It's a pity party...

...and you're all invited.

Booo for me.

So, if you've been reading previous posts, you know how excited I was to not ovulate while I was away at the conference. The possibility of such an occurrence plagued me, both before and during the trip, but now I know it's something I never should have given a moment's thought to.

'Cause I'm not going to ovulate any time soon.

After thinking that we were just a day or two away from our first attempt at interuterine insemination (IUI), I got quite the shock this morning. I was as bubbly as I could be at 8 am, sitting in the clinic. I enthusiastically offered my arm up to the blood sucking lady so she could do her thing. Then I bounced over to the ultrasound area, got my kit off, and headed into the exam room, surprisingly eager for my morning poke.

Hope is a wonderful and dangerous thing, my dear readers. You know why it's wonderful, but as for dangerous, well...let me tell you.

I'm sure I've mentioned somewhere in the course of the 77 blog posts made to date that my biggest fear is that I will not be able to have children. Medical science has kinda been backing up my sad assumption in the last little while, but it's also the one concrete tool we have to work with in an effort to not make that fear reality.

I remember the first day I sat with the doctor at the fertility clinic. We went through our histories, the test results everything and she said, and I quote, 'We're going to get you pregnant'. And in that moment, I actually felt hope.

Hope that had never really been there before, because the more hope you build up, the harder you fall when things don't work out as...well...as you'd hoped they would. Don't get me wrong, this is not an anti-hope post by any stretch of the imagination - I'm the last one to rail against something so powerful and necessary in daily life - it's simply my take on this particular situation.

I'd been afraid to hope because I didn't want to be let down too much. One of my favourite expressions is 'prepare for the worst, hope for the best' and it's how I live a lot of my life. I need to have a plan for how to handle things if they go bad but I refuse to focus on it, dwell on the negative, and then, by so doing, make it happen.

But because I've been carting this feeling around for the vast majority of my adult life, I've really started to believe that this is how my life will be. I'll go through the motions, we'll try things, but they won't work for whatever reasons. And that sucks. It's something that I've been trying to prepare myself for all of these years (the prepare for the worst part), and it's only recently that I really allowed myself to hope for a positive outcome.

And now, here I am. I'm sad, very sad, that it's come to this. And I have to continually shush the devil on my shoulder that's trying to say 'I told you so'. The angel on the other is whispering platitudes in my ear - this is only the beginning, there's still so much left to try, there are other people in way worse circumstances than you, it will work if you give it time, you're still young (that was my personal fave - the doctor actually said this to me this morning), it just wasn't meant to be this time....the list goes on and on and on and on.

The 'this' that I refer to is the cancellation of our first IUI cycle. I am not responding to the medication and will not ovulate anytime soon. My endometrial lining is now thick enough that it needs to go (get to know me!!!), so we cancel this cycle, stop the monitoring, and attempt to get back to square one.

Awesome.

Now I get to start pumping some new drugs into my system in an attempt to bring my period back. Again. I go from not having one for over four months, to having two in 28 days. Hmmm...come to think of it, guess that's how the majority of the rest of you live. Strange. Something I'm totally not used to, but here we go.

Once that starts, we'll try the clomid again, but this time at a higher dosage. The doc says that we have to start at one level then keep going, because it's really important to not have me produce too many eggs all at once 'cause that's dangerous, and we don't want to 'make your ovaries explode'. I'm hoping he was being figurative there, but you never can tell with these doctor types at 8am on a Sunday morning.

I left the exam room in tears of frustration and sadness for the lost opportunity. I've shed a lot of tears of loss today and it's weird, all I've lost thus far has been potential, a maybe, a what if. The possibility of going to the next step. But to me, it's a huge loss just the same.

The instant gratification girl in me hates the thought of having to start all over again, especially when it took me so fucking long to get here in the first place! I thought I'd paid my dues, put in my time but nope! Survey says? Try again. Start from scratch. Back it up.

Thankfully Hubs is insanely understanding about all this stuff and has been absolutely incredible. I'm really so lucky to have married such an amazing guy. He's made it better, as much as he possibly could have given the circumstances, and I can't ask for anything more.

So here we are, back at square one. I've gone to the pharmacy, picked up my new prescription, and will start it tonight. I'm trying not to build up too much hope yet again, but the optimist in me can't squish it completely. Maybe Provera will work faster for me than the prometrium did. Maybe it'll take 8 days again to get things going instead of 24 like the last time. Maybe 150 mgs of clomid will be the right amount, and these damned eggs will actually develop into something worth fertilizing. Maybe we just weren't meant to have a January baby - who knows.

What I do know is that I've got a pretty decent support system in place and that's worth its weight in gold (well, silver actually. I hate gold - it clashes with my skin tone). My friends and family have all showed up for my pity party in their best outfits and have brought with them smiles, kind words, and platter upon platter of hope canapes to keep things going.

'Cause lord knows, hope is the one thing that's in rather short supply in my kitchen these days.

And that's your daily dash. How's your diva doin'?