Get Ready for Jokes About a Dozen Eggs

I wondered what the next super-higher-order multiple birth might be. Would someone top 8? Ever get to 9? 10? Would anyone ever be “eating for 12″ as DH and I joked when my own betas were sky-high? Now I have an answer.

At least the woman pregnant with 12 babies is in Tunisia and the media coverage might not be as crazy as it has been for Octomom (or Octomum as the Brits apparently call her).

Stop giving the rest of us a bad name!

Perfect Moment Monday: A New Hope

This week’s Perfect Moment is more of a process than a single moment.

I’m a geek in many ways, but I’m not especially a Star Wars geek. I like Star Wars as much as any girl born in the 70s — well maybe just slightly more. After all, I own Star Wars Monopoly, and on years when we celebrate Christmas, there’s a Boba Fett ornament on the tree. Some of the following information is common knowledge or available through careful movie viewing, but some requires deep backstory research.

Although it contains universal (ha ha) themes like finding your niche, connecting to others, and searching for truth, Star Wars doesn’t have storylines that particularly resonate with most people. Your arch-enemy turns out to be your father? That person with whom you have a strangely strong connection turns out to be your twin? The murder of your adoptive parents is engineered by your biological father (who is the stepbrother of your adoptive father) and carried out by clones who once fought alongside your mentor? Not so universal.

I’ve always been aware, in a casual sense, that there are adoption themes in the story, and the boy-girl twin connection was been brought to my attention by more than one friend when we announced our babies’ sexes, but it was only last week as I watched all 6 movies on TV that the extent of the ALI themes has really emerged for me.

Boy-Girl Twins
Everyone with a passing awareness of Star Wars knows that Luke and Leia are boy-girl twins, separated at birth.

Only a few people know, since it’s part of the Star Wars universe outside the movies, that Leia and Han Solo later become parents of “Jedi twins” Jacen and Jaina. (It’s not as cute as it sounds — Jacen eventually turns evil and Jaina has to kill him.)

When we announced that we are having boy-girl twins, our normally geeky friends said, “Luke and Leia!” and our extra-geeky friend said, “Jedi twins! Jacen and Jaina!”

Adoption
It’s a key plot point that when Luke and Leia are separated at birth, they are each adopted.

Kin adoption: Luke is adopted by his uncle Owen and aunt Beru. Owen is the step-brother of Luke’s father Anakin. Luke is aware that they are his aunt and uncle, but he is told that both of his parents have died, when in fact his father is alive but is a threat to Luke’s survival.

Open adoption and closed adoption: Leia is adopted by Prince Bail Prestor Organa and his wife Breha. In Revenge of the Sith, Prince Organa says that he and his wife have “always talked of adopting a baby girl.” This is open adoption in one sense — the Organas are aware of their daughter’s origins and knew both of her birth parents. But, it’s closed adoption for the rest of the triad. It is not open for the birth parents because the birth mother dies in childbirth and does not know the fate of her children, and the birth father does not know of Leia’s existence because he was not aware of the twin pregnancy. (What, they can fly through space at light speed but they don’t have ultrasound?) It’s also not open for the adoptee because although she knows she was adopted, she does not know the identities of her birth parents nor the existence of her twin brother.

There are also informal adoption themes, with many references to people being “like a son” or “like a father” as part of a mentoring relationship.

Reproductive Technologies
The stormtroopers are clones of Jengo Fett, genetically modified for accelerated growth and docility (except for one unmodified clone, whom Jengo kept to raise as a son, and who later went on to become my Christmas ornament). Although most of us don’t deal directly with issues of cloning or genetic modification, there are a lot of debates right now about genetic selection and modification, particularly as they relate to reproductive technologies. The media (and public at large?) seems pretty freaked out about human cloning.

Infertility and Pregnancy Loss
This is the part that I didn’t learn until this week, because it requires delving into the Wookiepedia (yes, that’s what it’s called). The Organas had “always talked of adopting a baby girl” because they were infertile, and had lost at least two pregnancies. Breha was told that another pregnancy could kill her. A couple of years pass before Leia enters their lives.

The full quote from Prince Organa when he agrees to adopt Leia: “We’ve always talked of adopting a baby girl. She will be loved with us.” Now, his statement resonates so much more.

Perfect Moments
We already knew that people dealt with adoption, loss, and infertility everywhere on earth, but it turns out that these themes are also prevalent in a galaxy far far away.

