The beginning of a couple of ends

I am hopeful coming in to this new year.

Hopeful might be too strong a word. I'm not depressed, at least. I'm holding my head up and trying to peer ahead. There are two deeply unpleasant projects that finally have visible ends. They may go well. They may go poorly. But, by the end of 2008, they will be over.

First, the IVF thing. I start Lupron either tomorrow or the day after. Yes, it's horribly difficult and expensive and probably won't work. But there's an end in sight. We have three vials on ice, and that will be it. At most three cycles: this month, and, if necessary, late spring and maybe late summer too.

We've decided to not use donor backup. I wish I were young enough and/or had produced enough embryos in the past to feel like we could do single embryo transfers, but at 37, and having never frozen anything in my three pre-35 cycles, that seems foolhardy indeed.

It will hurt if it fails. I'm worried that, since our first cycle at Cornell worked, it doesn't seem real enough to me that this one could. I've been lurking at IVF Connections, reminding myself of the pain. But -- but -- yes, if we cycle three times and they all fail it will be horrible, and we will have gotten much more invested in the process along the way, so it will be more horrible than I can empathize with now -- but we will be at an end. If one or more vials fails to defrost, we'll be at an end even sooner.

Second, the book project. Dr. Wow is itching to get the damn thing off to the publisher, ideally by February. It's clear that he and the second author (for I am oh so third) have largely stopped talking to me; they're handling all the big-picture issues. There's a small list of tasks that were assigned to me, oh, a year ago, and I'm going out to visit Dr. Wow next week (why yes, I'll be on Lupron, and yes, he's three time zones away from Cornell, yes indeed -- there's a chance of a red-eye straight east at the end of the week) to try to finish them. No family coming along, so I can sweat away (sweat! ha ha! no, actually, I don't get hot flashes on Lupron) all my non-sleeping hours.

And after that I can start working on something else! There are a couple of small papers that I've discussed with editors of service journals. I have a couple of ideas I want to chase down -- I want to be doing something scholarly that's mine, all mine. Next semester's teaching shouldn't be as weighty as fall's was, so I might even be able to get something underway before the summer.

Comments

[Katie]

I read IVF blogs before I read academic ones, though I can't remember how that started. Despite that, I still never know what I should offer to women who are trying to conceive. So I'll say that I'm thinking of you and am very hopeful that the forthcoming endings are very happy and the new beginnings are even more promising.