I'm Baaack!
It's been almost a full year since I posted anything. I've often started writing a post in my head while on the bus or reading something for school, but every time I started thinking about typing out my thoughts, something always came up. My priorities have rested with finishing my undergraduate degree as fast and as well as possible, so until now I decided not to beat myself up about abandoning my blog.
Yesterday at 6:10 pm I walked out of my very last undergraduate exam. I am now done. Nothing left for me to do but wait patiently for the mailman (or woman or transgendered mail-person) to drop that all important letter through my mail slot which will advise me that I am sufficiently edu-macated and will be awarded a neat-o looking piece of paper which backs up that claim! What I can do with my lovely degree in English literature is pretty much nothing…on its own that is. I will be taking a year to breathe and fill out applications so that in September 2009 I will start law school in Vancouver with the hopes of suing people for infringing trademarks and copyrights. If you need a good Intellectual Property lawyer in about four or five years look me up.
So for the first time in a few years, my life is sorta going to be my own. I say 'sorta' because the next four weekends have been claimed by parents and various friends who have been trying to get me out of the house and away from my books and computers for a while now. I have a few shopping days already booked, mostly to go shopping at the various farm markets and specialty shops in and around Vancouver and am hoping to see something resembling a beach at least a few times over the summer months. I am also hoping to finally complete a novel I have had sitting on my computer only partially finished for the last few years. I keep adding notes to it when ideas strike but I haven't actually committed more than a half hour to writing in over two years. The story is still there and still raring to get out so I'm hoping to get it out of my system and see what the world thinks.
However, my biggest project by far that I will be working on this summer is trying to get pregnant. Now this may not seem like a hard thing to do (and no I do not require diagrams) but as it turns out, for me nothing is ever easy. I am suffering from what my doctors are currently calling Unexplained Infertility. Since I am only really just starting to get anywhere in the testing process I'm not yet truly infertile. To explain this I'll have to give you a little background.
The DH and I decided in November of 2005 that I should go off of birth-control in hopes of starting a family. I was all revved up to be pregnant within months and mothering a child in late 2006 or early 2007. But month after month my period would come like a timely little trouper, to advise me that it hadn't happened for me. While I was in the thick of school I really couldn’t concentrate on it much so this went on for about a year and a bit before I started to get a little worried. There were so many things that could have been (and may still be) contributing to my inability to conceive including the ongoing stress from being in school and working full-time, being over thirty and being overweight, so I wasn't as freaked about it as I would eventually get.
The thing is I have conceived in the past. A few years before I met the DH I got pregnant accidentally while in a long-term relationship. Nature intervened and I miscarried a couple of months into the pregnancy. I think Fate was looking out for me because looking back on it, having a child with that boyfriend would have been the worst possible thing that could have ever happened to me. So what we know is that I can get pregnant, so the question is why am I not now?
Last summer, with the end of this round of schooling in sight, I decided to really focus on what was going on with my body and start working towards a plan of action. I started taking my basal temperature every morning, started using ovulation predictor kits and as the DH would not unhappily report we were doing it like rabbits. And….NOTHING! After a year and a half of trying this was starting to get a little disheartening then September and October 2007 hit and my emotions went a little sideways when three of my friends became pregnant within a month of each other. While I was ecstatic for each and every one of them (and I know they're all going to make great moms!) a little piece of me died inside every time I got one of those happy calls. After the last one I finally did what I had promised myself I wouldn't do. I went into a private dark corner and cried…a lot. And I've cried a few times since then too. The Dixie Chicks have a song called "So Hard" which was written by the two sisters that are not Natalie Maine (sorry can't remember their names) who both experienced similar difficulties with trying to conceive. There are a few lines in that song which can explain the way I feel better than I ever could:
It felt like a given
While these are the things I can and am doing to make the process easier, it has also been determined that it was time that we started to see a specialist. After all our blood work and other such testing was done, the doctors couldn't find a good reason that I wasn't conceiving so they referred me to a specialist who I will be seeing at the beginning of May. My best guess - and this is only a slightly educated guess - is that I am not ovulating regularly. I believe I am ovulating…but not every month. So if my chances at my age of conceiving under normal circumstances are 25% then think how low that percentage goes if I'm not ovulating regularly. But this will be up to the doctor to determine.
So I guess what I've been trying to say in the most longwinded way possible is that for now the focus of this blog is going to be changing. I'll still post my thoughts on pretty much anything and everything, but you'll start seeing a whole lot more of the posts chronicling my journey to get knocked up! Wish me luck!
Yesterday at 6:10 pm I walked out of my very last undergraduate exam. I am now done. Nothing left for me to do but wait patiently for the mailman (or woman or transgendered mail-person) to drop that all important letter through my mail slot which will advise me that I am sufficiently edu-macated and will be awarded a neat-o looking piece of paper which backs up that claim! What I can do with my lovely degree in English literature is pretty much nothing…on its own that is. I will be taking a year to breathe and fill out applications so that in September 2009 I will start law school in Vancouver with the hopes of suing people for infringing trademarks and copyrights. If you need a good Intellectual Property lawyer in about four or five years look me up.
So for the first time in a few years, my life is sorta going to be my own. I say 'sorta' because the next four weekends have been claimed by parents and various friends who have been trying to get me out of the house and away from my books and computers for a while now. I have a few shopping days already booked, mostly to go shopping at the various farm markets and specialty shops in and around Vancouver and am hoping to see something resembling a beach at least a few times over the summer months. I am also hoping to finally complete a novel I have had sitting on my computer only partially finished for the last few years. I keep adding notes to it when ideas strike but I haven't actually committed more than a half hour to writing in over two years. The story is still there and still raring to get out so I'm hoping to get it out of my system and see what the world thinks.
