National Infertility Awareness Week, April 21-27, 2013

I've been so busy with work lately (I travelled to four different conferences, four weeks in a row, ending last week), that I kind of dropped the ball on blogging during National Infertility Awareness Week (NIAW), so I am going to commit to blogging every day this week (the week after NIAW), to continue the movement even after the big push is over.  In so doing, I also hope to promote awareness of the upcoming advocacy day next week.

In honor of National Infertility Awareness Week, I first wanted to share this video and increase awareness of Resolve, the National Infertility Association.  I hope all of my readers struggling with infertility have visited this site and taken advantage of the many resources available there.

A few quotes really stood out to me in this video:

1. We view infertility as a movement... [and] as a cause that people need to care about.
2. We want the government to view this as a disease and put... financial resources behind it.  It's a public health issue, and we want to see it taken as such.
3. Your resolution may be that you are child free... or... that you build your family through adoption.  Resolve stands for helping you meet that resolution... [whatever it may be].
4. I hope that we can raise awareness so that when someone is diagnosed with infertility, instead of hearing, "Oh, you just need to relax," they'll hear, "How can I support you?"

That last one is still a huge thorn in my side.  You'd be shocked by how many people STILL suggest that maybe we just need to relax when they learn of our struggle with infertility!  At first it was insulting and annoying, now it is so predictable it is almost funny.... or at least it would be if it wasn't still so painful.

A Return to Blogging

I am risen!  Today marks a return to blogging and chronicling my & B's story as we wade through a sea of infertility during our quest to start a family together.  This blog has been conspicuously dormant for the past four months, and very quite for another six months or so before that.  I have been having a silent rebellion against blogging and sharing my feelings with the world for nearly a year, and have finally decided to open up about what has been on my mind and hopefully get back into a regular routine of blogging again.  How fitting that I should make my return on the first day of National Infertility Awareness Week (NIAW), which is recognized April 21-27, 2013.  This first returning post will be my small contribution to the movement, though my busy work engagements this week will not allow me to be much more active than this until the week is over.

My hiatus all started with some comments from friends and family which were well intentioned or at least not meant to be hurtful, but made me feel bad in a way I didn't like, so I slowly stopped sharing my feelings for a while, since so many people who know me personally also follow my blog.  If this was a completely anonymous blog and nobody knew me, I could have shared my frustrations about other people's comments on here as an outlet.  But as it is, I was finding that opening up on here was leaving me vulnerable to painful comments and so I refrained from writing for a while.

Many have been asking me in person why I don't write any more, and looking for updates on our story.  Here we are, one year out from B's surgery and many are wondering if anything has changed.  

I may choose to blog later about the specific comments that made me think twice about opening up in my blog, but only so that people can understand how truly sensitive I am about this stuff and with the hope that it will prevent them or others from making the same mistake again....  or I may just keep silent about it forever because in the end, I know that I am over-sensitive to everything revolving around babies, motherhood, and fertility and nobody with whom I've shared my blog with has anything but concern and love for me, so why would I want to call them out on something that is really my problem anyway?

But for now, I will satisfy everyone's curiosity with an update on where we are one year post-surgery:

No changes.

B had another sample analysis taken a couple months ago, and there were no improvements to any of his counts.  He's pretty much right where he was before the varicocele repair surgery.  Which honestly, wasn't a bad place then either.  He's always been right on the edge.  Always on the low end of normal, or just low enough to be right on the outside of normal.  We always knew the surgery was a shot in the dark, since his numbers did not indicate that the varicoceles were definitively what was causing our infertility, but it was the only treatment we could consider that was covered by health insurance.

With that last sample analysis, we are now pretty much just biding our time until we can try to finance IVF in 2014.  We are always aware of our infertility, but we are barely even TTC anymore, since we don't have hope that the surgery made a difference and it has been technically four and a half years of trying on our own not working (three years of purposefully/actively TTC).  After a while, you just kind of lose hope and give up.  We know our plan is to try to find a way to afford IVF early in 2014, so the end goal seems tangible, like  a light at the end of the tunnel, like the end of this torture is drawing near, and makes each month that we don't get pregnant seem like less of a big deal than it used to be.  

Sometimes.  

Other times things hurt as much as they always have and I can't pull myself out of the pain and depression of wanting what is natural and my human instinct to have, only for my body to work against me and nobody can even tell me why.  

Unexplained Infertility is the worst.

One Year Ago Today

I got my period today.  It happens every month, so I shouldn't be surprised, though I'm never prepared for it.  I'm still always wondering if this could finally be "the month."

Kind of ironic that I would get my period today, of all days.

It was actually a year and two days ago that I started this blog, as I was trying to process the decision that B and I had made to not go through with our scheduled IVF cycle.  

And it was on this day, January 19, 2012, that there was no turning back from that decision, because it was the last day to take our insurance company's partner up on their offer to make good on the mis-advertised discounted rate for IVF on their website (see the tab in the navigation bar above for more information on this story).

