Torrefaction

I've ridden my bike 5 miles a day for 7 days now...and went to the gym this weekend...and my weight's still climbing.  I've gained 10 pounds since this time last year and 4 of those pounds have been in the last couple of months.  And it all seems to be in my ankles!  Yep, I've got hellacious edema and the online advice says stuff like "avoid sitting for prolonged periods."  Since I spend all my time in front of a computer, and will have to continue doing so if I want to go on making a living, that's not helpful.

So I'm continuing with the exercise program because I need the energy and mood boost anyway, and I have hopes that after a few more weeks I'll see some results.  In the meantime, though, I'm going off of the Camila.  It's helped a bit over the past year, but not miraculously like the Ortho-Tri, so I've still missed a couple of days of work because of The Ow. And it's shortened my cycle to 3 weeks instead of 4, so thats (calculating)...4 extra periods a year...FUCK!  FOUR?  Well, screw that.

I'm not sure what I'll do about pain management, but I'm sure some spammers will be along soon to post comments with drug suggestions.  I have my OB/GYN checkup in a couple of weeks so I'll talk to her about it then.

Oh - Camila's a mini-pill, so there's no "break week."  If you stop taking the regular pill in mid-pack, you'll get your period immediately, so keep that in mind if you're thinking of quitting the pill. 

Posted by alchemist at 09:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

My first attempt at NaNoWriMo was a bust, although a few good things came out of it.  I did find a couple of quiet places that I like to sit and write...and I found that I can force myself to write a little bit even when I'm completely stressed out.  The family medical situation is still lingering, three divorces are underway among our circle of friends, my new job is still a source of confusion to me as I try to figure out all of my new responsibilities and hand off my old ones.  But at least I'm not working on our dossier any more.

It was Christmas last year when we had to admit we were beaten, and that we were going to have to set aside the (failed) notion of getting pregnant in order to treat my ever-worsening menstrual cramps.  After years of TTC it was a relief to throw myself into the adoption process.  But now the main part of the process is done.  In about a year I'll need to get an updated home study so I can get a second I-171H when the first one expires, because the total wait for a referral will probably be 2 years or so.  So I'm in limbo now, and I'm trying really hard to see it as a nice break from thinking about baby stuff.  Yes, I still have tasks to do like painting the baby's room and buying furniture, but there's no hurry.  I'd rather open the door of that room and think "jeez, I really need to paint that," than see a finished nursery with no baby in it.  I had enough of that with the room (now our guest room) we originally painted for the baby I never got pregnant with.

So soon it'll be a new year, with nothing baby-related to do all year long. No morning pee tests, no ovulation predictor, no social worker, no blood draws, no medical techs, no financial reporting, no notaries, no paperwork.  What the hell am I going to do with myself?

Posted by alchemist at 11:08 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

You know how some clothes just make you look pregnant?  Particularly if, like me, you're over-supplied in the boob department?  Well, I had a few of those tops tucked away--when I did a wardrobe culling a few years back I decided to save them for wearing when actually pregnant.  Except, well, infertile.  So today I gave them to a pregnant friend.

Sigh. 

Posted by alchemist at 05:17 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The lovely Manuela over at The Thin Pink Line has something very exciting happening.  Go post an encouraging comment!

Her latest post is about infertiles who become pregnant without (apparent) intervention, and all the dumb comments that invariably ensue.  It got me thinking, and I came up with this analogy:

Fertile people go to the ATM to get cash. Infertile people go to the slot machine. It's not impossible to get cash out of it, but the odds are really against us. If you hit the jackpot, fertile people will say, "see, I told you if you did it like I did it, it would work for you," and will share all the info about how their "system" works. But the ATM doesn't require a system...whereas the slot machine is designed to SCREW YOU.

Some people pour their life savings into the slot machine, and eventually hit the jackpot...or not.  Others may find a quarter on the floor on their way out of the casino and get lucky on that one last try. But no matter how many lucky people you see or hear about, you should know that it's NEVER going to be the same as the ATM.  And just like a slot machine, there is no system that can beat it...only luck. 

Of course, thinking about this got me thinking about how to extend the money analogy to cover adoption. And what popped into my head is: since the ATM doesn't work and I can't afford (emotionally anyway) to play the slots, I'm robbing the casino!

