you guys are awesome

Thank you so much for all the comments on my previous post.  I really appreciate all the feedback and it helps me to get a good ballpark for what this is going to cost.  They were not able to give me a straight answer at the clinic yesterday — they’re just going to charge piecemeal for each visit, ultrasound, and blood draw, and tally it up at the end.  Boo.  Since we’re doing Clomid, at least the drugs are cheap.

Regarding what my husband did to get his numbers up — this is what we’re looking at:

• 7.9 million (up from 3 million)
• 58% motility (up from 13%)
• 4% morphology (up, but I don’t remember the old number)

We don’t have any hard evidence for this, but we suspect it has to do with him going off Prozac and Deplin.  He has cyclothymia and has been on one antidepressant or another for over 10 years, and from time to time has combined them with various mood stabilizers.  Over the past few years his cycles have gotten much milder and less frequent, and he made the decision about 4 months ago to go drug-free.  Since stopping the Prozac, his libido has definitely been much higher (lower libido is a known side effect).  After getting the latest SA results I did a little bit of poking around online to see if Prozac or Deplin have any effect on fertility.  It looks to me like this just hasn’t been studied.  I found one tiny little study that seemed to indicate SSRIs could decrease sperm count, but I can’t find where this has been studied on any kind of significant scale.

I asked our RE about this as well, and he said he just doesn’t know if there’s a link there.

That’s our best guess, and if we’re right it should mean that he’s doing even better now than he was last month, since it takes a while to produce sperm and it takes a while for the drugs to leave the system completely.

Here’s hoping!

 

they really ought to be red

The pills, I mean.

I took my first dose of Clomid last night and, like the overwrought drama queen I am, I really feel I’ve gone down the rabbit hole.  It’s hard to believe that since August 2008 — after seeing three REs, being misdiagnosed, having surgery — swallowing those pills was my first real step forward.  This could be our first legitimate shot at getting pregnant.

I am on 100mg of Clomid once a day until next Friday Sunday.  RE wants me to start OPK next Thursday.*  Friday they will check my follicles, and hopefully we will be good to go for our IUI!

It’s kind of amazing, really, that it has taken us this long to get to this point.  Three and a half years of infertility with no end in sight — and now here we are with a real chance.  It feels sappy to say it, but my life in the last six months has really turned the fuck around,** and I’m sort of left wondering what I did to deserve all this good fortune.

Like I said, the pills ought to be red.

–

* Believe it or not, that’s another thing I’ve never done before. 

** Nothing cuts sappiness like a good old F-bomb.

baste me

Last month we went to see our new RE.  He wanded me, did some blood work, and had the Husband give a sample.  Then he gave us the Best News Ever:

Husband’s numbers are up, and we are now candidates for IUI!

The RE actually called me himself to give me the news, which I thought was nice — instead of having a nurse or receptionist do it — and he told me to call on my next CD1 to make an appointment for CD3.

I am some kind of Patron Saint of Bad Timing, because CD1 happened over Christmas weekend, and the clinic was still closed on CD3, not to mention we were out of town anyway.  Knowing this was likely to happen, we talked about changing our travel plans, but I called the clinic to check to see what we could do and since they were going to be closed anyway I figured we didn’t need to change our plans.  After all, after 3.5 years of waiting, what’s another month?

Today is CD1 again, which means I should be able to go in on Wednesday and (hopefully) get started with something that, I have heard tell, can occasionally result in pregnancy!  Holy crap.  Clearly rejoicing is in order.

But.

As I think I have mentioned before, my insurance is not covering one red cent of this.*  That first office visit + testing has set us back $608 so far, with another $165 likely after the insurance company denies the claim for the SA (for some reason the clinic thought it would be a good idea to submit that one and have it be denied rather than just have us pay out of pocket).

We have decided that at least for now, we’re going to just go ahead and spend what we need to spend.  We don’t have a lot of extra money, of course , but my husband has a good job, I just started working, and frankly I don’t know how much longer we can wait.  We have very little savings but excellent credit, so we’re going to go ahead and be financially irresponsible and put this stuff on the credit card.  We figure we would rather spend years paying off the debt than spend the rest of our lives never having tried.

So what I’m trying to figure out is, about how much should I expect an IUI cycle to run out of pocket?  Can anyone who has done this help me understand if this is in the ballpark?