After the 19th, they would no longer honor that price of five thousand and some dollars for a fresh round of IVF.  It was on this day one year ago, that we sealed the last nail in our coffin.

Had we gone through with it, and it had worked, I'd have given birth to our child in early October.  I'd have a three month old baby to care for.  I'd be just returning to work after my maternity leave.  Our dream would be a reality.

Instead we are left with empty shadows and fleeting memories of what our life used to be like before this nightmare of infertility, and the future we once hoped for and looked forward to.

Now we are in a constant state of limbo.  Never wanting to make too big of a decision, never able to commit to anything, never ready to give up, but finding it more and more difficult to hold on to hope, or at least it is for me.

How ironic that today, of all days, I would get my period.  Just another tickmark noting yet again, we aren't pregnant.

I suppose this could probably go without saying, but I'm not exactly handling all this today as gracefully as I would like.  But hey, tomorrow's another day, and it's just one day closer to the day we finally do IVF, or get pregnant naturally, or until whatever is meant to happen, happens.  

Tomorrow is another day, and things always look different in the morning after a night's sleep, yada yada yada.  I got myself a lovely manicure once I finally dragged myself off our recliner this afternoon, and that makes me feel pretty darn special.  And that's a start.  So I think I'll settle in for yet another episode of Breaking Bad on Netflix and a tasty glass Moscato wine (thanks Steph!) with my husband for the rest of the night, and in tribute to Scarlett O'hara, I'll worry about all the rest of it tomorrow. 

Did this 'New Girl' episode freak you out?

Did you freak out after watching this episode of 'New Girl'?  Jess was freaking out after her gynecologist friend broke the news that a woman can lose up to 90 percent of her eggs by age 30.  As cosmopolitan.com points out, Jess's panic session was funny—but do we really lose most of our eggs by age 30?

Dr. Lauren Streicher, assistant clinical professor of obstetrics and gynecology at Northwestern University
Eggs tells Cosmo that eggs "do age, but as long as you are ovulating and it's a good quality egg, it doesn't matter how many you've got in the bank." 

Dr. Streicher says egg quality is more important than egg quantity, a factor that just varies from lady to lady. We are born with about 100,000 eggs and we slowly lose them over our lifetime, but there is no magic rule that says egg count drops dramatically at age 30. 

"Even if you did lose 90,000 eggs by age 30, who cares?" she says. "You’ve still got 10,000. That's enough for 10,000 babies." Which would be about 9,998 more than a lot of us could handle! 

Well, that's all well and good, but sounds a little bit too simple and too good to be true.  So I scrolled down to the comments of the article.

A woman pointed out a study that was featured on abc two years ago: http://abcnews.go.com/GMA/OnCall/women-fertility-falls-lose-90-percent-eggs-30/story?id=9693015#.UMH6wJPjnIZ.

Dr. Marie Savard, a "Good Morning America" medical contributor, discussed a study which looked at the egg supply of 325 women of varying ages from the UK, the US, and also Europe and answered some frequently asked fertility questions for women.

The full study can be found here: http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0008772.

The most important point that the findings of the study shows is that women lose eggs a lot faster than was previously thought, and that by the age of 30, we lose about 90% of our egg reserves!

The GMA piece did answer the question that the 'New Girl' episode brought up for many of us about having your eggs counted. The answer?  It's not possible.  You can measure the size of your ovaries and test your hormone levels, but there is no way to know for sure how many quality eggs you have left.

What is the take away message of this study & news story?  Have kids earlier rather than later if possible.

I'm 31, and B & I are planning on doing IVF when I'm 32 if we are not pregnant on our own yet.  We started out on this whole infertility road when I turned 27, and started seeking help when I was 29.  When we started, I was still at a healthy reproductive age and by the time we hopefully get pregnant with ART I'll be entering the age of those poor women who "waited too long" to have kids.  Not fair.

I wish they didn't blame it so much on women's rights and career driven goals.  Some of us try to start at a younger age and still face these issues.  ART is expensive for most of us, and so we don't always have the luxury of jumping into IVF as soon as we find out that conceiving naturally won't come easy to us.

I can have a career and not blame my infertility on it.

This is how crazy I am

So Prince William & Princess Kate are pregnant.  I'm curious and my attention directly gets sucked into any news about their condition... and I should be happy for them like the rest of the world, but I'm not.

I always kind of felt like my life mirrored Prince William's.  My parents got married the same year as Charles & Diana, and I'm only about 9 months older than the first-born prince.  I got married about 10 months before the current Duke & Duchess of Cambridge, and I just hoped in my silly-little fantasy mind of mine that we'd get pregnant around the same time as the royal couple.

I don't wish the heartache of infertility on anyone, but part of me takes comfort when celebrities share their stories of infertility tragedy & triumph.  I'm glad the princess is NOT suffering from infertility, but if she was, like me, it would bring a lot more awareness to a growing problem in modern society.

