Back to my roots

For some reason I've been thinking a lot about the origin of my blogging career (using the term "career" very loosely, since my posting is sporadic at best, and no one is paying me. I have to pay people to read it. Usually with favors.) When I first started blogging, it was about our adventures with infertility and IVF. Since Sawyer is now 3 1/2 we've had a lot of people asking us when we're going to do IVF again. I've brought the questioning on myself by being way out of the IVF closet, and by announcing openly that we were going to transfer our embryos last year - before we found out our insurance was cheaping out on us. Anyway. It's really hard to explain to people that I'm just not ready to go through the whole process again. I know my kids (if we're successful) are going to be several years apart, which is probably not optimal, etc, but...I just can't bring myself to make that phone call to Dr. A right now.

Part of the problem is that people don't realize what the IVF process entails. They think of it as a one-time visit to the doctor, one procedure, and then you find out if you're pregnant or not. In reality, it's a multi-step, months long process of painful testing, invasive procedures, lots of money spent, more needles than I ever thought I'd see in a lifetime...and the whole time no one knows whether or not it will even work.

And I haven't even experienced what a lot of IVFers do. We have an official diagnosis - at least 10% of IVF patients have "unexplained" infertility. Knowing what our problem is (bad sperm) actually makes us feel better about going through the treatments. Our first IVF cycle worked, which makes us extremely lucky and probably means I shouldn't complain about the process at all, given that a lot of couples I know have undergone multiple cycles with no success. I must be a wimp, because just that one cycle (and the testing/surgery) that preceded it makes me terrified of doing it again. Maybe terrified is too strong a word. It's more of a big, fat, "I don't want to."

Of course the end result is worth it. Of course. I would go through 100 IVFs to have Sawyer again. But when the best chance anyone has of success is 30% (much less for a frozen cycle, and less now that I'm over 30) it's difficult to be excited about going through it all again. I definitely want to give our frozen triplet embryos a chance. And doing a transfer only cycle will be a lot less stressful than a full IVF cycle, in theory anyway. It's just going to take me a little while to work up the courage again.