The Price of Love is Grief

The title of this post came from my favourite podcast, The Savage Lovecast (with Dan Savage).  I suppose a better line would be that the price of love is to risk grief.

I love being a primary nurse.  I love having the same babies, getting to know the parents, working towards getting them home.  I love watching them grow, and try to keep in touch when they go home.

My very first primary was a baby girl named Erin.  She was born with only a 10% chance of survival from a left sided congenital diaphramatic hernia.  She fought, she lived.  She was still struggling with some fairly serious medical issues when she suddenly died last night.

I stayed in touch with her mom thanks to the wonders of social media.  I saw them every time they were in my 'hood for check-ups and follow-ups.  I watched Erin grow and become this funny, mischievous and resourceful toddler.

We have babies who die at work, it's always like a punch in the gut, but I don't KNOW the families and I don't know the babies, so I am removed.  By being a NICU nurse, I have accepted the inevitability that some babies WILL die, and that sometimes it's better if they do (when they're option is to live in agony for the rest of their lives).  This is an entirely new level of grief.  I was at work while all of this happened, surrounded by people who understood my tears and gave me the space I needed to just have a moment, who don't think it's weird for "getting attached", who would have taken over my assignment if I had needed to go away for a bit.  My BFF happened to be working too, which helped tremendously.

I feel like it's just a terrible nightmare, that this cannot have possibly happened, that this (rather large) baby I cradled in my arms to soothe her cries is no longer here.  That this baby with the biggest and most beautiful eyes you've ever seen on a baby has closed those eyes forever.

I feel absolutely heartsick for her truly amazing and wonderful mother, her dad and her siblings, especially her big sister who just doted on Erin and loved her with every fibre of her being.

 Blessed be, little one.  May your wings carry you high and onto your next adventure.

Thanksgiving

It's interesting that this blog has become the emotional dumping ground for whatever I don't want to carry with me through my days, or whatever I don't want to dwell on.  It makes me sound like a rather miserable human being, and I'm sorry for that!  In real life I'm smiley and giggly and sort of ridiculous.

Like every other Canadian, I thought about all the things I am thankful for this past weekend.  We had dinner with very close family friends (we jokingly call them my "other" set of parents, and their two kids are as close to us as siblings.  Their oldest is 9 days younger than me, our parents met in prenatal class).  It's a tradition that we have stuck to, despite the fact that we really don't see each other much.  I consider them family and are thus invited to all family gatherings.  I am deeply thankful for them, as I had a house and people who welcomed me with open arms at all times.  It also filled the hole that I had growing up, without any biological family around me.  I didn't have cousins to play with (my 2 cousins are 8 and 10 years older than me and live on the other side of the country).  My parents filled their lack-of-family hole with this other family, and there is an intimacy built on 28 years of family dinners, shared vacation, sleepovers, hiking, biking and general outdoorness.

I am incredibly thankful for my wife, as I look at her just about every day with the stupid expression that belays how amazing I think she is.  She is my favourite person, I rarely get tired of her (could be because we also have different interests).  I have learned so much about myself because she has helped me to look deeper.  She has so much time and love invested in me, and likewise.  We have given each other space to grow, and support to grow together.  It's been a fantastic five and a half years, which blows both of our minds!!  In a way I am also thankful for our infertility issues, because it's reinforced how much of a priority we need to make US, and how we need to have other things to do than just be mommies.  One day our kids will be grown and neither of us want to stare at each other going "ok, so now what?"

I am thankful for our privilege, that we have money and food, we are safe.  Nobody's shooting at us, I can go to work without being raped or kidnapped or enslaved.  My problems are generally first world problems.  My complaints revolve around why my internet or iPhone are working so slowly, not whether I will survive another day or how to feed my family.  I have a job I love doing something that makes me feel GOOD about my contribution to society, that pays me enough that I can do things I enjoy, for my benefits, my sick and vacation time and for the incredible education opportunities.

I am thankful for my future children, who are already giving me grey hairs.  ;)

I am also thankful that the people around me have had generally a good year, with lots of exciting things that have happened (one friend got married, another adopted a little guy who is ADORABLE, another got through a rough spot in her life).  I am thankful that my mom's retirement in December will find her still well in mind and body, and that I will have many more years with her!

I am thankful for pumpkins.  Omg pumpkin.  The sugar pumpkins are so late this year that this completely bypassed thanksgiving... but oh lordy am I going to stock up and make lots of pumpkin puree!!


Peace out!

Goal setting

According to someone famous, all the overachievers in our culture are goal setters.  I set goals, usually, but I'm not known to write them down. DW has been in a transition state, and very unsure of where she's going and has thus been reluctant to make goals. We made a goal together: have a baby.

That goal is something that isn't working. It's more of it 3 year goal now. DW has gone back to school in an effort to get something out of her massive amounts of student loans.

I have also started (back) watching "Till Debt Do Us Part", with the ever wonderful Gail, who herds migrant finances back into well contained pens.  She did a series about babies, 3 in particular involved fertility treatments. It kept coming up loud and clear: your debt should be paid off as much as humanely possible before your jump into fertility baby making. Now I understand why our baby has not yet materialized, it's waiting for its parents to get their act together.

We are not in terrible shape by any stretch of the imagination, however our high cost of living (thanks, Vancouver) means that we need to work extra hard to clear up any stray bits.  This is totally do able, and it's do able and worth doing for everyone. Paying off debt is not something to be done later, Gail repeatedly shows math that clearly demonstrates that not dealing with the issue now means you will spend double in interest.

