on the bed, playing in traffic, and eating only corn and animal crackers, I have found her guidance to be increasingly unhelpful in allowing me to identify her actual needs.

Up until recently, I had never questioned my belief that we are lucky that Mystery is a stay-at-home dad. I love it that they have this time together, that they have such a special relationship, and that I can go to work knowing that my child is being taken care of someone who loves her more than anything else in the world. I know that not everybody has the option of having a stay-at-home parent, and I do think that we're lucky. However, lately when I watch my own little Egg and compare what I see other people's children doing, I kind of wonder what she is missing out on by not being in day care. In my most insecure moments, I wonder if somehow we're cheating her out of the chance to learn from child care professionals, rather than just her goofy parents, and even if we're somehow causing her lasting harm.

The thing is, while Mystery and I are both patient, involved, and interested parents, we both find it very hard to teach little Miss Egghead anything. She has always marched to the beat of her own drummer, and while her development is on average right on track, it's always been wildly uneven--she was walking very early, but at almost 16 months she still has no interest in using a spoon or fork, and I gave up in despair at patty-cake months ago after she left me hanging one too many times. She is curious about the world, but seems absolutely determined to do things her own way. I am 99% proud of this, but there is 1% of me that worries when I see other mommies and babies playing out scenes right from parenting books, and realize that not only has Eggo not read the book, but she likes to rip the pages out and eat them. She has been talking for about three months now, but to this day, she only says what she wants when she wants to, and no amount of questioning will elicit words on cue (although bribery does work if animal crackers are involved). She won't follow instructions to make animal sounds, or point to things, or really to do anything at all that she didn't already mean to do (although we have made some headway in stopping her from doing things that we don't want her to do). I see other moms and toddlers walking along in public, hand in hand, or even just side by side, while the very thought of unleashing a free Eggbert on the public makes me shake and sweat. When we take her to the park, the only place that she's allowed to walk outside, given her tendency to bolt, she starts sprinting the second that her feet hit the dirt. Nothing that we can do, short of picking her up and turning her around, has any effect on her trajectory. We can scream and shout, or sing and dance, or offer her all of the tea in China if she will just for the love of God STOP RUNNING TOWARD THE CLIFF/PIT/RABID DOG! but she will ignore us completely and do her own thing. I end up running along behind her holding onto the back of her jacket just to keep her from running off of the edge of the world.

Lately, I've noticed that my apparent inability to lead, guide, or discipline the Egg effectively has been getting me down. It's not her behavior that bothering me, but rather my concern that her behavior means that I'm doing something wrong. I can't really put my finger on it, but she's just so different from other people's kids that even though I am for the most part delighted by the differences that make her her own unique and special person, they also make me worry.

Last Sunday we had kind of a bad morning. I had spent days searching through all of the wrong stores to find some crayons so she could start to learn to draw. Finally I found them, and we had the big "reveal" on Sunday. I let her hold all of the different colors, showed her how to use them, scribbled a little myself, just to show her that it was fun, and then she poked the crayon into the paper three times, looked disconcerted, sat there for a minute doing nothing, and then bit the end off of the crayon. After which she picked up the paper and started shredding it while I fished waxy bits out of her mouth. Not quite the tableau that I had envisioned. Then I tried to do a puzzle with her and she just wanted to throw the pieces, and I tried reading a book and she walked away, and I put on some music so we could dance and she wanted no part of that either, yet when I decided to let her play alone, she got upset about that too, and spent the rest of the morning whining. Nothing was wrong, but we were just obviously not on the same wavelength. That had never happened before, and it really took me by surprise. For the first time, my recent worry about her made the leap from the category of "things that I occasionally think about idly in moments when my brain is otherwise unoccupied" to "the sick feeling that something might be really really wrong." I started thinking things like ADD and autism and attachment disorders and leprosy and things that go bump in the night. You know, the usual suspects.

That afternoon, I popped the Egg in the baby carrier and took her to the park, even though it was kind of cold. As usual, when I put her down she was off like a shot. She ran straight to the muddy ditch, then to the rusty grate that looked like it had been infused with some kind of special military-grade vaccination-cracking tetanus spores, then to the big pile of cigarette butts. Every time I redirected her by physically picking her up and moving her to another region, she found something more dangerous and filthier to race for. I kept trying to interest her in pinecones, trees, birds and other pretty and nice things that she could look at, while she kept her head down and her legs spinning as she searched for some kind of dirt-encrusted toddler holy grail. Within a few minutes, she looked rather a lot like Pigpen. Eventually, we made our way over to an area with a lot of trees, each surrounded by its own individual mound of dirt about 1 meter high. Upon spotting the mounds, she immediately stopped her aimless running and spent the next several minutes walking straight up to a mound, falling down when the grade got too steep or the ground too loose, getting up, marching right back up the hill, falling down, getting up, falling down, getting up, etc. At first I tried to stop her, but then I realized that the ground was soft, she was well-padded in a winter coat and hat, and she was having a good time, so I just let her be. After many failed attempts on a big mound, she looked around, chose a smaller mound, and started working on that one. Within 10 minutes she was running up and down the small mound, after which she moved back to the big mound. A few minutes later, she was standing at the top beaming. Then she came down, ran right over to me, and hugged me. I picked her up and started talking about something-or-other, and she somehow picked out the word "tree," (which she hadn't used before) and started saying "twee?" "dwee?" I pointed at a tree, and said "tree", and she then pointed to every tree on the landscape, saying "dwee! dwee!" Then just to make sure I got the point, she wiggled until I put her down, ran over to a tree, patted the trunk, and said "dwee!" Then I showed her a pinecone, and she held and patted it and carried it around for several minutes before giving it back to me, I assume for safekeeping.

The whole way home, she beamed out at all of the passers-by, and the second that someone so much as looked at her, she started waving cheerily at them. Our walk home was punctuated by a trail of "awwwww's."

I think my little girl is going to do just fine, as long as her mama can just relax and let her be herself. I'm working on it.