I know, I know, it's a terrible, insensitive, non-positive-adoption-language analogy.  But I feel pretty guilty about benefitting from another woman's loss (and a child's loss).  And in the movies it's always a glorious thing, when they open the vault and find all those stacks and stacks of lovely money.  It's better than any jackpot...but ethically questionable.  So the analogy works for me, at the moment anyway!

Posted by alchemist at 05:57 AM | Permalink | Comments (6)

Well, my golden idyll of little-blue-Pill-taking is at an end.  It was going so well...manageable cramps, no particular side-effects.  Except.  Today I had my yearly pap & pelvic exam and my blood pressure rang the bell at 148/98.  SCREECH!  I was a little stressed from seeing a different doc than usual, but nothing so bad as to justify my ridiculously high diastolic number.  So she took me off the Ortho-Tri-Lo, weep, weep.  In a couple of days (she said I could finish the cycle) I'll start taking the mini-pill, which is .35 mg of progestin and no estrogen. 

The main side effects of going progestin-only are:  possibly not getting any period at all (rock!), or getting weirdly timed periods or irregular bleeding (lame!) .  And, of course, possibly getting pregnant - if you don't take it at exactly the same time every day your chances go way up.  Just mentioning that in case some of you reading this are NOT infertile.  I'm, well, not particularly worried about that side of things.  The plus side is that it doesn't affect blood pressure or cause most of the other bad side effects of the pill.

I had a little pity party for my fat hypertensionated self, because I had been so happy to finally have a solution to my hell periods.  But now I'm somewhat cheered up again, after a really good sandwich from Panera (note: bad news seems worse if you're hungry when you're getting it).  Optimistically hoping that the stronger dose of progestin will make my cramps totally go away...as opposed to making my sex drive totally go away! 

Posted by alchemist at 04:13 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Warning: contains discussion of my period!  12-year-old boys beware!

Ok, so back in February, I went on the pill.  I have always had bad cramps, and the older I get, the more they move from causing "pain" to "horribly, ungodly, debilitating pain."  Maybe this is endo, maybe my hormones just hate me, etc etc.  Part of why we decided to stop TTC was that it meant I could return to the one thing that had, in the past, helped my cramps - the pill.

Ortho makes three pills that I have personally tried.  The first one I took, back in my late 20's is a single phase pill called ORTHO-CYCLEN.  Single-phase means that all 21 of the "active" pills in the pack have the same dosage, which is this case is .025mcg of norgestimate (the Progestin) and .035mcg of ethinyl estradiol (the Estrogen). (I am going to get ungodly amounts of pharmaceutical comment spam for this!)  The single phase pill, back in the day, totally got rid of my cramps, reduced my normally 5-day period (3 heavy 2 light) to 2 and a half light days, and cleared up ALL of my acne.  It also totally killed my sex drive, put my blood pressure up to 160/90, and made my normally roller-coaster-like mood swings go away to the point that I felt like a walking corpse.  So eventually it wasn't worth it and I went off it.  The changes to my period persisted for a while, with my cramps getting gradually worse/back to normal over the course of about 3 years.  (does that sound like endo? does surgery actually help?)

So, for this go-round, I decided to try the Ortho Tri-Cyclen, which is tri-phasic.  This means you start with a week of "low" dose pills, then go to a week of medium dose, then a week of "high" dose.  BUT: the estrogen stays at the same level for all 21 days of active pills.  It's just the progestin that changes, from .015 to .020 to .025 mcg.  You can google up the various side effects of the two drugs, but in a nutshell, estrogen causes most of the bad side effects (blood clots, cancer, nausea, loss of desire).  So, I took OTC for a month, and my blood pressure shot up to 160/100, with shakiness, headaches, weird pains in my legs (probably imaginary).  Also it made me so nauseous I missed work one day and had to start taking it with dinner (so I could feel ill in my sleep) instead of in the morning.  And my cramps were improved, but not gone by a long shot.

I stuck with it for the first month and then switched to Ortho Tri-Cyclen Lo, which is new and therefore has no generic equivalent, so costs $44 bucks a month.  The "Lo" means that the estrogen is at .025mcg instead of .035mcg - otherwise it's the same as OTC.  This difference of .010mcg is apparently why the actual pills are about HALF the size of the OTC pills - they're so teeny weeny that I can't push them out of the blister pack using my fingers; I have to use a pen or a spoon handle.  Thanks, dumbass Ortho marketing people. "Let's make the pill REALLY SMALL so people know what a TINY dose they're getting!"