However, my biggest project by far that I will be working on this summer is trying to get pregnant. Now this may not seem like a hard thing to do (and no I do not require diagrams) but as it turns out, for me nothing is ever easy. I am suffering from what my doctors are currently calling Unexplained Infertility. Since I am only really just starting to get anywhere in the testing process I'm not yet truly infertile. To explain this I'll have to give you a little background.
The DH and I decided in November of 2005 that I should go off of birth-control in hopes of starting a family. I was all revved up to be pregnant within months and mothering a child in late 2006 or early 2007. But month after month my period would come like a timely little trouper, to advise me that it hadn't happened for me. While I was in the thick of school I really couldn’t concentrate on it much so this went on for about a year and a bit before I started to get a little worried. There were so many things that could have been (and may still be) contributing to my inability to conceive including the ongoing stress from being in school and working full-time, being over thirty and being overweight, so I wasn't as freaked about it as I would eventually get.
The thing is I have conceived in the past. A few years before I met the DH I got pregnant accidentally while in a long-term relationship. Nature intervened and I miscarried a couple of months into the pregnancy. I think Fate was looking out for me because looking back on it, having a child with that boyfriend would have been the worst possible thing that could have ever happened to me. So what we know is that I can get pregnant, so the question is why am I not now?
Last summer, with the end of this round of schooling in sight, I decided to really focus on what was going on with my body and start working towards a plan of action. I started taking my basal temperature every morning, started using ovulation predictor kits and as the DH would not unhappily report we were doing it like rabbits. And….NOTHING! After a year and a half of trying this was starting to get a little disheartening then September and October 2007 hit and my emotions went a little sideways when three of my friends became pregnant within a month of each other. While I was ecstatic for each and every one of them (and I know they're all going to make great moms!) a little piece of me died inside every time I got one of those happy calls. After the last one I finally did what I had promised myself I wouldn't do. I went into a private dark corner and cried…a lot. And I've cried a few times since then too. The Dixie Chicks have a song called "So Hard" which was written by the two sisters that are not Natalie Maine (sorry can't remember their names) who both experienced similar difficulties with trying to conceive. There are a few lines in that song which can explain the way I feel better than I ever could:
It felt like a given
Something a woman's born to do
A natural ambition
To see a reflection of me and you
And I'd feel so guilty
If that was a gift I couldn't give
And could you be happy
If life wasn't how we pictured it
Now like any Type A person, a group in which I am firmly planted, I had my functional little breakdown and started looking at alternative reasons why this might be happening. While I still don't have any answers a few really positive things have come out of my search. First of all, I discovered that I am gluten intolerant. My body does not like wheat, rye, triticale, barley or anything that they are found in. This includes soya sauce (a devastating discovery for an Asian girl), pretty much any kind of processed meat or sausage and even certain types of body lotions which contain wheat/bran oil as an ingredient ~ a fact I found out ever so itchily and painfully one evening. I've pretty much had to change my whole diet and am a compulsive label reader these days. What used to be a half hour shopping trip to Costco has now turned into a two hour adventure while I pour over ingredients lists and cross reference anything that I am not sure of. Thank God for Blackberries with the internet and Wifi. I feel a million times better and realized that it wasn't natural that I was having stomach cramps every single day (stupid parents told me for years that I had a 'nervous stomach'!
Now like any Type A person, a group in which I am firmly planted, I had my functional little breakdown and started looking at alternative reasons why this might be happening. While I still don't have any answers a few really positive things have come out of my search. First of all, I discovered that I am gluten intolerant. My body does not like wheat, rye, triticale, barley or anything that they are found in. This includes soya sauce (a devastating discovery for an Asian girl), pretty much any kind of processed meat or sausage and even certain types of body lotions which contain wheat/bran oil as an ingredient ~ a fact I found out ever so itchily and painfully one evening. I've pretty much had to change my whole diet and am a compulsive label reader these days. What used to be a half hour shopping trip to Costco has now turned into a two hour adventure while I pour over ingredients lists and cross reference anything that I am not sure of. Thank God for Blackberries with the internet and Wifi. I feel a million times better and realized that it wasn't natural that I was having stomach cramps every single day (stupid parents told me for years that I had a 'nervous stomach'!
This change has assisted me in the second positive thing. I have easily and naturally lost just over twenty-pounds in under six months by changing my diet alone. Now that I am not studying and working insane hours, exercise will be added to the mix very shortly and I hope to see much more weight lost over the course of the summer. This weight loss will hopefully result in my ability to wear a two piece bathing suit by September when the DH and I will be jetting off to a luxury vacation in Mexico (more on that later) another of the things we are doing in an effort to de-stress my life and give me a better chance of getting pregnant.
While these are the things I can and am doing to make the process easier, it has also been determined that it was time that we started to see a specialist. After all our blood work and other such testing was done, the doctors couldn't find a good reason that I wasn't conceiving so they referred me to a specialist who I will be seeing at the beginning of May. My best guess - and this is only a slightly educated guess - is that I am not ovulating regularly. I believe I am ovulating…but not every month. So if my chances at my age of conceiving under normal circumstances are 25% then think how low that percentage goes if I'm not ovulating regularly. But this will be up to the doctor to determine.
So I guess what I've been trying to say in the most longwinded way possible is that for now the focus of this blog is going to be changing. I'll still post my thoughts on pretty much anything and everything, but you'll start seeing a whole lot more of the posts chronicling my journey to get knocked up! Wish me luck!
posted by La Generalissimo at 10:54 AM
1 Comments:
Dude. Welcome back. And congrats and school being OVER. I look forward to reading about your new challenge. Despite being one of those bitches that conceived at the drop of a hat. I do consider myself ridiculously lucky. Good luck to you and the DH.
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