It is National Infertility Awareness Week this week, and I am celebrating by having my eggs retrieved tomorrow. Also, my RE's office offered free muffins in the waiting room, accompanied by a little card that said something like "During National Infertility Awareness week we honor your courage."
On Tuesday when I was in the waiting room there was a couple there with a seven month old baby girl. This is unusual because the practice asks patients and visitors to leave their children at home. As you know, some days it is hard to see happy couples with their happy babies when you aren't sure if you are ever going to be a parent.
I was surprised to see the baby there.
After I was escorted into the exam room and plopped my jeans and panties on the chair, I noticed the pamphlet across the room that said "Tell us about your experience" or something like that. It was one of those customer service things. It was in the same plastic holder as flyers for the 12 week Mind/Body workshop. Of course at this point I was covered with a paper sheet, so I didn't feel comfortable getting up and grabbing it. I vowed to grab one after the exam. And of course I forgot then.
They are overall a great practice with lots of caring, committed people. But what I wanted to tell them was that being able to reach the right person on the phone and get my questions answered in a timely way would go a long way to reducing my stress. As an infertility patient you are juggling many jobs -- advocate for yourself as an infertility patient, beancounter ($), information repository, egg farm, therapist (for your partner), and caregiver (for nurturing yourself). It's hard to do it all. Anything that can be done to make those roles easier is helpful. For example, I paid the big deposit, but today when David delivered his back up sample they asked him for a check. What's up with that?
(My IVF coordinator told me to tell David that before he produced his sample he should wash his genitals with soap and dry them thoroughly.
We thought this was funny.
Tonight, while we were talking about the logistics for tomorrow David said that after he dropped me off at the facility he would head home to produce his sample. But first he planned to clean the kitty litter box with his penis and then douse his penis in cologne to cover any stinkiness. I asked him:
ME: did it take you all afternoon to come up with that?
HIM: no, only about 10 minutes.)
After I left the exam room I headed to get my blood drawn.
There was a couple in front of me. The woman was reading One for the Money by Janet Evanovich, and I mentioned to her that I loved that series (although I haven’t read the last few because infertility and the Internet have reduced my the attention span to that of a gnat.)
She said she’d read a couple of Evanovich’s romances that she’d written together with someone else and had liked them. She was a school teacher. Her husband was there with her too. When she got called in to get her blood drawn I heard her talking to the phlebotomist.
This was her first beta test for their one and only IVF. As the woman made nervous jokes with the phlebotomist, her husband and I sat in the chairs in the waiting area and giggled. We chatted about the test. He expressed his anxiety about giving his wife shots, but he was nervous and excited. They didn’t know what the test results would be that day (i.e. they hadn’t already bought a home pregnancy test and peed on a stick (POAS)).
I was nervous for them. When they left I wished them good luck. I will probably never find out whether or not that IVF worked for them. But I keep thinking about them. I keep praying that they got good news.
If I'd run into them anywhere else, we would never have known about the common thread that we shared -- the infertility. We might never have had that conversation. So it's time to work on fixing that.
This is National Infertility Awareness week. See the thread at the top of the right column on this page? Click on it. To show your solidarity, or to help us just identify each other at Barnes and Noble, Starbucks and even StrideRite wear your pomegranate thread. Read about how this great idea got started here, and the great ladies who started it here.
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