I Ruined My Body

My guilt factor is sky high lately.  What if I hadn't had that surgery, what if I'd had another doctor do the such-and-such surgery, what if I'd had no surgeries at all?  What if I'd factored in my health first?

It's just overwhelming to live in constant pain, pain that's a direct result of (in)fertility treatments.  (Side note:  I feel like an imposter saying "fertility" treatments because I really only went through one medicated treatment cycle). 

When we were TTC, any guilty feelings were centered around what I wasn't doing:  not eating/drinking the correct things, exercising too much or too little.  I shouldn't have eaten that goat cheese! I probably killed my embryo!  Etc.  Or feeling wishing I had started treatments earlier.

I can't stop thinking lately about all the infertility-related choices I've made in the past few years.  I chose the crappy RE to do my initial IF workup.  Since the crappy doc suggested a laparoscopy to see how "messed up" I was inside (his words) and I didn't trust him to do it, I chose an outside endometriosis-specialized physician to do the surgery.  During the lap, the endo guy also did a hysteroscopy and said my septum wasn't large enough to be a fertility issue, and he didn't see any other problems.

Enter the good RE, who eventually found scar tissue in my ute and thought my septum was an issue after all.  Two surgeries later, my life was turned completely upside down by chronic pain.  I don't blame her surgical skills—I blame the damn balloon—but my life changed dramatically on 3/9/12.

I'm trying to forgive myself for everything.  For not seeing the good RE first, for not doing more research before I started having surgeries.  For trusting that any type of hysteroscopic surgery was minor.  After all, I'd had laparoscopic surgery already.  Why would I flinch at something less major than that?  It's like doing injectable IUIs after Clomid ones; eh, not that big a leap.

Now that my TTC chapter is closed, I can look at it as a whole and see the flaws and horror more clearly.  I'm not wrapped up in next steps and cycle days, which is AWESOME, don't get me wrong.  But reflecting on that period of time is rough, and I guess the TTC chapter is being drawn out in a way because I'm still physically feeling the effects of my treatments.

I feel like I've ruined my body.  I mentioned on my last post that I used to run half marathons.  Running was a huge part of my life throughout my 20's.  I ran 5Ks, 10Ks, and half marathons.  Before that, in high school and earlier, I was as dancer.  In my 30's, I took up yoga and practice almost daily.

That's where I was, physically speaking, on 3/9/12:  lean and mean from many hours of yoga.  I felt great when I practiced and was strong enough to do some pretty tough poses.  I was flexible for the first time in my life.

I can't even take a walk now.  I risked my body's wrath today by walking for about 20 min at lunchtime and I'll probably suffer the consequences this weekend.  I feel completely defective and it's embarassing to talk about; how do you tell your coworkers that you can't walk because your pelvic floor muscles are fucked up?  Who wants to say "pelvic" anywhere in the vicinity of work?

My body is mushy now and 5 pounds heavier.  My pants are getting tighter and tighter.  Surprising fact:  if you don't move around at all and keep eating as if you do, you gain weight.  I want to move.  I crave exercise.  I want to stretch and be flexible again and not feel my hamstring clamp up when I put up my leg while shaving.  I've tried stretching; I really have.  It turns out that your pelvic floor muscles are connected to EVERYTHING and hence EVERYTHING hurts to stretch.  Want to stretch out my pinkie finger?  Can't.  Connected to the pelvic floor.  My PT tells me to do what I comfortably can but not to do anything painful at this point, so I'm left with nothing to do except a couple of measly exercises she gave me.

So, to summarize:  my lady parts are fucked up because we tried too hard to get pregnant (see what I mean?  Impossible to talk about without getting into areas all sexual-like).  I hate my body and hate that I ignored the warning signs.  I already had pelvic pain before all the IF shenanigans started.  Why did I screw things up more down there?  Blah.

*****
Hmm, that was all over the place and not at all what I set out to write.  Funny how that works.

I'm tired of the headaches.  TENS helps with them so we're going steady again.  The headaches almost make me feel cross-eyed at moments, like I can't focus for a second because of the intensity.  It's really weird, but I can tell that the headaches are part of the neuropathic pain, and my doc concurred.  It's like the pain comes up from my pelvis (hate that word and must find a new one), through my core and spreads out in my head.  Caffeine and painkillers don't touch it.  Lyrica is pretty much the only thing that works, that and TENS.  I'm going through 9V batteries like a fiend.  It turns out that rechargeable 9Vs aren't as readily available or as high a quality as you might think.

