One Journey

~ ONE JOURNEY ~

~ There is only one journey: going inside yourself. ~
- Rainer Maria Rilke

La Vida in Vitro, Part 4 ~ Tuesday, September 16, 2008

The Crying Game

Well, there you have it. Close, but no cigar(s) to be handed out in approximately nine months or so.

Thanks so much, everyone who's been sending along good wishes and thoughts.

We're both pretty upset--though that's possibly an understatement. For me, I'm actually closer to being devastated. The part that we thought wouldn't work, worked. The part that I really did believe would work--no problem with implantation last time--didn't.

We had a pretty good clue last week, when the spotting I was experiencing (Implantation bleeding? Implantation cramps?) turned into a veritable tsunami, so to speak (i.e. not so implantation-ish). But, we wanted to get the official word, from the official pregnancy test, before we announced it.

So we're still dealing with the grief, the questions (is there anything that could have been done differently in the course of the entire procedure/protocol? Anything that could be tweaked, that would yield a statistically significant better chance of success?), and the next step. Going into this IVF, I had figured this was my last shot at the fertility stuff. My body, it seemed, just didn't want to get pregnant or be pregnant--as had been demonstrated and reinforced again and again over the past several years. But now that insidious grain of hope has been planted. If the thing that we didn't think would work, worked, then is there a chance that doing it again might, just from the perspective of probability, yield better results?

Hard to say.

So, I'm poised--torn between saying "got the message, thanks" to my body (this was one of the most physically painful periods I can recall having experienced, like that endometriosis was giving me the finger for having the temerity to try and sidestep all the damage it had wrought to my reproductive apparatus over the years and actually get pregnant)--and saying "nope, I think there's still a chance, and I"m going to take it"--and spending the $10,000 for another cycle, while keeping my fingers crossed.

Or, we could put that $10K towards the cost of adopting a baby. I believe a domestic adoption (if it's not through Children's Services) is around $10K. International adoption is even more.

But for now, it's time to grieve that possible path that hovered tantalizingly before me, before it suddenly reached a dead end. The one nice thing is that the other path remains open--I have almost a full-time roster of classes, and so at least, I have something to occupy my thoughts, rather than brooding, when I'm supposed to be trying to do some writing. Busy is often very, very good.

Thanks again, everyone! It's over and out, for now.

Labels: fertility, IVF