In Case You Didn't Know

Mulberry and I are again contemplating next moves --this time in the wake of our insurance company's blow to our plans. The plan re-organizing coupled with Mulberry's nausea and intestinal discomfort from the birth control pills she was taking and the heartburn and chest tightening she is experiencing from the ineffective asthma medications have, to say the least, further stressed matters. I am usually an upbeat, confident, non-swearing kind of dyke but I have been none of these in the last few days. I have felt defeated by my physical limitations, clueless, and financially retarded. Where I started to feel the most powerless, Mulberry traded places with me and started hunkering down and told me she was not ready to give up this easily. I mean the woman can't breath but she's ready to fight whomever. She also still managed to come through for her community organizing buddies who needed her talents to enhance a small event they were hosting. She actually had to perform a song and she did it. She was a bit worried at first of course about her breathing capacity, but in the end she did it lovingly and movingly. That is the kind of woman she is. She shows up for her friends and does her best to meet her obligations with competence and grace. It is in times like these I am struck with awe at my beloved's tenacity of will and focus even with personal adversity. Today I am feeling grateful. Still clueless, but grateful.

Our talking is filled with anger about the situation, tears, cluelessness, strategy, respect and love love love. As grateful as we are to have each other, we have also been talking about how we both are so appreciative to all of you for your support. We started blogging to find community and to flesh out the myriad of feelings creating a family can sometimes thwart with confusion and disappointment or sometimes bloom with welcome surprise. We've only just started, but we feel the unmistakable sense of community with you. Certainly we have supportive friends in our lives, but we also feel so grateful to you who drop in, read, and may nod your head in silence and sometimes comment in friendship and support. This undertaking would be so much harder without knowing you are out there with us and we with you.

I don't write as often as I'd like. My work days often bring me home well past one a.m. And I am for better and for not, a muller (there is no such word, I made it up but you know what I mean)-- I have to mull over my thoughts and feelings for a while before I can articulate them. But on this one I need no extra time. Just want to reach out and say, thanks buddies. Thanks so much for being here.

One great thing. One infuriating thing. And there is swearing in this post

I met my beautiful new baby cousin today. Her mom, my cousin, completed what she deemed a three year pregnancy and just returned from abroad to pick up her little girl. My aunt pulled me aside and said she had never seen her daughter so happy. I had to agree with her. Although my cousin has not really slept in two weeks, she was -- I hate to use a cliche but--truly glowing. At a little under two years old, the little one is brilliant (uh of course), strong willed (duh another family trait) and just a love. We spontaneously decided to drive over and have her meet my mom as well. It was a veritable love fest! My cousin whispered to me as we parted, "You and mulberry better hurry up. She needs her baby cousins as playmates."

Sweet. Incomparable to the news I would be punched in the stomach with as I drove home.

While for the last few days I've been trying to gather my feelings around our new plan of action, the insurance company has thrown in a new twist. They've denied our claim for mulberry's IVF. They say she has to have supposedly tried six (!) times before they would allow it. Does that mean if she had a husband with viable sperm and they had been trying for six months she would qualify? I don't know. I do know I am furious and disappointed and and and it smacks of heterosexist garbage! Although my feelings are mixed because of my own issues (feelings of guilt, loss) we along with our doctor should have the final say on what is the best plan of action for our family.

We are waiting for our doctor to contact us regarding this. We talked about the possibility of our doctor making a case for needing IVF due to advanced maternal age. Mulberry brought up that if this case is successfully made, it may backfire on us if we want to go back to IUI with her at a later date.

Then I started thinking, insurance companies try to deny people with cancer vital services they need so why would they act differently here? I just want to step out of character and say SHIIIIIT! F*CKING A**WIPES ! I hate them all.

