All spring I've had to hold myself back from everything having to do with the upcoming IVF cycle.
I made a little color-coded schedule with cycle forecasts, academic dates, vacations... I pored over it daily. Once I had my first post-failure LH surge (on day 21!) I was able to fill in estimates for 4 straight months. Whoops! I missed the March slot for the coculture biopsy; well, let's fit the HSG in instead!
I was happy to have a good reason why we weren't finishing the upstairs bathroom or buying still more shoes for Miss T. No, not when every extra dollar should go to improving the lifestyle of some of Cornell's best-paid employees!
But now it's time to really get going. I should surge today, then have my biopsy next week. I need to get the HSG images and report to Dr. D pronto. The cycle itself is on track for late May.
And I'm procrastinating. I'm not making the phone calls. I fear this cycle. I know, once more, that all of this can fail. That it probably will fail. Especially so, now that I've moved on to the world of obscure poor-responder protocols. I find myself backing away.
So, certainly part of the issue is that I've now had a totally crappy cycle at Cornell, and I'm going back to the scene of the crime. I fear pain. On a smaller scale, dealing with this clinic over the phone is always, always horrible, and that's what I get to do for the next several weeks.
But, I think what really tipped the balance of emotion was doing our taxes. We got them in on time! (A real improvement over last year, and, I think, the year before that.) And, this year there were no big institutional screw-ups to deal with. However, one of the consequences of last year's big payroll computer screwup ("Ohindinois? Where's that? Naaaah, I'm going to send your money to Iowassouri instead... I know where that is!") is that we effectively paid double local taxes in 2007, which pushed us into alternative minimum tax range, and... and we had to send a good chunk of the IVF nest egg to the IRS, all of a sudden.
I felt naked and exposed. This isn't all just a game. By choosing to cycle, I am also choosing to make my life worse in the short term (no upstairs toilet! no spiffly new sandals!), and the futures of some other people just a little more precarious (putting off college savings, underfunding the 401k).
I am very, very lucky, perhaps unspeakably lucky, that we are able to do this at all, and that the things we are sacrificing are not, e.g., food and shelter. I am going ahead this time. But the doubt is looming large.
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