Tolon Wilile ("The Party is On!")

 ATTENTION READERS: You are cordially invited to attend.....
 
 For the past two weeks, I have been busy.  In search of a defense mechanism. Seriously, but with tongue in cheek (a grain of salt).  Lo and behold!  The fix? A nice brand of escapism.  Okay, listen, listen.  Soon after joining the IVF community at large, it became evident to me that while I can really listen to collective blues (you know, BB King (I Like to Live the Love), Albert King (Blues Power) and Koko Taylor (I'm a Woman)), individual tales told in blue keys threaten to kill me.  I'm empathic, and what I think and read, I feel.  And what others feel, I feel.  In my gut.  Hold on don't leave me yet.  There are Sistren who are truly tormented with their fertility status (the other "in-" word  hurts when I use it). They and we blog and we are in the same club.  But I can't (caint-not in the vernacular) read and adsorb their words and experiences without paying the price of a hot belly and achy joints.  And tears for them.   I know someone out there understands me!

     The stakes for my silly self (cause I'm usually giggling as I write you must know) since yesterday became even higher when my RE (reproductive endocrinologist/test tube baby doc) figured out a way to have me making a baby in a laboratory by January 1st.  The Party is On! Just in time to pay my newly discovered yearly deductible of $200.00 twice in thirty days. In less than thirty days I may be pregnant.  That is a maybe full of waits.   As the stakes grow higher, I have really got to use my imagination (my favorite word, second to sublime) to figure out how to help myself and others who are going through this too.  What to do?

When I was in undergrad, one of my sweet African friends shared with me that where she was from, when a woman had her period it was customary to cater to her by having a party!  Her favorite foods and music filled the house.  What a good idea!  Nutrition and mental health intervention to promote wellness....for fertility and sanity.

      Please don't judge me now too harshly.  Remember I am an aspiring midwife and a nurse.  This is what we do: develop interventions to promote the health and well being of people, families and communities.  We also devise these to help them overcome, to hope and cope.  So, as my doctor asks my chocolate guy to give me weeks of shots in my high hip (BTW my protocol will be the Luteal/Estrace/Ganirelix,  each med no more than $35.00 for 30-day supply ) I must find the humor and some levity (BTW, he will not be doing that!).  Gotta find a way to be okay!  So this party has a twofold purpose.  It will serve as my theme music so to speak.  Or background music when the ignorant, or insensitive, or know-it-all folks, or professors, or even my Chocolate Guy gets on the nerve that runs from my brain to my womb.  So I am programming myself for this one.  Here it goes.  " Niqi, you do not want some kids running around your house at your age....what if you have eight, just don't ask ME to babysit.....and so on."  It also gets me up off of my backside allowing blood to flow there, while getting creative meridians going. Seriously on that one.

     If you find me, it will be here cooking and dancing and listening to music for the next thirty days or so.  My ongoing IVF party.  We started our Saturday off with some Soukous, Zouk and Compas, Calypso and Cuban. Drop on by if you are so inclined.  There will be food and laughter with a log on the fire, and we will be waiting for you.  RSVP by commenting and let me know what your fave party song is!

Jammin & Eating Bird of Paradise Pie,


The Chocolate Cyster



Pata Pata time (Miriam Makeba)

The Party is On! (Salif Keita)

