Pre-IVF

I don’t know where to start. I want a baby so badly that I cry for days every time I get my period, even now that I know there is less than a 2% chance of us getting pregnant. We were putting it off for a variety of reasons. We were young, we wanted to buy a house, enjoy being newlyweds, and save some money. We finally stopped trying not to get pregnant and my husband was diagnosed with testicular cancer two months later. Then we were putting it off because he was being treated for the cancer. I refused to start IVF while he was still going through treatment. Then we put it off because he had a Cholesteatoma. Now he is dealing with the fatigue and depression that accompanies feeling ill for so long and coming face to face with one’s own mortality and not liking what you see.

I am beginning to have trouble handling it with grace. I want to be there for him and give him the time and space he needs to find peace with his life and his future. It is only natural to struggle with these unexpected developments in life. The parallels between him and my father are distressingly uncanny. I resent it. I resent this interruption in our life and I resent the role of caregiver that I have adopted, no matter how well prepared I am to play it.

In my less patient moments, when I have had a long day at work and my period arrives and we still haven’t started IVF and I come home to find him listless and bored and frustrated with everything in his life, I want to smack him and tell him to shut the fuck up and get his shit together. That I have selflessly slogged through this shit and just because I am not the one who was sick does not mean that it hasn’t been just as difficult for me. After all, I was the one facing a life alone, bereft of all the hope and plans we had built if he died. That I have swallowed the stress and the fear to be his rock and his constant ray of hope and rationality. And now that all of the treatments and surgery are over and it is time to start IVF, I need him to get over himself and all his shit and just be okay for a while, because IVF is going to suck. I am sure it was terribly unmanning to have to jerk off into a cup. But now I have to get numerous vials of blood drawn, vaginal ultrasounds, sonohysterograms, inject myself with horrible hormones that are going to throw my body and my mood into disarray, have minor egg retrieval surgery, egg implantation, take time off of work for multiple doctors appointments and procedures because none of this waits until after that report has been sent to your boss, it happens whenever your body says its going to happen. I can not deal with all of that while he throws this pity party.

However, that is just in my weaker moments, which always pass.