Post IVF Cancellation

I am profoundly unhappy. 

Last night was my support group meeting. I love that group because everyone there is screwed, too. Not as much as I am but not the ‘Woe is me, I only got 12 eggs at my retrieval’ crowd in my online groups. I may need to take a break from those. 

While looking up a chromosomal inversion that one of the women in that group has, I went down a rabbit hole of the blog of a woman (who does not have this inversion) who went through 7 IVF cycles and 8 miscarriages to have her one daughter. And I’m thinking, is that worth it to me? Her successful cycle, like so many, was at Colorado Center for Reproductive Medicine. How do people get the time off work to go there? (I could go to NYC). She never even had cancelled cycles, though. 

Oh yeah, cancelled cycles. 

This month we’re trying timed intercourse again. (The only way to get me to use the horrifying phrase “baby dance” is if that utterance were guaranteed to produce a take home baby.) I’ve been faithfully wearing my Ava tracker and dipping five ovulation test strips into cups of urine every day to catch my 3 hour luteal surge and I think I ovulated yesterday. Cycle day 24. From what I’ve read, eggs that ovulate that late are damaged and so is a lining that old, but we’re actually at a point where this has a better chance than assisted reproductive technology. So I’m drinking this cycle’s last cup of disgusting raspberry leaf tea. 

I’ve been avoiding my best friend because we didn’t go away for her birthday because it was in the middle of my cycle that never was, and she texted me this morning to ask if I’m okay. Just knowing she cares, I became so weepy and sad I realized, I’m not okay at all. 

In real life I tend to turn everything into a joke. I’m that woman who can joke about her own miscarriage. But it’s not funny. Or I try to pretty it up by arranging my meds in cute bins and taking pictures of needles with flower printed cards. But it’s not pretty. 

I am doing one thing that makes me happy, though. I’ve started knitting again. I’m a serious knitter but I almost completely stopped after my ectopic in 2014. I’ve knitted things since then, but I went from knitting daily to knitting maybe two small items a year. During my first pregnancy, the cervical ectopic, I started a baby blanket in some crappy acrylic that I liked. Under duress in the hospital, I made several mistakes in the blanket. It then sat in storage for years, moved twice with us, and finally came back out last week. 

I ripped back past the errors and started knitting again. I left the beginning, the part that was knit with hope for my first pregnancy, and now I’m finishing the rest for my first baby. Here it is, less than 1/5 complete (with a little cat butt photo bomb).