Aside from being horribly depressed, I keep coughing, and my left foot is huge and swollen and purple from where I kept it crammed into a dress shoe all day. I also started having abdominal pain again on my way home (early; my boss said I could finish up remotely). This morning I coughed up snot for the first time in awhile; last night I forgot to Flonase, but I'm not sure if that's related.
I had a bad dream right before I woke up this morning, in which Sean basically informed me that I existed to amuse him, and when I tried to leave, he threatened violence, so I headbutted him and then grabbed him hard in a very sensitive place. But as this was happening, dream-me thought that maybe this was all pretend, so I shouldn't hurt him too badly.
Then I woke up.
When I told Sean about the pregnancy test last night I had already been asleep for awhile, and I woke up when I heard him settling in in the living room. He said the same thing AJ did: "Don't get your hopes up." And like I said before, I really thought I wasn't. But apparently I did a lousy job.
The nurse said that false positives hardly ever happen; it's usually false negatives. I looked up false positives online and it said they are usually due to taking fertility drug shots, which I have not done recently. I guess the test was just defective.
Pretty lame. Oh well, yet another bad memory to add to the pile. I've been thinking about writing a timeline of all the bad things that have happened in my life, but I'm pretty sure that would be counterproductive. Not to mention whiny.
I should be thankful I'm alive, and have such a great family, and a cute and sweet husband who loves me, and a job I enjoy, and enough money to be able to save and eat out and have fun.
It's funny, I had decided recently that I was just going to assume I couldn't have children, because I figured that would be easier. But I guess I never fully embraced that path, because I was so susceptible to the idea when the nurse (who apparently knew nothing of my situation) asked, "Do you think you might be pregnant?" It took a week or two, but then, like a moron, I looked into it.
And then, like a moron, I posted about stat labs on Twitter, and that made Mom wonder why I needed stat labs, and so I ended up telling her, and she was at the farm with Dad and Ben and Manda so they all found out, and so I called AJ because everyone else knew...and I originally wasn't going to tell anyone until I'd had a blood test. I'd had one that morning but it turned out the lab couldn't do them stat, so those results will actually be in tomorrow, and it was too late to get them done by the time I found out, so I had to wait and do them this morning. And I guess I just got upset and frustrated and nervous from all the waiting and ended up blowing it, and I got Mom's hopes up.
Damn it.
When the nurse called to tell me, I didn't want to talk to anyone, so I just sent Sean and Mom a text message about it. Mom called back and I may have been rude. I just tried not to think about it for as long as I could for the rest of the day. But of course, eventually it overwhelmed me, because I'm a stupid wuss, so here I am, sitting at home gushing in stream of consciousness on my blog when I should still be at work. That frustrates me too, because I've been sick so much lately, and I was just getting back to being the kind of employee I strive to be. And now this.
I think life likes to let me rise up before it kicks me back down. Maybe it's more amusing that way. This time I feel like I was crouched on wobbly legs when it hit.
Whine, whine, whine. Let's take a step back. What have we learned here? I was told years ago when I first went to an endocrinologist that my chances of being fertile were low, especially if I couldn't have my own periods. I started out taking hormones, but after awhile I decided I was tired of pills and wanted to be normal, so I just stopped taking them. (Good job.) Five years later, I have a period out of the blue, which is likely a menopausal flushing of all the lining that had built up for those years. I take this as a sign that my body is curing itself, instead. My doctors tell me otherwise but I am apparently incapable of comprehension. I start back on hormones religiously and take pregnancy tests anytime I start to feel "weird". They are all, of course, negative. I get frustrated. After my doctor leaves her practice, I let everything slide again. But after awhile I decide I want to get back on track with my health, so I find a new doctor. She tells me that the chances of someone who's had chemotherapy regaining ovarian function after this long are practically zero. I feel like I can maybe move on. Then she adds, "But miracles do happen." I have grown to hate this phrase because it gives me hope.
That brings us to now. I have weird symptoms where I get overly tired just walking from my office to my car. I have chest pains. I seem to not be breathing properly at night, and sometimes during the day. Flonase, saline spray, and elevating my head seems to help with sleeping, but does nothing for the weird day breathing. Eventually I started getting bloated in my legs and hips. I also occasionally experience abdominal pain, at one point so bad I threw up. I am often so hot that the only thing that helps is sticking my head and arms into the freezer.
Of course I think the hotness is a menopausal symptom, but I have put off starting my hormones because I thought I had a drug interaction one day when I threw up. I'm still not sure what happened there.
In discussing my various symptoms with my various doctors, the nurse at the endocrinologist's office asks the fatal question, the question I've been asking myself. "That's supposed to be impossible," I say, keeping my voice level. "But I suppose I could check." And eventually I do. And for some fucked up reason it says "Pregnant".
Why would you do this to me? I mean really. What is the point?
Maybe the point is that I should just have a hysterectomy so I can stop worrying about it. (Or I could stop having sex, but I doubt Sean will get on board for that.)
Hahahahaha, I did it to myself again! I let myself believe it was possible. At least this time I had a decent reason--the pee test SAID "Pregnant", it didn't say "Not Pregnant".
But whatever!
