The High Tech Way

Middle Age and Its Discontents

An old friend from high school died last week. We weren't best buddies, but we sat at the same lunch table, laughed together, and she set me up on a date with her brother once. She was beautiful, fun, funny, silly. All the good things. When the call went out for short stories about her, I had none. Just a general impression of enjoying her company very much and wishing we'd stayed in touch. Some things about her life have been similar to mine. The late in life motherhood, for example. She leaves behind a 4 year old daughter which means she had that baby when she was 41 or 42.

She had a stroke a bit over a year ago. A minor one and then a major one. They left her debilitated and headed for rehabilitation. And then they found the cause of the strokes was clots thrown off by stage 4 lung cancer. She'd never smoked. (My yoga teacher tells me it's a minority of lung cancer victims who smoke.)

So there she is, an invalid, rehabilitating from a stroke and then undergoing chemo and radiation.

Her brother, (the one I dated) through all this, is hopeful. Looking for her to get better. And really, who wouldn't? She had everything to live for. Had given up the successful corporate career to run a flower shop downtown. By her side every day was her young daughter.

As we get older, more people our age will be dying. From one friend every 10 years to one every 5 years. One day it will stop being a shock. We will start reading the obituary page every morning to look for our friends (or whatever passes for the obituary page when newspapers also die soon).

As we age, the world around us will become less familiar. The music we liked in youth becomes oldies or classics. The sounds on “the radio” or whatever it is then sounds like noise. The ones of us who seem to maintain our youth are those who keep up with youth culture, not the familiar songs of our friends from high school and college.

In 100 years everyone we know will be gone. The music we listened to will likely not be listened to by anyone living anymore.

I think, for someone who lives to be 100 years old, that life becomes less appealing. The friends you knew are gone. The people who understand the things that got you so excited about life are gone. No one gets into your music. No one remembers how hot Brad Pitt was in Thelma and Louise. So you are more alone, even when you are with other people. The world becomes less fun.

I don't want anyone I know to die. I don't want to die myself. But in this middle age where I am I have a growing realization that there will be a time when I will know more people who were gone than people who are alive. This is when you'd miss talking to people who GOT where you were from – the inside jokes, the cultural references, that made you feel like you belonged where you were.  When you got to this place in time, I think it would start to feel like dying was OK. Like you were going home.

My three sons

Last year on this day when I was 4.5 months pregnant with the baby who would be called James, we took Jack to have him Baptized. Before we left for the service, I had slipped Will's ashes into my bag.  As I sat there in the pew, I realized it was the only time I would be out anywhere with all three of my boys.  When I wrote the check to the church as an offering, I realized that it was Feb. 25, a year since my sister-in-law, Heidi, died of cervical cancer.  After Jack's Baptism, we went to the cemetery where David's Dad was buried, and where David's brother Chris, and his sister Heidi's ashes were. We went to David's Dad's grave. I told Will that we loved him very very much and I left him there to be with his grandfather, who he was named after. It was a very emotional morning. 

Five days later I got on a plane with Jack and moved across the country.

Letting go

At Jack's birthday party I mentioned that the only thing that marred what was a perfect event was when we all watched his yellow balloon leave his toddler grip and float up into the sky, gone forever.  We all watched for as long as we could still squint and see it.  And we talked about it days later even.  Jack and I spent the following day at Nanna's house, where the party had been. On waking from his nap a full 24 hours later he said: "balloon gone."

And that is how it goes.  It's hard to let go, but sometimes things are just gone. Gone forever. Gone irrevocably.  And holding onto the pain of the loss just keeps you in agony.  You want the yellow balloon back.  You want to know WHY the yellow balloon had to go.  The red balloon is an inferior substitute for what used to be so good.  You think about the yellow balloon and how wonderful it was.  How happy you were when it was here.  And you wonder where it is now.

And it reminded me of my lost luggage -- or rather my lifetime of mementos contained in a single suitcase that was lost by Continental Airlines when our family moved across the country in March.  This week, as we were cleaning (well, cleaning as well as we could in a house under renovation with no kitchen and boxes everywhere) in preparation for some house guests I was clearing off my temporary desk in my temporary office. And there was the meager check from Continental Airlines. On the back of the check it pretty much says that if you deposit it you are agreeing that it represents settlement of your claim.  So I have not deposited it. 

