Update du jour...

...is that's I'm waiting for an update.  Husband and I chose an anonymous donor.  (Thanks to you, you-know-who, for your thoughtful discussion of the risks and benefits of known vs anonymous donors!)  Our reasoning eventually came to the fact that S, my best friend, has too crazy a schedule because of her residency and too high a stress level for it to be fair to ask her right now; also, she doesn't have proven fertility, which is the one thing the REI specialist suggested we could change.  So we found a lovely young woman with two children and we're waiting to hear back.

I'm trying to occupy my time as best I can.   I've gotten back to exercising, though to solidify it as a habit will take several more weeks.  I'm reading (Charles Dickens and Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni) and studying Infectious Diseases.  (When your Daddy is the attending, you especially want to look smart!)  I still get sad but it is a little better this month, perhaps because of ID being a fun field and my fellows being fun girls.  Sometimes, though, it's hard.  I called one of my good friends from high school.  She's pregnant, and I have a hard time figuring out about what to talk.  I don't want her to think that she's nothing more than her uterus, but I don't want her to think I'm avoiding the (growing) elephant in the room.  I will say I did a very good job of being excited for her for a solid hour and a half on the phone when she called to tell me her good news.  It's also hard when someone gets excited for me to proceed forward.  I ended up telling the ID fellow about needing a surrogate.  She's asked some questions, which is really sweet.  But she doesn't realize that when it's round 5, there is nothing exciting about it anymore.  You sigh, and steel yourself for disappointment, and try to force yourself not to be excited.  The two-week wait actually becomes easier each time, because you know it'll be a negative beta-hCG so why rush and why be anxious?

The scary part is, I find myself becoming hopeful.  That, dear readers, is not good.  Hope hurts when it's betrayed.  I worry that this cycle -- which isn't even a go yet since we still need to hear from the donor -- will fail and I will fall apart.

Yet this hope isn't like the anxiety and hope I felt with cycle #1.  It's more...prophetic in nature.  Of course in the Torah Miriam was a prophetess even from the young age where (according to midrash) she told her father Amram that he should not divorce her mother Yocheved.  But honestly, sometimes I have intuitions which are surprisingly accurate.  (Don't worry, psychiatrists -- I will provide an address to which you may send the antipsychotics at the end.)  With the first cycle, I didn't expect to lose baby B, but once we did, I had numerous visions of losing baby A.  I saw myself telling my internist/mentor and telling my batch-mates in residency.  With our second cycle, I looked at names for the brief moment of happiness, yes, but I never truly latched on to the idea that the transfer took.  Even before we knew there was no heartbeat, I felt the sadness and emptiness and had no expectation of a baby.  With our fourth and fifth transfer, I expected failure.  And now?  I don't have quite that same expectation of failure.  I had such clear visions of losing baby A.  It wasn't that I exactly thought it would happen.  It's more that I kept seeing these stories in my head where we lost the baby, me telling those close to me that we had lost the baby...and with the second cycle I had a dream too that we lost the baby before we even had the fatal fetal (haha) ultrasound.  Now I have had many pictures in my head of telling my attending that I might not finish out the rotation because (surprise) we are thirty-four weeks.  In these visions I haven't told anyone except close family and my best friends because I don't want to tell anyone until I hold a healthy baby or babies in my arms.  But I am not righteous like Miriam and certainly I don't merit prophecy, and anyway, if I did, I would hope Hashem gave my insight into something more helpful to other people that just knowing the outcome of my IVF attempts.

At any rate, I do wish that this next cycle might succeed, but I don't want to hope.  I am so afraid of hope.