I don't know

It has been hard to write and organize my thoughts. Last week we decided on a very high drug complex plan of action that will involve mulberry freezing her embryos first then us both going through a process for a fresh transfer of my embryos to her. Then we found out mulberry has asthma, and a continued mystery swelling of her ankles. Doctor says might be just a bit of weight gain but we are not sure. She's on birth control pills while we are waiting for our two insurance companies to reject and accept whatever parts they will. I know she is afraid of the drugs related to IVF. I am too, especially since we won't know what new symptoms will arise from them. I know how much she wants the experience of pregnancy. I keep coming back to wondering whether this really is the right thing for her--trying to carry my embryos. She hasn't been diagnosed with anything negative regarding her fertility, and we've only tried once to get her pregnant less invasively. Oh.

When we were in the RE's office discussing our options back in June and got to the part where mulberry would carry, I started to cry and blurted out that it may not be fair for mulberry to do MY heavy lifting. When the RE asked me whether her husband had allowed her to do the heavy lifting when they had their child, I said yes. Yes he had. As a feminist, I feel that he and we all betta recognize as they say in the neighborhood. Women do an incredible thing (risk our own lives really) bringing life into the world.

I can't finish these thoughts yet. I feel suspended and surreal and sad today. U2 is on the radio I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For. Which has been followed by Ohio Players Rollercoaster. I am ovulating too. Another twelve-hour work day awaits.

haiku allergy prayer #1

goddess please help me
not remain a lezzie who
achoos coos for cats

Edit Note: I welcome anyone's haiku prayer for the day/week. The structure is three lines with five syllables in the first, seven in the second, and five for the last. Give it a try? Would love to hear whatever/angry/hopeful/whimsical. xxoD.

Crossing Borders

We still have the kittens. Given my allergies, our lives now involve a lot of costume changes, special baths, air purifiers, and constant hand washing as we cross the borders between kitten land and the allergen free zone. But then of course there is all that delicious purring, playing, protecting us from water bugs and the scientific fact that they are just so damn cute. Anyway, back to business.

I am heterozygous for the MTHFR gene. All the bloggers are right. There really is no way to look at that without thinking I've got a cursed little mothafu... well you know, gene. Thank you so much for your comments to my last post. Your questions prompted me to refer back to my lab reports. I've read that many people are heterozygous for this gene (some statistics state as high as 50%) but I don't have my anti-phospholipid antibody numbers at hand nor do I know the statistical mix with my hypothyroidism. Although I have been taking vegetarian prenatal vitamins which contain 1 full gram of folate and 200 mcg of selenium for a while now, with exception of the folate, no one has ever specifically recommended any particular dosages of vitamin supplements to me. I was surprised to read on the internet how much these may be essential to managing my condition.

[This is very unusual for me. I am generally quite anal about getting all the background material on all things of interest. On parenting mulberry says that she will probably be scary mom (the-if-you-even-get-in-the-same-room-with-drugs-I-will-kill-you mom) and I'll be information mom (the-let-me give-you-a-five-part-audio-visual-series-lecture-with-a-field -trip-on-why-drugs-are-bad-for-you-mom). But I digress.]

Our last IUI try in April involved aspirin and later Lovenox and progesterone supplements. Our reproductive endocrinologist kept insisting that the best time to start Lovenox would be with a positive pregnancy test. Both mulberry and I thought that may be too late. It took a while for our doctor to agree that it wouldn't do any harm to take the aspirin at the beginning of my cycle. After insemination our week one progesterone result number was good, therefore no supplements were recommended. The next week we had a positive pregnancy result but low progesterone levels--that is when we began the suppositories. It was a difficult few days because at the time we didn't know which way the pregnancy was going.

Mulberry and I are a bit back to the drawing board so to speak on how to start the next cycle. I've read that if I tried the complete IVF myself and was successful, my condition predicates an elevated risk to possible problems in the last trimester. One is that there may ostensibly be more preeclampsia result for women like me. We still don't know how to get sync'd up if we go the route of mulberry not taking any initial drugs and then taking my biological embryos. This weekend we are going to make a chart of all the options we are considering and send more questions to the RE on what it will take to get us there. Mulberry is patiently/impatiently ready to get started again. I want to get on with it again too. We both just want to consider more fully what may give us our best chance. The million dollar answer.