A Hydrosonogram and a Prepoo

     What a difference a day makes/made. 24 little hours pass and you can come together like green pineapple and coconut jello mold. I had always wondered when in the world I would experience my rite of passage.  Menarche did not quite feel like it. Nope.  Partly because I did not tell my mother the news & hid it (for like a year) because I did not want my personal business broadcast to Aunts V & S & X,Y,Z (love you) and every other snickering bystander/brother/dad in my little world. And the news always seemed so catastrophic in my neighborhood.  A girl getting her very first period marked guerilla parent/community counterfertility action and stern tension. 
     Counterfertility. Like getting dragged back home caveman style by your brothers because it is now too risky to permit you to play with your once-upon-a-time cribmates. Further proof?  I was not permitted to have phone calls from the opposite sex until I was nineteen.  Yeah. Like those Black community evidence based mantras, "No babies until you've got the degree and the house."  Counterfertility.  Now from just whence would me rites of passage arise! A cottillion? High school graduation? Hot August nights in a Cleveland swamp listening to "For Lovers Only" while my parents' trained dog refused to let any suitors to come within 2 feet of our white picket fence (hee! yes 'Ma, I do exaggerate).  Is it any wonder I ever got married?
     Letting that and so much else go in the past twenty-four grueling hours has done me well. But let me tell you, my yesterday brought me to a rare precipitation: real tears.  Naw. Stereotypically, I tend not to cry. On day 7, full moon-leaving, at 10pm I wept. Then and again at 5am, I cried in the dark. Quiet, hot tears.  The kind that even smell salty, in such a showing that they humidified our bedroom and insantaneously roused a man who often asks me, "Why don't you ever cry?" 
     Tears like insulin must come in relatively finite amounts I guess.  My entire adolescence, lifegoals and future converged on my yesterday.  After: the hardest interview for the only job I have ever wanted in my life concluded with the "you really don't have the experience we're looking for", an F (74%) on a resubmit in grad school,  news that I need two more crowns; and a man who must have never heard O'Bryan's version of Still Waters Run Deep on a sweltering, August night in Cleveland. 
     My early morning prayers saved me.  Up.Up.Up I got and called my breakfast friends.  As I drove to my friends in the beauty of the misted Carolina pines this "what-a-beautiful" November morning, it all came together. What I'm gon' do, that is.  Don't know the details, but I just chose gratitude again, gave my big ole chocolate guy some credit and just drove.  As I did I got a little spunk and decided to get some resolution about my multicomplex of ironies.  Underemployed. Overeducated. Underexperienced. Undermarried (did I say that?). Demotivated to pay for the academic hazing with little return. Childless.  And the equillibruim shifted to favor my effervescent personality, my kind, ethical, gentle, humanistic way with its threatening undercurrent of fire.  I could see clearly now. 
     After breakfast, I drove to get my water ultrasound at my brandnew testtube babydoctor (RE).  Emotio-logically  (that's a word I think I just made up) I could hardly justify doing it--for the aformentioned reasons. But something just carried me.
     Something about the feeling of the morning was a flowing beautiful though.  One of my long seen friends just so happened to be at the testtube baby store orienting with my fave nurse and I didn't mind. At all. In fact I took it as a blessing, one of a few I have not bored you with, that has cushioned the harsh past 24.  This woman is one of the most sincere people that I know.  Oh what a beautiful morning.   Dr. K. wheeled really close and said to me "So, I looked at that MRI you had last year.  It looked fine, better than I thought it could. You virtually have no fibroids, the ones in question are really,really small. I got your labs back.  Your FSH is under ten--6! Your AMH? Aah... could be better if it were above 1, but its workable at 0.5.  Lets do this ultrasound so I can see if that lil fibroid you do have is in your uterine cavity."  (Flashes of sharp cervical pain and minor cramping enter the room.)
    I needed to know, "Well  Dr. K? What do you see?" He then turned the monitor for me to see it too, while uttering words no one has ever said about my uterus...  "It looks beautiful,..."  No polyps, no fibroids, nada, nunca, nein! "....let's do IVF, now." And he smiled at me, renewing my faith in humanity.  He then said "It kinda depends on what your yearly deductible  is, I'm afraid though. You'd have to pay it again in January. Do you know if its huge? Make that appointment to sign consents ....Find out about that deductible."
     My uterus did look good.  Even to me. A I checked out, the clerk said, "Goodbye Mrs H. See you next visit.  And you have no copay no deductible. Have a good day."
     Recently I wondered where my creativity had gone.  Like my groove--where was it?   Not my motivation, my free flowing creativity that comes from being up up up off your backside. (When you dance so you can feel better, thing).  As I sit pampering myself, with the dregs of my raw honey, Palma Christi Castor Oil & EVO prepoo and facial, I flow.  Just for me.  Anticipating in vitro fertilization not as  a guarantee of sorts, but a rite of passage.  This welcome emotional paradigm ("feel like" versus "gon' do") I rarely have indulged in you see.     
     So imagine how easy it was when I told my chocolate guy this afternoon, "The new doctor said that I'm all good and we can start taking the meds next month after we sign the papers next week..."  And he looked at me, nodded and said, "Okay."  (This my friends is a big deal.  This thing right here.)
    Don't care if anyone every hires me.  Care if I get kicked outta school, but not today. Looking for a good (read benevolent & free) cosmetic dentist or the Extreme Makeover folks to knock on my door.  But other than that?  Everything's going my way.

