We have our next appointment on Friday, September 17. For that appointment, our donor will come with us to the clinic and will meet with our RE by herself. We will also meet the three of us with the RE to discuss all the steps involved in the egg donation. And of course, our donor will be treated to the magic wand, and I will have the sonohysterogram.
I believe that this appointment will make the prospect of the egg donation very real. For now, it has been hypothetical, with some brief moments of realizing that it was part of a shared reality among a few people who know. I think it's mostly when I hang out with our donor (she is a good friend of mine) and we speak about it that it becomes very real. Her resolve astounds me. There is no amount of scaring her with descriptions of needles and early morning drives. She is steadfast. She wants to do this.
Why has it been so hypothetical for me? We all know the answer: it is because of fear. The reckless prospect of hope is prohibitive to us who have failed at fertility treatments. Why would this work? Why would there be a baby in my uterus at the end of this process? I've come to understand my decision to go ahead with the egg donation as prevention from wallowing in regret in 5-10 years, when I sit there childless and feel like there could have been so much more I could have done. I do not want to give myself more ammunition to be beat myself down for not trying hard enough.
I find my heart cloaked in an opaque, velvety wrap that seems at once comfortable and smothering. The cloak becomes visible to me when I talk about the egg donation with my close friends and they light up with excitement and hope. All I want to do is run my hand gently across their face to make the excitement go away, like a mime changes his face by the brush of his hand. Thankfully, I happen to have the best friends in the whole entire world, so they can hold me in my fear of hope. My darling friend Dragonfly just looked at me lovingly from her little skype window on my mac and said "I'll be excited! You don't have to be excited. You can give that part to me". Bless her heart. That was just what I needed.
I thought about this potential baby on my walk to school this morning. I think it as a girl. I gave her a name and thought about carrying her for 9 months. I usually can't envision it. Like Jess talked about in her post, I have had mucho problemo visualizing this process coming to fruition. I am of the same opinion as she is, that for something to materialize, one must first create it in the mind. It makes me nervous that I have difficulty believing this will work.
I realize that my history does not permit me to believe in pregnancy very much. Never having ovulated, never having had a pregnancy scare when I was younger, let alone a BFP, it has become fiction in my mind. I had all sorts of hopes and dreams about being pregnant until the treatments failed last October and since then nothing. My unconscious doesn't really let those images come to the surface in the form of dreams, by day or by night. But I also find as I am reading your blogs that I am missing something so fundamental that most of you have: a cycle of some sort, a history of at one point having ovulated, an experience of early pregnancy, or something along those lines. In my case, it will be this friend's egg mixed with Mr. August's sperm, inserted into my (tiny, chronically under-stimulated) uterus, and a whack of estrogen and progesterone support. And from that, a baby is what we hope for an outcome. My logical side can't digest it very well.
What is left is that there is also part of me that knows it can happen. I have always responded to estrogen and progesterone, and for my last cycle at this time last year, the lining got all nice and thick, ready for an embryo. So through magic, or miracle, or the best of science, there is part of me that believes it could be successful. I just wonder if that is enough. Do I have to leave the safe platform of my fears and leap wholeheartedly, believing unequivocally that this process will work. Is it reasonable to be afraid, and does being afraid mean that it will fail? Ah, the superstitious workings of an infertile's brain. I tell ya.
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