This vs. That

At first I thought I wanted a Yamaha FZ6R (top pic) which is considered (by whom I don't know) an entry-level sport bike.  Now, I like speed, power, and control.  However, when I sat on the bike I thought, "Wow, this is big.  I'm not feeling very comfortable on this."  I think I could have handled it but perhaps I'm not ready.

So, I moved on to a Yamaha XV535 (bottom pic.)  The picture version is a bit supped up.  The one I was looking at had a basic seat.  So, I have to be careful of the exhaust pipes which might burn my leg but I think this one will be OK for me.  The husband offered to test ride it for me tomorrow and if it runs alright we're buying it.  Oh, happy day.

And we'll all ride on OK

Here's my favorite picture from the San Francisco trip.  Hopefully, I'll get even better ones in New York.

Since my post about how terrible work had become, I made some significant progress.  Very long, complicated story made short and oversimplified, I'm on the verge of moving to a new section within the company.  Although, I'm unsure how much freedom the new boss will give me, it's a risk worth taking given how patently awful my current boss is.  

I'm in the market for a motorcycle.  I've wanted to ride for nearly a decade now and got my license four years ago but never practiced or bought a bike.  Now, I'm back on track and ready to hit the streets.  I saw an online listing from a woman seller.  She said she bought the bike about a year ago, and two weeks later found out she was pregnant.  I told my husband about this and he said, "THAT COULD HAPPEN TO YOU!"  I'm not holding my breath, just having other things to think about besides infertility is a wonderful blessing.  

Don't let stress get you down, ladies.  Get out there, do good, and have fun!   

When you're trying hard to be your best, could you be a little less?

I keep meaning to upload some pics I took in San Francisco but life keeps getting in the way.  I guess it's comforting to me that "Faith makes things possible...," JellyBelly, and I all got to CD 1 on pretty much the same day.  I woke up early for a big hike on Saturday and... blood.  The hike was actually a really great thing to do on CD 1 since I barely felt any cramps and the hard work took my mind off of the situation.

The husband and I have been getting along great for the past couple weeks (with a couple momentary exceptions.)  This morning however, he hit me with one of his favorite things, anecdotal evidence.  He loves to talk about the ONE couple he knows that couldn't get pregnant, adopted, and then got pregnant and had their biological child.  For my husband, this is proof positive that, "If people just relax, they'll get pregnant" and "If my wife will just relax, she'll get pregnant."

I've tried to debunk the relaxation theory here on my blog, but since my husband doesn't read my blog, he wouldn't know.  I do talk about this theory at home but perhaps its falling on deaf ears.  I took this from wikip.edia:

Evidence, which may itself be true and verifiable, used to deduce a conclusion which does not follow from it, usually by generalizing from an insufficient amount of evidence. For example "my grandfather smoked like a chimney and died healthy in a car crash at the age of 99" does not disprove the proposition that "smoking markedly increases the probability of cancer and heart disease at a relatively early age". In this case, the evidence may itself be true, but does not warrant the conclusion.    

Amen.

I explained this morning that scientific studies had been done on people much like me and I've posted that here and shared it before with my husband, and I have a 50% chance of endometriosis based on verifiable evidence on hundreds of women, not one or two or ten, two hundred and twenty-one.  Dr. Stige.n says I have an 80% chance but I didn't ask her the source of that number.

I'm trying not to make to big a deal about this but it really sucks when your husband is accusing you of being too tense to make a baby.  I have tried every trick in the book when it comes to sex during fertile time.  I reminded him that on Saturday, there was barely a blip in my good mood when getting ready for the hike.  I didn't cry, I put a tampon in, got dressed, ate breakfast, and drove off.  That's what a tense woman looks like?

Not that he mentioned it, but I had to do a self-congratulatory speech in dealing with asymptomatic infertility like a mature adult.  I've weathered a quack doctor in one of the poorest parts of L....A..  I've dealt with a jackass doctor who tells me things that are medically untrue.  I've worked out my treatment pretty much on my own.  I found the NaPro doctors by myself while my NFP teacher quits on me unbeknownst to me.  I've studied the evidence and not relied in one-off success or failure stories.  It's hard, really hard when you have to rely on yourself for affirmation.

Disappointment

As the one-year-wait was coming to a close, I spent lots of time planning how I would "do" a pregnancy.  I wanted to be the person that had it all together.  But, I wasn't at all sure how I would actually react since it had never happened to me.  For sure, I wanted to stick with my exercise routines and I watched over and over the video previews for pregnancy exercise video on Coll.age.com.  It's a site dedicated to home exercis.e DVDs.  I even picked out three I intended to buy when I got the positive result.

