Broken Record

At times I've wondered if I should stop blogging because sometimes I feel like a broken record.

Once again, I found out last week that an IUI didn't work and that I'm not pregnant.

This time, though, it's official: we're definitely doing IVF this next round.

At the doctor's office on Friday, there was only one nurse working so I didn't see the usual suspects. The nurse I typically see is this fakey-sounding, too-cheerful woman whom I disliked pretty early on.

Friday's nurse listened as I asked some questions about early bleeding which I'd thought were implantation bleeding, but just turned out to be my period starting even before the scheduled pregnancy test.

She turned into a terrific resource, the Nice Nurse, as I began to break down and explain that every time I came to this office, I left with bad news, and that it was hard to have to keep coming here, and that now that we are about to start IVF and have to pay out of pocket for the drugs, we can't even get a simple answer about the cheapest way to actually pay for them.

(My secondary insurance, which will cover a good portion of the actual procedures with IUI and IVF, doesn't cover the medications. There are several places I can get them, but it's been hard to figure out where I can get them for the least money. This has led to some Google searches about ordering drugs from Canada, checking stock prices to see if I should sell a chunk of stock I own, and heated conversations with the Mister about money and how we need to save more for these down-the-road expenses.)

Nice Nurse found me an actual price list of the IVF drugs from some discount pharmacy, and took the time to sit with me and figure out exactly what my doctor had ordered and how I could order different combinations of things so that it would be the least expensive. This was the first time I'd talked to someone in the office who went out of their way to sit with me and figure things out, rather than just shuffle me through the office in a pre-measured time frame.

Nice Nurse told me she'd been through six IVFs and then ultimately adopted a cute Caucasian three-day-old infant through a local agency. The whole thing took less than a year, she told me.

I don't know much about the whole adoption process except through other people's experiences and hearsay. While I know it's too early to consider it yet, I also know that if faced with adopting, I'd really prefer to adopt a white infant over an international one or an older child, and I'd always thought that white infants were the toughest kids to adopt and therefore could take many years to do so.

Nice Nurse gave me adoption information for one agency along with the actual price chart of the IVF stuff and my actual medication amounts as written by the doctor. This way, if I have to call one or two other places to get pricing for the drugs, I'll know exactly what to ask for. And now with an actual price list, I realize that at least one round of IVF drugs won't bankrupt us and will actually equal a few extra freelance assignments. Then again, that's if we only go through this schtick once. Doing this over and over will surely wipe us out. Then again, we're hoping to switch primary insurances in November so next year we have a plan that actually covers infertility.

Sadly, Friday happened to be the Nice Nurse's last day in the office, so I won't get to see her again. She did give me her email and urged me to email if I had any other questions.

On the diabetes front, I've been wearing a continuous glucose monitor for the past few days to determine the cause of my overnight weird blood sugars. My bloods have definitely been all over the map so I'm eager to see what my doctor says about it. I did one of these a few years back with a different doctor's office, but it wasn't really helpful. My main complaint this time is that the shower bags you have to tuck the monitor into don't fasten properly, so I end up taping them closed with my own tape.

And now that I'm not pregnant over these next two weeks, my eating patterns will likely get worse as I start drinking a bit of diet Coke again or eating deli meats for lunch and frankly, I'm sure I'll gain weight and feel large(r). At least this month I'm probably not going to correct my blood sugars to such tight pregnancy levels. I mean, really, what's the point?

And yes, before you suggest I should see a therapist about this, I'm seeing one this week, one who knows diabetes and supposedly, infertility issues as well. The infertility people keep pushing this general mind-body class, too. While I typically love the idea of one-on-one therapy, the group class doesn't really speak to me. I'm already familiar with the topics they'll discuss, but the class is also far from my office, would require me to leave work early frequently, and it's frankly, more money out of pocket. I've been in group therapy before, and while that experience was terrific and I met some great diabetic women through it, I also just want to deal with my own infertility concerns, not the problems of five other couples also in this same boat.

I just read something about how 2006 is half over and how you should sit and think about what you've accomplished these six months so far. Unfortunately, all I can think of is that I've tried to get pregnant and haven't. I've written a book proposal about diabetes and pregnancy and how can I write more about it if I can't actually live what I'm trying to write about?

I sometimes get emails from long-lost acquaintances who ask how things are going, and I usually feel like I give a generic answer about how things are fine and work is busy. I think I sound boring. But the truth is, we've been trying to get pregnant and aren't. I spend a lot of time in doctor's offices for various health ailments that I don't care to discuss with most people. So like a broken record, I gloss over the details with most people and just sound dull: "All's fine, status quo. How are you?"