Back to our regularly scheduled program

I am still grieving, but unfortunately my biological clock couldn't care less. Endometriosis doesn't take a break because there's been a death in the family. It's been made clear to me by my infertility doctor that time is of the essence. I don't have the luxury of mourning for six months, then starting IVF. My endometriosis is so severe that it could start to grow back well before then.

So, I went to my doctor yesterday for "sounding" and a lesson on injections. The sounding was kind of like a pelvic exam, but quicker and weirder. A doctor came in to the exam room, saddled me up in the stir-ups, and practiced putting a catheter through my cervix and into my uterus, sort of a dry run for the embryo transfer. The docs wanted to make sure there were no impediments to getting the catheter in, and luckily there were not. It did not hurt.

The injection lesson was quick and a bit confusing. I guess I have the option of doing the pre-egg retrieval shots in my thigh or belly. I talked with a friend of my sister's who had IVF five years ago, and she strongly suggested "pinching an inch" of my belly and jabbing there. Seems doable. She said it really doesn't hurt there. This is a time when it pays to have what the commercials call that "annoying belly fat." More fat means less pain.

As for the post-retrieval progesterone shots, my husband will have to do those. They go in the tushy, and those do smart. But I really don't have a choice. This is what I've decided to do, so it's time to suck it up.

I wish...

I told her everything I wanted her to hear. How much I loved her. How she molded me into someone who was fearless to try something new, even just once. How much I knew she loved me.

I just wish I had the opportunity to tell it to her again, and again, and again.

January 17, 1938 - June 3, 2009

The Bustle in a House (1108)

by Emily Dickinson

The Bustle in a House
The Morning after Death
Is solemnest of industries
Enacted opon Earth –
The Sweeping up the Heart
And putting Love away
We shall not want to use again
Until Eternity –

She had loved them Double

My mother is still alive, despite the fact that several hospice nurses told me with authority that she would be dead by now. She appears to me to be comatose, non-responsive, her pupils fixed and dialated. And yet she still breathes, and the blood vessel in her neck still throbs quickly.

The last book my mother finished reading before she slipped into her coma is called The God of Small Things, by Arundhati Roy. Mom thought it was a strange book, not the normal mysteries or literary classics she's used to tackling. But at one point she took a pen to the book, and circled a passage. She told me to read it. Not now. But later. So I read it last night.

The passage refers to the death of the grandmother (Ammu) of a child named Rahel. Rahel watches Ammu get cremated.

"The steel door of the incinerator went up and the muted hum of the eternal fire became a red roaring. The heat lunched out at them like a famished beast. Then Rahel's Ammu was fed to it. Her hair, her skin, her smile. Her voice. The way she used Kipling to love her children before putting them to bed: We be of one blood, though and I. Her goodnight kiss. The way she held their faces steady with one hand (squashed-cheeked, fish-mouthed) while she parted and combed their hair with the other. The way she held knickers out for Rahel to climb into. Left leg, right leg. All this was fed to the beast, and it was satisfied.
She was their Ammu and their Baba and she had loved them Double."