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Some people wrap their positive pregnancy tests with pretty paper and ribbons and present them by way of announcement. Some save them for…well, not the baby book, I guess. Something. (How would you fit that in a book?) I know of some people with a half-dozen positive tests sitting in a drawer or cabinet just because it seems wrong to throw them out.

I, on the other hand, have never peed on a stick and had a positive result. Plenty of negative results, until I realized what a complete waste of time and money that was given my generally consistent thousand-day cycle, but not a positive test to be found.

Abby is an IVF success story, so our positive test was actually a blood test at the doctor’s office. I was downtown in a meeting when the nurse called with the results, but she didn’t leave a message. I knew I would be an emotional wreck no matter which way the results went, so I didn’t want to call until after we got back to our office. By then I figured I’d be a wreck driving home, so I might as well wait until I got home to call her back.

When I walked into the house I found my husband, who was working from home that day for whatever reason, with the most serious face. He told me that the nurse had called the house with the results of the pregnancy test, and I totally lost it. I was sure he’d be smiling if the test was positive, after all, not being so serious about it! It took me almost five minutes for the rest of his sentence to penetrate - that we were pregnant! He had known that I was pregnant for hours before I did, which I found strangely amusing (and still do).

(Swistle asked how we found out we were pregnant. Who am I to pass up blog fodder?)

Ugh, what a day. I haven’t talked about it much (at all?) here, but we are (have been) actively trying to make our baby

Abby a big sister. I was hoping that maybe actually having Abby would be some kind of miracle potion that fixed everything that’s wrong with me, but…apparently not.

When Abby was about twenty months old and had been fully weaned for almost six months and I still had seen no signs of fertility, we knew that we needed to get with the program and resume our contributions to our fertility practice’s swanky new digs. (I kid. Mostly. Not bitter at all. Much. But the new offices are really very nice. They seem expensive.)

So, blah blah stuff happens blah, we come to today when I am scheduled for a frozen embryo transfer (FET) of the one embryo left from the IVF that gave us Abby. They were supposed to call on Tuesday or yesterday to let me know what time I needed to be there (over an hour away) for the procedure. No one ever called, and - surprise! - now that I actually HAVE a kid, I am much less flexible. (There are babysitters to schedule and arrangements to make! Not so much with the spontaneous over here, people!) I called them and determined that our transfer was scheduled for today at 2:30pm.

All was going according to plan, babysitter (aka Grandma) had arrived, and we were almost ready to leave - early, to have a grownup lunch on the way - when one of the nurses called. Not my usual nurse, who was on vacation this week, but one of the other nurses. (Relevant? Who knows. She’s very nice, and I don’t blame her at all for anything that happened. Moving on.) She was calling to catch us before we left, to let us know that our embryo had not survived the thawing process so the transfer was cancelled.

Sad. Disappointed. No more shot at having “not twins” conceived together but born 2+ years apart. Money down the drain (infertility treatments make you somewhat immune to that pain, it turns out), more procedures needed. No amazing positive pregnancy test as the best Christmas present I could ask for this year. But…all things considered, my expectations had been pretty low, so it was okay.

Plus - hey! We have a babysitter, we already took the day off, let’s go to lunch. We were sitting at lunch when my cell phone rang:

So. Apparently they rescheduled my transfer? Without telling me? And…um. They had the right person, earlier, when the called to tell me the embryo didn’t survive…right? Because that would sort of suck if we had to rush all the way up there. Except it wouldn’t suck because yay! Undead embryo! Maybe I should call the nurse? To be sure?

I did, and they did have the right person (yes, that’s me with the shriveled useless embryo, thanks) and were rightfully pretty horrified about what happened. Thankfully (for me) they handled it was well as possible - the nurse took it seriously and talked to my doctor, who also took it seriously and called me directly to apologize and talk about what they could do to avoid problems like this in the future and to make it up to me in some way. Other than the part where I’m obviously not pregnant RIGHT NOW I’m as okay with the resolution as I can be.

And I get to spend the holiday season doing a fresh IVF cycle, which sounds SO FUN I can hardly describe it here. Those of you who have been there know exactly what I mean, and those of you who haven’t should just be glad of that.

This has not been the best day ever.

For those who are currently fighting with infertility, the thought of a single week to be “aware” of it is laughable. It consumes every single waking moment of your life - the hours spent in doctors’ offices, the time spent taking inventory of your medications, the endless worry about insurance and how little it covers and trying to figure out how you’ll ever be able to pay for the treatments you need just to try to become a parent. The futile Google searches that you hope will just tell you what you want to know: when will you…WILL you…ever get what seems to come so easily to so many others. The hours you spend crying because the money you’d so carefully saved up for retirement and your unborn childrens’ college funds is all but gone, and nothing to show for it but bruises on your body and on your heart.