Rather, I have had fantasies of going to their vast lost luggage warehouse in Houston. I have also had fantasies about taking their asses to small claims court and getting the full amount of the claim from them. As I mentioned before, the $285 they are paying me does not even cover what I have to pay out to replace the rented baby doppler.

Don't get me wrong. The PEOPLE, the individual human beings that I have dealt with at the airline have been very kind and helpful.  I will be forever angry at the CORPORATION for losing my treasures and I am angry at them for their stupid policies that made it difficult to locate my luggage or settle my claim for a fair amount.

Nonetheless, hanging onto the check and my fantasies has been making me crazy.  Here I am now, 8+ months pregnant. I am not going to Houston. I am not going to small claims court.  And hanging onto the idea of those things is only punishing me, not some corporation.  Even if I took them to small claims court it would represent just a drop in ocean of money to them -- as unimportant to them as my luggage was.  It would be a lot of effort and emotional distress for me to do what would be just a tiny blip to them. 

So tomorrow I will deposit their check.  I have filed a claim with my homeowners insurance company, and I am hoping that they are more reasonable than Continental.  (A continental representative suggested I file a claim with my homeowners insurance company, and what was not covered by them I could deduct as a loss on my taxes next year).  Interestingly, one of the claim people at the insurance company said to me: "Most people don't realize that the only thing airlines pay for are lost clothes."  I hope the insurance company comes through.

What can I do now? Well, I can tell everyone I run into for the rest of my life that Continental lost my luggage and the corporation's policies made it impossible to find it again. And that their reimbursement policies are not even close to being fair.  And I can tell everyone I run into to never check anything in luggage that they aren't willing to lose forever.

I can set an example for my son, something that is actually truly important, and stop crying over the yellow balloon.  There is nothing I can do to get it back.  It is just gone.   

The quest for Mexican food, and another woman's loss

Since David is from California and I spent the last 12 years there, we are sort of jones-ing for good Mexican food. You know, not Taco Bell.  Our old neighborhood had many Taquerias to choose from.  Not so much here.  Here there are plenty of Italian restaurants, but they don't serve enchiladas.

So we've been searching for authentic Mexican restaurants -- the ones with good food and no atmosphere.  On Sunday we decided to try one that we'd found in one of our multiple searches of online Yellow Pages.

It was in a seedier neighborhood than the one we have moved to, and indeed when we went inside everyone stopped talking and looked right at us. We were the only white people there.  And the menu featured items such as cow's head tacos and cow's tongue tacos, along with some other less scary selections.  The refrigerated drinks case had Jaritos (or however you spell that Mexican soda)

We wanted to sit down and drink in the whole experience.  (After everyone realized that we knew what we were doing, they resumed their conversations and were so friendly and nice.)  However, Jack was in a bit of a state.  He'd been up late the night before for his Daddy's birthday party. And he hasn't been napping at daycare so he really had that sleep deprivation crankiness going.

David and I took turns taking him outside while each of us ordered. When it was my turn to order we realized that this would never work, so we got the order to go.

While waiting another white woman came in. She saw I was pregnant and asked what I was having. I told her a boy.  She said she'd had a boy a few weeks ago.  It seemed strange that she didn't have a baby with her.  She said everyone she knew was having boys.  She seemed relatively happy, but then said to me something like "watch out for the cops. they'll take your baby away."  And then she told me that social services had her baby because she'd been determined to be schizophrenic and borderline retarded.  She'd only been allowed to spend an hour with her baby since he was born on April 2. She said she had a hearing on Tuesday to determine whether she could have more time with him or get him back.

This is such a terribly sad story. I totally empathize with anyone who wants and loses her baby.  I don't know this woman or her baby, and I only know a very sketchy version of the events as she has explained them.  So I don't know what is best for the baby or for her.  But it broke my heart to see this new mom wanting her boy and not being able to be with him.

Our food was ready, and David brought Jack back into the restaurant. The white woman asked about Jack, and she looked very sad all of the sudden.  I wished her luck, and we were off with our Mexican food.  And I was immensely grateful to have my boys with me, (even though one of them was screaming in full tantrum form.)