Other than that, it's doing a very good job.  My cramps are still bad, by normal standards - I have to take about 12 advil over the course of the first day of my period, and about 6 on the second day.  But if I stick with the advil I'm able to have a fairly normal day - i.e. I can work.  The worst periods before we stopped TTC (which may have actually been early miscarriages), I took 12 advil before lunch and then had to switch to vicodin, and even then all I could do was lie on the couch.  Also, since the pill gives you a totally predictable period, I've managed to nudge my schedule a bit so it always starts on a saturday, so I can just plan to stay home that day if I want. 

It's not the spectacular result I was hoping for, but I'm pleased with it because on the OTCLo, I have almost no bad side-effects.  My blood pressure is normal (for a fat 38-year-old, anyway), my period is 5 days (2 heavy 3 light), my moods, which have evened out with age anyway, are just enough up and down so that I feel like ME, but overall I'm cheerier and less prone to blue days.  Also I'm a lot less anxious and stressed, and I have way more energy.  This may just be because I'm not TTC any more so I don't feel like I'm carrying the weight of my failed womanhood around with me all the time, but I suspect the hormones also have something to do with it.  It also has helped clear up my skin.  Does this mean I do NOT have a zit on my chin right now?  No. Damn. I still get zits, but not as bad and not as often. Oh well, can't have everything.

What else?  Well, I haven't lost any weight but I haven't gained any either. Oh, my sex drive! That's been a net gain, actually.  I've always had peaks and valleys throughout the course of any given month and being on the pill seems to make the valleys a bit lower.  That is, instead of being too tired/busy/stressed for sex on some days (pre-pill), it just doesn't even occur to me to think about it, some days (on-pill). The peaks are probably a little lower too.  But because the pill/getting off the baby wagon has made me more cheerful and reduced my anxiety, I'm more likely to be in the mood for sex on the days when it does occur to me to think about it.  Also, I have more energy overall, so I've just recently started exercisiing - lifting weights and riding my bike - which does help to increase desire. So I'm getting laid a little more and expect this to continue to improve as we get back to the "hey, this is fun" type of sex instead of the "we must be doing it wrong! this'll never make a baby! hurry up! the computer says we've only got 20 minutes left!" type of sex.

So, the overall verdict:  OTCLo has made my mood better, my energy better, and has not made me sick or miserable in any of the usual ways pills do.  It has not eliminated my cramps but it's made them manageable.  I don't know how good it is at actually preventing pregnancy (I forget who, but I at least one blogging mom got pregnant on it) but since my body manages that without any assistance, I'm not worried about that.

Sorry if that all sounds like a big frickin' ortho add, but dang, I love feeling healthy and not worrying about unmanageable pain.  Unless something changes, I'm staying on this thing until menopause.  

Addendum:  I forgot, there is one bad side effect -- my allergies have been CRAZY.  Not as bad as before I had immunotherapy (aka "allergy shots"), or as bad as when I had 2 cats instead of one, or when I was still eating chocolate. (Yes, pity me, for I am allergic to chocolate, and have had none for lo these three years) But bad enough that I'm hitting the benadryl regularly during this season of blooming things, and can't have pizza or garlic more than a couple times a week.   For me, a more than fair trade, but if the hay fever was amped up into the migraines & athsma range (chocolate does this, sigh) I'd maybe reconsider.

Very Late Addendum, 1 year later: This pill sent my blood pressure up to 180/100 or thereabouts.  So there's another side effect to consider. (I had to stop taking it at that point, of course) 

Posted by alchemist at 09:04 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

So I arrived in the office this morning to discover that it's "take your kids to work day."  ARG!  I love kids, yadda yadda, but I wasn't in the mood for a whole passel of them running, playing, yelling, etc in my actual work area all day.  Particularly because a lot of my job requires attention to detail. And because I'm still getting used to being INFERTILE.  I spent a lot of time today typing the same crap over and over because I kept screwing up.

I could have put on my headphones or asked the parents on the team to set the kids up somewhere other than our communal table, but I actually do love kids and I don't want to be Cranky Infertile Woman, so I made nice and just stayed late to get my work done after the kids were gone.