I still sometimes still look at the previews and really long for the day it's appropriate to shell out the bucks for purchase.  

Round Up

Laparoscopy is exactly seven weeks away.  I would be experiencing a lot of anticipation but New York City is two and a half weeks away so that's where my excitement lies.  I'm sure I'll feel different when we return.  I guess the hospital is excited since they called me for registration yesterday.  Dr. Stige.n assures me that I will feel well enough to return to work by the following Monday, which is my absolute goal.  The thought of abdominal surgery gives me the heebie jeebies, but I'm running out of options here.

Since I gave up charting, I feel as if I've reclaimed a large part of my mental health.  Less stress, less tension; those are very good things.  I'm on CD 28 today and don't have a clue when the peak day was.  My last cycle was 25 days and I've had a max deviation of six days on total calendar days (I'm losing it again.)  Either way, I'm not expecting anything.

I'm a bit discouraged that we're approaching a full year of TTC.  After a couple months, I was determined to jump on testing and any treatment.  Looking back not too far, all my testing fell within July and August.  It was a bit of a struggle to get my first two doctors, Dr. Douche and Dr. Bagg.ot to take me seriously.  They wanted to just prescribe Clomid and test for heavy metals, respectively.  What a waste.  But, after meeting Dr. Del.gado and Dr. Stig.en in June and July, we were back on track.

I really feel like parenthood is in God's plan for us.  Just have to be patient but still work on solutions.  

Work sucks (for more people than just me)

Several weeks ago, JBTC wrote a great post about her work situation.  I did a cursory search and can't seem to find that post but maybe she'll give me a boost and provide the link. ;)  Update: I found it!

It's no surprise that in this economy many Americans are unhappy with their jobs.  I'm hard pressed to think of anyone I know who's content with where they work and what they're working on.  And it hits every career segment.  I have Ph.D friends don't want to teach college anymore.  I have attorney friends that don't want to lawyer anymore.  I have people in service jobs that can't stand it anymore.  So, I'm not alone.

I get paid reasonably well and the benefits are quite good.  I don't feel totally robbed, compensation-wise.  I also have a lot of autonomy and freedom to do what I want. (I'm starting to feel guilty about beginning to complain.)  The director of my small management team does not hold team meetings of any kind.  I have to go way out of my way to understand what my colleagues are working on.  My director's director does not give any notice of meetings with clients, vendors, partners so we're typically pulled into meetings at the last minute with no time for preparation.  The last several months, I've been dropped completely from the biggest partnership initiative.  Dead dropped. (I don't feel guilty about complaining anymore.)

When it comes to the projects I do manage, I send regular emails with my recommendations, analyses, general interest stuff and 99% of the time, I get no response from anyone in the company.  Just typing these emails makes me bored stiff and feel like crap thinking that nobody cares.  Because they don't.

Last week, I asked my director's director to include me on key meetings that have something, anything to do with one of my projects.  He responded, "well, you know how busy my schedule is."  This comment was indicative of the kind of manager he is, a shitty one.  My work life is a joke.  But what is really getting me curious is what my annual evaluation is going to say.  It's coming up, I think this month and given I see my supervisor on average of three days a month and it's just to chit chat, he doesn't give me any work or ask me about mine.

I want and need another job.  Unfortunately, lots of other people want better jobs, being married to a man who makes more than me and has far more work experience than I limits my ability to move for a better job, and I live in an exurb where there aren't very many jobs, compared to a large city.

Wow, all this and it's only 10:20am. ;)  

We built this city on rock and roll

We're heading off to San Francisco tonight for a few days.  I haven't been there since 2006 and never with my husband so I'm very excited.  I also used to live there so it'll be fun to head back to the old haunts.  We'll be there at the same time with a friend who lives in our town so we've arranged to have dinner together on Thursday.  I wanted to find a nice place with great food, not expensive (since I don't want to pay someone's rent through their food), and not too pretentious.  I found an Italian seafood tappas place.  I read some reviews that the portions were very small and you had to order enough food to break your budget to feel well fed.  I also wasn't terribly excited because during my DC days, tappas were a total fad.  I couldn't go to a happy hour without them.

I told my husband about the place last night and I asked him if small portions would bother him.  He just looked at me, raised his eyebrow ever so slightly, and gently nodded.  So, I'm planning on leading the group to Pl.uto's, order at the counter, no reservations, and super good food.

UTI

I knew right before I woke up this morning I had a urinary tract infection.  I had a choice of three doctors to call and finally decided on Dr. Douche.  And boy, did he ever prove his nickname again.  Because I used to be a chronic sufferer, I always ask if the doctor can just call in the antibiotic without an office visit.  That used to work with Dr. Liz but Dr. Douche wanted me to do the whole nine yards, urine sample, the little talk with the doctor.