U.S Supreme Court

I never imagined myself as a person who would terminate a pregnancy, especially after waiting so long to try for children and then having so much trouble conceiving.  So much trouble that we ended up using some of the most advanced procedures available, IVF with ICSI.  After so many negative pregnancy tests you don't really ever expect to see a positive one. 

But there it was, 11 days past retrieval (or if you prefer 11dpo or 11dpr).  And when the first trimester passed without a miscarriage, I actually started to get happy. I wore maternity clothes. I smiled a lot. The joy was back.

And then we got our amnio results at 18 weeks pregnant and they revealed that our precious little boy had Trisomy 18. We weren't sure if we would ever be able to get pregnant again, given the trouble we had conceiving at all. But we decided to terminate and we were glad that we had that option. We considered it to be disconnecting our fatally ill son's life support.

Aurelia and Cecily did an exceptional job today of explaining the issues and expressing the emotions around the U.S. Supreme Court's decision this week to uphold a ban on certain types of abortion.   If you haven't already been there, please take a look. 

It's eye drops, not heroin

I've been looking like a total stoner since I woke up on Thursday.  Back when I was in college it might have been acceptable to arrive at the various stops of my day with eyes as red as Mars.  But today as I drop my toddler off at daycare, go to meetings for work and am just 42 years old, it's just not so cool.

On Thursday I went to my primary physician hoping that she would give me some drops for the pink eye. Not only did I sit in the waiting area for 40 minutes before I got called in, as she saw people who arrived later than I did first, but when she did see me she told me the pink eye would probably go away by itself. I wasted an hour of my time for nothing. She said to call if it hadn't gotten better by Monday and she would give me drops.

So yesterday (Friday) I went to my regularly scheduled OB appointment, nearly a week after the bleeding drama began.  And although she was rushed because of an imminent delivery at the hospital nearby, my OB had enough time to check for continued bleeding (no blood in the vaginal canal right now) and OFFER ME FREAKING EYE DROPS!  Needless to say, I happily took them, got the prescription filled, and now I just look tired instead of like I am leaving a Grateful Dead concert.

Nonetheless, this cold still has me dragging. It's been a cold with lots of congestion, the kind that interrupts your sleep.  It has progressed to a stage that causes painful coughing fits.  All of this has me thumbing through my OB practice's little handbook about pregnancy, specifically what drugs I can take. They say sudafed is OK.  They say Tylenol is OK. They say Robitussen DM is fine. I've taken scanty amounts of the sudafed and tylenol so far, and only in my most desperate moments.

Which made me think of another thing about that period of time in the Trisomy 18 pregnancy between when I learned the diagnosis and the D&E took place. During most planned and wanted pregnancies women are painstakingly careful about what drugs they take for fear of harming their child. But after our Trisomy 18 was diagnosed the perinatalogist told me to go ahead and take ibuprofen (a big no-no in pregnancy). At that point in time, that limbo time, I felt like I should still be nurturing this much loved child with everything I had -- the right nutrition, the right self care, and no drugs from the bad list.  But on the other hand, everyone acted as if it suddenly didn't matter anymore.  That was a hard thing to reconcile. And I don't know that I ever did.

Happy for this quad mom, sad for another

A colleague of mine pointed out this story today about the birth of quadruplets and how it made her misty to see such a happy ending. She is a conservative religious person and also pointed out how the couple had turned down the offer of selective reduction and everything worked out.

I am really happy for this couple too, and happy that they were able to beat the odds and deliver their quads healthy at 33 weeks gestation. But I knew of another mom in the same town a few years ago who had also turned down selective reduction and lost her quads at something like 22 weeks.  And I kept thinking about how this story must make that other mom feel.  And how it must make the other moms who at one time had been pregnant with multiples but did not beat the odds.

[I'm not advocating selective reduction and am not advocating against selective reduction. I think it's an individual choice that individuals must make with the risks in mind. There are risks of continuing with high order multiple gestation, but there are also risks that go with selective reduction.]

Indeed, my reaction to the story was to think about how many women would read it and be sad. Not because they are bitter. But because they miss their babies. My colleague suggested that the emotions of grief can be “channeled for good things.”

No doubt this is true, but when confronted with a story of the loss of quadruplets, do you tell the mom about the good work she should be doing? I don’t think so. Instead you let the person experiencing the grief guide the discussion. I think that Melissa had an excellent post on just this issue today.