• I figure at least four office visits, two with ultrasound (one on CD3 and at least one to monitor follies, then the actual IUI and the beta).  Each office visit is $278; I’m not entirely sure if they charged us an additional $165 for the ultrasound or if that line item was for some of the blood work.  So that part will probably be somewhere between $556 and $886.
• The actual IUI procedure is (I think) between $300 and $400.
• Some quick googling gave me a figure of $1000 for meds — what do you think?  Is this too high?  (Tell me it’s too high.)
• I assume they will charge separately for the sperm washing.  More googling — $200?
• $165 for the beta.  (And another $165 each time I have another one — assuming it’s good and I start looking for doubling!)
• Giving me a grand total of somewhere between $2,221 and $2,861.

Does this sound right to you?  Has anyone paid out of pocket for IUI?  Obviously I’m going to ask the clinic about this, but they were not really very straightforward about the total cost of the first visit — I was not expecting it to be as high as it was, and I’m afraid there will be hidden costs they don’t tell me about.

Like I said above, we are fucking doing this regardless of the cost, but if it’s really going to be close to 3 grand for 1 cycle, I don’t want it to be a surprise.  Especially if I get a giant bill out of the blue after a failed cycle.  (If it’s a success, I will GLADLY carry the debt, of course.)

I hate that I even have to think this way.  I hope it goes without saying that having a baby is more important than the cost, and that as far as I’m concerned this kind of life event is what credit cards are for, but still … I would like to know what we’re going to be looking at.

–

* They also didn’t cover my husband’s emergency room visit last month.  Tell me again why we’re giving them several hundred dollars every month?

solidarity

I found out via effing effbook that one of my former colleagues is infertile.  She is much braver than I am — she posted a link to Resolve’s Superhero campaign with a short description of their story (2.5 years TTC, endo and PCOS) and asked all of her effing effbook friends to help the cause by donating.  Wow.  That’s some serious chutzpah* right there.

I understand that the only way to get infertility into the public eye is to talk about it, and frankly any condition that affects as many people as this deserves to be treated as a public health emergency, and to that end I have been trying to be more open about our situation.**  When someone asks me when we’re going to have kids, or why we don’t have any, I tell them we hope to have children someday (if it’s an acquaintance) and that we’ve been trying for years with no success (if it’s a friend).  It’s a change from what I used to do, which is to smile uncomfortably and give a non-answer deflection about how I’ve got lots of performances coming up.  But that is a long, long boat ride from what my former colleague did!  I applaud her.

Maybe someday I will be able to be more open.  I’m not even sure why I’m so hesitant.  I think there’s a little prudish part of me that thinks talking about infertility is just like talking about my sex life.  And while I actually don’t mind going there with close friends or on this blog, I’m not about to post anything remotely sexual on effing effbook, nor would I bring the subject up in casual conversation.

There’s also the issue of my husband’s privacy — with the MFI diagnosis, it’s not just my problem, and I have to respect his need to keep it quiet.  So even when I am talking with someone who knows we’ve been trying, I don’t divulge the diagnosis.  It’s a funny line to try to walk, and it makes me maybe just a little more reticent that I might otherwise be.

–

* As Michelle Bachmann would no doubt say.

** Could I have gotten one more clause into that sentence?  Yeah, probably.

indolence, wal-mart, the middle class, and the kitchen sink

Slow and indolent is the initial tempo marking for Samuel Barber’s Summer Music for wind quintet.  When I took my comprehensive exams in grad school, in addition to the major questions that involved a lot of writing, there was a set of short responses.  Slow and indolent was one of them.  Like a spot-check on my knowledge of the quintet literature — you either know what that refers to or you don’t, no way to b.s. your way out of it.  I knew it was a silly question, a relatively meaningless hoop to jump through, but I was still really pleased with myself for knowing the answer.

Slow and indolent might also be a pretty good descriptor for my current life.  Depending who you ask, I am the scourge of society — unemployed, overeducated, lazy, leeching off my husband, not doing anything “useful” (read: lucrative) with myself.  But I beg to differ: I am staying home, keeping things clean, getting the bills paid, running errands, and so help me, I love it.  I can go to the bank, I can go to the post office, I can grocery shop on a weekday, I can keep us in homemade granola and keep the carpet vacuumed, and I still have time to practice for the concert I have coming up.

