What's in a Name

So somehow I ended up moving to the fertility capital of the universe. No one told me this was the case when I was looking around. This was not a point included in my realtor's tour of my new town. But shortly after arriving, I looked around and realized that everyone -- my husband thinks this is an exaggeration but it is not, it is literally everyone -- has at least two kids with one on the way. Having four children here is not unusual. And no, I did not move to Utah. As you likely surmised from my last post, I have moved to the suburb of a -- perhaps the -- major metropolitan area of the country.

If this quest for number two is ultimately a failure and I remain a parent to one, I will rock it, don't worry. I'll take the money I would have spent on diapers, buy a Birkin bag and send around a birth announcement about my new baby that doesn't cry, poop or keep me up at night. But for now, now that I'm still trying to take down secondary infertility with everything I've got, it makes me feel like a bit of an outlier. I'm new to town, and I've got this baggage, this thing that may ultimately make me different from most everyone else here. It makes me feel, for the moment, just a little bit more alone.

The other day I met some very nice moms on the playground. As we were chatting, a nanny came over with her charge and as soon as she said her name, this mom chimed in and started asking her about it. The mom said that her sister has been telling her to use it if she ever has another girl. It's a relatively unusual name that you don't hear often, and it happens to be my girl's name. So much so that my husband and I use it in casual conversation to refer to a future child that may live in our house. As in, that would be __________'s room. In this conversation about the name, the woman went so far as to use the actual nickname we were planning to use, saying her sister wanted her to use that too. It was sort of like watching a horror movie that you somehow can't put on pause. I wanted to jump in and say that's my girl's name too! But for obvious reasons I did not. Because it would have made me look weird, because I may never have another child, girl or otherwise, because it was too painful to even hope that someday I may actually have the problem of having a girl, selecting this name, bumping into this woman and looking like a shameless copycat. So I stayed silent.

My husband doesn't get why this bothers me so much. He thinks it's ridiculous that I would even worry about using the name, even if I end up running in the same circle as this mom, which is unlikely since our existing children are different ages and what is the likelihood that I will have another child that happens to be the same age as the children this woman will obviously be having, most likely without difficulty or complication?

I'll tell you why it bothers me. Because I have a funny feeling that in a couple of years, when I'm running around town with my Etoupe Birkin bag anchored on my arm, I'll hear this woman calling after her newest charge, calling out the name I so wanted to use too, and it will sear my chest like an arrow. I'm bracing myself right now.

Good RE Hunting

I decided over the weekend to get a second opinion here. I like the new doctor we've seen, but I just wonder if I'm more of an academic medical center kind of girl.

If anyone out there knows anything about NYU's program and its physicians, please email me at goodegghatched@gmail.com.

Keeping the Dream Alive

I want this space to be about more than my continued battle with infertility and loss. I want it to be about playing in the sand with my H, and how sweet three is, how good it is to wake up every day and know I'm his mom. Because that's what my life is like, too.

But when you struggle to conceive and deliver, and you dare to wish for more than one child, there's this background noise of that struggle that won't be ignored.

I thought I was going for a routine saline sonogram today with my new RE, to make sure there was no scarring from the May D&C. I thought it would be straightforward, even if there was a small amount of scarring. But the truth is, and I never, ever say this, you know I'm a worst-case-scenario girl, I thought it would be totally clean and we'd be ordering IVF meds today. Instead, you know what was there? A new fibroid. In the cavity. That he wants to remove in the OR.

So let's review the deck stacked against our heroine at this point:
-PCOS/unexplained infertility
-Asherman's
-Recurrent/unexplained loss
-MTHFR
-Slightly hypothyroid
-And today, a bonus fibroid

I have a history of a few fibroids that until now, did not excite anyone. They were out of the way, and even as recently as in March when my longtime RE did a hysteroscopy, there was nothing inside the cavity. So of course I'm totally weirded out by this whole thing (where did it come from? did it move? how did it just spring up out of nowhere?) and since I hardly know this new RE and had years of trust built up with the one that got us H, I reached out to her. She was so lovely to call me and talk about it and look at today's images, which I emailed her. And then I asked her if she could do the procedure, and she basically told me it's time to cut the cord.

I know she's right. But sometimes I don't like the sound of the truth. I heard a lot of that kind today.

So where are we? Hell if I know. I'll tell you what it feels like: It feels like someone is trying to tell me something.

All I know is it's hard to keep on dreaming when the facts keep whispering to you that the dream is over.