Jeez Louise

“Are you here for a little chat today?”

That is my RE’s nurse’s way of asking if she should get the dildocam and the KY ready. Very delicate. As though Dr. B and I are going to have a cup of tea, maybe some Peek Freans (oh man, that link made me hungry), and discuss the weather or our plans for back-to-school. Actually, generally when she’s poking around in there, we *do* discuss the weather and our plans for whatever. I think doctors learn the Art of the Small Talk (“Have you seen the construction on the corner of Grafton? Now, just scoot your bum down a little further. Yeah, they’ve got the street torn up over there! Lots of detours.”) alongside learning How To Warm A Speculum.

Anyway. We were. There for a chat, that is. We were there to discuss my surgery, and go further into detail about what Dr. F had explained after said surgery.

Dr. B came in, sat down, and said “Well.”

That “Well” was loaded with “We have some Big Things to discuss” overtones.

“What did Dr. F tell you, Louise?”

“Well, basically, that from the outside everything looked normal, but from the inside, everything was… weird, and he’d never seen anything like it before”.

“Yes, well, that’s pretty much it. From the outside, everything looked perfect. It’s when they put the dye in that they noticed that it didn’t go anywhere – not through your Fallopian tubes- it just absorbed into the walls of the uterus because it had nowhere else to go. That shows that the tubes are blocked. After that, he put the camera in. This is where it gets interesting. When he first put the camera in, he thought maybe he had created a false channel- that’s where instead of putting the camera inside the uterus, he might have poked it into the muscle itself- because the cavity was so small. But he hadn’t; he checked a few times. There’s no endometriosis or tumours, nothing that can be removed or fixed; you’re not bicornuate or unicornuate… it’s just a tiny cavity, with blocked tubes.”

She went on to speak about our options.

“IVF would probably not work for you, because there would be very little chance of a fertilized egg being able to implant. Now. Gestational surrogacy would be a good choice for you, since Rob’s tests were all normal, and we have found that you do ovulate with the help of Clomid”(and, since I went off the Clomid in February, I have continued to do so fairly regularly) “so you do have eggs. There are a few gestational surrogates in Atlantic Canada – two sisters in PEI, and one other lady in New Brunswick. They’re all pregnant right now, though… of course you could find your own surrogate. Age isn’t so much a factor with gestational surrogates because she wouldn’t need to produce any eggs – anyone up to age 40 with a normal uterus, who has had one or more uncomplicated pregnancies in the past, would do. Of course compensating a surrogate is illegal in Canada so you would only have to pay for the IVF and the counselling and legal fees. There’s also adoption – depending on which route you go, it could be more or less expensive, but there wouldn’t be that much of a difference, I don’t think”.

She also offered to send my information to the fertility clinic in Halifax, to see if they’d want to do a hysteroscopy, because she had no name for what’s wrong with me – again, had never seen it before, in her 20 years as an RE – and maybe they’d have further insight into the whole thing. We said she might as well ask, but we’re not really hopeful.

I hadn’t realized it, but I had been holding out some tiny glimmer of hope – that she would say “Oh, no worries, we’ll just scoop out the weird part of your uterus and drill holes through to the Fallopian tubes and voila! babies!”

This is when I fully, 100% realized that, barring some miraculous influx of cash or magical barley seeds, we will never be parents.

My friend C has always said that she would be a surrogate for us if we wanted (she’s had her children, and doesn’t want any more, but loves being pregnant. She had her tubes tied after her fourth baby, but her uterus is, according to her doctor, ‘pristine’). It’s the money (isn’t it always?). Although I know that surrogates aren’t compensated in Canada, and the checkups/labour/delivery etc. would be covered because it always is, we would still have to pay for all the medications, plus the procedures related to harvesting my eggs, mixing them up with Rob’s guys, and then transferring the whole thing into her. Plus legal fees. I haven’t been able to find a solid figure online, but another friend (who went through IVF – just follicle stim, not the whole embryo transfer thing, though she knew people who had had embryos transferred) told me that it would probably be around $15000, before legal and counselling fees.

For one chance.

And there’s no guarantee of a baby at the end.

Some research on adoption has told me that public adoption in Canada would cost between $18000 and $25000, and take 8 years or more (that’s not a typo – 8 years. Or more. I don’t want to be the 80-year-old mom at her kid’s soccer games), with private adoption or adoption through an agency being much quicker, but costing significantly more. There is foster care, but right now I can’t imagine having a child for a week/month/year, and then having to give that child back. I think it would kill me. Plus there’s the fact that apparently there isn’t a huge need for foster parents where I live (this is purely anecdotal – a couple who live near us were approved as foster parents three years ago, and haven’t had a child placed yet, and a teacher at my school and his wife are also certified foster parents, with no one placed with them).

Rob and I have talked, and talked, and talked about this, in much greater detail than I’ve gone into here. There comes a point when you’ve talked so much that you’re just repeating the same things over and over again. We haven’t found a solution. He has been working so hard to make me feel better. He’s amazing, caring and sympathetic, and I love him so much. He’s hurting so badly right now but trying so hard to make me smile. It still hurts – badly – that something that comes so easily to so many others just isn’t going to happen for us.

I’m not asking for anyone to offer a solution, because there isn’t one. If you do have information that you feel would be pertinent, I would really prefer for you to contact me privately rather than in comments, although comments are welcome as well. Or not. You must be getting so sick of me writing about this. I’m getting sick of living it.

Edit: One last thing that I will add (not that anyone who is reading this blog does this. It’s people in “real life”), because I found it to be so true:
Rob said to me, when I was upset about it the other day (after someone basically said “yeah that sucks, let’s talk about TV now!”) “They don’t want to talk about it, because they don’t want to make you feel worse by bringing it up, in case you’d forgotten. What people don’t realize is that you will never forget. The grief is always there in your heart. You can’t just ignore it and make it go away – that doesn’t work. It’s so much better for them to speak and show you that they care.”