I do promise that I tried very hard not to get excited. I was even marginally successful! But you know what, I honestly thought when they called with the blood test results that they would say "Congratulations."
[Edit:] My family sent me flowers. They're pretty.
Doctors seem to think they'll hurt my feelings if they say no. "Never say never," they'll say, even after informing me that there is only a 7% chance of ovary function returning to normal after a bone marrow transplant, and even then it usually happens within the first year of recovery.
I would rather you just told me it was impossible, because I hate wishing and hoping and planning when I don't know if it will ever happen.
Regardless, I do think I like my new doctor, despite her tendency to ramble.
Growing up, I had many ideas about motherhood: what I believed was important, goals I hoped to achieve, things I wanted to do for my kids. I wanted to be like my mom, first of all, and think of fun and educational activities that would keep my children engaged and prepare them for life as adults. As I got older, I started thinking about what I'd feed my kids and how I'd keep them exercising, and that's at least partially why I get so upset with myself for being out of shape. Because it was also important to me to practice what I preached, and not expect anything from my children that I didn't expect from myself.
I wanted to have a large home with a swimming pool and a game room, and I wanted to host my children's friends often. I wanted to make healthy and delicious snacks for all the neighborhood kids and provide them a safe and fun place to play after school.
Travel was also very important to me. I wanted my kids to see more than just the town where they were growing up. But I didn't want to be constantly moving and taking them away from their friends; I just wanted to broaden their perspectives. When they got to be in high school and college, I wanted to send them to study abroad, and take in exchange students.
I wanted to foster in them a love of community and a desire to serve. I planned to take them to retirement homes and hospitals and other places where they could volunteer and meet people and brighten someone's day.
I also wanted to teach all of them to know their way around the kitchen and how to do their own chores, and to enforce it--and in recent years that plan included implementing some FlyLady methods.
I wanted to take them places where they could learn: Shaker Village, astronomical observatories, big cities, small towns, historical cities, museums, beaches, forests...anywhere that practical learning could take place.
My goal was to make sure that my kids grew up safe and happy with the knowledge of how to enjoy life, and with a strong curiosity and love of learning.
Another one of my notions about motherhood was that I wanted to absolutely make sure I had my kids before I was 30. I wanted to be a young, "cool" mom. I wanted to be able to keep up with them, sure, but I also wanted to be able to relate to them. Not so I could be their friend instead of their parent, but so I could understand what to say. Somehow, I always thought that 29--the age my mother was when she had me--was too old to be beginning, that by then I should already have my kids.
These ideals have lasted this long because "before I'm 30" was always so distant...but as I continued into my 20s, I started to see that things weren't quite going to work out the way I'd planned. Sure, I knew somewhere inside that things wouldn't be perfect. I might not be able to provide all the trips and recreational activities and educational tools and such that I hoped to--money, space, compromise, those and more factors could easily alter the end product. And I knew after three rounds of chemotherapy that it was possible my ovaries and eggs were completely shot. But somehow I still imagined that I would find a way to have my cake and eat it too.
So now here I am, 29, no kids, no plans to adopt or even to ask a doctor if there isn't some sort of aggressive treatment we might try. Up until now it's always been treatment to bring my body to a sense of normalcy. The goal wasn't pregnancy; pregnancy was a marginally possible side effect. Given my FSH levels at last check, I am a little afraid of making pregnancy the goal, but Sean and I also haven't committed to having children. We haven't planned for it at all. Up until now, the idea has been that if it happens, it happens.
But I'm 29. I don't know if I can just bounce around anymore waiting to see if something will happen.
I don't know that I want to start trying to adopt immediately or anything like that. I just feel that it's time to take a larger measure of control over my potential parenthood. Even if that just means deciding to wait. At least then the waiting will have been a decision and not simply the natural outcome of doing nothing.
I had another weird dream the other night. In this one, AJ and Faye had six or seven children. They were living in this tenement-style apartment building, and the kids were distributed throughout various floors. We used the fire escape to go between them.
I was trying to play with all of the kids and get to know them, and it struck me as odd that some of them had the last name "Mills". "Why aren't they Aubreys?" I asked AJ.
"You're the one who came up with Shelly Mills," AJ retorted. Shelly Mills is the fictional deceased girlfriend of a character of mine from the AMRN who was loosely based on AJ.
"Oh," I said, because this was somehow logical.
"I think we have too many kids," AJ said later. "Do you want one?"
He's said this to me before in real life, as a joke, but in the dream he was absolutely serious. And I seriously considered it for awhile in the dream.
I went to Brooke's old apartment during my lunchbreak to spend a little time with her. Right about now she should be at Augusta Regional Airport, getting ready for the first leg of her transcontinental trip home.
While I was at the apartment I noticed she had a tiny Magic 8 ball sitting above her stove. I picked it up, and, stupidly, I asked, "Will I ever be able to have children?"
There was a big blue glob in the way, so I couldn't see the whole message. The last word was "Doubt".
"Will I see Brooke again this year?" I asked.
The reply appeared to be "Count on it", but I just checked a list of standard Magic 8 Ball responses, and the only one like that in the list is "Don't count on it".
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