The idea for this iteration of Ninth Circle (not that I did much of anything with it before) came from reading this article that my friend Kristin sent to me: http://www.self.com/health/2010/08/breaking-the-silence-on-infertility

 When I read it back in July of this year, I thought about blogging about my own experiences and refusing to contribute to the culture of silence that surrounds problems with infertility.  At that point, however, I was starting something new, acupuncture to aid in fertility, and I thought it would be pretty silly to start a blog about infertility and then conceive in the very next month.  Besides, I didn't know whether what I was experiencing was really an infertility problem.  At that point, my husband and I had been trying to conceive for 12 cycles, not technically a full year, which is 13 cycles of 28 days.  For the sake of his privacy (in case I end up with people I don't know reading this), I'm going to go with the convention I have seen on forums and call him DH, for Dear Husband.  After all, while I am trying to break the silence for myself, we are still two separate people, and I won't speak for him.

Anyway, at this point, I've reached the milestone of labeling what DH and I are dealing with as "infertility."   We've been told that there's nothing that should be causing a problem.  In other words, there are two issues that could be causing a problem but supposedly are not.  While I do know two couples who have taken 18 months to conceive with nothing wrong with either of them, I also know that statistically, we should have conceived by now if there's not a problem.  A couple with nothing wrong with them has a 25% chance of conceiving on any given cycle when they are trying at the right time.  I may not have been that good at math in general, but I was good at statistics, and I can calculate that there is only a 1.8% chance of not being pregnant by now if there really is nothing wrong.  For you statistics people, we're outside of two standard deviations, and if this goes on for 5 more months, we'll be outside of three standard deviations.  We're pretty damned close to disproving the Null hypothesis here, people!

OK, now that I've come as close to geeking out on math as I'm generally ever going to, I'll be a social worker again and talk about feelings.  I'm depressed.  I'm angry.  I'm frustrated.  I'm hopeless most of the time.  I swing back and forth between wanting to cry when I see a baby and wanting to slap every bitch that has it easy when it comes to getting pregnant.  Yes, I know that a lot of people who have babies had to work hard to get them.  And yes, I know that many people who have babies had difficult pregnancies or deliveries.  But right now, I'd give almost anything for even a hard pregnancy full of complications (as long as the baby was healthy in the end) just so I could be pregnant at all.

And the worst kick in the stomach has been the past week.  I spent 5 days in a row at the end of my cycle queasy and exhausted, with my BBT readings not dropping in preparation for the end of the cycle.  Reason to have a smidge of hope, right?  Nope, cause there's never a reason for hope down here in the Ninth Circle, boys and girls.  Realized Saturday night that the reason I was queasy and exhausted and my temp wasn't dropping was because I was running a slight fever.  Oh, joy!  And then DH and I get back from our weekend trip, and DH is opening the mail last night and finds a bill for $635 for bloodwork that said there's nothing wrong with me but that insurance doesn't want to cover.  And of course we can't find out what insurance is supposed to cover in terms of testing for infertility problems because we can't even get a copy of what the insurance covers from DH's HR department at work!  I don't know why I even bothered to get checked out...at this rate, we won't be able to afford to go to the fertility clinic or to adopt if our next efforts don't work out.  Oh, yeah, and I was in enough pain from the results of having failed again that I was having trouble moving today.

So yeah.  Have a good night, boys and girls, while I go take some more Tylenol to try to keep my fever down and my pain at a minimum.