Hanging with fertiles

So the trip to London wraps up today and while worried at first, an intensive weekend hanging out with fertile friends has actually been  a lot of fun. Mrs IVF and I dont have any kids in our circle of friends in NYC, so hitting kidsville in Lon with my best mates has been a shock to the system. I was woken on Saturday morning by young Oscar and Ollie with cards they have had made with all sort of pictures (fireworks and rockets etc) saying “Mr IVF we love you,” Not bad for a 5 and 3 yo.  I also went and hung out with my 7 y.o. god-daughter and her little sister. The god-daughter needs to get her attitude adjusted but her somewhat sneaky little sister was a doll and wanted to know if I was staying or if “I would be gone again in the morning like you normally are”… told her I’d be gone and she said “well you should just come and stay more often. 10 days would be the right amout of time” All very cute and sweet. It really was touching and a complete surprise I didnt wig out.

I also think I have worked out why fertiles struggle to see what we go through. Our struggle is just so 180 degrees from where they are. Their life is saturated with children and completely flat out. I spent the weekend sucked up in the jetstream of what goes on with families with 2 kids between 3 and 8 years old and everyone just collapses once kids have gone to bed. Sure – my mates care and are interested to hear our kiddie struggles and are pretty reasonable support, but they don’t and will never really get it, but they try. But I guess that is like any illness. A really great mate’s wife is dealing with breast cancer. We sent her a box of books and try to ring from time to time but I dont know what she is really going through.

I felt good I can hang with my fertile friends and not feel hugely jealous. I see it more a sign of fate that this is my training lesson, (nothing wrong with some positive thinking!!). Just like when I had to read one of the stories to the girls they picked a book about tadpoles. OMG. I cracked up laughing and I said “nice selection – arent they a great batch of tadpoles.” I was frikkin jealous of sperm on the front cover of a 3yo’s book! Mum and dad didnt get it until I spelt it out of course. If she had a smurf book I probably would have keeled over in hysterics

However, the weekend was not event free.

Flashback…. June 2008 I had my birthday dinner with 3 other couples. We were about to start IVF, one couple announced their pregnancy (which kind of trashed my night, but they weren’t in the inner circle then, so you can’t blame them), another couple, we found out later, were also about to announce their pregnancy, but had the 12 week scan on monday so decided to hold off. The 12 weeks scan 2 days later showed no heartbeat. Ouch and the 4th the couple had no kid story as far as we know. But it was a weird, kid laden dinner when the dust settled and we looked back 4 months later on the whole thing and the MC came out.

I remember being incredibly jealous of these folks who announced their pregnancy. They had been at it for 30 seconds and of course we had 18 months on the clock ahead of them…. I really don’t need to tell this sort of story in detail. We all have “kiddie queue jumper” stories to tell. Anyway, my mate is in the loop now and has asked all the right questions and been quite supportive but can trip up on the insensitivity sometimes. E.g. he really needed to just go out with the lads and get pissed on a weekend a few months ago. Bloke weekend away, go hard! The guy didn’t invite me, but told me all about what they were doing and then repeated it all when he got back. You getting the sensitivity?

Anyway, he called me on Saturday night in London and announced with enormous fanfare ” we are pregnant again”. Smack. Cop that punch. “now we can both be pregnant at the same time!!”  Which, in hindsight is prob about as good as he can say. It acknowledges where we are at with an optimistic spin. But it still hurt. I decided not to ruin Mrs IVF’s night and would break it to her when I got back to NY. 5 mins later I get a txt ” X is pregnant. I can’t fucking believe it”. Fucking Facebook.  Mrs IVF took it hard. We thought we were pretty bullet proof but this one got in under the flak jacket.

So life goes on. We struggle again with what news we can handle from the fertiles but we stay laser focused on the plan. Mrs IVF is doing 5 units of Lupron every night and 1 estrogen patch every 2 days. Electro acupuncture starts on Wednesday with another blood test to boot. If that is good, she goes up to two patches on Friday.