5/25/2017 0 Comments One Year Blog-aversaryIt has been a while since my last update. I still don’t have much to report. Tomorrow is my one year blog-aversary. That is crazy to believe. I remember writing the first blog post thinking that it was probably going to be the last or only one I wrote. This will be my 66th post and I’ve had almost 26,000 visitors. That’s kind of mind blowing to me. I remember thinking that I was (hopefully) blowing this whole infertility thing out of proportion (as some of my friends had told me I was doing). Don’t get me wrong, I do have a tendency to get worked up over little to nothing. Up to this point in my life when something went awry it would quickly work itself out. But this…this has not quickly worked itself out. It has not resolved in the slightest. Things really have only gotten harder with each failure. I am definitely not the same person I was one year ago—for better or for worse. It is what it is.
Last week my therapist recommended a Dialectal Behavior Therapy group that was just starting up. The term “dialectical” “comes from the idea that bringing together two opposites in therapy – acceptance and change – brings better results than one alone.” This therapy was initially used in the treatment of people with personality disorders but is now a widely used therapy for mood disorders as well. At first, I was kind of taken aback because I knew it was used for people with Borderline Personality Disorder. I’m not sure why this was so stigmatizing to me. I don’t have BPD, but I’m certainly not managing my stress as well as I’d like. The module I’m participating in is distress tolerance. It’s supposed to teach you to deal better with ambiguity, uncertainty, and “thwarted life goals.” My life goals have certainly been thwarted. Can I really argue that I don’t need better distress tolerance? Definitely not. So I went. It was the most surreal thing I’ve ever experienced. If ever I’ve had an out of body experience my first DBT group was definitely it. I felt like I was in some kind of TV show. At least the group facilitator was not like Nurse Ratched. We started off by introducing ourselves to each other and telling about a high and low from our week. Some of the women shared quite openly which was somewhat shocking to me. The whole time I really kept thinking, “How did I end up here?” Everything the psychologist was telling us I already knew. I don’t do DBT specifically with my students but everything I heard was very familiar. So how did I get there? I’m clearly not using skills I already know about and teach to others. It’s kind of a weird situation to be in. Quite honestly it felt somewhat embarrassing. But I clearly need it. I went to my second class last night. It was much less surreal. The other ladies are not that unlike me. It actually felt somewhat helpful. 6 more sessions to go… Perhaps I will make it to radical acceptance. Yesterday I did get news that our donor showed up to her appointment and she will be starting her medications on Monday. Step one of so many more steps is complete. Her retrieval is tentatively set for June 9th which is my last day of school. My husband leaves for Switzerland June 1st. This will definitely be a long summer. Hopefully my transfer will be sometime in July. Today on my Facebook memories a quote from the book Wonder showed up and it seemed quite fitting. “So doesn’t that make the universe a giant lottery then? You purchase a ticket when you are born and it’s all just random whether you get a good ticket or a bad ticket. It’s all just luck.”
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5/11/2017 0 Comments May 11th, 2017It’s been a while since my last update. The last week and a half has been long…as usual. I think my emotions have been pushed to the brink this past week or so. My husband is leaving to go to Switzerland for three months soon. We had talked about me going to meet him for a couple of weeks, but I realized it just wasn’t going to happen. For the two days I thought I was going to be able to go I felt really happy. But of course… I realized the time I was going to go would be right in the middle of when we would be prepping for our transfer. I honestly still don’t completely understand the transfer process. But in June when I start my period, I’ll go in for an ultrasound on day 3 of my period. My period is normally predictable but sometimes it throws me for a loop. There’s no way I want to risk missing my ultrasound date. I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t be able to find someone spur of the moment in a foreign country to do that for me if something were to go awry. When I realized I couldn’t go I was pretty devastated. And that is a gross understatement.
I remember when all of this started happening I had to keep reminding myself to feel my feelings. Every day on the way to or from work I would just let them wash over me. I cried ALL THE TIME. Apparently at some point I was like “F*&! Feelings” and totally shut down. Perhaps it was because so many people kept telling me I should be grateful for what I have in my life or I should just be happy. Maybe my feelings were just too much for me to handle at such high intensities all the time. But somewhere along the way I really lost myself. When I first started therapy and my therapist would ask what kinds of feelings were present while we were talking, it was terrifying to realize I truly had no feelings about anything. The last few weeks I think I’ve started having feelings again and it’s so inexplicably bizarre how scary that is. How can you go so long without feelings and not notice? But today I am feeling pretty good. I’m giving myself permission to feel as okay as I can feel and I’m not going to judge myself for not feeling better. This week I hit a big milestone with my weight loss. I’m officially down 20 pounds since Christmas. When I did the progesterone shots my weight loss took a bit of a hit. I also realized in my haste to get ready for work yesterday I accidentally pulled a pair of pants out of my closet that have never fit me before. I bought them a few months ago online but they were too small and I was too ashamed to take them back. Now they fit very comfortably! This is pretty huge for me. Food definitely used to be my biggest self-medicating vice. Now I don’t feel like food controls me at all. That feels like a win. As far as updates go on this whole egg donor process goes… I have ordered all of my medications this week. I’m taking 9 medications to prepare for this transfer. That’s way more medications than I’ve taken before I think. I ended up having to go through 4 different pharmacies for these medications. Some of the medications they are prescribing are to reduce inflammation. Our doctor believes that the majority infertility cases may be caused by some kind of undiagnosable inflammatory/autoimmune response. It really seems like a very progress view point. Two of the medications were not allowed to be shipped from New York to Virginia because of some medication standards. So I ended up having to go through two different pharmacies in order to get these medications. One medication I will take just before the transfer so they are shipping that medication directly to the clinic. The other I will start before I leave home so I had to find a place that was able to ship to Virginia. Costco had several of the medications and were cheaper than the other pharmacies. Although some of Costco’s drugs were much more expensive so I had to rely on our old pharmacy called Mandells. Yesterday I got a call that one of the medications that’s about $60 was actually covered by my insurance and is only a $7 copay! He said he’s never seen insurance pay for that before. Tonight when I went to pick up my prescriptions from Costco, I realized my insurance picked up some of those as well! I'm still waiting on the two most expensive medications and I realized one prescription didn't get sent over. Glad I'm doing this way in advance. So our our meds have cost only $177! I think the others will cost about $475ish. That's a far cry from the $1500 I initially thought they would cost without insurance. So now we wait some more. Our donor is supposed to go in for her baseline scan on May 24th. Her egg retrieval will be around June 9th. Then I just have to wait to start my period and start my medications. I have a new favorite Doctor Who quote that almost sounded like it was made for infertility, "Hope is its own form of cruelty." |
Heather Joyce
Trying to conceive. Archives
April 2018
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