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