Hurry Up and Wait

UPDATE: Skip this one if you want, I’m just grasping at straws, in denial and sick of having no control over anything, my body, my plans, my finances, any damn thing. I’ll do as the doctors say and let another due date (would have been September 23, such a nice time of year) crumble into the wind and just… wait. And hope. Same damn thing I’ve been doing for four years. So sick of “holding my chin up.” So sick of all of this. I thought we were seven and a half months from a baby. I thought we were going to be able to escape going into debt by the skin of our teeth. Now it’s all up in the air again. And it just sucks. Trying to put on my “big girl pants” and deal with it, but not doing a great job at the moment. Blah.

They want me to wait for my next period to start birth control pills and start this whole process over again. I asked why we needed to wait instead of just start BCPs now, and they gave no satisfactory answers. They said it was to make sure “something else wasn’t going on,” like I wasn’t going into menopause or something.

Um… I’m 37. And even if I were going into menopause, what does it matter? I’m on drugs / simulated cycles anyway.

They said it was also to make sure all the products of conception were expelled, but doesn’t the lowering hCG show that? (Actually, I looked it up. Sometimes things can be retained even though hCG is zero, though it’s rarer with a natural miscarriage. But I don’t see what that has to do with taking BCPs or not?)

I’m just frustrated. Champing at the bit. If my next period is EXACTLY on time, and I get a match more or less as soon as I’m back on the list, then there’s still hope of having a baby or two in 2017 (when I know I’ll still have decent insurance).

But if my cycle is delayed OR matching is delayed, then… not so much.

And I wonder if there’s really a good reason to keep me in limbo like this, or if it’s just a cookie-cutter approach. Maybe they just want me to wait a few weeks, and this is as good a way to say “a few weeks” as any.

I’m contemplating going on BCPs on the sly and just telling them in four weeks that my period has started. I just don’t see the point in waiting for my ovaries to kick-start themselves again, only to shut them down again when we start the next cycle (with BCPs, Lupron, and estrogen).

On the other hand, it does seem like it would be nice to have a month “off” from drugs and just let my poor body be. Maybe it does need time to calm down and regulate itself.

But can’t it more or less do that while I’m on BCPs? And it’ll take the stress off my natural hormonal system, which otherwise will probably spazz out with the sudden terrible freedom, and God knows what it might get up to. What’s the point of waiting six weeks or more for a period?

I was always someone who, as a kid, needed to know why the rules were in place. “Because I said so” was never good enough for me then, and it’s not very satisfactory now, either. Doctors can be wrong. (Believe me.) Or just take lazy, generic approaches when a more individualized one might be better.

So I would like to just trust them. But I don’t seem to work that way.

So I’m not sure what to do. The thought of just waiting it out is pretty exhausting. I really wish I knew if there was a *good* reason to do it, because so far they haven’t given me one.

And just in general, the idea of growing a human in my belly and getting a baby at the end is starting to seem like some kind of bizarre science fiction, not a real thing that really happens. I’m so psyched out by now there are moments when I’m not sure I believe in it. Maybe it’s some elaborate practical joke, something people invented to make me feel bad about myself for not being able to do it.

I feel like I’ve been stuck in this limbo forever, this dark hole, and every time I seem to be close to clawing my way out…

It feels, again, like I’m all the way back at zero. I know I’m not. I have five more tries, right? But how do I know any of those are going to work? How can I keep doing this? How can I hurt my husband with bad news even one more time?

And how can I just sit around for 4-8 weeks with my thumb up my butt waiting to see what my somnambulant reproductive system decides to do when suddenly jarred awake by a withdrawal of drugs?

I’d run a marathon to get to this goal, I’d fight horses, I’d dig holes with my bare fingernails. And all I can do is sit around and hope my ovaries yawn and stretch and spit one out in a timely fashion — one we are not going to use anyway?

If BCPs can spare me from that, why not?

I wish I knew.

EDIT: Sorry for all the spinning out lately. It’s good for me to vent this stuff, put it out in the universe to get it out of my head. They say sunlight is the best disinfectant. Thanks for bearing with it all. Hopefully next time (always next time…) it’ll finally not be hopelessly sad.

I’ll probably just stay off drugs for the next month (or so) (other than alcohol, that is) and hope my body kicks in like it’s supposed to and try not to get lost in doom and gloom worst-case-scenarios (though things have gone so consistently wrong for so long, it’s really hard not to).