I should have stopped having the conversation with this colleague, who is normally someone I genuinely like, in spite of our religious and political differences.  But I didn’t.  I told her about some other moms I knew who had gone through horrendous losses — one whose IVF baby was stillborn. And her response was “don’t some women have to face that maybe they aren’t supposed to be a mother through biological means?”

This question was tremendously offensive to me. I stopped the conversation soon after that. And I don’t think my emotional response was just a side effect of the Lupron.

On its surface the question itself asks something that someone wonders in a straightforward way: Don’t some women have to face that maybe they aren’t supposed to be mothers through biological means? (something that some of us may eventually have to accept.) But it skips over the tremendous grief that comes with losing a full term pregnancy. It skips over the the feelings of loss of identity and physical and emotional inadequacy that come with infertility. It ignores the fact that many of us feel screwed or abandoned by the God/the Universe.

It’s like asking a cancer patient, well, why can’t you just accept that your body has turned against itself? Or an obese person: don’t you know you need to stop eating so much and exercise? Or an unconnected person: can’t you just accept your career is going nowhere because you don’t know the right people and you never will?   

Not useful comments.

Birth control pills and David's scary thing

News bulletin: I am more than half-way through my birth control pills. I took number 14 tonight. I have 12 to go. (OK, not as exciting as some of these crazy headlines. What's going on in this world lately?!)

But the potentially scarier news bulletin for us I think belongs to David. His mom got a call recently from someone who served with his dad in the Army Air Corps. David's dad's main assignment was search and rescue, but apparently he had another duty at one point. Somewhere in the late 1950s to early 1960s David's dad, the guy who called his mom, and a bunch of other guys served together and one of their jobs was cleaning up after atomic bomb tests were performed (great job, huh?). 

The guy who called David's mom said that ALL of these veterans have contracted some form or other of cancer.  David's dad was no exception. He was a colon cancer survivor before I ever met David. And then a few years after David and I were married, my father-in-law started to get sick again. But it wasn't a recurrance of the colon cancer. They couldn't figure out what it was. He was only diagnosed after he died. He'd had liver cancer -- a rare form, and it was unrelated to his previous colon cancer.

They had no idea what had caused either of these cancers then. In spite of an occasional cigar habit and a diet low in vegetables, my father-in-law was not an unhealthy person. But from time to time members of the family mentioned that atomic thing.

David's oldest brother died a few years after his dad did. He was never a healthy person. He had terrible childhood allergies, Tourette Syndrome (before anyone knew what that was), and the doctors put him on high doses of steroids. Later in his life he worked in a place that used lots of chemicals and developed chemical sensitivities. He was diagnosed with Osteoporosis and eventually was put on disability leave by his doctors. He died of a heart attack in his 40s.

David's sister was diagnosed with Ovarian cancer about five years ago. Although her cancer was diagnosed very early and treated promptly and thought to be gone, it came back.  She went through many rounds of life-disrupting chemo that didn't help. As a last ditch effort they also did radiation.  She had several surgeries, with the recovery from each successive one becoming more difficult.

A few days after Jack was born one of her old surgical incisions burst open and started oozing a foul smelling substance. She and I were in the hospital at the same time, but we couldn't visit each other.  People came to visit both of us and went back and forth from room to room. 

She was sad that she couldn't hold Jack the way he wanted to be held, in a standing upright position, even when he was a little tiny guy.  She didn't have the strength. 

She went back into the hospital around Halloween of last year with more problems with that old incision.  Stuff that wasn't supposed to come out of there was coming out of there.  She was scheduled for another surgery to repair her colon. The recovery from that surgery was the worst of any of them and she deteriorated from there. She came back home (she was now back living with her mom) before Christmas last year.  She died there at the end of February at the age of 44.

Anyway, didn't mean to give the whole extended summary. But I wanted to give a flavor of what a hard time it has been for David and his family with so many painful losses. 

David and his sister were conceived after his dad did the atomic clean-up, and some people have mentioned that the effects may be passed down to successive generations.  I have not yet heard this from a doctor (nor have I asked a doctor yet), but my acupuncturist commented on this.  And the guy who called David's mom mentioned it too. This certainly might be a cause behind David's sister's cancer.  There was not a previous family history of ovarian cancer and our genetic counselor at our CVS said that 40 was very young to have that type of cancer. 

