Our seven year old daughter has old parents. We're not retirement aged but, by the time she's 17, we'll be 50-ish and 60-ish. I'm an only child and we're not super-close with our extended families. While we've always thought about having another kid, the biggest reason we'd like another is that we don't want our daughter to find herself alone in her thirties or forties. And, if we live as long as our grandparents did (99 and 101), it's only fair she should have someone else to pawn us off on. Nothing lightens the load like knowing it's someone else's turn next time.
The first kid took nearly five years and twenty months with a fertility specialist before we were finally given the diagnosis of "unexplained infertility". In case you're unfamiliar, that's doc talk for "everything checks out, so we're stumped". Clomid worked the first time we tried it, but that pregnancy tanked at 7 weeks and I was too frazzled to try again right away. Three months later, two months before I was to enter a GIFT trial, I got pregnant the old-fashioned way: lots of wine and a hotel room. Woo-hoo!
This time, rather than having to go through the stress, inconvenience and cost of infertility diagnosis, we were able to cut to the chase. The doc at CIMA, the 'big' hospital here in the Central Valley, handed me Serophene last month and we started the chemical assisted version of the baby dance.
I hate taking non-recreational drugs. I worry about the side effects. I worry about the intended effects. I was not a happy camper when I was pregnant the last time. I worried about EVERYTHING. It was like a 9 month long panic attack. I worried about dying in childbirth (that was actually more of a phobia). I worried about what might be wrong with the baby. I worried about the amniocentesis. I worried about the fluoride in my toothpaste!
This time around, I worry that it might not happen at all. I worry that I'm too old, that the last egg has already shipped or, if there are any left, that they're wonky and unreliable.
Over the next few months I have decided that, in between bitching about taxis, neighbors and rain, I'm going to bitch about trying to get getting pregnant, past forty, in Costa Rica. At the very least, the extra hormones short-circuiting my famous coping skills and extra-ordinary patience should provide some entertainment for everyone.
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