FREEEEEDOMMMMM !!!!!

We have been batting around our options lately. IUI, IVF, Adoption, Living ChildFree. We think IUI will be our best bet at this point. Neither of us is sure about the gamble of IVF but I agreed that if T has his heart set on it that I would give it two chances, absolutely no more. We are both in favor of adoption but I think I am more pro-adoption than he is. He still looks at it as raising someone else's kid and not having "our own". This grates on my nerves to hear since that is precisely the language adoptive families avoid but I know he is still new to the whole thing so I will give him a free pass… for now.

We also decided that we could be happy living without children. We have things we would like to do in life that we could do with or without kids (buy a motor home and travel around to different NASCAR races, etc.). Our one big goal is to not look back with regret about any of the decisions that we are making along the way. I think we are in a good place. I think all of the grieving I have done over the years was over the opportunity to have children, not the children themselves. I have always hated being told I could not do something so that I would do that thing just out of spite. This is not a good reason to have children.

So, this next year will basically set the tone for the rest of our lives. We dropped off a sample for T's third S/A this morning. This time at the RE's lab (it seems so strange to finally be able to say I have an RE), not the pathology lab at the hospital. We are hoping for more accurate results this time since the counter will be a specialist and not just the person who was (un)lucky enough to be working at the time we dropped off our other two samples.

I am to call on CD1 to schedule a U/S for CD13 or 14 and will ask about scheduling my post-coital around that time. Oh Joy. Today is CD31 without even the slightest hint of a tint on the TP. I have been getting sharp pains in the area of my right ovary for about a week now. They come and go. T is hoping that it means I am pregnant. I am thinking more along the lines of a cyst. Keeping fingers crossed its not an ectopic. I will not test until Saturday but I honestly expect AF to show up any minute now.

One of the hardest parts of all this is that T has all kinds of hope and optimism and I do not. I am not depressed; I am actually quite at peace with everything that is going on. I am doing everything I am supposed to do and I am not obsessing over every twinge and change in my chart. I am just along for the ride. I feel detached from the whole thing and at this point I do not think that is necessarily a bad thing. I have seen so many women become so fragile and closed off to everything around them except what is or is not going on in their own uterus that I feel lucky not to be in that place.

I think once we decide that we have gone as far as we are going to go with treatments that I will be able to shrug and think "if it happens it happens and if it does not, then it does not". What will be will be. Of course, I suppose that is easier said than done since I am not actually facing that situation right now, but I think it has taken the pressure off the treatments to know that if they do not work, I will still be OK. We may adopt, we may not, and that is OK too. I do not feel like I HAVE to do anything anymore, I can do what I WANT to do.

There is freedom in that.