The Lost Year

I hope everyone had a great holiday.  Ours was pleasant but quiet, which was fine by me as I started coming down with a pretty bad cold on the 23rd.  By Christmas Day I was hacking and coughing my way through presents.  Luckily we managed to find one pharmacy that was open and some cough medicine helped both M and I finally get some sleep on Christmas night!

As the New Year approaches I'm always big on reviewing the year that was and planning ways to improve in the year ahead.  I'm a "fresh start" kind of person...that means diets always start on Monday morning, and whatever calories I consume on the Sunday night before don't count.  Yup, infallible logic there.  And the New Year?  Well, that's the biggest fresh start of all.

Reflecting on 2012, it actually started out pretty great.  M and I went to Jamaica with a huge group of friends for a wedding, and when we came back we got into the Insanity workout program for our New Year's fitness resolution.  Shaun T kicked our asses for three whole months, and by April we were in awesome shape.

Unfortunately, we were also just about to find out that we were infertile, and the year went downhill from there.

We had originally planned to take a belated honeymoon trip to Paris in May or June, but that got pushed off for fertility testing and cycle monitoring.  Then in June we had a huge thunderstorm that caused the sewer to back up into the finished basement of our house (which we had been living in for less than a year).  Luckily insurance covered everything, but there was a few months of basement chaos and reconstruction in store.  In July I found out I had to have a LEEP procedure to deal with some pesky abnormal cervical cells that had been hanging around too long for my gyno's liking.  The procedure took place in August and was icky enough on its own, but it also benched us from TTC for six weeks. Then in September, my folks informed me that my cat (who had gone to live with them after M and I got married due to M's allergies) would have to be put down.  The turd icing on the shit cake came in October, when our IVF was cancelled and the resulting IUI failed. 

All in all, M and I are in agreement that it's been a bad year.

Unfortunately, our response to this was less than stellar.  We sunk into it like a dense, dark fog.  We let it smother us and take over our lives, to the point where it became hard to see anything good and we just expected there to be more bad stuff on the way.  We stopped working out, because that's the easiest thing to do when you don't feel good.  We fell off our healthy eating plan, because we're both emotional eaters.  We put off vacations and trips to see my family so that we could be available for fertility treatments.  A bunch of stuff we wanted to do in our new home got sidelined, with the excuse that we needed the basement repairs done first so that we could organize our storage situation.  We never had our long-awaited housewarming party, because we were so disorganized as a result of the flood.  And on and on the excuses went.  We felt tired all the time.  We spent more time in front of the TV and less time out exploring our new neighbourhood and all it had to offer.  Our sex life suffered.

Reflecting on all of this, I realize that I obviously couldn't have changed any of the crap-tacular stuff that happened.  But what needs to change is how we responded to it.  We responded with eight months of stagnation.  Our year, which had started off so great, instead turned into a whole year of waiting.

I will look back on 2012 as the lost year.  Lost opportunities, lost hope, lost dreams, lost possibilities.  Lost motivation.  Lost innocence.  Lost me.

I won't make the same mistake with 2013.  I am making this my New Year's resolution.  While we can't control what happens with our infertility, I resolve to stop letting our infertility control us.  I resolve to be healthy and strong again, and enjoy life with my amazing husband instead of feeling like I am constantly waiting for something.  Of course I'll need to be sad sometimes, but I also resolve to figure out a way to pull myself up and keep moving.  Above all, I resolve to stop putting my life on hold and actually start living it.

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In related news, I took my Cetrotide shot today.  My RE is using it instead of Lupron in the preceding cycle to down-regulate me and hopefully avoid the over-suppression from last time.  While I used to find the Lupron injection site a little itchy for a few minutes afterwards, this one felt like a dozen mosquitoes bit me in the same place on my stomach.  It itched like crazy for an hour!  It's probably due to the huge single dose (3mg) as opposed to the tiny daily doses of Lupron, but man did I feel like scratching my stomach off for a while there!  I'm still on BCP until January 2nd, and should find out the rest of my IVF dates once our clinic reopens.