It’s your last day to vote for always-inspirational Lori from Weebles Wobblog for the Most Inspiring Blog Award.

Perfect Moment Monday: Veteran

I have always found my husband adorable. But on this Perfect Moment Monday, he was adorable for being an infertility veteran.

We were watching the Daily Show interview with Mike Huckabee that occurred a week and a half ago (I fell behind on my viewing when I was out of town). Throughout the interview, we had to pause the TiVo at least a dozen times to make points to each other (and at one point, high-five each other). We are even more bizarre behind closed doors than people imagine.

Anyway… Jon asked Huckabee his opinion of IVF — fascinating and bloggable in its own right — and Huckabee clearly had no idea what he was talking about and repeatedly tried to cram the question into something that would fit his talking points. Jon started explaining about infertility and IVF, saying that sperm and egg are combined outside the body, then the embryo is implanted…

“Transferred!” my husband yelled at the television.

I have been in love with this man for a decade and a half, yet he still finds ways to blow me away with his fabulousness.

There’s still time to vote for Perfect Moment Maven Lori from Weebles Wobblog for the Most Inspiring Blog Award — have you voted today?

Desperate Measures

I was so sidetracked by yesterday’s ultrasound that I didn’t get a chance to talk about Monday night’s episode of 24.

For those who watch it on delayed TiVo like I do, don’t worry, there are no spoilers about the plot. The only spoiler is about a particular stand-alone scene.

DH rightly points out that one expects to see the occasional mention of infertility on shows like ER that have a medical focus or are “for chicks” (or both, as he would argue for ER). One does not expect infertility to come up on a thriller show like 24.

We were both taken aback during this week’s episode — much pausing and rewinding ensued. A very minor character was first depicted on the phone with his very pregnant wife, who is carrying twin girls. Later, that characters ends up explaining to Jack Bauer that he agreed to be in cahoots with bad guys because he and his wife had been trying to conceive for three years, and that the treatments had been so expensive and “not one penny” had been covered by health insurance.

Infertile victory! A little political message sneaks in for the masses.

It’s probably not ideal that the guy was depicted doing shady stuff, but it also conveys the desperation of infertility. C’mon, I know that plenty of you have thought of doing something desperate to pay for IF treatments. Anyone want to fess up?

Show and Tell: Jaded

Three orders of business.

#1. The Meds Fairy! I have most of a 900 IU pen of Gonal-F (probably about 700 IU worth) left over from IVF #2 that just ended. I won’t be starting the next IVF for a couple of months, and the pen is supposed to be used within a month of being opened. Since I paid out of pocket for all of my meds they are extra precious, and I don’t want them to go to waste. It would be even better if I could save another self-payer a few hundred dollars. Please, if you can use some Gonal-F in the next couple of weeks (or know someone else who can), leave a comment or email me.

#2. Update on the IVF storyline on ER: the first time I can remember seeing subcutaneous FSH injections incorporated into daily life on television. This episode also illustrated the way that the meds make you a complete maniac, alternately bitchy then fragile — something most of us know all too well. Good stuff.

#3. Show and Tell! During my trip to Asia in the fall, I insisted on a detour to a Jade Market. Not for jewelry (okay, I did also buy some jewelry), but for fertility talismans. Also because I thought it would be cool to go to a Jade Market.

There were several dozen stands. A few were simply a table covered with a sheet (often an amusing sheet like Snoopy rather than a tasteful plain sheet); untold riches lay under the sheet, but you had to get a special sit-down. Most stands had hundreds of items on display. Some had particular specialties, but others had a wide range of jade offerings. Here’s an example of a typical jewelry-oriented stand.

Ahead of time, I’d done my research and determined that traditional fertility symbols included dragons, bunnies, and double fish. Dragons allegedly benefit male fertility, and are recommended regardless of whether problems are male factor or female factor (the ancient Chinese seemed be more cognizant of potential problems in either partner than many other cultures).The rabbit is a fertility symbol for obvious reasons — even though we all know that more sex does not necessarily mean more babies. Fish represent fertility because they have hundreds of babies.

Dragons were plentiful. I chose a red one for maximum power. He now lives on my husband’s nightstand.

Rabbits were also plentiful at the Jade Market, since they (along with dragons) are among the twelve Chinese zodiac signs. I chose purple because, uh, I like purple. This little bunny lives on my nightstand, to achieve feng shui balance — since there’s a dragon on his side of the bed, I needed something on my side too.