Being at home to take care of all the stupid little day-to-day crap feels like greasing the wheels of life.  It’s kind of a revelation that if I can get these things done during business hours, I can spend my evenings with my husband.  I can spend my weekends having fun.  And my house is clean.  Of course I am sure someone will be knocking on my door any day now to revoke my feminist card, but damned if I don’t feel like I’m doing more good now than I was when I was working 12 hours a day and still not keeping up with the bills.  What I’m doing now, this is valuable work!  Over Thanksgiving I was talking with my uncle, who retired recently (my aunt is still working), and he has had a similar experience.  He’s home to take care of everything, the house is clean, the errands are run, and their evenings and weekends are their own.

This stuff matters.

At our old place, I was working and working and working and rehearsing and teaching and practicing.  We lived in a very hip neighborhood in a 100-year-old house.  We shopped at the farmer’s market and ate at hole in the wall ethnic restaurants.

But.

We had a very serious mouse issue.  We were going deeper into debt with every passing month because my job didn’t pay enough to support us both while my husband finished school.  That house, with its quaint woodwork and original plaster walls, was always a dusty mess.

Now we rent a house.  There aren’t any hip neighborhoods in this town.  There are no ethnic restaurants.  We buy our groceries at Wal-Mart.

But.

Now I have a dishwasher.  I have a washer and dryer.  A garage. I have yet to hear a single gunshot in this neighborhood.  And we actually stand a chance at starting to chip away at some of that debt.  It sort of flies in the face of who I thought I was, that this sort of thing should matter to me.  I’ve gone from being an avant-garde performer with tattoos and a nonprofit job helping inner-city kids, to being a small-town housewife.*  Surely socially conscious artistes don’t really care about having a dishwasher?**

The thing that has been hardest to adjust to has been shopping at Wal-Mart.  Prior to coming here, I was a Wal-Mart boycotter.  Their treatment of their employees is abysmal, they push out locally owned businesses, they exert undue influence on all sorts of other companies … you’ve all heard the arguments, I’m sure.  Anyway, when my husband first got here he told me that Wal-Mart was the only grocery store in town.  That’s not actually true — there are quite a few places to shop, as it turns out.  But Wal-Mart has the freshest produce.  Wal-Mart is the only place that carries fair-trade coffee.  Wal-Mart is the only place that carries soy milk.  Wal-Mart is the only place I can find fresh ginger, hot peppers, cilantro.  So after having tried all the other places in town, my choices seem to be as follows:

• Shop local chains and learn to do without my snobby food.
• Drive 30 miles one way (really!) to the next nearest place with sufficiently snobby food.
• Suck it up and shop at Wal-Mart.

So far I’ve picked Wal-Mart.

This whole life, the house, the neighborhood, the town, it feels slightly surreal to me, like I’ve been given some kind of tourist pass to the middle class.  Like I’m going to get kicked out or something.  I walk around this house thinking, “I get to live here?”  And I can’t help but feel that it’s hubris, that we don’t really deserve it, that we’ll be found out as impostors and sent back to the pit like the mudders we really are.

But until that happens, here we are, and I’m so grateful.

–

* Still got the tattoos.

** Holy crap you guys, I PRESS A FREAKING BUTTON and my dishes are clean.   You’d better believe I care!

daruma

My dad brought this for me from Tokyo as a housewarming gift.  It’s a daruma and it is in the wish-granting business.

According to my dad, you write your wish on the daruma’s right eye at the beginning of the new year, then paint over the whole eye with black.  The daruma stays in your house with one black eye and one white eye for an entire year.  At the end of the year, when (not if) your wish has come true, you blacken the left eye as well and then take it to the local temple to be burned.

We are lacking in Japanese temples here in the hinterland, but I am tempted to make a wish to my daruma anyway.  Will 2012 be the year?  I’m sort of counting on this.  Daruma, don’t let me down!

banana flower salad and panang tofu

One of the best things about where we’re living now is that we can drive up to see my family.  We don’t have to fly, we can be there in under 4 hours if we want to, and they can come see us too.

Even better, when we go up there we can stock up at the Asian grocery store.

Thai eggplant, pak choi, long beans, banana flower, shallots, chillies, wonton wrappers, egg tofu, fish sauce, coconut milk, curry paste, and spices.

Praise the lord and pass the ammunition!

