A bad night

Look at me, getting into the swing of posting every day ;).

I, sort of unexpectedly, had a really bad night last night. Obviously not totally unexpected, today will mark only a week that I got punched in the gut and found out that Peanut had no h/b. I feel kind of foolish in retrospect, like I should have known that OF COURSE any egg of mine is a ticking time bomb. I even posted to that effect when I announced my pregnancy on a message board that I frequent. But after going through some crazy stuff before week 8 (bad spotting weeks 4-8, a flight, a Caribbean cruise), the fantastic week 8 ultrasound finally made me feel secure in the pregnancy. Foolish, foolish girl. If I ever do get pregnant again with my own eggs, NoodleGuy is going to have his hands full keeping me calm.

Anyway, yesterday was a beautiful day up here, sunny and 75, without a cloud in the sky. Work was not too busy -- as I've mentioned before, I work from home. I'm a web developer, my company kind of jumped around and changed hands a few years ago, just as NGuy and I were doing our long-distance dating from New York to Boston. A year before we got married, they moved the headquarters from NY down South and allowed those of us that they were keeping on to work full-time remotely. It was so lucky for us -- now neither of us needed to quit and find a new job. It made the choice to move to NGuy's neck of woods very easy.

However, the negative side is that I left all of my friends, my neighborhood, my apartment. And since I work from home, it has not been easy to meet new people. I always thought that once we had kids, I'd meet people through them. We all know how that's gone. Perhaps if we actually lived in the city of Boston, I'd be OK. There would be more to do, more distractions, more things to stimulate my brain. But instead we chose a perfectly nice suburb, thinking it would be a nice place to raise children, and my soul is dying. There is nothing to do here. Yes, there are malls and TGIFriday's and all of that. But nothing for a somewhat young, single lady to do during the day. Usually I'll go for a walk or a bike ride, but sometimes I want something else to do, involving real, live people. A yoga class, a knitting class, just strolling through an interesting neighborhood. Nothing. Now, I grew up right in the heart of New York City so maybe I'm just not coded to live in the suburbs. I think I could be happy in the country, but not in this depressing in-between world that is all about convenience and nothing about helping a person's brain percolate.

Yesterday I was searching my brain for something to do on my lunch break, since it was such a lovely day. And came up with nothing. I wound up sitting on the porch and reading for an hour, which I know sounds awesome. And sometimes it is, just not for the 45th day in a row because you couldn't think of anything else to do on your lunch break in your boring hometown. So, I was a little bummed by that but it's not as if NGuy and I haven't hashed this out many times. I'm not happy here and he is completely aware and our plan is to move as soon as the economy gets better and our house builds back up to the value at which we purchased it two years ago. Poor timing recession! Please try to be more courteous around my schedule in the future.

Our house value dropped about $50k since we bought it. It has since creeped back up maybe $10k, but still has a way to go to get to our buying price. We didn't overpay or overbuy, it's a perfectly nice house and neighborhood, worth our purchase price. It's just that there's not much of a market right now, as we all know. Once people start buying again, we're confident we won't have a problem selling. We're guessing it'll be about two years.

So, that's the background on the suburbs crushing my spirit. One of the many great things about Peanut was that he totally distracted me from how lonely and bored I am here. I certainly could endure two more years of suburban life with the excitement of a pregnancy and Peanut's first year here. Yay, nursery decorating and maternity leave next summer! Watching Peanut learn to crawl and walk on our frustrating-to-keep-up-with-the-Jones yard! Yea, that didn't work out so well.

Last night as I was telling NGuy about how I was bored and couldn't think of anything to do during the day, everything just kind of came crashing down. Our frustration over how we feel financially trapped (house, unable to change jobs, etc) despite the fact that we both have good jobs and supposedly have done everything the financial experts always told us to do. How it seems like any idea for having children going forward has so many negatives for us, there doesn't seem to be a right answer. How I'm scared of this breast surgery coming up and what the results will be. And on and on...

