More gallows humor: Anti-maternity photos

Jealous of your friends' maternity photos?  Sick of ogling their adorable baby bumps?  Why not take photographs of your own?  Here are some ideas for anti-maternity photos:

1. Arms out from your belly as if encircling a baby bump.  But you haven't got one, so frown.

2. Sit in a rocking chair, cradling the printout from the last ultrasound taken before you miscarried.  This one's a frown as well, and tears if you can manage.

3. If you sport a flat stomach, do a close-up flaunting your perfect body.  Grin and toss your hair for the camera.  Stick your tongue out at those pregnant women if you want.  No stretch marks for you!

4. A black-and-white or sepia shot of the empty room waiting for Baby Godot.  Sunlight focused on the cradle provides extra effect.

5. Multiple miscarriages?  Commemorate them artfully by laying the ultrasound printouts artfully in a bassinet.   Making "no" signs on each ultrasound in red permanent marker drives the message home even more.

6. Stand at the entrance to a maternity clothing store, wistfully looking in.

7. Sit on a park bench watching a new mother (ideally also younger than you) playing with her baby.  You are in soft focus, she is in sharp.

8. Close-up of your BFN.  Enough said.



And here are some other crafty ideas:

1. Glue a mirror into your empty OCP disks and voila -- you just made a compact!  Decorate with glitter and you've got a great party favor.  Especially fitting for handing out at baby showers.

2. Can't use prenatal vitamins yourself since your aorta is apparently porcelain-fragile?   Just don't need them because of your BFN?  Neither reason is an excuse not to by them.  Instead, use them to spell out "congratulations" on your friends' new baby cards!

3. Wondering how you will possibly afford your next IVF cycle, especially if you are using a surrogate?  Hold a raffle, with the prize being all the baby items you collected back when you naively thought you would quickly become a parent.

4.You can also raise money for your next treatment by holding a guessing game with a small buy-in, where friends and family guess when you will end up with a baby.  If you don't need the assistance funding the next cycle, or are taking a break, use the money to treat yourself at the bookstore/mall/ice cream store depending on your personality.  Or be nice, and use it to buy a gift for the person/people supporting you during this process.

5. Why are birth announcements the only announcements going around?  Must we discriminate against the other possible endings to embryo transfer?  Make BFN announcements (see photograph idea number 8) or miscarriage announcements.  You deserve to share your news, too!  Suggest that in lieu of baby gifts, coupons to the nearest soft-serve station are appreciated.



Why is it that as I approach our next round, I am increasingly bitterly sarcastic?

A little bit of gallows-humor...or perhaps I should consider this approach after all?

CITY, STATE – _______ University Internal Medicine resident M. and her husband I. were apprehended earlier today while attempting to kidnap two newborn girls from the _____ Women’s Health Hospital.

The couple, who are unable to conceive due to a chromosomal abnormality, have been exploring various options for family-building since December 2009.  While originally intending to pursue in-vitro fertilization using a donated ovum, the couple learned in June 2010 that health risks made carrying a pregnancy too dangerous for M.  “It wasn’t easy to accept that I’d never have the adorable baby belly and that our private issue would become public knowledge, but eventually I accepted what I could not change,” states the first-year resident planning to pursue a career in academic internal medicine.  She and her husband I. (a Master’s candidate also at _______ University) started the process to find a surrogate mother to carry the child.  

I. states, “It was just taking so long, and it isn’t even legal in our state so we would have to go to Chicago, and I just hate driving long distances.  So we came up with an alternative plan.”

"We also felt this would be more cost-effective," adds M.  "Surrogacy can total over one-hundred thousand dollars.  Our ski masks cost fifty dollars for the two of us, and we used a scissors from home to cut the Hugs tags."

Indeed, the couple went to their local Bavarian Village store and purchased two black ski masks.  Faces covered, they went to the hospital, which is part of the ________ Medical Center.   A security guard tried to bar the entrance but backed down when threatened with a stethoscope and a Queen Square reflex hammer.  M. then used her student identification card to gain access to the nursery.  Inside, she and I. blinded the on-duty nurses with specially-augmented Panoptic ophthalmoscope.  They then chose two newborn girls, cut off the infants’ Hugs tags, and exited the secure area.  They were apprehended when M. realized she had failed to perform the medicine reconciliation and stopped to fill out a form at the  closest nursing station.

The newborn infants were safely returned to their respective mothers, seventeen-year-old A and sixteen-year-old B.  Neither mothers nor babies were available for comment. 

Sometimes, I really do wonder if that might be the easiest way to get a baby.  It's just that I have a feeling they don't let you continue your residency if you go to jail.

In Which our heroine seeks advice

I am sad, bitter, and envious.  I admit this freely.  And now some friends are baking Baby #2, which doesn't make things any easier.

But why should I feel this way?  I have such goodness in my life and yet I can't appreciate it.  I have tried chasing away the negative emotions by listing the reasons I should be grateful.  I have forced myself to dance to peppy music.  I have banged out Beethoven on my piano in ways that would make him spin in his grave.

Nothing helps.  Does anyone have advice?  I wish I could move on to acceptance already.  I know I am missing out on life by feeling down and upset.  And I know that my attitude is the only part of this process under my control.  So why can't I learn to bear this with grace?

Struggling again...but trying to hold on to hope

I love medicine.  I love teaching medical students (on those rare occasions when I actually know something).  I am no good at either the medicine or the teaching, but I enjoy them.