Even when you’ve gone through this journey and come out the other side, the reality is that the strain is still there. The knowledge that we are compromising our daughter’s college fund in an attempt to give her a brother or sister is not easy to sit with. We believe that it’s the right thing to do, but the need to make these choices hurts. Watching our daughter hug her cousin, or a friend’s baby, and hearing her ask for a baby of her own hurts.

It’s definitely different the second time around. Some of the questions are different. Some of the feelings are different. I’m a mother now, and no one can take that away from me. If all I ever have is Abby, then I have gotten my miracle and am so grateful for that.

But especially now that I really know what it’s like to have a child, I know that what I want the most is more of what I finally have.

For a variety of reasons, we are currently using COBRA* for our family’s health insurance. J’s employer continues to promise that they’ll be implementing a group health plan “real soon now” (and have been for over six months, so we’re not holding our collective breath over here). Because of my medical history, I am considered “not medically insurable” under any individually available insurance policy. Until we’ve exhausted our COBRA period or become eligible for another group plan, we’re stuck between a COBRA and an uninsured place.

Today we got the paperwork for the health plan’s new open enrollment period - the annual exercise in frustration where we get to decide which limbs we’ll sacrifice in the hope that we’ll not go bankrupt if someone actually needs health care in the next year. Because we’re on COBRA, the cost is…high. The cheapest plan available for the next year is more expensive (monthly cost) than what we have now, and the copays for everything are also going up. Office visits will run $5 more per visit. Prescriptions will run anywhere from $10 to $30 more per copay. My first pass at estimating monthly expenses for next year? $1650. Just for health insurance and monthly prescription copays. God help us if anyone actually gets sick. It’s starting to look like I may need to get a job just for the option to get health coverage under a group plan.

What’s really sick? The thought that our health insurance costs alone are more than the monthly mortgage payment for most people.

(* Basically, for those of you lucky enough not to know every painful detail of the U.S. health “insurance” system, what that means is that we are allowed through the graciousness of law to pay full cost (plus some percentage) in order to continue our health coverage from J’s last employer. We can carry this insurance for up to 18 months or until we’re eligible under another group plan. Once we’ve exhausted our eligibility (in 18 months), THEN (and only then) we can purchase an individual (or family) plan. We could (in theory) purchase an individual plan any time, but they’re not required to actually accept your application for insurance unless you’ve exhausted your COBRA eligibility. What’s more, since we can’t keep COBRA insurance for just one member of the family (i.e., me) and buy (much less expensive) individual insurance for the rest, we’re pretty well stuck with COBRA for 18 months.)

Just maybe. It feels way too early to get emotionally invested (hah - like I’m not already), but…maybe. 19 days. 305. More on Wednesday.

Sometimes two weeks is a very short time. Sometimes, though, two weeks is almost unendurably long.

This is one of those times.

I’m freaking out a little bit about this doctor’s appointment tomorrow. Now that we’ve sorted out a lot of the other medical stuff (tumors eliminated, death staved off another day, a more or less healthy status quo obtained), it’s time to get serious - read, “significantly more aggressive” - about the preganancy situation. After much discussion and research, we decided that we really need to move to a dedicated infertility clinic with a much larger staff than the individual doctors we’ve been seeing. Our first consultation is tomorrow afternoon.

I’d be lying if I said I’m not a little scared. I’m worried that they’ll think we’re stupid for waiting this long, worried that they’ll say that I still have too many other problems for them to work with me, worried that we won’t be able to figure out how to finance what we need to do, worried that we’ll be able to swing the financing but it won’t work anyway. I’m just one big bundle of worries right now.

It’s almost the end of the year - smack in the middle of the holiday season - and this is not a resolution. This is not one of a list of goals for the New Year that I’ll think about a lot for a few days, then occasionally throughout the year, only to recycle in slightly worn-out form next year.

No, this is not one of those. This is big. I’m going to make some changes and start taking it seriously. It’s my health. More than that, it’s my life - whether I want to have one at all, let alone a vital and active one. And I do.

What does that mean? Lots of doctor’s visits. The drugs I’ve been taking aren’t working. I can’t take the more potent drugs until my body is healthy enough to withstand them. I can’t get my body healthy unless my mind is on board with the whole thing. My adrenal is nonfunctioning, my ovaries are doing nothing, my metabolism is shot. I’m exhausted and sick and miserable, and it’s going to be a long, tough road to change all that, but that’s exactly what I’m going to do.

Baby steps. This is the first.