Then we started moving on, talking about a block party our neighborhood is having this weekend. I said I wanted to make an appearance but I didn't think I could stay very long. NGuy nodded but then said "Are you sure you don't want to meet the new neighbors?" And I said "Yeah, that's why I want to go, to meet the new folks. But I don't think I can be around children for very long right now..." and then I started sobbing. Kind of unexpectedly, I just couldn't get sentence out without breaking down. NGuy was great as usual, saying "Come here" and hugging and cuddling me.

I'm not used to being such a powder keg of emotions. Obviously I'm sad. But I also think I'm having a serious hormone crash. My boobs have suddenly stopped hurting in the past two days and I started taking my BBT again this morning (a practice I had been more than happy to leave behind) and my temp was only 97.5 which is way below my usual coverline. In addition, I can actively feel my uterus contracting back to it's non-pregnant size with spasms throughout the day. Because I like to torture myself, I still get my daily pregnancy tickers emailed to me each day, and on the day I found out that Peanut had died it said that my uterus "was now the size of a small grapefruit". So, it had grown quite a bit and now I'm waiting for it to go back to normal.

I know it's understandable to have breakdowns, but depressing nonetheless. Life is short and I don't love wasting days on moping around. I'm going to try to take the bull by the horns and force some out-of-the-house activities that my limited suburban town offers. After my boob surgery, I will join the local YMCA. They built a new one in the neighboring town and it's beautiful. I had let my gym membership lapse because the old gym we went to was a little creepy and this mentally unstable guy used to chat me up while I did the elliptical each morning. When it came time to renew, I bid him sayonara and haven't joined up anywhere else yet. I miss having calves of steel and feeling healthy. Also, I've been wanting to take a watercolor painting class for years and I found a nice little studio nearby and I'm going to sign up for classes. So, there you go, I'm going through the motions of being a normal person.

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In other news, I have moved up the date of my breast surgery (an excisional biopsy) to next Thursday, 9/24. It had been originally scheduled for 10/5 because it was when Peanut would have just made it into the 2nd trimester. My surgeon and RE had pow-wowed and decided that was the best time to do it. Now, obviously that's not a consideration and I want to get it over with. Both for peace of mind but also so I can move on with whatever TTC plan we come up with sooner rather than later.

Because they fit me in late, the two parts of the surgery will have to be separated. The first part is threading a wire into my breast to the area of concern, as a guide for the surgeon. Then, the actual surgery. When I had planned early enough, they had the first part lead right into the second. Now, because of the radiologist and surgeon's divergent schedules, I have the wire part done at 11am and the surgery not until 3:45. So I have to spend almost 5 hours sitting around with a wire sticking out of my boob. Lovely. It's worth it because it's short term pain (literal and figurative) for longer-term gain. I need to bring a seriously good book and maybe my laptop, though I don't know if they'll let me use it.

Since I was able to move up the surgery, I was also able to schedule my STBY appt with my RE. So: surgery on 9/24, follow-up with the surgeon on 10/7 (where I'll grill her for her opinion on whether fertility meds caused this issue) and then the appt with my RE on 10/9. Hopefully I'll have more of an idea of where to go TTC-wise after that week.

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Finally, on a happier note, I have not completely lost my sense of humor. For you bloggers out there, if you don't already have one yourself, you may have noticed the Feed.jit traffic feed that some of us have on our pages. It's fun to look from where your traffic comes and how often, etc. But the best part is that you can tell when someone has just stumbled on your site from Go.ogle and what their search terms were to get there. Usually people find themselves here when searching on "TTC", "EPP IVF" or "Peanut" (when searching on 'peanut', I'm sure this is not what they bargained for).

I had to chuckle the other day when I noticed that someone found my blog by searching on the term "remove panties". It was because of a post from a couple of weeks ago about a routine dermatologist skin check I had, and my quandry about whether or not I needed to remove my undies. It amuses me that some perv was looking for risque photos or erotica and instead found a decidedly not-sexy infertility blog.

If you need a chuckle yourself, nothing makes me laugh out loud on the interwebs more than when Alexa at Flotsam combs through her random search terms and comments on them. Here is her latest batch, the terms in bold are the search terms that led to her site, and her witty responses are below them: http://flotsamblog.com/2009/08/31/reader-request/. Enjoy!