It helps not a bit.  I sit in the radiology reading room to review a CT abdomen and a pelvic ultrasound series, but my mind is back in March 2010 when I was the one on the receiving end of the pelvic ultrasound, and the same Dr. J was reading, and they couldn't even find two streak ovaries.  Just one.  I remember the student ultrasound tech's sympathy, and how I tried to reassure her that this was ok, they had proved my uterus was normal, so this wasn't really bad news.

I couldn't have known that two months later a certain REI specialist would tell me my PERFECTLY NORMAL aorta is in terrible (yes, because 2-5% is such a high rate) danger of dissection if I become pregnant.

(By the way -- that same aorta has had no trouble pumping blood for a six-mile run.  Just saying.)

It was like this last time, too -- the sadness was a delayed reaction.  Again I walk on leaden legs, and my thoughts are 80% baby/infertility-related.

I should be looking forward.  Our new donor had a successful consult pending the send-out genetic tests which should be back in a week, and we are hoping for a transfer in late July or early August.  But I stopped expecting last August.  Why should this ever work?  My therapist told me this will eventually work out -- that I am motivated, and keep trying, so it will eventually work out.  If only.  It won't work.  The only future I see is one in which I continue to watch everyone else have children while I remain forever childless.  The only reason I am even willing to board the emotional roller-coaster again is that I won't accept this childless future.

My mentor/internist/person to whom I come crying far more than I ought tells me motherhood is great but not all that life has to offer, and that I shouldn't let it be the only reason I exist.  I'm a "wonderful human being with lots to offer."  If only that last were true.  I am unwonderful.  I do one thing well, and that is complain.  And what could I possibly do that would provide the same connection, with all its wonderful and pull-you-hair-out moments, as motherhood?

I feel sad and alone.  And the worst part is, I am not alone and I should be grateful for all the wonderful people and pets and things in my life.  Infertility isn't making me sad.  I am.

Told you I was unwonderful.

It has been a frustrating week.  I feel overwhelmed at work, both with the workload and with my utter lack of sufficient clinical skills and medical knowledge.  And then work has been sad.  I made two patients hospice this week, one of my favorite clinic patients almost certainly has hepatocellular carcinoma, and another of my patients has advanced cervical cancer -- which, incidentally, is now a PREVENTABLE DISEASE.  GET VACCINATED AGAINST HPV!

These patients are good people.  They are young.  They are parents, siblings, spouses.  And I had to tell them they have advanced cancer.

I wish I could tell them it would be all right.  They could take a magic pill and get better.  But they won't. And while I can be liberal with morphine, I cannot say that it won't hurt.  And it might hurt a lot.

But then, if I understood why bad things happened to good people, I would be the wise (wo)man on the mountain.

And yet -- and this is what I really don't get -- why do I still get so upset over my small problems?

Trying to think about what I am rather than what I am not

I am not a mother this Mother's Day.  And if Mama tells me she will be wishing me a happy mother's day next year, I may break down and cry because I doubt a baby will ever happen.

But maybe if I focus on what I am, I will feel one teensy bit better.

1. I am a physician.  I have the best job in the entire world.  I go to work each day to make people feel better and teach students the art and science of medicine.  I make crying patients smile.  Is that even a job?  A calling, really.
2. I am the winner of a Hopwood award.  I won't say which category or which year because I want to remain anonymous.  But dang, I won a HOPWOOD.  If you don't know, that is the same award Arthur Miller won during his time at the University of Michigan.
3. According to the in-training exam, I am in the top 5% of internal medicine first-year residents in the nation.  (It's clearly inaccurate, but...)
4. I am tough!  I said a last goodbye to my almost-son, got on a plane home, and spent the night admitting patients at the hospital.
5. I make the best matzah-ball soup and the best challah and one killer Tzvia cake.  Don't mess with me on Erev Shabbos.
6. I am witty.
7. I get along with my mother-in-law.  (Trust me.  This one deserves to be on this list.)
8. I can do peppy on three hours of sleep.
9. My eyelashes are so long that when I wear mascara, people think they're fake.
10. I can run for a code in heels and be first on the patient.

Mother's Day, Infertile-Style

Tomorrow is, of course, Mother's Day.  Also known as "Flaunt your fertility" day or "Happy working gonads day."

I am trying not to be bitter.  It isn't working well.  Had things gone as hoped, I would had a baby boy right now, or actually twins, and then another baby on the way.

But my arms are empty for another Mother's day.

I am trying to remember how lucky I am.  How many people must remember mothers who are gone this Mother's Day?  I can't even imagine how horrible and catastrophic it must be to lose one's mother.  I am so incredibly grateful to have my Mama and my Mama Phyll.  And I know the point of Mother's Day is to celebrate one's own mother, not to be upset about being excluded from the club.

But I will never compare stories of morning sickness.  I will never have war wounds from pregnancy, labor, and delivery.  I will stay silent as my friends come up with cute ideas for telling their husbands they are pregnant.  And *if* we ever even end up with a baby, or so close to delivery that we want to tell people (like, 39 weeks, perhaps?) I will receive quizzical looks instead of congratulations, as every is confused at my empty belly.  I will explain, and most people will understand, and ask more questions because they find it fascinating.  (We're doctors, remember?)

It is not fascinating.

It hurts.

It especially hurts when two people today wish me a Happy Mother's Day.  Ummm...thanks?  Are you bringing the  baby as a present?

I have however come up with some dark humor.

I would invite my family for brunch this year, and make eggs, but -- oh!  I don't have any!

(And yes.  You were supposed to laugh.)

It was a very long week returning to work.  I have the day off tomorrow, though, I don't have more to write now because I am exhausted from a very long week at the hospital and some needy patients.  Thank goodness I have a day off tomorrow!