Stay tuned,

The Chocolate Cyster

The Test Tube Baby Shop is Better than the Mausoleum

I need to speak to a few people who may need for me to make it plain about what I am doing. Please forgive the fact that I will have multiple voices; don't let this confuse you.  Its still me, The Chocolate Cyster.

(This is Boo, y'all.)

If you have heard of "test tube babies", I am trying to make one.  There is a place down the street from where I work that does it and well, I stop in there like every day or so and we're working on it.  We are on the first stages where they just look to see if you qualify for the project.  It does cost quite a bit and good insurance makes it possible for people like me.  They have the process down pretty good now.

I stopped yesterday on the way home from work.  I just wanted to know my very first lab results, but they did not have them yet.  I don't know if I can do it yet.  But I am on the case.

Why would I want to do this?

Because when I come home from work and even when my man is there, the house is like a mausoleum.  That's like a crypt or where they buried Michael Jackson.  Cold and silent and still and smelling like nothing.

Any yes I do cry because I "don't have no babies." Not having children is not really a blessing for all my baby-mama peeps out there.  You should be where I am.  It gets tired after about ten years of it.

That's why.  Any questions?

I am off to the dentist.  Gotta keep the oral hygiene together....to keep the inflammation out of my body and to keep the miscarriages away.....We can talk about that more if you want to know.

Will let you know as soon as I know,
The Chocolate Cyster

The Drought of 2007 & 2010

     A week or so ago, I was in the gyne's office pleading for a Mirena--a progesterone laced device that lures many women like me with promises of rest from the torturous monthlies we endure.  And maybe it could ease me with the pregnancy dreams.  Not dreams of being pregnant, but dreams you get when you are pregnant and progesterone laden.  You should also be reminded that Mirena is a contraceptive device.  But little did I know that my ambivalence and inner conflict would not pass the sniff test with this random doc. She started, "So what do you exactly want?  I am not so sure that this (the Mirena lure) will work for you, with what you've got going on.  Maybe you should wait."
    This woman was a random gyne assigned to me because mine had sent me the postcard saying, "Won't be there on November 2nd, so pick another one to do whatever it is you think you need."  Blessing in disguise, that is, this straw threatening to break my camel-back. That 'wait' part was the straw. And true to my camel nature, I gulped my intears and began unintelligible speak then. Complaints and whines about my satisfaction with their services, no clear plan, random encounters and management of my pregnancy and subsequent miscarriage, failed communications and cancellation postcards.  Ramblings about losing my good years under their care from 36 years old to now 40, having to travel to Atlanta for the world famous guy to straighten out my endo and them dropping the ball after that surgery.  So I felt. Mirena-- give me mine now to end all hope of babies. Relief.
     She widened her stance and looked at me squarely. "Your needs are not being met here. It looks like a few months ago you wanted a pregnancy? Or do you (now) want to hurry menopause?...What?...You need to get what you want, get your needs met elsewhere if we are not meeting them here. Look. Advocate for yourself." What moxie she had, but she was telling the truth and she said it with the right cadence and sincerity.  "If you want a baby, go somewhere else.  You have insurance, we are not the only reproductive endocrinologists in this area. I'll be happy to send you over to the other guys," she concluded.
 
