The One With our 2021 Primary Infertility Battle Plan
Hey guys! We’re alive, we’re still infertile, and, now, we’re ready to do something about it.
[SOUND OF TRUMPET]
Over the second half of 2020, we launched PWB (…you may be aware) and we’ve done months of tests and studies with our doctor to really get all up in my interior plumbing. It’s been a real treat. But! Now we know stuff. Now we know, maybe, what to do.
[SOUND OF GONG]
[TED DROPS GONG HITTER THINGY AND WALKS AWAY, WHISTLING INNOCENTLY]
The thing is, what we’ve learned has made it clear that we’ve got a potentially LONG road ahead of us. We’re on, like, page 47 of the Silmarillion………………..or three minutes into The Phantom Menace.
Here’s where we're at: Ted’s sperm is confusing and silly. My eggs are weird. And sleepy. And really, really, bad at following directions.
[SOUND OF ANCIENT WINDOWS START-UP SEQUENCE]
What’s that leave us with? AN EXCELLENT QUESTION.
Today, let’s talk 2021 strategy. It’s time to reveal our PROJECT WATERBEAR BATTLE PLAN.
[SOUND OF SAD SLIDE WHISTLE]
12 months; hormone therapy (primarily progesterone, because I naturally have none of it); Femara, which is an anti-estrogenic breast cancer drug that has an off-label use for helping women with PCOS get pregnant; and lots and lots and lots of blood tests, tense war councils with our doctor, and a super strict diet for at least one of us.
12 months.
Basically, 2021 is our year, guys. It’s gonna happen, or it’s not; and, at the end of the year, we’re gonna start thinking about other ways to build our family.
I mean, it’s not as if we’re gonna stop trying forever starting January next year (of course not). That’s just when we’re going to take a break from the expensive, intense treatments that are already doing a number on my body. That’s when I can (sigh) have a glass of wine again. That’s when we’ll take a break and reassess.
At that point, we’ll likely shift focus from having our first kid via (my) pregnancy and (my) childbirth, and instead concentrate on a first kid through adoptive means. We’ve talked a lot about it, and that seems right…at this point in time.
A lot can (obviously) change in a year. A lot has. A year ago, we were pretty sure we were facing unexplained infertility. Now, we know better. I have (a mysterious, invisible, highly confusing version of) PCOS; and I (likely) have LUFS, a condition which makes it less confusing that my PCOS is confusing, but doesn’t offer much hope overall tbh.
(We’ll be talking more about LUFS in the future, but the basic gist is that it’s a whole ‘you can lead a horse to water and even give it a bendy straw, but your body still probably won’t ovulate anyway’ situation.)
Flash forward to now. My medicine cabinet is overflowing, and the fun is about to begin. (Well, technically, it’s begun; I started hormone therapy last month, and I took my first mega-dose of Femara yesterday morning.)
HERE’S THE SCARY THING.
It might seem a little abrupt, like, oh, Rebecca and Ted are going to try one solution for a relatively short amount of time (in the grand scheme of things), and if that doesn’t work, then they’re just gonna throw in the towel?
The thing is, that ‘one solution’ is kind of our only option.
As previously discussed, we’re really not in this game to explore IVF/IUI/etc. The kid’s either happening the old-fashioned way (albeit with a barrage of drugs) or not.
We’ve figured out what’s probably wrong with me: I have little to no progesterone, and it’s a complete toss-up whether I’m ovulating each month (despite having literally all the symptoms of doing so). The solution to that is simple: Add progesterone, take drug that’s supposed to make me ovulate.
If those interventions work well, I’m supposed to get pregnant in 3-6 months. Yay!
If those interventions don’t work, I mean, there’s really not an alternative for ‘giving Rebecca more progesterone’ (that I’m aware of). (Remember, I already eat super well and am doing acupuncture and stuff, too.) Similarly, we’ve already tried Clomid, and Femara’s the other big ovulation inducer, so. We could try Lupron/etc, but there’s a certain point (aforementioned horse to water idea) where if big-time ovulation meds aren’t doing the trick, well, then…we might be out of luck.
Our doctor has already told us (and we trust him, because what he’s saying lines up with the overwhelming amount of research we’ve done) that if we’re still not seeing any luck by about mid-2021, he’s going to recommend us for surgery to find and remove endometriosis. And that also isn’t something that we’re particularly interested in, because it would be a) exploratory, b) super invasive, and c) very very expensive……and, at this point, I have zero of the risk factors for endo.
Now, I’m not stupid. I also didn’t think I had PCOS, yet here we are.
However - for our first kid, right now, with everything - we’re just not interested in putting me through a surgery that’s not wholly warranted for the off-chance that maybe it’ll be the thing that brings me back to optimal fertility.
Later, we might be singing a different tune. We might wait a couple years, adopt a kid, switch insurance plans, do a lot more research, and take that gamble.
It’s just not what we’re planning on doing now.
WHY TWELVE MONTHS?
Seems like a bit of an arbitrary timeline - especially seeing as our doctor told us 3-6 months with our current treatment plan is what he’s looking at.
We’re going with the 365 timeline because:
- It’s a really nice, round number, and we like that
- It gives us 2-4x the ‘this treatment should work’ window to give us a really, really good chance
- It gives us time to research other options
- It’s long enough for us to give having a bio-kid a really good try, in our minds, but short enough for us to get a move on with the (potentially years-long) adoption process in 2022 if that’s what’s in the cards for us
- It gives us an end date and a way out.