In the interest of ending on a high note, I had a major victory today.  <drumroll> ...I did not cry at a coworker's pregnancy announcement.  I cried at her last one but shrugged off this one like a champ.  It helped that my pregdar went off big-time when I saw her this morning...it wasn't her body, it was her smug pregginess.  And I'm sure I will love the upcoming meetings when she will turn work-related conversations into something about her baby. 

But anyway.  No tears!  Victory! :)

Have a great weekend!

Holding Down the Couch

Welcome, February ICLWers.  It has been such a devastating week in the ALI community and my heart goes out to the bloggers who are experiencing losses.  The support and care you've shown to them really make me grateful to be a part of this community. 

You can find a brief subfertility/loss timeline on my right sidebar if you're new to my blog.  Most of our issues have to do with my uterus.  Recently, though, for the first time in 60-something charted cycles, I've become fully aware of my ovaries.  They tried to kill me this cycle.  It was my second cycle on letrozole and I got pregnant the first cycle, so I'd assumed the pains that first time around were (totally worth it) implantation-related ones.  Had the exact same pain this time, though, but for a much longer time, and this time I had zero chance of a little embryo implanting.  We'd found out post-letrozole but pre-ovulation that we had not yet optimized my uterine environment (that's doctor-speak for "needs more surgery, or at least more procedures"), so we opted not to gamble with trying this cycle.

For the past two weeks, it has felt like my ovaries had been replaced by angry baseballs of pain (they're probably smaller than that, but "angry golf balls" didn't sound right).  I feel ridiculous complaining about it when so many of you have gone/are going through IVF; I know I am not getting the Treatments gold in the Pain Olympics.  But it's sucked lately.  The only thing that eases the discomfort is lying down, so when I'm not at work, I'm on the couch feeling like a sloth and indulging my new Downton Abbey habit.

I'm excited to get my period today because it means the ovary pain will end soon.  I'm sure the period will be epic—hello, worst cramps ever (they're always the worst ever)—but at least it's a different kind of pain.  I'm tempted to try a lower dose of letrozole next time to attempt to decrease the hellish ovary pain.  I realize that might be crazy talk, because my doctor says this dose works well for me: nice follicles, progesterone of 22, and, of course, the fact that I got pregnant on it before.  However, the thought of going through this madness again with only a 10% chance of getting pregnant each cycle drives me to despair.  Then I feel guilty about not being willing to submit to two weeks of pain and slothfulness for a possible pregnancy.  Will have to discuss further with my doc.

My next hysteroscopy is March 9.  I'll start taking testosterone tomorrow to thin my lining for the procedure.  Can't wait to take a new hormone, and a male one at that!  My random black chin hairs do not need that kind of encouragement.

My doctor sounds optimistic that she won't see scar tissue next month, but I don't know how much of her talk is just to keep me from feeling hopeless before the procedure.  By giving me hope, I'm trading being depressed now with being depressed later if she unexpectedly finds more scar tissue.  Hope can be brutal.

Between watching TV and chatting with my fertility clinic almost daily, you might wonder if I have time to fit in anything else.  I've managed to fit in a few social engagements, which has been a mixed bag.  Lately, more than ever, there are tons of coworker pregnancy announcements, lots of "I understand such-and-such because I'm a mom," complaints about kids, etc.  The good parts of being social are still outweighing the bad, but the emotional fall-out afterward has been intense.  I don't want to isolate myself like I did after my first miscarriage, but I feel so powerless in the face of "Let's compare labor stories!" and "OMG nursing is soooo hard!"  I completely lose the ability to change topics.

In baby-obtaining news, my husband and I have been fantasizing about convincing his brother to hand over baby #4 to us.  We'd start small, asking for just a weekend here and there.  Eventually, we'd "babysit" more and more often and brainwash the baby into thinking we're his parents and he wouldn't want to go back.  That should work, right?  Baby #5 is coming this summer, so I'm sure the parents will need our childcare services soon.

I received a funny message from an infertility nurse last week.  She left me a voicemail saying that she couldn't answer my question, so my doctor would call me later.  The nurse seemed to be irritated that she'd gotten my voicemail and said, "Please be available when the doctor calls you back."  She didn't give me a specific time or range of times to be available, so it felt like "Don't go to the bathroom, drive, attend meetings, or otherwise live your life until your doctor finds a moment to call you back."  No one would be more thrilled than me never to miss calls from their doctor, but come on.

