This blog may liven up again

I talked to a nurse at the IVF clinic today, and here's our tentative plan:

- Get preliminary ultrasound on 4/1 to check condition of uterus.
- When period arrives in mid-April, start Es.trace 2x/day.
- 4-5 days after period, get laminaria placed, left in place for four hours, then removed, leaving a much more agreeable cervix to work with.
- 2-3 weeks into the Es.trace-taking, get an ultrasound to check lining.
- Up the Es.trace to 3x/day, add PIO or suppositories, which they say have now been proven to be as effective or nearly as effective as the shots.
- Tentative FET date: 5/9 (a Friday, so my husband could potentially be there).
- Four hours before FET, gobble ibuprofen; one hour before FET, take Bus.par and Dem.erol; feel happy.
- Dive back into the 2ww!

Mmmmmm.....I can just taste the hope and despair already!

I thought I was kind of joking about the fears

My husband left for California yesterday. This morning, at about 6:45, I heard a bunch of sirens. I didn't think much of it, since the emergency services in this town tend to overreact (though I'd certainly feel as if my emergency were being taken seriously if I had been the one to call for an ambulance and received, say, four). But when I got to the gym, MSNBC had a breaking news alert that there was a shooter in our little city! So.ren was semi-safely ensconced in the gym daycare, where the child-to-caregiver ratio was about 15:1 at that moment. I turned to the local news station and got more info about the shooter, who killed his wife and four kids. On our side of town. And he was still at that moment thought to be on the loose.

And then everyone at the gym was huddled in corners, and many people were crying. It turns out that the wife was an early-morning regular at the gym and the coffeehouse next door. And the husband had recently been indicted for embezzling hundreds of thousands of dollars from his job to support his cocaine habit. And all four kids were adopted. Not like it would be okay if they were biological; it just somehow seems even more awful that they were adopted.

The man apparently crashed his car into a sign on the interstate and burned alive. I'm not sure why he couldn't have just done that first instead of killing five other people.

Fear, denial

My husband moves to CA on Sunday. I've been ignoring that fact fairly successfully, although I have been pushing him to get some manly tasks done (e.g., cleaning the gutters) before he goes.

I have some irrational (or maybe partially rational but still weird) fears related to being a solo parent. One, what if I die in my sleep? Actually, this is probably the best-case scenario of my worst-case scenarios, since if I were asleep, it would mean So.ren would be in his crib and more or less safe until the babysitter arrived to find my cold, dead body. I am more worried about, like, falling down the stairs while holding So.ren, who is now totally mobile and EXTREMELY INTERESTED in anything hazardous. So what if I fell down the stairs and got knocked unconscious, and So.ren either got hurt or was okay but crawled into the fireplace or chewed a power cable and then the dog ate both of our bodies? I need to think of some system for alerting people that I am still alive at appropriate intervals (end of day, start of day) so that they can send in reinforcements to check on our welfare if needed. The dog, incidentally, would be completely useless and not one of those heroic pets who calls 911 or alerts the neighbors by barking "SOS."

Also, what if I am somehow responsible for injury or death befalling So.ren? My husband is usually the delinquent overseer (for instance, while he was "watching" So.ren the other day, I returned to find So.ren halfway up our very steep stairs while my husband was emailing and thought the baby was still in the room), but what if I start developing similar habits? More realistically, what will happen to So.ren if I am so afraid of his getting hurt that I don't let him do anything? His muscles might atrophy and he could lose all social skills.

Wow, that sounds insane. I hope by verbalizing my fears, I will be inoculated against their coming true.

We also decided not to do an FET until May for a few logistical reasons, such as that we have to go to my father-in-law's 70th birthday party and a wedding in late April, right around the time we'd be getting the FET done, so why not just wait until May? This sort of blithe toying with the schedule probably ensures that it won't work.

[Pictured above: So.ren at 10 months, ready to dive off the couch and go in search of hazards.]

Well, that was nice.

I may have mentioned before that I actually like my insurance provider (or maybe it's just that I like my coverage, which is very good, which then means fewer fights with the provider). Anyway, I just called them to find out how much fertility coverage I have left since my plan has a $25K lifetime limit, and I'd obviously used up some of that for tests, two fresh IVFs, and one FET. (Conveniently, since my hospital/clinic is the largest one in the area and the provider is also the largest one in the area, there are negotiated rates with the hospital/clinic that are much lower than list prices, and the negotiated rate is what gets counted against your lifetime limit.)

It took the phone rep a while to find the answer (which was that I have about $5K left), but after telling me the details, she then paused and very kindly said, "And good luck!" I temporarily felt warmth for my fellow man.