As I sat in the exam room thinking about how much time I was wasting, I decided to try and curb my obvious disdain for this guy and play the clueless ingenue.  But after he made his first statement, I couldn't help myself.  His opening line was, "You haven't been a patient of mine for very long?"  "Well, yes, I think it's been about 2 1/2 years."  "That's not very long," he said.  He couldn't care less that I am a UTI veteran and know virtually everything about treating it and avoiding it.  He then went into the standard medical monologue about what a woman can do to ease the pain or try to avoid this situation; cranberry pills, and Vitamin C.  To my surprise he neglected to mention urinating right before and after sex (which works for me, by the way), or avoiding alcohol, soft drinks, coffee, any citrus drink which I find can irritate my bladder more.  He talked me out of the standard sulfur-based drugs I've taken in the past and prescribed Macrobid.  Whatever.

And what took the cake was the following statement, "And no sex for five days.  You can get cute and creative but I don't want a penis bouncing up against that urethra."

Why do I trip and stumble?

I wrote an email to Afina this morning saying, "infertility is not good for my mental health."  I'm having some bad lows, which my last post can attest to.  I leave out the worst parts just so I don't embarrass myself further but suffice to say, my low moments are pretty low.  As the conception failures pile up, my hope for success goes lower and the feeling of hope draws me into an internal thought conflict of hope versus rationality.  When the rationality wins the day's argument, my mood completely drops.  It's not so much that I ask myself explicitly, "Why me?" or "How could I be so unlucky," it's a feeling of abandonment or being left behind.  I'm not praying in these moments and that shows a major lack of spiritual discipline, but my ego and what I thought things were going to be like, are ever present in those moments.

I'm starting to really regret the things I did before I got married.  I was very committed to the idea of preventing a potential pregnancy back then.  I thought it would have been bad all around, for me, for my family, and my future.  And I think I got led into believing that life and relationships were a particular way, and now I've found out it's not that way at all.  That I was out for myself and those relationships were there to serve me.  That my fertility would be there when I was ready for it.  And a (successful) married relationship is about as selfless as you can get.  It can be a hard adjustment for selfish people like me.  

And I, I don't, didn't think we'd end up like, like this

1. I want to say thank you for the prayer bouquet, ladies.  It's been terribly lovely to open Goo.gle Reader and see all those purple posters on the ladies blogs saying I might be a target for prayer.  For someone who only shares their feelings about infertility on the web :) it's very comforting.
2. Dr. Sti.gen is on vacation this week but I need to set up a phone consult with her to go over some questions about the laparoscopy.  
1. Shouldn't you do a pelvic exam to see if you can palpate any endometriosis? 
2. Did you see anything on the ultrasound images that looked like possible endometriosis?
3. My plan to play it cool didn't work out so well.  I'm not a saleswoman and I take no interest in being evasive in order to manipulate.  I'm not saying it doesn't happen sometimes, it just doesn't happen regularly.

I stopped charting this month but I know I'm at CD 13 today.  I've also stopped checking the mucus status several times a day, just noticing what's plainly obvious.  There hasn't been much there despite my still obsessive use of Fertile CM.  This morning, my husband tried to seduce me around 5am.  This was too early for me but by 6:15am, I turned the tables.

[Husband] Do you have stretchy mucus?
[Me] I don't know.
[Husband] (Becoming more insistent) How could you not know?
[Me] (Getting frustrated) I really don't want to talk about this now.

Later in the morning I was upset by comments that we shouldn't have had sex but worked on getting rid of the computer viru.s I seem to have downloaded on my home PC.  I swear sometimes I feel like I'm that character in the Joy Luck Club.  At this point, I was quite upset and just trying not to cry away the mascara I'd just applied.  I was trying to explain to the husband what not charting meant to me.  He seemed to believe I was still checking mucus.  So much for taking the relaxed approach.

My husband and I are the two most tense people in the world.  And we thought it was a good idea to marry one another. :)  So, it ended with him saying he was leaving for the day, and I didn't say goodbye for fear of just uttering the word goodbye would put tears in my cereal.

Tori Amos's record label must have put the smack down on YouTube users who uploaded her videos in violation of copyright.  This sucks big time for me since I find her songs a great comfort in times of trial and frustration.

34AA

I think that's my bra size, but since I only bother to wear one at work, church, and sometimes out in public, I can't really remember.  It was a revelation to find an article about lingerie for super small breasted women.  Everything they said in the article, I've said.  Yes!  I wear deep v-neck blouses with no fear of any inappropriate cleavage.  It's freedom!  I feel bolstered.  If you're petite in that department, too, you might find the article interesting.