So...in the midst of the pandemonium, one of the dads says to me & another co-worker who's still young & single, "This is the world's greatest birth control, right here, huh?  After this you'll never want to have kids, huh?  I'm telling you, world's greatest birth control."

This guy knows my situation - his sister's also adopting from China.  So I sucked it up and gave a wan smile and said "uh-huh" but what I wanted to say is "Actually, you FUCKING MORON, being IN-FUCKING-FERTILE is the world's greatest fucking birth control! YOU FUCKING MORON!!!!!"

But, I didn't.  Let's hear it for take your fucking kids to fucking work day. 

Posted by alchemist at 09:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

We've hit a lull in the paperchase - waiting for fingerprint clearance to come back from the FBI so that the Home Study can be completed.  Just about every other piece of paper is done (the I-171h won't come til long after the home study is done, so I'm not even fretting about that yet.).  Now I have nothing to do, adoption-wise.   So that leaves me plenty of time to feel bad about being infertile.

I spent my 20's trying to get my shit together.  It really wasn't together at all.  I made a huge radical life change when I was 25, after the sudden death of a close friend.  I dropped out of graduate school (Lit and Creative Writing) and moved to the big city and started working with computers.  I had a few friends here but mostly not, and I'd never lived anywhere really big.  It was the right choice - it started me on the path to being actually happy for the first time in my life - but it was a very hard couple of years.  I didn't do anything too masively stupid but I did manage to fall mildly in love and get my heart broken.  I was 28 when I met Hub and was still licking my wounds and kind of drifting, life-wise.

It took a while to get around to getting married - I wasn't cut out for partnership.  I'd always dated jerks, so I didn't really know how to deal with someone nice.  "You mean, when I come home, I'm supposed to sit and talk with you?  But what if I'm in a bad mood?"  Fortunately for me, Hub is a very patient, sweet guy, and he rode out the crappy first year of living together while I figured out how to be an ok girlfriend. 

So, I had more things to learn.  For assorted reasons, I didn't acquire certain skills as a youngster.  Managing stress, keeping my workaholism to a manageble level, friendly conflict resolution, building normal instead of super-rigid boundaries -- I had no idea how most people handled these things.  On the other hand, I am super-duper in a crisis, and will wrassle with a rabid tiger if I think there's a need.  A year or so of therapy made a big difference. (Advice to folks seeking therapy: find someone who specializes in your Issue.  If you're dealing with the death of a friend, for instance, see a grief counsellor. If you're addicted to crack*, see an addiction counsellor. Otherwise you get a sympathetic person who says "oh, wow, that's terrible" but doesn't teach you useful skills for changing)

By the time I was about 34 I felt like I was ready to be a mom.  I'd always wanted kids, but I didn't want to screw them up.  I knew I would never be perfect but I wanted to have skills for dealing with stress, and I wanted to get past the majority of what I'll call my moodiness.  Thanks to a good job, a terrific husband, a good therapist, a stable home life, and nobody I loved having died recently, I was feeling normal and healthy and ready to start trying for a baby.

Two years later, we thought probably something wasn't working right. My confidence in my ability to be a mom had grown a lot - we'd had a bunch of family crises & illnesses, including losing a very dear aunt to cancer at the age of 56.  It was horrible but it didn't send me into an anxiety spiral - it was just a sucky, grief-filled time, like anyone else would have.  So I felt like "if I can handle this, I can handle anything," but my body seemed to be going the other direction.  Another 2 years and I'm 38 and we had to decide how to address the situation.  If I was 30 right now, we'd be making a different set of plans.  We'd be adopting a baby, because we want to adopt a baby. But I'd also be going in for a laproscopy to see what they could do about my apparent endometriosis, and then I'd be finding out what they could do about the uterine abnormality.  In short, I'd have more options.  I could still daydream, at least, about growing a life inside me.

So, not only has my body failed me (and let Hub down), but my psyche has too.  If I was one of those people who sailed into her 20's truly knowing herself, not struggling with life angst or what have you, not wasting years in school and starting a career later than everybody else, not dating worthless bozos, etc etc, etc, then maybe I could be, you know, a REAL woman.

Sheesh, where's a giant stack of paperwork when you need it? 

*note: I am not addicted to crack. This is merely an example.  At the moment I am addicted to "chuckles" candy, but I'm sincerely working on beating it.