So, our challenge now is to get our financial house in order (and no more procrastinating) and get DW healthy and well, and to get her through school, and also to save for baby.

What to say?

I have tried blogging over the past month, it just feels like an exhausting exercise rather than a release of words.

We had our appointment with the gyne surgeon, and she laid everything out, everything looked to be OK.  We got our pre-op list and everything in the mail, including a date for her surgery.  We stopped looking at donor profiles (clearly TOO early), and started focusing on getting ready for her surgery (October).

And then on my last set, I got home in the morning from my very last shift and J was in agony and throwing up.  Thinking it was just her biliary tree spasming, she took her drugs and tried to wait.  3 hours later, nothing had changed, so off to the ER we went.

J had appendicitis and required emergency surgery to remove her appendix.  Fortunately it didn't rupture, and her healing time was pretty quick (except for getting a really yucky sore throat 3 days post-op).  However, it has completely destroyed our plans.  Set them on fire, throw them under the bus, completely crush them under your feet destroy.  Clearly J won't be having a fibroid removal in 5 weeks, clearly there is SOMETHING ELSE much more sinister going on that we need to address post-haste.

J has also gone back to school, which is a huge financial commitment for the next 2 years.  For me it means working OT to help her pay for school (since I make too much money for her to qualify for student loans, which she has quite enough of already).  I feel like I'm drowning in financial obligations, leaving almost no room to do anything else, which is really scary when I think about adding a baby.

I'm suddenly not coping well with this either. I feel so incredibly disheartened and sad and bitter, to the point where I feel like I just spend every day covering how sad I am.

Some small nice things have come from it though, I'm learning to really appreciate each day (even though I'm crushed inside), to appreciate spending time with my wife, just the two of us, and to focus on each moment, because that's the only thing that's getting me through.  I'm trying to get a life outside of home and work, trying to read more, eat more leafy green vegetables.  Can't say it's a bad thing...

However it's like a sharp stabbing sensation when well meaning strangers ask a very simple question "so are you guys planning to have kids?".

Slow movement forward

DW's hysteroscopy went... well... not exactly as expected.  She has a rather large fibroid on the back wall of her uterus, right where the nice little embryos like to implant the most often.

So.  Now there's surgery in our future.

Picking the donor, however, has proved to be that much more hysterical than I could have ever imagined.  It's just SO funny.  Also, we're so un-picky that we are overwhelmed with choices.  Do we pick a donor with blue eyes?  Do we pick one who is Chinese and have one kid that is 3/4 Chinese and the other 1/2 (and then include a good dosing of Asian culture in their upbringing, which I think they'll get anyways, irregardless of their DNA origins).

I have an interesting view on our choice of possibly using an Asian donor.  DW is 1/2 Chinese, I am not.  I feel that if we choose this route, we have a responsibility to ensure that they are well immersed in their ethnic origins, despite the fact that their donor is American (the Canadian sperm bank sucks.  No, seriously.  It's terrible) and most of the American Chinese donors have barely a trace of an accent.  Our kids will be Canadian, and living on the west coast, that Canadian identity isn't really based on the amount of melatonin in your skin or the shape of your eyes.  I'm enjoying the project of deconstructing what I *think* is important to a child's racial identity, despite the fact that I have no ability to ask our kids about this.

The blue eyed donor choice is simply that we figure both of us carry a recessive blue eyed gene, and that it would be a fun game to try to "customize" our kids.

Oohhhh the customizing of children, that's another blog post entirely...

More prepping

So DW had her HSG, in which all looks well except for a tiny blip on the side of her uterus.  Now she gets to go for a hysteroscopy, in which they will thread a camera into her uterus to look at it.

We rebooked our donor orientation as there was too much going on that day, it's next week!  And then we have to pick a donor and figure out how we're going to pay for sperm.  Huzzah!

I'm so much more apprehensive this time around, last year we were full of hope and ambition and being confident that I would be holding a baby by this time instead of still struggling through this.  I suppose it's because forking out $1K/month to do this is a bit terrifying.  I suppose also that it's because I'm just used to disappointment.  If this doesn't work, it's going to be so much more disappointing.  We're giving this one shot, and then throwing in the towel for a couple of months and taking a looonngg break, which makes me really really sad.  But such is life.

Donor Picking

I haven't really written about the process of donor picking yet.  I joke in RL that this it's "flipping through the Ikea catalogue" (even though it's all done online).  We've only just begun to look at donors, and it's surprising, or rather unsurprising, what's important to us and what is kind of unimportant.

Generally, sperm banks only accept donors over a certain height.  They are generally all post-secondary, with good family histories (it goes back 2 generations on maternal and paternal sides).  ALL of them seem to be incredibly remarkable people with big hearts (in Canada you don't get paid to donate sperm).  The sperm is quarantined for 6 months and retested to ensure it's clean, it's screened and DNA tested for things like CF and other "big" diseases.  The morphology (what the sperm look like) is closely inspected, and donors have to have a good sperm-thaw count (i.e., even of the donor has a great sperm count to begin with, it may not defrost well).

All of them have at least one post-sec degree (most of them seem to have at least a Masters).  They're either incredibly talented athletes or musicians or artists or SOMETHING.  It makes me feel like I've been wasting my talents!  A lot of them want to become parents.  We are looking for an ID release donor, as I don't feel that completely cutting off my kids' ability to find their donor later is something that I am comfortable doing.

In any case, soon the great sperm hunt will begin.  Oh the hysteria...