Finally, I had to find the double fish. This was quite a challenge. Most stands didn’t have any; a few had double fish that were quite ugly, with giant open fishy mouths. One was very nice but was a couple hundred dollars — a bargain, actually, considering that it was several hundred years old, but not what I was looking for.

At last, I found this little necklace. I wear it occasionally, always hidden under my shirt, but the day of my egg retrieval for IVF #2, I kept it close at hand. While driving to the retrieval, I had the cord wrapped around my hand while driving. Then, during the retrieval, because I would be wearing only a hospital gown and my striped socks, I made DH keep the fish necklace in his pocket until everything was over.

Here are all of them together, accompanied by our old pal Wonder Woman Pez, for scale.

The funny part is that I don’t actually believe in good luck charms — we’ll talk more about that on Thoughtful Thursday. But I sought these out for two reasons:

1. I thought it would be a great blog entry.
2. Although I don’t believe in them, they can’t hurt. Seriously, I can use all the luck I can find.

In honor of Delurking Week, I’m going to donate money to a specific charity (more on that next week) for each comment. Regular comments from beloved existing readers get $1; comments from soon-to-be-beloved delurkers get $2. C’mon, spend my money! To make commenting extra easy, you can answer the following question:

Do you have a good luck charm (either in general, or specific to fertility)?

Go see what the rest of the class brought to Show and Tell.

Perfect Moment Monday: My New Hero

I haven’t heard anything in the IF blogosphere about the most recent episode of ER. I think I may be the only person who’s still watching after all these years.

Ladies, time to set your TiVo’s — and not just because John Stamos is hunky.

Outspoken stirrup queen Angela Bassett is a regular cast member this year as the new Chief of Emergency Medicine. Her character is fair but tough; the prickly exterior turns out to result from her grief after the death of her young son several years earlier (one flashback episode heartbreakingly portrays his death). It has offered an unusually nuanced portrayal of the loss of a child.

But this past week, the loss storyline became an IF storyline! (Perfect Moment #1)

She and her husband decide that it’s time to rebuild their family. Following one failed cycle with charting (!!) and timed intercourse, Basset’s character considers her advanced maternal age and immediately consults the Chief of Obstetrics (who, frankly, is not the person I would approach for fertility issues — I would go straight to an RE, but the OB is a recurring character). The OB tells her that her estradiol and prolactin are fine, but that her FSH is elevated. I’ve never heard all of the IF lingo in such detail on television before, with acronyms and terms tossed around casually just like on our blogs.

The obstetrician tells her that the odds for IVF with her own eggs approach zero, and that many fertility clinics won’t even attempt IVF on someone with those FSH levels. She lays out alternative options: “adoption, surrogacy, egg donation.”

A realistic portrayal of odds and options! I was shocked. My husband kept exclaiming, “Blog! Blog!”

Bassett’s character decides to take one shot at IVF with her own eggs and then pursue the other options.

As with the second season of Mad Men, I am so excited to see what happens next. This is the last season of the show, so there isn’t a huge amount of time to go through an extended portrayal of multiple routes to family-building, but there is time for her to do an IVF cycle or two.

Perfect Moment #2: What’s particularly exciting about this for me is that Angela Bassett and her husband Courtney B. Vance (who also plays her character’s husband on the show) have talked openly about their 7-year battle with infertility and successful use of a gestational surrogate, resulting in boy-girl twins. It is so gratifying that not only has she been forthcoming about the difficulties she encountered bringing her children into being, but she is drawing on her experiences to bring an intelligent, informed infertility storyline to a network television show.

About 6 or 7 years ago, I saw Angela Bassett in person. I’d always found her to be somewhat pretty on the movie screen, but in person she was absolutely stunning. And, if I do the math, she must have been dealing with infertility at the time I saw her — despite that, she had an aura that drew the eyes of everyone in the room. Many people didn’t even recognize her at first, but just had to keep staring at this unknown woman with magnetic beauty.

She seems to have dealt with her infertility better than I have been dealing lately. Hundreds of turned heads is not what I get when I walk into a room. Most days, I can’t even manage to put on actual pants.

Head to Weebles Wobblog to see more Perfect Moments.

Show and Tell: Infertility Christmas Card

First of all, I will not be posting the winner and prize for last week’s Creme de la Creme contest. Because nobody won. So instead, you should come back in a couple of days for a multiple choice version of the contest. It involves picking a number between 1 and 10 — do you know any other contest with odds this good?

