dead silence

I don’t know what to do.

It’s over. The appointments and the hormones and the craziness and the hope – every emotion filled and spun onward from our bulldozing towards an unattainable the last several months – it’s all gone.

Is this the hardest part?

Somehow it’s easier to suffer from the hormones than from the sadness. When I’m going bonkers from Lupron, or my ovaries are aching from Menopur, or have ouchy nipples and pasty panty stains from the progesterone,  I know there is a reason, purely chemical, that does not have to be dealt with on more than a superficial level. I know that I am doing this to myself for a reason and that reason is the hope that it will work, that we will have a baby and that I will be freed from this limbo we have been living the past (almost) five years.

It didn’t work.

I know there are women who do IVF over and over and over again, and that I should not be discouraged. I know that there will be other chances. I know that it is not over.

Maybe I feel lost knowing that a life, however tiny, did begin to latch on to me.

Funny, the only experience I have with motherhood at thirty three is the failure to be able to provide the most basic of things: a safe uterus for baby to grow in.

My RE is overbooked so I can’t even have my WTF appointment until August 18th. Manboy insisted somewhat by a non-violent sit-in at the secretary’s office last week, and was curtly awarded the promise of a telephone call for his efforts.

She called yesterday.

My RE says that the IVF cycle confirmed once again what we already knew, that I have a very diminished ovarian reserve, and taught us something that we didn’t know, that my right ovary has called it quits. I asked her what she could do about that. She said nothing really, except to let my ovaries rest over the summer, and in the fall try again, this time with an even more aggressive protocol. She warned me though that it would be a heavier treatment, and more difficult to endure. She told me bluntly that in my case she would make no guarantees about even IVF working, and that even with a different protocol, that we might not do any better, eggwise, and we might even do worse. But she did say that she thought we had a chance, and that even having the tiniest glimmer of a beginning of a pregnancy is always a good sign. She compared me to a woman over forty when she spoke of our chances of success. I tried to act like I did not hear that last comment.

And I told her not to worry about what I could endure, to bring on the heavy artillery.

After coming so close and having our hopes dashed, I’m feeling a bit masochistic. Besides, I don’t think any treatment could come close to hurting as much as the heartbreak we are feeling right now.