wink     ; )

Preview

Want a preview of what upcoming infertility posts will look like? Read Julie's post about infertility. A lot of the same emotions and situations are going to come up even if she's coming at it from a female perspective and I'm coming at if from a male one.

Infertility: Part 4 (Wrestling with Doubt)

(For background info, see Infertility, part 0, 1, 2, and 3.)

In August of 2001, we drove across the country. The various national parks that we visited were a welcome distraction from the thoughts of infertility which were dangling just outside of my awareness, held at bay by hope and denial. When we arrived in Portland, we moved in with my sister, settling in to a nice space above the garage.

And once we got settled in, I could no longer ignore the infertility issues. I went to the doctor and got retested. The results confirmed the first set of tests. I was now convinced, but that didn't stop the doctor from ordering another set of tests. I gave another sample, and the results were amazingly consistent with the other two.

So.

Now it was time to think about adoption again.

Having already considered AI and IVF (see part 3) and discarding them as unfeasible, adoption seemed to be the only way that we could have children. When we first discovered that I had a distressingly low sperm count, Tree was immediately ready to start the adoption process. I was not. When she wanted to know why I was unwilling, I told her that I needed time to get used to the idea. "You've been thinking about it for 14 years. I've only been thinking about it for 14 days. Give me time..." I assured her, "I'll warm up to the idea."

By the time I had gotten re-tested and re-re-tested, it had been months. And I hadn't yet warmed up to the idea. "Maybe remaining childless wouldn't be so bad," I thought. After all, only a short time before this (less than two years previous), I was fighting to not have children (see part 0). However, I knew that as much as I may waver on the issue, Tree's position was never in question: she wanted children.

Adoption scared me. One of the reasons I had been reluctant to become a parent in the first place was that I knew that it was a huge responsibility. With something that big and that important, I knew that self-doubt would cause me to make lots of mistakes. And I was very good at doubting myself. My fear with adoption was that my self-doubt would overwhelm me. I feared that I would always be asking myself, "Would I have loved my child more if she (I had always envisioned having a daughter) were a biological child instead of an adopted one?" That one question would cripple me. As long as I was asking myself that question, I guaranteed that I would be failing my child on a number of different fronts.

I know myself. I know how I think. I know how I act. I would not and could not be a good parent until I had answered that question definitively in the negative. I needed to wrestle my doubts to the ground and pin them into certainty before I could adopt a child.

So I wrestled.

Day after day and week after week I wrestled. And each day my self-doubt refused to be mastered.

Infertility: Part 3 (Treatment Options)

(For background info, see Infertility, part 0, 1, and 2.)

We found out about my infertility a few weeks before we moved across the country. There wasn't time to go back to the doctor and get more testing done, and there was a lot of packing and tying up of loose ends to do. This fit in nicely with my denial; I figured I could just deal with this stuff after we moved.

During those final distractible days at work, we did a lot of internet research on infertility treatment. Here's the rough summary of the various treatment methods:

1. Drugs. Give Tree drugs that will make her produce lots of eggs. This treatment was obviously inappropriate for us--the problem wasn't lack of eggs, it was lack of sperm.
2. Artificial Insemination (AI). Collect sperm. Wait until Tree ovulates. Use the medical equivalent of a turkey baster to squirt the sperm into her womb. This sounded promising at first. But that first step was a problem. You need a decent sperm sample in order to do this. Sure we could collect multiple samples and combine them together, but with a sperm count less than 1% of normal and a storage procedure that includes a freeze/thaw cycle which kills 50% of the sperm, I would need to provide over a hundred samples over the course of a year or so just for one shot. Not as promising as it first sounded.
3. In Vitro Fertilization (IVF). Give Tree drugs that will make her produce lots of eggs. Suck out the eggs via a scary needle. Drop them into a petri dish. Flood the petri dish with sperm. Implant the healthiest embryos into Tree. Sounds promising...and ridiculously expensive. And there remained the problem with the "flood the petri dish with sperm" step. We wouldn't need as much sperm as AI required, but we still needed more than I could reasonably produce.

None of this looked like it was going to work out. Maybe we could do IVF, but maybe not. And IVF is terribly expensive...not something you want to experiment with. We'd be paying a lot of money for no guaranteed results.

After this discouraging round of research, we moved across the country. My hopes were still pinned on botched test results--maybe my next test would show that the picture was not so bleak after all.

Infertility: Part 2 (Reactions)

When we first learned of my infertility back in the spring of 2001 (see Infertility, part 0 and part 1), I went into immediate denial. Maybe the sperm count was wrong and the next test would show that everything was OK. Maybe my cluster-headache meds had temporarily suppressed my sperm count. Maybe some lab tech had neglected to add three zeros to the end of my sprem count. Who knows, anything is possible. I had never considered the possiblilty that I could be infertile, so I had no idea how to respond to the news. And I certainly had no contingency plans.

Tree, on the other hand, had already already given the matter plenty of thought. Being one of those worriers who is always convinced that the worst is going to happen gave her a big head start in preparedness over me when disaster actually struck. She had always known that she wanted to be a mother. But the pessimist in her made her ask herself "What if I never get married? What if I'm infertile? What if my husband is infertile?" By the time she was 12(!), she had decided that if she couldn't have biological children for whatever reason, she would simply adopt.

Though she feared the diagnosis of infertility, she had been expecting it. In fact, she suspected it starting from the moment when we had our first negative pregnacy test. So immediately after opening the test results envelope, Tree turned to me and said, "I think that we should adopt."