This week for Show and Tell, I offer up an Infertility Christmas Card. Last year I received a literal infertility Christmas card, but that’s a long story that I’ll tell later this week. It’s a story that I want to scream from the rooftops, but I can’t tell people IRL without outing myself as infertile, so instead it’s just between you and me, Internets.

This past week when we were refugees/nomads during the ice storm and subsequent almost weeklong power outage, I spent lots of time in places where I normally spend little or no time. One day I went to a local pharmacy (not a local branch of a big chain, but an actual local mom-and-pop pharmacy) to buy B6 vitamins since I’d left my bottle at home, in my fleeing haste. In the process of browsing the quirky offerings of the store, I came across a small display of boxed Christmas cards. Normally stores have a dozen to choose from, or two dozen, or more, but this little store had only 5. I almost fainted when I read the words on one of them.

Huh? What the hell kind of Christmas card is that? Is someone really making Christmas cards to announce infertility? What?!?

Then my eyes zoomed out and I looked at the cartoon.

Okay, that’s kind of weird. Not an infertile 30-something woman, but a horse. Hmm. Zoom out again.

Oh!

It’s kind of funny from a neutral standpoint, but from an IF standpoint, it is funny on so many levels. And also not funny at all.

Go enjoy more holiday goodness (and some non-holiday goodness) at Show and Tell.

Gallows Humor

DH and I just watched this week’s Law and Order: SVU. (By the way, the episode, “Persona”, talks a lot about fertility and reproductive rights — try to catch it online or when it gets rerun; by then you’ll forget my spoiler.) A couple in their 60s are talking separately to the detectives. The husband says that they weren’t able to have children and that the wife was diagnosed infertile. The wife says that she was secretly on the pill the whole time (it sounds horrible, but it makes sense in the context of the plot).

DH: How could the husband be so blind for so long? Any husband would know she was on the pill that whole time.
Me: She could hide the pills, easy. That’s what I’ve been doing all these years! (I begin rolling around laughing, literally.)
DH, stony faced: That is the least funny thing you have ever said.

I think it’s hilarious. You?

Testimonial

I purchased an Ov-Watch about a year and a half ago, in a last ditch attempt to let nature take its course before we finally turned to Dr. Full Steam Ahead for the big guns of IF treatment.

I actually like the idea, much easier and possibly more reliable than OPK kits and certainly less effort than charting. I think it probably helps a lot of women, especially the newly TTC who don’t know a lot about how their bodies work.

Once a month, their email newsletter arrives in my inbox, telling me about the media coverage of the watch and featuring some testimonials. The website is also full of testimonials from women that the watch has helped. The women write about how they got pregnant the first month they tried, or how they tried for three whole months before using the watch and then got pregnant after only four months with the watch. A miracle! There are even some testimonials from women who aren’t pregnant yet but are still very happy with the watch because they don’t like peeing on sticks.

Trista from The Bachelorette is their celebrity spokesmommy. It took her almost two years to get pregnant, and the watch really helped her know when to have sex because of all of the times that she and her husband had failed to do it because one of them was away on vacation.

The company actually pays its customers to write testimonials, which may be part of the reason that they have so many more testimonials than any other product I’ve ever seen. The prize varies, but it’s generally somewhere around $25, a gift card for Target or a baby-related store.

Here is the testimonial I have decided to write.

Dear Ov-Watch,

I just had to write in and tell you about my experience with your product!!! I had been trying to conceive for five long years when I found out about your watch. I had tried everything — charting, ovulation predictors, fertility treatments, sex – and nothing had worked. I was hopeful and eager to try your watch, especially with your Mother by Mother’s Day program, in which you’d send me 3 extra months of sensors if I didn’t get pregnant in the first 3 months. You were that confident about your product!

One thing I liked a lot was that the watch itself would remind me to wear it every day. On days when I’d forgotten to wear it by 6pm, or on days when I had worn it for 18 hours but the sensor had failed and the watch didn’t register anything, it would beep to remind me! Every half hour! Beep! People would say, what’s that constant beeping? Beep! What beeping, I don’t hear anything? Beep! Oh, that stupid watch. Beep! Why is it still beeping? Beep!

I really liked the style of the watch. I felt like I was a glamorous woman at an aerobics studio in 1982.