And the atomic clean up also might be a cause for David's infertility. Now I am worried about David's health and want to find out about regular tests for him to take to make sure he is OK and stays that way. I'm a little scared about it.  And I haven't let on that I am scared to him because he gets more freaked out than I do. Not good in a crisis.

But he wonders about the infertility too, so I will ask some doctors and see what I can find out.  There is an organization, the National Association of Atomic Veterans that has information about health affects and how to make claims.  This is one of my new research projects.

From another blog: "The National Association of Atomic Veterans, Inc.
is a nonprofit veterans service corporation dedicated to assisting an estimated one million U. S. veterans, from all service branches, who were first hand participants in atomic weapons test detonations, from July 16, 1945 to Nov. 23, 1992.
Their exposure to ionizing radiation particles has caused severe health anomalies to themselves, and in many cases by genetic mutations of the reproductive process, to their children."

It's been kind of a dark week. Besides this stuff one of my colleagues was laid off and it was very painful for her and for the rest of us.  I am still in a state of disbelief over it.  And somehow we need to fill in for what she did, and we were already stretched to the limits.   Plus the whole IVF meds story.  I'll try to finish that one tomorrow.

Loss and the universe and endings

There's nothing like news like this to stop me in my tracks. This is so terribly sad. Just when you feel like the torture might be over and you may finally be catching a break, the joy gets yanked away.

I don't know how I would have handled it if something like this had happened to us after we lost Will. My heart goes out to this family. Why does it have to be so hard? And why does there have to be such a long string of hardships for so many of us?

I think that is one of the very difficult things about infertility and the pursuit of parenthood when you are childless -- you don't know when and how it's going to end, or if it ever will.  If someone could just tell you that in 3 years you will be playing in the park with your adopted child, or that in a year you will give birth to a healthy child, then you would know the happy ending will eventually come.  It would make it so much easier to endure today's hardships. But, speaking for myself, when these miseries are sprung on you as a horrible new surprise, killing today's hope, you feel as though the Universe hates you. It sucks sucks sucks.

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And this story makes me feel guilty about what we are about to do. We are on the precipice of a new IVF cycle in an effort to conceive what would become a second living child -- a brother or sister for Jack. It makes me feel terrible when there are people still waiting to have the first one and become moms and parents for the first time. I feel like through my greedy effort I may be snatching up the limited supply of success that the Universe is prepared to grant to the unlucky infertile. That there is a limited supply of babies to go around for us, and I am trying to take more than my share.

I also feel like people will think that I am somehow not unspeakably grateful for what the Universe has already seen fit to give me -- the most amazing, sweet and beautiful child I have ever laid my eyes on. Or as my mom said -- I've already hit the Jack-pot...

Indeed, my mother, who in years past sent me birthday cards with pictures of women with clocks on their bellies, has recently told me that I should count my blessings and be grateful for what I have rather than going off in pursuit of another baby.

After considering this remark I have realized that I already count my blessings every day. Every smile, every sideways look, every toe tickle, every giggle, every breath, every tiny pointed finger,every gleeful dance move from this now 15-month-old has the potential to move me to tears.

Julie, who has begun the injections for her new IVF cycle puts it well, saying: As we try for a second child, I feel more than a little greedy.

Like Julie, there is part of me that doesn't want to do anything to disrupt the balance that as been created since Jack brought the magic back.  Our lives had become a grief-fest, from infertility to advanced treatments for infertility to pregnancy losses, to bad prenatal diagnosis and then beyond all those things to the many deaths of people close to us over the past decade. 

Jack didn't undo those things, but he brought the joy back again.

If our new IVF cycle is not successful, that will be OK. We have Jack and he has made the world a beautiful place again.

But if I can, I'd like Jack to have someone to eat Thanksgiving dinner with after his parents are gone. I'd like to have another baby to cuddle and be moved to tears by. I'd like another chance at successful breastfeeding. I'd like to try for more of this amazing joy that Jack has brought.

Our chances of success aren't great. I'm older, and David's problems have worsened in the 2 1/2 years since the last cycle. But if we don't do it, I'll always wonder what might have happened if we had. 