If infertility wasn't such a stigma, and more people talked openly about it, and more became aware of it, maybe someday ART could be covered by health insurance and our pocketbooks wouldn't determine our eligibility to conceive and give birth.

Like I said yesterday, B & I need to move to a European country where this stuff is covered so I can stop projecting my own angst onto every celebrity, acquaintance, friend, and relative who gets pregnant.

Seriously, I'm upset about Princess Kate being pregnant (and announcing it at 8 weeks, that just seems cocky!)?  As the title of this post says, it just goes to show you how cray cray I'm really becoming.  Glad I can say these things here so I don't have to say them out loud!  Maybe there is something to that Dutch study about involuntarily childless couples having a higher risk of psychiatric illness... ;)

Meredith is Pregnant, Are You Happy for Her?

I've blogged about infertility themes on Grey's Anatomy before, in fact, I started watching the show again earlier this year (all 8 seasons, from beginning to end) just because I heard they were struggling with infertility.  I also learned about Derek's ex wife, Addison's infertility troubles on Private Practice at around the same time.

I loved the adoption episode, when Meredith says that they tell you when you're going through the adoption process that, "The baby you have is the baby you were destined to have.  It was meant to be."

To learn more about what Meredith & Derek's infertility diagnosis is, follow this link: http://www.wetpaint.com/greys-anatomy/articles/behind-the-medical-jargon-what-is-a-hostile-uterus.

Anyway, if I'm being honest, I have to admit that the recent turn of events, in which Meredith tells Derek she's 3 weeks pregnant really disappointed me.  I should be happy for her.  I should be rooting for a formal infertile sister who finally gets what we all want so badly.  But I can't.

I can't because it's not real anyway.  She is a fictitious character.  Although it comforted me that in her storyline the writers had her sharing similar experiences as me, and brought awareness to the struggle so many of us face, I feel that having her just get miraculously pregnant without going round after round of ART just isn't fair.

It's like they are just validating the bane of every infertile woman's existence, the comment,"if you just relax and stop trying so hard, it will just happen."

In fact, I'm so mad about this, I can barely get into it.

I see in the most recent episode Meredith needs to schedule her 8 week ultrasound.  I know how horrible this sounds, but I was hoping they'd have her miscarry again, but it's starting to look like they might go through with this and give them a baby.  If she miscarried again though, it would bring more awareness to what so many women go through in their quest to become mothers.  Getting our hopes built up so high just to have them all dashed without a moment's notice.

Yes, Mer miscarried once, but it was before she was even trying.  Then she tried for a few months, and they gave up and adopted Zola.  Now, they are magically back together, their house (which took them 8 seasons to slowly build and they got nowhere with it), is all the sudden finished and they are living in it with their happy little baby Zola.  And now they are surprised with an unexpected pregnancy.

This is not real.  And it's not fair to all of us who are not going to get this fairytale ending.  Have them go through a few rounds of IVF.  Show the details.  Show the heartache.  Show what it does to a relationship.  Then let something happen whatever way you want it to, writers!  But don't give this to them so easily.  It's a disservice to the beautiful work you started out to do in highlighting this plight that effects so many.

The previews for the winter-season finale lef us with a bit of a cliff-hanger, having Mer express her fear that she'll miscarry again and Derek giving her a concerned look.  So we'll see I guess.  I know I'll be tuned it to see this thing play out either way.

Childless Couples Don't Live As Long As Those With Kids?

On Rock Center with Brian Williams on Thursday night, there was a quick report about a Dutch study that was recently published in the December issue of Journal of Epidemiology & Community Health, which finds that childless couples don't live as long as those with kids.

Being the good librarian that I am, I did some research and found the original article, which turns out to be much more interesting than these popular media sources are letting on.

The study finds that childless women's risk of premature death (such as cancer, circulatory disease, and accidents) is four times higher than those who gave birth to their own children, and twice as high as women who adopt a child.

It also finds that men who don't become fathers are twice as likely to suffer from premature (or crude as the study refers to it) death than men who either have biological children or adopt (it's apparently all the same to the guys I guess).

The really interesting part that you have to dig into the original study itself to really find, is that this study also differentiates between voluntary and involuntary childlessness.

The nature of the study is inherently causes the researchers to look at this from the perception of the involuntary childless.... because their entire pool of subjects are couples undergoing IVF treatments!

The news media sources don't highlight this, but the other major finding of this article is not only that the involuntary childless don't just have a higher mortality rate, we have a higher risk of psychiatric illness too.  I can 100% believe this.

Interesting tidbit I learned from the article: In Denmark, couples must attempt IVF before they can adopt, and the government provides 3 free cycles of IVF!

B & I really need to move to Europe, A) so we can do IVF and  finally have a baby, and B) so we can apparently live longer and not go crazy :)