Status Quo

While on the subway on my way home yesterday, a pregnant woman was standing in front of me, my eyes at the level of her belly (she had declined a seat), and I didn't feel like I was going to cry. Now that is progress.

Also, because I wasn't in burst-into-tears mode, I called my brothers to tell them. Of course, neither of them were home so I told my sisters-in-law. But that ordeal is over with. Everybody was being so positive, which is nice. We are very hopeful, at this point, and feeling a bit better, but it is still a loss to have to use fancy modern medicine to conceive. I am still grieving over losing the natural process of conception.

Conceiving a baby is a very intimate thing. It has now gone public. Not in the sense of this blog being posted here for everyone to see, but in that the process of creating this life now has to involve poking and prodding by professionals. I don't know much about the IVF process as of yet, but we have to go see doctors, I have to have ultrasounds to see when they're ready to extract the eggs, then there is the actual extraction procedure. Then comes the fertilization which is done in a test tube in a sterile environment. Then they have to grow in the lab. Then they take one cell and look a the chromosomes and find if any of the embryos have normal ones. Then there is a procedure to put 2 or 3 embryos into my uterus. Then there are more ultrasounds to see how implantation and growth are going. There will be several people in the room for most of these procedures.

Now, if I end up pregnant and we have a baby, this whole thing will be competely, utterly and totally worth it. We will be lucky. I am not denying that. I am happy that right now I feel like there is a chance that this can go just like I described above. However, having to do it this way is still a loss for us. This is a new idea. We just learned this about 2 weeks ago. It's an adjustment. And though it feels like we will have a baby at the end of all of this, I am still sad that the "normal" process of doing this is lost.

So I'm hoping to start thinking about other stuff sometime soon. Which, unfortunately, includes biostatistics. But I'm going to do it, damnit, and then it will be done. Then I can work in the garden, sew some curtains for the house, finish the shrug I am knitting and do more stuff I like to do.