     Three and a half years ago, and again this year we urban gardeners in this area had suffered loss after loss in drought and other climatic miseries.  And on top of losing 14 varieties of organic tomatoes to months of no rain and the best honeydews around, I had some kind of complex  miscarriage of at least one baby due on Leap Year Day-- February 29th. I will save that story for another day if you really must hear it. But for now, I cannot look at dead or dying plants much like I cannot hardly see the fruit of my own womb in the same state.  Nor beautiful greenery with absolutely stunted fruiting.  The slaughter of the 2010 season forced me to withdraw from my golden hands gardening because it was replicating my own fertility status.  Not even the weather had been cooperating; it too has been oppressive. (And yes this is color is hard to read, ironically.)

     True to her word, she did send my records to the competition.  And I got a phone call from the other guys the next day and the voice on the other end sounded as confused as I knew myself to be.  "Ahem, Ma'am? What exactly do you want? Did you want IVF or something else?" I had rarely gotten a call back, let alone one so timely. I began, "I don't know. I don't know.  Sigh.  I want to know what is possible. I want to know what the test results are when they are taken, I want to know what they mean.  That is what I want."  
     This I repeated to my new reproductive endocrinologist, Dr. K, then promised him that I would give myself a week to think twice about giving up my last good year of fertility.   Then I said it again to the lovely phlebotomist Synthia this morning when she drew two tubes for estradiol, follicular stimulating hormone and antimullerian hormone on Day 3.  True to my midwife nature, I want to be involved in my own babymaking.

Stay tuned for the good parts........
The Chocolate Cyster

     

From Day 1

We all know what day one means. Or from day one, I really should say.  Sentimental I am, ill-advisedly, and in hindsight, I should have known from day one what it all would mean.  Back in the days, boys used to offend my chastity and say, "If you don't use it now, cobwebs will grow all around it!" Hmph.  They were not right, but they were not exactly wrong either.  Well, I think what was optimal was what my Kentucky bred Dibbs (Daddy) used to randomly say and suggest to me in my early twenties...."Having babies is for the young." 
   As I moved through my twenties the rest of all my mother's huge litter (love you  'Ma) would tease and predict...."Guess who's havin' a baby---fifty-years-old!!!??....Yeah! Boo(my beloved urban nickname)!" They too were so very wrong and almost right.  Forty-years-old.  Ten years into an all-too-often-missed diagnosis of endometrosis after a 1999 laparascopic exploration showing no chocolate cysts--just lots of the dreaded cobwebs. Many years of supplements organic gardening, knitting, fasting, raw juicing and running from my husband's DNA.  I would say that these tactics were all worth it, they helped me survive and even get pregnant. Once.  That pregnancy became a huge learning experience that one day I will soon share with my virtual audience if you really really want me to.  In fact, I am so thankful for that experience because so many of my friends who are chasing fertility have never had the sublime privilege of being pregnant.
    Here on Day 2, I blog because have finally decided to descend into the Jetsonian pit of IVF. (Naw, do Black people do that junk? one person says....But its soo unnatural, my chocolate guy says).  After much melodrama, avoidance and conflict.  Long after not liking: the idea of culturing my babies in horse serum, or the last reproductive endocrinologist and that crazy miscarriage I had with him or trying to explain to my husband what in the world that last MRI was for....to.... I  cannot afford that.  To are we really to old to adopt?  To tired of living in utter stillness after work, hobbies, religion, volunteering and friends who really do have to go home. I am ready. In a protracted midtermitis as a student nurse midwife.  I am ready
     Tomorrow is Day 3...for the first lab draw in a long series of lab draws that may lead to what 'Ma says will be for certain three babies.  I dunno.  I will take one.  I will even just take my best shot because endo is fast on my heels and pregnancy in my size 6 waist case may stretch out any adhesions in my bod and give me a rest. I need a rest because symptomatic endo is beyond pain.  And I need some crazy lil brown babies with protuberant backsides and pouty lips running aroud here.  So back to tomorrow. To check my "ovarian reserve".... or the "are you in menopause yet test"for FSH (follicular stimulating hormone), I will go in before work and really hope that the menopause that endometriosis had me praying for has not yet descended upon me....I hope its not too late....
To be continued,
The Chocolate Cyster