Posted by alchemist at 05:07 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Gardening seems like a good antidote for my infertility-based bummage.  I mean, it won't make me pregnant but it's girly and it's about new life and what have you, and it gives me a (probably false) sense that I'm not a total failure as a woman.  So I'm going to fling myself into it as soon as I can.  The temp's a little too unpredictable yet for anything crazy like rose cultivating, though - killing things isn't going to cheer me up--so I decided I'd get to work on the landscaping side of the equation, carting dirt around in a wheelbarrow, de-rocking the space behind the garage, or whatever else needs doing. Even though that's a teeny bit less girly than coaxing tender seedlings up to the sun, etc.

This is the hideous shrub group - a Juniper with 3 thorn bushes sort of woven into it.  This was here when we bought the house, so it's not really our fault, although I didn't keep up with the pruning last year because it seemed pointless.  I've been limited in what I could do to give it a nice shape. The lower parts of the juniper are masses of dead twigs with the vaguest hint of greenery on the outside, so I can't cut far into it when I prune...or can I?

Meet my new toy, the DeWalt Reciprocating saw.  I opted for the DeWalt instead of the SawZall because the Dewalt is way cuter.  Seriously, that was my whole decision process.  The SawZall weighs the same and does the same thing, but is ugly.  My uterus may be misshapen but damnit, my power tools WILL be pleasing to the eye!

Even the saw blades are yellow!  How adorable is that? 

So the saw and I made this big heap of branches...

...and here's my cute little Juniper bush!  Yay!

Posted by alchemist at 08:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Last night I dreamed that I had a baby prematurely, and that several of the babies in the ward that same night died of pneumonia--including mine.  I spent part of the dream trying to find out what kind of unsanitary conditions could have led to so many babies dying at once, part of it trying to find someone on the staff who actually cared about the deaths, part of it looking for some of the other parents to see how they felt about it, and part of it weeping.  The weeping part went on for quite a while.

In real life I don't let myself cry all that often.  So I guess this dream is my way of having a weep over my infertility.  Let's hope I don't need to have too many more like it.

Posted by alchemist at 12:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Ortho-Tricyclin is an oral contraceptive pill that comes in four colors.  Palest blue for the first week, a little darker for the second week, true blue for the third. Each week it's a little bit stronger, until the end of the cycle.  The fourth week's pills are an unpleasant olive green and contain no active ingredients.  If I make it that far I'll throw the green ones away, once a day, rather than taking them.  I'm ok taking hormones that make me what can only be described as "sick," but I won't subject my system to the possible bad things found in an inert green tablet.  Striking a blow for natural living!

I'm not taking the pill because I don't want a baby.  I desperately want a baby.  But my body isn't playing along, even a little bit, so my route to parenthood will be adoption.  Meanwhile the pill should eliminate the cramps that routinely knock four potentially useful days clear out of my monthly calendar.  The alternative is to take Lupron for 6 months, to duplicate the always-popular menopause experience, and then go back off it, in the slim hopes that I'll have a year or so of reduced pain and improved fertility once my cycles come back online.  Then I can get back to the soul-crushing grind of trying to conceive, and hope I don't lose the theoretical pregnancy to one of the other risk factors I'm rocking.  Ducky.

So, I'm taking a different path to motherhood.  And, having decided that, I'm finally free to take the pill to treat my cramps.  I'm in the third week.  Last week I was so queasy I missed a day of work.  I switched to taking it with dinner instead of in the morning.  I figure, if it's going to make me sick for 8 or 12 hours after I take it, I can just make sure I'm sleeping when that happens.  So far, that seems to help.  It's made my allergies a little stronger -- nothing dramatic, just enough that I sneeze a lot and wake up with a headache most mornings.  Supposedly, it gets better after the first month.  Even if it doesn't, I'm willing to be a little unwell for most of the month, if it means I can skip the killer cramps.  It's got to be healthier than taking Vicodin and Advil at the same damn time, which is what I'd been resorting to the past couple of months.

A friend of mine was on the pill for a while but switched to Depo. 

me: Is it true it can kill your sex drive?

friend: YES.  in fact, that is the true contraceptive effect of the pill.  There's probably not really any hormones in there or anything.

me: But I also heard that exercising can help you get it back...

friend: See, that wouldn't work for me because I want to exercise even less than I want to have sex!

We'll see how it goes.

Posted by alchemist at 12:18 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)