Homecoming

So I had my appointment at the RE on Thursday. A few things had changed. First, they'd moved the clinic, along with the regular OB clinic and the specialty clinics (where they treat your gynecologic cancer and/or repair your hoo-ha after childbirth), to a fancy new wing of the already-sprawling hospital. The downside to this merger and relocation is that everyone checks in at the same place, so the infertile are subjected to seeing the heavily pregnant, which didn't happen in the old place, which was on an entirely different floor from the regular clinic. Once you check in, though, you are sent to a different waiting room, which is clearly the infertile ghetto. That said, I actually felt HAPPY to go in there. What the fuck? I was glad to pass the teeming fertile masses in waiting rooms 1 and 2 and step into the warm confines of waiting room 3, where no one was pregnant but everyone had that look on their face that said they were ready for some gallows humor. Or maybe I was projecting. One other change I noticed was that the Go.lden Girls was not playing on the television. Instead, it was on ABC Fa.mily or some such nonsense. I kind of missed Dorothy, Blanche, Sophia, et al.

I was greeted by a nurse I recognized from the old clinic as being a half-wit. Not promising. She said I'd meet with one of the staff doctors that day, either the head of the department or the RE who was pregnant when I had my FET. In the meantime, I saw a physician's assistant who took my history, listened to my well-thought-out requests, and tried to say that she'd bring this up at their weekly meeting. When I insisted upon seeing one of the staff REs, I could tell she was insulted. Well, maybe she should go get her MD and not have to deal with the elitist prejudices of people like me. Really, she seemed quite knowledgeable, but if I am going to schlep my ass into the RE's office, I want to see someone who makes more money than I do.

So the formerly pregnant RE came in, and I will say this about her: she looked very, very tired. I took some solace in that. It then turned out that she is PREGNANT AGAIN and due in early April. And, um, I couldn't tell. Like, I wouldn't have known she was, like, seven months' pregnant, except that she was saying she'd be on maternity leave beginning at the start of April or even earlier. She's tall. Anyway, the deal is that it's pretty easy to schedule an FET, so I just need to decide when to do it. This means I either need to pull the trigger and do one soon or wait until she comes back from leave (since she's the one with the magic ET touch on my crazy cervix). As an aside, I thought it was interesting that they let you schedule ET with a particular RE, because they never let you schedule anything with a particular one otherwise - you just get whoever is on duty that day. But she acknowledged that there might be something voodooish about ET, and they were willing to indulge that.

If I aim for an FET right when she gets back in June, however, and if the damned thing worked, then I would miss my 15th college reunion. I don't want to do that, so I might push it out a bit. But I realize that these sorts of attempts at managing my fate are destined to end poorly, and then I will wish I had just jumped back on the IVF train so that I could be plunging back into fresh cycles or moving onto adoption or buying a my fake baby. So we will see.

On Monday, I am going out of town for an entire week. It is really too painful to imagine being away from So.ren for so long. But the stars aligned, and it makes sense for me to combine a couple of intended trips into one long one.

Finally, in case you're dying to know, my sleep has improved over time a great deal. I still wake up frequently, but I'm pretty good at getting back to sleep now, even if I wake up within an hour before my alarm goes off. Phew!