Meandering Reproductive Thoughts

I'm on my first IUI.

I wasn't originally going to do any drugs, but my doctor persuaded me to take some. So for the last three weeks I've been taking a colorful spectrum of drugs to be swallowed, injected or otherwise inserted. I thought it would all be covered by my insurance, but it turns out the injectables weren't. Argh!

So far I haven't had any side effects other than an increased craving for carbohydrates. I'm definitely gaining weight because of this.

I've been reading a few fertility forums. The information is really valuable. But I have some problems dealing with the atmosphere of relentless positivity and emphasis on support at all costs. For example, the idea that mentions of pregnancy and childbirth are something that a lot of women need to be protected from.

I don't want to judge other people, because it's really about me and my own issues. Maybe I'm a horrible jerk who lacks empathy. Or maybe I'm just paranoid. In other types of environments where the goal is support at all costs, I've noticed that the goal is often achieved by stifling dissent or constructive criticism. I understand the need for "safe spaces" and I've benefited many times from belonging to them. The important part of a safe space is that you should be protected from people who deny your reality (something which can be depressingly common outside the safe space). But there's a tricky balance involved as well.

It's a bit easier to describe in terms of adoption communities. Forums that cater to adoptive parents are common. If an adoptive parent is feeling hurt or frustrated or in pain, the support can be really healthy. It can also be really counterproductive and infantilizing.

For example, on one forum I'm at (which is primarily but not 100% supportive) a parent asked for advice on how to explain that her young child, adopted from Russia, was of Roma descent. She was already fielding a lot of questions about how her child "really didn't look Russian". Especially in summer. She was worried about anti-Roma prejudice so she was thinking of how to keep her child's background from being a topic of discussion.

All the adoptive parents of color on the site, including myself, gave her the exact same advice. DON'T KEEP IT A SECRET. Emphasize Roma heritage and Roma pride. The child is going to have a much, much different experience of race than a white Russian adoptee. Realize that you're in a transracial adoption even though you never signed up for one. We all did this with as much politeness and empathy as possible.

She didn't want to hear our advice. She just wanted to be propped up in her decision to keep it a secret. In fact, she quickly left the forum in a huff because she wasn't "being supported".

A need for emotional support shouldn't translate into entitlement to act stupidly or selfishly.

And this has very little to do with infertility, but I'd like to mention how much I hate the word "triggered". I would never use it myself, because it reduces me to some horribly passive inanimate object. I can be insulted, angered, enraged, humiliated, upset, disturbed, shocked or saddened. But I can't be "triggered", unless I actually had a flashback or a seizure or something like that.

In any online environment where the word "triggered" is really popular, I get the impression that the participants are presenting themselves more as collections of traumas than the individual human beings that they undoubtedly are. Why would you want to depersonalize yourself? I don't understand the motivation.

I'm probably reading too much into it... ultimately, it's just a case where a word is undergoing a semantic shift.

Anyway, back to the infertility stuff. I'll make some posts about my protocols and results because I want to contribute to the same sharing of information that has already given me great benefit. But I'm just not into the emotional support aspect.

A set of information that really helped me was reading (on a different board) accounts of the LEEP procedure. I had that about twelve years ago for cervical dysplasia. I've wondered for years whether it would affect my fertility, but my doctor says my cervix looks great and is definitively healed.

I had such a terrible experience with the LEEP. It really have me a healthy fear and distrust of any medical professional who gets close to my reproductive system.

In hindsight, maybe I shouldn't have had the LEEP procedure at all. A lot of times if you come back in six months for another pap smear, the dysplasia clears up on its own. But the doctor recommended the LEEP and I was so scared of cervical cancer that I agreed with anything he said. I was told it would be a simple outpatient procedure with no pain, so I planned on taking the bus home afterwards. When I got onto the table, the nurse placed an oddly-shaped, heavy pad on my thigh. "What's that for?" I asked. "Oh, we're just grounding your thigh." That's when I started panicking. The doctor brushed aside my questions and gave me the attitude that he was doing me a big favor and I needed to quit whining... so I just laid back and let them go ahead and electrocute my cervix in what turned out to be the most painful experience of my entire life. And then I took the bus home.

Many women who had the LEEP procedure reported back that it was no big deal. But a few were like me, and said things like "OH MY GOD THE PAIN" and "I had a really painful natural childbirth and it was a walk in the park compared to the LEEP procedure." What must have happened was that the local anesthetic was not working correctly. Instead of giving me more anesthetic or looking into the problem, the doctor just didn't give a damn...

I wish this was all information I knew beforehand. But now I'm always going to research the hell out of any drug or procedure.

Let's see how IUI #1 goes.

Sunny recently asked me a birth-related question. We were talking about someone else's baby, and he asked, "how do babies get out?" I said they came out through the vagina, which was part of the private parts that women have. He seemed kind of weirded out by that. He said that that wasn't the only way that babies came out, sometime they came out through the stomach. I congratulated him on knowing that, and reminded him it was called a Cesarean section.

We haven't really had any big talk yet about this stuff, partly because he knows a fair amount about the facts of life already. He knows that you have "sex" and that women can get pregnant and have babies. He knows proper words for private parts but messes them up sometimes, most hilariously, "peanut" for "penis".

I've stressed the word "private parts" in that they're "private" and they belong to him only. For example, when I put lotion on him after the shower, he's always responsible for lotioning his own private parts. I think he needs to be more educated in this area, but I probably wouldn't be the best teacher. Luckily a group we belong to has great classes on stuff like this, so I think I need to sign him up soon.

I'm thinking about showing Sunny a carefully selected clip from a great documentary called The Business of Being Born. There are a few scenes where a woman gives birth very easily, at home, with no blood and no screaming, and it's very inspiring (although not terribly representative of the average birth).