That’s the big thing, honestly.
When we started to put together our battle plan, we realized that it needed to have some kind of end date or cap on it, because…that’s the kind of people we are. We’re not good with indefinites.
We also (this is selfish, but true) want to be young parents. We want to have … idk, not a huge family, but we’d wanted more than one child.
(Relevant: I’m from a family of 6 kids, and I grew up thinking that that was a completely average number, so my concept of a ‘huge’ family is extremely skewed. Our initial goal was circa 2-4 kids, influenced by many factors.)
While we’ll be ecstatic with any number of kids, at this point, we’ve also realized that we’re gonna have to think outside the box a little, here. And that’s okay. We’ve spent the last several months getting our brains used to the idea of a first kid via adoption and a possible blended family situation, and, you know what, we’re going to be okay.
We’re also extremely serious, silly people. You may know that. And - surprise! - we can even see the future, a little bit.
We’ve realized exactly what’s going to happen, if you’ve been reading along and can see our lovely train wreck happening in slow-mo, like we can.
Here’s my bet (I’ll put $5.27 and a bottle of bourbon on this, if anyone wants to call it):
We’re going to try for a year and not get pregnant. We’re going to fill out paperwork and become okay with the fact that this is our life. We’re going to spend a lot of money, do a lot of interviews, and sit on waiting lists for months before getting matched with a beautiful toddler.
And then, once we’ve pretty much passed the point of no return with that adoption, we’re going to find out that I’m pregnant. With triplets, probably.
And that will be our life. And it will be hilarious and brilliant.
(Either that, or the incredibly likely scenario in which I get pregnant after like 2-3 months of hormones and ovulation triggers, because science.)
In case it wasn’t incredibly clear, we like having our bases covered.
This week's TedTalk consists of an incredibly helpful graphic Ted put together!!!!! Voila:
WHAT DOES THIS MEAN FOR THE BLOG?
We dropped off a bit for the past few weeks, which felt really nice. Work for both of us has been super intense, not to mention what’s been going on, you know, in the world around us.
In 2021, we’d like to get back to it. A few things:
- We do plan on being pretty open about the results of what we’re going through. We’ve decided to ‘reveal’ whether each cycle ‘worked’ or not on approximately a one-month lag (so, we’ll discuss January’s results in February, and so on). In a best-case scenario, this could result in us making a super-super public pregnancy announcement at, like the 8-10 week benchmark, which … is not traditional. But! We’ve decided that we’re okay with it, honestly. If we have further miscarriages and bad stuff happen, we want people to know about that. And the lag will give us 4-5 weeks, approx, to celebrate privately and to make sure our family and friends know before the Internet does. (We obviously reserve the right to change our minds about that, but ’tis the current plan.)
- I also want to amp up the shareable, SEO-ish, super-findable content that I post on the blog. Why? I’m a writer. Currently, I make my money by writing words for other people - and that is lovely, and quite fun, and I’ve been very lucky to find several clients that I very much enjoy working with. I’m also lucky to make a good amount of money doing so - no complaints; again, very lucky (and, I’ll take some credit: I’ve worked very very hard over the past year to make that happen). I don’t have any plans to stop writing for clients anytime remotely soon. However, if I’m able to build up my own audience a little, to have a website that brings in a good amount of traffic daily, that’ll be a good … insurance plan? Extra source of revenue? Fun side project? …that could keep me safe, just in case something happens and I lose all of my clients. To that end, in 2021 I’m going to be writing about fertility/infertility/women’s health stuff, but I’m also going to get back to writing about fairytales (just something I like doing, I definitely don’t think that’s gonna blow up anytime soon) AND also about the business of writing well (which I think could be relatively successful: how to pitch clients, how to start building a portfolio, how to put together a good writer website, etc. A LOT of people google stuff about how to make money with writing!). (If you follow me on Pinterest, which you absolutely do not have to do, you might have seen the glimmerings of my incredibly pretentious forthcoming rebrand, which I’m v v excited about.)
- For PWB, I think we’re going to target three posts/month: A chatty update on what’s working/what’s not/the last month in our lives, a science-y GIF-filled look at something relevant to our journey (the first three will likely be on LUFS, Femara, and hormone therapy, for example; we’ll probably also talk about finances, adoption logistics, and more) and then a more reflective essay (like this) to round things out. And then we’ll take a week off, because life.
Ultimately, I’m trying to cast an extremely large net with my website.
Some of it is meant to attract strangers on the Internet (yay for safety!).
Some of it is written expressly for friends and family.
Some of it (the fairytale ish) is basically written for myself, because I like doing it.
I’m also thinking about putting the two novels I’ve written online, chapter by chapter, in a sort of Andy-Weir way (note: I am not Andy Weir, and my books are nothing close to The Martian). I’m thinking of putting them up in an I’m-rewriting-and-making-fun-of-them-and-editing-them-in-real-time kind of series? Should be devastatingly, self-deprecatingly funny…hopefully. Again, just content that I think I can easily get out there…as it’s already written, you know.
I also plan to get back to posting my weight stats. I stopped because I majorly plateaued at 70kg for like two months, and it got super boring. This morning, I was 69.45kg, so, we’ll see if anything fun happens there.
Annnnnnnnyway.
We'll be taking a(nother) break for Christmas and then coming in hot in 2021. Until then: Have a very merry holiday season! Can't wait to see you next year!
(pinterest images below)
