The Hard Swallow

**thank you so much for all your good wishes and encouragement for our imminent rumpusing! It was a good reminder of why I shouldn't hide away too long from this lovely place and you lovely people.**

This is a new sensation I've discovered in the past few months - "the hard swallow". It happens when I'm driving, and see a 4WD coming towards me, or when I see a baby and try to estimate - 11 or 12 months old? Or when the IVF administrator tells me the dollar amount we have to pay to start IVF. A ball of fear or sadness, or something of a similar texture, rises in my throat and I have the urge to run / scream / hide. But I know I can't, so instead I swallow it down, "suck it up" and get on with the business of moving through the world.

I'm not pregnant this time. I didn't really think I was, but when I got to the 27 day mark, I just started entertaining little thoughts, "maybe Christmas would feel good after all" etc. But no. And while IVF felt like a relatively positive Plan B when I went to visit Dr Lovely last week, it doesn't feel like such a fun path now.

I'm a big hippy, you see. I don't like the idea of doctors taking control of my cycle, forcing my ovaries to blister with artifically stimulated ova, vacuuming out my eggs, and coercing them to germinate with a selected sperm. It all feels a bit too much like high school dancing classes where we were made to dance so closely pressed to the boys that a record put between us couldn't fall to the floor*. As though the doctors were telling my body, "Oh, just get out of the way and let us do this properly!" I know what it feels like to have medical experts take over my most basic bodily functions - I'm lucky they did, otherwise I would be dead, but that doesn't mean I like it.

We don't *have* to do IVF. As a dear friend has pointed out, our lack of luck so far is probably more about timing than anything else. But given our issues with frozen insems, and the difficulty and stress involved in interstate fresh insems, and "advancing maternal age"**, it is making sense. What I don't like most about IVF is that I feel corralled into it by fear - fear that maybe Z will be the only baby I have, that it is all too late, that if Christmas 2011 were to roll around without a pregnancy in sight, I'd lose what scrap of sanity I've got left. So it is a pragmatic choice, but a very reluctant, sulky one. And it makes me even sulkier to know how much we have to pay for procedures which I don't want anyway (or wish I didn't need).

But this is where the hard swallow comes in. *Gulp*




* Yes - a record! Remember them? Round, flat, black things with grooves on them. Told you I was old.

**I'm 34 - I know that is not so old in the scheme of things, but I'd like to have more than one, and I'm very conscious that it only gets harder and more risky after 35).