Where I’m living now, I can’t get any of this stuff.  That shopping trip was like Christmas.  So I put it all in the car with a couple of ice packs, brought it back here, and today I got down to business.

I made panang curry with egg tofu (easy because the curry paste came out of a can) and banana flower salad.  Here’s how I did it:

Banana Flower Salad

This is something I ate in Burma but had no idea how it was prepared.  When I saw the banana flowers at the store I had to get one.  Thanks to the power of the internet I found this great recipe from Delhi Belle, which is Thai rather than Burmese.  It turned out just great!

banana flower salad

The banana flower is the great big red teardrop-shaped thing in the groceries picture above.  You eat the tender petals in the center and not the tough outer red petals, so there is a lot of peeling to be done.

banana flower with one petal removed. you remove those little blossoms too.

the edible part, chopped up and soaking in lemon water.

Never one to follow a recipe, I didn’t have any chilli paste so I pounded a few chillies in my mortar and pestle.  I ended up serving the salad in the mortar (it’s really big).  The rest of the dressing is lime juice, soy sauce, coconut milk, and sugar.

I cut up half a tomato and a scallion, then fried up some shallots.

This all got tossed together with the dressing and served!

 Panang with Egg Tofu

panang with egg tofu*

Egg tofu is … um … tofu made with egg.  And it tastes … um … different from ordinary tofu.  This completely unhelpful explanation has been brought to you by ginger and lime.

Along with the tofu (which is the stuff in the tubes), I used curry paste and coconut milk from cans, hot peppers, kaffir lime leaves, Thai eggplant, and basil.

curry ingredients

This is pretty easy to make since I don’t make the curry paste myself.

You stir fry the curry paste in a little bit of oil, then add the coconut milk and stir till it’s well blended.  When it’s boiling, toss in the eggplant, cut into wedges.

Cover this and let it simmer.  In the meantime, slice the egg tofu into discs and pan fry it on both sides.

Roll the kaffir lime leaves up into a cylinder, then slice very thin.  Slice the chillies on the diagonal.  Add both to the curry and simmer a few more minutes.

Here’s what my kitchen looked like at this point:

note the glass of wine: cook's prerogative.

Add the basil and the fried tofu and heat until the basil is wilted; serve with rice.

curry, salad, and rice

 

–

* Yeah, baby.

i’ve done it again!

(Gone totally MIA during ICLW, that is.)

I had such high hopes for the posts I was going to make last week, despite it being Thanksgiving, but as usual when faced with the choice between turning on the computer and playing another game of pinochle with my aunt and uncle, I picked pinochle.  All week.*

My husband and I drove up to the Ancestral Home to see my side of the family for Thanksgiving this year.  We haven’t been able to do that for a very long time and it was nice to see everyone.  In our new place we are a lot closer to my family (driving distance instead of flying) but farther from his.  I kind of feel bad about that, but we lived relatively close to his family for several years as well, so I guess it’s my turn!

We feasted.  We visited.  We played lots and lots of pinochle.

And now I’m catching up on my ICLW comments as well as the blogs in my reader.  A substantive post is coming, I promise.

–

* We’re kind of obsessed.

do i have toilet paper stuck to my shoe?

Every time I sign up for ICLW I either find myself with nothing at all to write about, or I am in the middle of some kind of emotional meltdown and write only about what a basket case I am.  Either way, I don’t exactly put my best foot forward for people who may be clicking over from the list.

Sooooo…

Welcome everyone!  Doesn’t that introduction make you want to stick around and read more?*

I am 33 and have a tendency to take myself way too seriously.  I love footnotes,** music, and reality TV.  I started blogging in March 2010.  My husband and I have been TTC since August 2008 and … zero, zip, nada.  Not a chemical pregnancy, not a late period.  We were diagnosed in spring 2010 (me, uterine fibroids, removed the following summer) and fall 2010 (him, MFI, IVF/ICSI recommended).

We haven’t done any treatments but are seeing a new doctor in a few weeks and may be doing IVF sometime in the next few months.

Thanks for stopping by!

–

* Probably not.

** Yeah.

yikes

Welcome to this week’s installment of “things not to place inside your vagina.”

Via Shakesville:

Kotex recalls tampons due to bacterial contamination.

 

The original article at parenting.com (linked in the Shakesville post) has lot numbers.  Check your stash, ladies!  This is scary stuff.