Just say no to bad juju

I’ve been asked several times how I’m doing since my Twittersplosion of despair and humor and my subsequent gushing blog entry about my husband on Friday.

Since I know (though I can’t fathom why) many of you care (and if you’re reading this and don’t care … um, you’re interesting), I felt obliged to dedicate a new entry to just that very question.

How am I doing?

I am fine and dandy, thanks for asking!

Go ahead and breathe that sigh of relief. I promise, I am fine.

Sure, I fell apart on BFN day (that’s a big fat negative to those happily ignorant to such lingo), but I strongly believe in keeping the negative energy in the negative cycle and focusing on positive energy for the next hoping-to-be-positive cycle.

For those of you giving me the side eye, I will admit to having a stumble or two in that quest. One of those such stumbles came Sunday, when my good friend was a big, fat jerk and made me cry.

(Laura, I’m totally joking. I love you, and I’m not at all upset that you made me cry.)

Laura asked a simple question: How long have you and Rob been trying *really hard*?

The answer? Four cycles. Four measly cycles. One BFP that ended in an early miscarriage and three BFNs.

Laura’s question made me cry because she asked when we were discussing possible next moves in my quest to conquer infertility. Basically, we’ve got this current cycle, then we are meeting with our RE to discuss where we go next, and I don’t know if that will mean we can continue our current attempts or our doctor will recommend IVF (which I’m not sure we can afford right now). The other two extreme options are birth control or adoption.

To be perfectly honest, Rob and I haven’t seriously discussed more aggressive measures to grow our family (or giving up). It just hasn’t felt appropriate yet, while we’re trying so hard to avoid that (even more) difficult decision.

But it hit me, looking at my friends’ faces, that we may be forced to make a Really Big Decision in the next couple months.

And we’ve only been trying to conceive four measly cycles.

I quit birth control with some suspicion that I’d have difficulty conceiving. I charted my cycles and learned before we even threw the TTC switch that I wasn’t ovulating. We decided to try for a baby a few months before it was physically possibly for that baby to be made. Because I don’t ovulate, there is no trying without medical intervention.

I’m not sure if I would have preferred some time of ignorant hope, relaxing and trying to conceive the old-fashioned way. I suspect that would have hurt just the same. I’ll never know that because I chose to educate and arm myself with all the ammunition I could carry, and, in doing so, I’ve considerably shortened the life span of our attempts at conceiving.

In some ways, I feel like I’ve gone down the wrong pipe and warped to a really scary Mario level. I’d like out now, thanks.

(I’m quite aware that miracles happen, and you never know when some unexplained thing can happen to a person’s body. If I drop down to 120 lbs., I might magically ovulate. If the stars align, I might ovulate. If I sacrifice a virgin nerd, I might ovulate. The thing is, I don’t know how to measure “If … might,” and I’m not about to put all my infertile eggs in that basket. Yet.)