Still Benched

My hysteroscopy yesterday dealt us another setback and I'm feeling numb. 

My husband dropped me off at the clinic 30 minutes early because he had a work commitment he couldn't get out of.  I told my sister to come pick me up around 10:30.  That's kind of how it is these days.  Get a ride from whomever is available, go home, sleep it off.  Repeat.  Procedures and anesthesia seem to be my new normal.  My uterus has been poked around in five times in the last 6 months, three of those with anesthesia. 

So having one or two more procedures in the next couple of months won't make much of a difference, right?  Yeah, right.  Waiting for just an opportunity to conceive has become really hellish.

My doctor removed a little more scar tissue yesterday.  She hesitated to call it scar tissue, like maybe it wasn't quite bad enough to fit that criteria, but I'll call it that for lack of a better term.   One area in the upper left corner of my uterus just doesn't want to behave.

I need to have another hysteroscopy next month to make sure it healed.  My doctor gave me the option of trying to conceive this month, since my follicles are rarin' to go after taking letrozole, but I can't.  I told her I'm not in a gambling mood.  If scar tissue puts me at risk of miscarriage, why would I risk it?  I'm desperate but not reckless. 

My procedure next month will need to be performed at the surgery center instead of the clinic.  My doctor wants to have access to special surgical scissors in case she sees more scar tissue.  If she does remove more scar tissue then, she'll insert a balloon afterward to promote healing.  Then there was something about removing more of my septum so that the balloon is more effective, something that didn't make total sense in my Versed/fentanyl haze.  She's going to call me today to discuss it further.  Oh, yeah, and I would need to have yet another hysteroscopy in April to check out the healing.

In addition to the whole waiting thing, which SUCKS, I'm not psyched to go to the surgery center again.  My surgery in December was there and while everyone was super nice, it was quite a process.  Lots and lots of instructions and phone calls before the surgery, hard-core anesthesia that required a longer recovery, and an audience of anesthesia people, surgical nurses, and random people off the street who wanted to see my freakish uterus up close and personal.  I much prefer feeling less like a circus act at the clinic with just my surgeon and one nurse in attendance.

My husband wants to do another letrozole cycle next month in case everything looks good at uterus imaging session number 252.  I was on board at first but am not feeling it anymore.  First of all, I have zero hope that my uterus will look stunningly clear.  Its track record lately isn't very good.  Second, letrozole isn't a walk in the park.  Taking it makes me giddy with hope, and I'm just not willing to be let down by an aborted attempt like this month.  Not to mention the side effects.  They admittedly don't get bad for me until the last day of taking it, but at that point my fatigue becomes crushing and I almost start crying in the produce department because I can't find my husband.

I'm pretty devastated.  I knew we might not be able to try this month, but holding onto hope that we could was keeping me going.  Two or three or four months isn't a long time in the scheme of things, and when you aren't the one going through it, it's really not.  But when it's your life and your body, it feels like it will never end.  In the next few months, I'll turn 35, lose my opportunity to have a 2012 baby, and possibly get closer to losing my mind.

I have to say, though, you guys are helping to keep me sane.  Your support has been tremendous and is making such a difference in my life.  I am enjoying getting to know each of you.  Thank you!   

Missing Filter

I'm blaming it all on the hormones I'm taking.  If they aren't to blame, who have I become?

I'm having trouble holding my tongue lately.  I just blurt stuff out.  Although this characteristic is sometimes seen as "just being honest" or "telling it like it is," it's not a quality I want to develop when the "honesty" is an expression of anger.  Particularly, when that anger is expressed at work.

So when I'm forced to interact with coworkers who turn every conversation into one about their babies—how do they transition that quickly from the Super Bowl to babies?—I'm genuinely concerned that I'm going to blow my carefully maintained workplace cover as someone unconcerned about having kids.  My irritation level is maxed out lately with supplemental progesterone and an upcoming treatment cycle, and I'm quickly losing the ability to coo for an appropriate amount of time over how cute their babies are. 

The progesterone baddie in me yearns to educate them.  To let them know how their constant baby talk feels to someone like me.  To tell them that I don't really want to know that they're about to try for #2 because I'm sure they'll get pregnant again quickly, just like they did right after my first miscarriage, and at this point I'd rather be hit with surprise pregnancy announcements than spend months worrying about impending ones.

My secret seems to be safe so far.  But once I start taking letrozole next month, watch out.

Note:  I wrote this post last week and I'm pleased to report that my irritation level seems to be decreasing.  I think.