I balked. No. I hadn't even accepted that the test results weren't just a big typo. I certainly wasn't going to start making plans yet. But Tree had already thought all of this through and was raring to go ahead. I was caught completely flat-footed and Tree, the consummate planner, was launching a contingency plan that she had put into place over a decade earlier.

So within hours of opening the test results, Tree was asking me why I didn't want to adopt. I kept replying that adoption wasn't the issue yet, and that I just wanted to get retested first.

There were a lot of tears that night, and for the next few nights.

Poor Execution

"Language is a great idea poorly executed." Or so Alex says. I have to agree with her. Of course, her complaint is about language in general and her inability to express what she wants. My complaint is in the fact that we have more than one language. Or, more precisely, that the number of languages that I need to understand exceeds the number of languages that I actually understand. Grrrrrr...

I hereby curse the idiot who thought that building the Tower of Babel was a good idea.

Home Again

We're home from CA. The time we spent there for Grandma's memorial service was quite good, though very sad and difficult at times. I spent a fair amount of time cuddling and calming down two of Grandma's great-grandchildren. I really love those kids.

We missed the cremation due to our flight being repeatedly canceled, but we were able to make it to the memorial service. It was packed. The service was solemn and filled with emotion. It was held in her church, a beautiful Episopal church which was smaller than I expected. We sang her favorite hymns, read her favorite psalms and took communion. We cried.

The family spent a lot of time in her house afterwards. Going through her stuff resulted in a flood of unexpected emotions. The grief I expected. But there was excitement in exploring and discovering new things about Grandma; regret that we had never done this before and would never do it again; longing for Grandma to be around so that she could tell us the history behind this object or that; delight when some family member actually knew the history of a knick-knack or heirloom; laughter when everyone tried to foist off the ugly painting onto everone else; dismay when we saw how Grandma had cut apart some of her clothes in an effort to make them more comfortable in her final days; bemusement at the many things that she had bought but never opened much less used; shocked hilarity at the surprises (my sister-in-law popped out of a closed holding a box and declared "There are some things a person should never find out about her Grandmother." Inside the box: a pair of tasseled pasties.); comfort in the fellowship and in being surrounded by memories of Grandma and the familiarity of her things; sadness in knowing that after this, the house will never feel like her home again--it will get emptied out and cleaned up so that it can go on the market and her personality and presence will be erased from the house.

I miss her.

Happy New Year!

It's the Year of the Monkey. Welcome to the 48th Century (4701). (Or did the century start last year? Is there a Year 0 in the Chinese Calendar?)

Grounded

Due to inclement weather (read: airplanes embedded in ice), we have not flown to CA for the memorial service yet. Maybe tomorrow, if the airport is able to thaw out the planes.

Memorial

We're off to grandma's memorial service. Be back Sunday or Monday. Don't expect much by the way of posting between now and then.

Stacks of unread stuff

Way back when, before grad school, after college, during my gainfully-employed years, my mind yearned for intellectual input. I could feel my brain getting stale. My job had stopped being intellectually challenging after about 4 months. I had read every book in my apartment several times over. I did not yet have internet access at home. I was so starved for something to read that I would devour Tree's Redbook, reading it cover to cover on the day it arrived before Tree even realized that the mail had come.

Now, life is a bit different. Information overload has caught up with me. I'm not complaining, mind you--I prefer this by a longshot over my previous situation. School, interesting work, multiple periodicals delivered to my door, and 24/7 internet access give me plenty to read.

Tree once asked me why I spend so much time surfing the web. My response: "I haven't finished reading it yet." However, my attitudes have slowly been changing. I'm getting used to the fact that more good stuff is produced than I can consume. Evidence: the stack of a dozen partially read magazines in my basket. In another time, I would have finished each article in each magazine before putting them down. Now I only read what I think might be interesting and leave the rest for later. Which of course never comes.

Now I just need to figure out how to filter and prioritize so that I don't waste too much time.

badly timed comic

Today's For Better or for Worse is nice and all. But all it really does is remind me that this is the first morning since she was born that Grandma didn't wake up.

*sniff*

Ollie, Ollie oxen free!

Grandma P died around 8:00 PM today.

"Ollie, Ollie oxen free!" was one of her favorite phrases. She used to shout it as a child to let her sibs know that it was time to come home. And throughout her life right up until her death, that phrase would never fail to produce a laugh or a smile.

Time to come home Grandma. I hope you're having fun wherever you are.

Happy New Year Grandma

I'm back from visiting the in-laws. It was a very good visit, though depressing. Tree's maternal grandmother, Grandma P, has cancer pretty much everywhere. We spent a good portion of our time in CA hanging out with her, taking her in for radiation treatments, and listening to her stories. Time well spent.

It is extraordinarily difficult to imagine that she is dreadfully sick. She has always been fiesty and full of life and though it was muted during our visit, her trademark vitality was still quite evident. The cancer and the associated drugs have killed her vision and have filled her with pain, but she was relentlessly joyful and loving.

During our vacation, we did one of the smartest things we've ever done: we bought a camcorder, sat Grandma P in front of it and had her tell her life-story to us. Pure gold. This woman has done and seen everything.

When we rang in the new year, I though to myself (just as Cobb did regarding his ailing grandfather), "2003 Won't Get Her". Given her energy and spirit, I figured January wouldn't get her either. Even as we left her to come home saying "Goodbye" for likely the last time, she still managed to put a smile on our faces.

Today we got a phone call from Tree's mother. Grandma P is semi-comatose and the doctors don't think that she'll last a week.