There will only be one cycle here. What happens, happens.

Friendships forged in shared experience (infertility) -- what happens when only one of you is successful?

After David and I lost Will at 18 weeks pregnant, I felt like we would never make it to parenthood. Actually, it was worse than that. I'd felt like were were allowed to taste parenthood and then it was ripped away from us forever. 

During this time it was hard for me to be around babies. It was hard for me to hear about other people's babies. It was hard to see other people's success stories.

Don't get me wrong. I was very happy for people who had babies. Whether they were fertile-types who got pregnant on their first try, or whether they were like us and had to use the most advanced technology available to conceive a child, I was happy for them.  I was glad their dreams had come true. I would not want to take any of that joy away from them.

But it was really hard for me see them experiencing that joy. Whenever possible I tried to avoid it. I declined an invitation to a reunion with some friends -- even though I would have loved to see them -- because nearly all of them had new babies or new pregnancies.  Hearing about their babies and pregnancies made me spontaneously start to cry, and I didn't like to cry in front of other people.

I did go to a family reunion where I knew one of my cousins would be and she had a due date that was similar to what my baby's due date had been. And then when I arrived at that event, there was yet ANOTHER cousin who was pregnant with that similar due date. And there were babies everyone.  One small toddler who had had water on the brain was there, and was joyful and running around.  His mom said he was her miracle baby.  And I thought, I had a miracle baby, but he is gone. I spent a lot of time in the bathroom crying at that event. It was very very hard to be there.

I remember in the month or two after we lost Will I did a phone interview with a company for an article that I wrote, and there were a few people on the conference call. One of those people was telecommuting, and I could hear her baby in the background. She had no idea what had happened to us.

She told me how old the baby was, as the baby cooed in the background. THAT was a very difficult experience. I was trying to keep it together and be professional. But part of me wanted to tell her what had happened to me, so she might be more sensitive about sharing her joy in front of me.

You see, even though I didn't want to take away anyone else's joy, it was hard for me to see it. They were enjoying their dreams and mine had just been lost, perhaps forever.  Seeing their joy was a reminder to me of just how much I'd lost.

So when I got back on the roller coaster, doing the frozen embryo transfer (FET), and then became pregnant again, there was part of me also that did not want to display joy.  When my pregnant belly began to become obvious, I tried to be very careful about going into and leaving my acupuncturist's office. All her patients were struggling with infertility and I didn't want to make it harder for them.

And the same thing with the online community I belonged to.  I was very leery of sharing my joy in the infertility section of the site.

This is something that is very hard about infertility and infertility treatment that is not often discussed. While it is so helpful to participate in support groups, online or otherwise, those groups are eventually going to fragment.  That's because some people will be successful right away.  And while everyone else is cheering for their success, those who are still undergoing treatments are not in the same emotional place as the pregnant ones.  For some people it will take much longer than for others to achieve success. And the truth is that some people will never achieve success using assisted reproductive technology (ART) -- either IUI (intrauterine insemination) or IVF (invitro fertilization) or something else. They may go onto adopt or decide to live child-free. Two women may have become fast and best friends at the start of the journey. But their friendship may become a source of unbearable pain for the one who experiences a loss or is unsuccessful in her effort to have a baby.

While we all start on the path together, we eventually may take different paths.  And this is a part I hate.  My success is hard for other people -- who are still struggling with loss and infertility. Even if they love me and we had a great time together, we are in different places. They are happy for me, I know, but my success hurts them. Being around me hurts them. It sucks sucks sucks. Even though I miss them, I have wanted to minimize that hurt as much as possible.

So, knowing how hard it is to see success if you haven't been successful, I have struggled with the idea of creating such a personal blog that combines my stories about infertility  and my stories about exclusively pumping.  In my heart, I have been wary of drawing people here who are suffering through infertility only to find baby pictures and stories of the challenges of breastfeeding. I apologize to anyone who has found herself here and is feeling badly about seeing these things together.

At the same time I wanted to tell the stories about these very personal struggles. While they fall under different topics, they are part of the same long story to me -- my quest to become a parent and then to be a good parent. These are the most important and significant stories of my life. 

And if you have stumbled here, I hope you find them helpful or entertaining or inspiring or useful as you travel your own path.