Cranky Pants

I’m not actually that cranky.  Honestly.  I woke up with a killer sore throat this morning, but I’m okay with that – for now.  I’ve had a really nice weekend so far, and it’s not over yet.  I saw family and friends, ate some wonderful food, enjoyed some incredible spring weather.

There is the specter hanging over me, however, of a very large event coming up this week.  My first visit with my reproductive endocrinologist.  Hopefully my husband will be able to get out of work to come with me, but there are no guarantees.  And if I have to go it alone?  I’m scared I might cry the moment the RE shakes my hand and introduces himself.

This is scary stuff, you guys.  A lot of you have been through it, I know, and it might seem like old news at this point.  But to me?  Not old news.  Very new news.  New and scary and weird news.

I spent the better part of Friday afternoon filling out all the new patient forms for my RE visit.  Sure, I should have been working, but clearly I had bigger things on my mind.  And filling out those forms was such a punch in the gut, when all I wanted was for it to give me hope and make the world seem a little brighter and more promising.  Instead I had to document how long we’ve been trying (and failing) to conceive, what measures we’ve taken, what diagnoses (or lack thereof) we’ve been given by other medical professionals.  I had to document any history of genetic disorders or serious diseases that our family members have had.  Basically, I had to see all the possible roadblocks to conception laid out on a few sheets of paper.  It was kind of depressing.

You know what else was depressing about it?  I requested my complete medical records from my ob/gyn and received them the other day.  And I looked through them to help refresh my memory a bit about what exactly we have done so far, and when.  And the first page was of our last IUI, the extremely poorly timed one, the one we had done a whole week before I ovulated.  Yay us.  And on the sheet, it said “Diagnosis: FEMALE INFERTILITY.”  And I kid you not, I looked at this and said out loud “What the F*CK?”

You see, I have never actually been diagnosed with IF.  I talk about suffering from IF because what else do you call failing to conceive for 15 months??  My husband’s morphology is low but not low enough to make things impossible.  And my ob/gyn told me that all my hormone levels are “normal” (whatever that means) and my ultrasound showed that all my lady parts are in pretty good shape.  But at some point, my ob/gyn decided to actually put on paper the words “FEMALE INFERTILITY.”  It felt like a slap across the face.

Now, admittedly, maybe this is just what they put when the cause of our infertility is a mystery.  They just assume it’s a female problem, since they are, after all, doctors who only treat females.  And I’m hoping that when we meet with the RE and he does whatever tests he has to do, he determines what our real diagnosis is.  But yeah, it didn’t feel good to see those words written down – or typed, actually, making it feel even more official – in my medical records.

So we’ll see.  Whatever our *actual* diagnosis is, we’ll have to deal with it.  But at least it will be coming from an expert, right?  And not an ob/gyn who just puts down the default setting on my medical records.  And also?  If I really like this RE I might consider using him as my ob/gyn, too.  Is that weird?

In the mean time, I am firmly within the two week wait.  As if I didn’t have enough to be freaked out about.

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