The best part was how it would tell me exactly when to “do the deed” with my husband. Whenever he would initiate the act of marital intimacy, I only needed to look at my watch. “NF” for not fertile? Sorry, buster, try again another day. “Fertile day?” Go for it, big boy!

On months when the fertile days occurred when one of us was out of town, the watch was a helpful reminder that we were squandering our 30s and would remain childless for at least one month longer.

I wore your watch religiously for over half a year. It keep telling me when I was ovulating, but I didn’t get pregnant. Finally I decided to see another fertility specialist. I had just run out of sensors, so I didn’t wear the watch during the cycle that he was monitoring. He said that I didn’t ovulate that cycle. I’m not sure if I failed to ovulate during other cycles, or if the one cycle that the doctor was watching was the one cycle that I didn’t ovulate. Maybe my ovaries got nervous because he was watching? Maybe they missed the Ov-Watch?

I would like to close by saying: Thanks so much, Ov-Watch! Thanks for nothing!

Lessons from Japan: Part 2

Yesterday I wrote about my recent trip to Japan and my reflections on what their low birth rate might mean for people facing primary and secondary infertility. I left you with a cliffhanger about something shocking that I learned. It has to do with the highest-profile infertile couple in the country.

When I was a little girl, I would imagine that I became a princess. Think Princess Diana, not Disney princess. That was never in the cards for me, but now I have discovered a new reason to be grateful that I am not royalty.

Princess Masako.

She is the wife of Naruhito, Crown Prince of Japan, elder son of the emperor and first in line for the throne.

In many ways, Masako represents a new breed of princess. She was born a commoner, but her pedigree would be considered outstanding in non-imperial countries. Her father is a diplomat and university professor. Masako grew up in Russia and the United States. She speaks 6 languages. She studied at Harvard, Oxford, and the University of Tokyo. She became a diplomat herself until quitting her job to become the Crown Princess.

The most notable feature of her reign is that she has been unable to produce a male heir. As a result, she has experienced tremendous personal struggles and rampant criticism.

Here’s a timeline, which I find helpful for understanding her situation.

Age 29: married
Age 29 to 35: no pregnancies, even though her #1 job as Crown Princess is to produce a future Emperor; meanwhile, her brother-in-law (her husband’s only brother) and his wife give birth to their second daughter
Age 36: Masako’s first pregnancy announced in the media; soon after, the media has to retract their announcement when Masako has a miscarriage
Age 37: pregnant again, probably conceived through IVF
a few days before 38th birthday: Masako gives birth to daughter Aiko

I will pause my timeline here. For most of us, after struggling with infertility for 7 years of marriage (presumably with 7 years of TTC), the birth of a daughter would be fantastic news. And it might even be enough. But that’s not the case when having a baby boy is your official mandate.

Age 39 to 41: Media and family pressure to produce a son; Masako allegedly undergoes IVF again and experiences another miscarriage; she increasingly withdraws from public life
Age 41: Depression officially revealed to media and public
Age 41 and 42: Political movement to allow daughter Aoki to become empress, pushed forward by government-appointed panel and prime minister
Age 43: Political movement abandoned when Masako’s sister-in-law gives birth to son

And so the role of women in Japan, which as I mentioned yesterday, is less progressive than in most western countries, had a chance to accelerate forward. And then progress stalled when it became unnecessary.

Masako’s experience highlights the many pressures that infertile women deal with, but magnified tremendously.

Being in a fertility race with family members like your sister-in-law.

Nosy mothers-in-law. Masako’s mother-in-law, the Empress, reportedly demanded to know each month when Masako got her period.

Having others assign blame willy-nilly. A German newspaper got into big international trouble when they ran a picture of Naruhito with the caption “dead trousers.”

Second-guessing yourself, or being second-guessed by others. The media questioned Masako’s motivation for baby-making, when for example, she would decide to travel.

Us against the world. Naruhito made a public announcement for people to back off from Masako, then got tremendous flack from his family for speaking out and not getting the approval of the Emperor.

And so, my trip to Japan taught me about an extraordinary woman whose private pain and years of attempts to have children were broadcast to her in-laws, the media, the country, and the world. A woman for whom infertility became so emotional that she had to hide away from everyone. A woman for whom youth was initially on her side, but whose attempts to conceive took so long that time became an enemy. A woman who did everything she could to have children, and with some success and much failure. For a princess, she sure has a lot in common with the rest of us.