Obsessions

One of the things that infertiles seem to have a lot of is time to ruminate about why the sperm doesn't seem to want to meet the egg. When you try and try but still fail cycle after cycle, you can't help but become obsessive about what is (or isn't) happening with your body.

It all starts out innocently enough, doesn't it? I joined Fertility Friend. I started temping and charting. I did OPKs. I checked for CM and occassionally experienced the displeasure of checking my cervical position. Hard or soft? High or low? Open or closed? I never really did figure that one out.

Then I moved on to preoccupying myself with Clomid, Femara, HSG, Laporoscopic surgery, IUIs, and injectibles. I moved on to IVF and obsessed about my meds, my E2 levels, how many follies I had, how many eggs they retrieved, my fertilization reports. The list goes on and on.

So I guess it should be no surprise that when an in infertile finally does get pregnant, she enters a phase where she doesn't really know what to obsess about. I've read so many blogs where the writer finds herself knocked up and suddenly doesn't know what to talk about. Maybe it is because all you can really obsess about at that point is whether the baby is still alive or not. It's all you can think about for the entire first trimester. I guess you can only blog about it so much without feeling like you are annoying or hurting your blogosphere friends who are still trying.

Now that I've entered my second trimester, new obsessions have started to pop up. Things like whether I should eat deli meat, soft cheese, sugar, fat, non-organic meat, caffeine, or artificial sweeteners. Will I kill my baby if I apply self tanner or drink a non-alcoholic beer? How about if I use Windex? What about if I clean the litter box, exercise, garden, take a bath, lay in the sun, lift something heavy or have an orgasm? Am I gaining too much weight? Too little? Am I drinking enough water? Getting enough vitamins? Eating enough vegetables? Should I already look like I've swallowed a cantaloupe when I'm just shy of 14 weeks? Bah, it's no wonder I'm so tired all the time. My mind won't stop spinning.

Before I would have blogged endlessly about all of my obsessions. But since this is an infertility blog, and most of my readers are still trying, maybe that isn't really appropriate? For now I've decided that instead of obsessing about myself, I'll continue to read about you all, hoping that soon motherhood will come to you, in any way possible. Sure, I'll still post here and there, because pregnancy is a scary thing too, and sometimes I just need to get things off my chest. But for the meantime, maybe I just need for things to sink in a little more over here before I can really blog about it.

Anyway, right now I'd much rather spend my time checking in on things like Fisher Queen's exciting news or Prop and Thalia's current IVF cycles. To me, it's much more interesting than googling about whether Feta cheese is safe to eat as long as it is pasteurized. Whatever...I'll just use mozzerella instead.