It absolutely amazes me every day how much women in our society DO NOT know about their own body. I can admit to that being the case 6 years ago. Granted, I knew all the basic mechanics of things like periods, ovulation, sex, pregnancy, etc. but didn't really know the nitty gritty details. Boy oh boy, do I look back at that now and laugh.
A doctor told me recently that he had a patient come in seeking help for infertility. She and her husband had been trying to conceive for over a year with no luck. When the doc asked her what medications she was taking, she told him she was taking a multi-vitamin and her birth control pills every day! Um, did it ever occur to her that birth control pills prevented pregnancy, therefore the reason she had not conceived. The doc said it shocked him because she was a well educated professional woman. My response to the doc when he was telling me this was, "You didn't tell her did you? If she is that dumb, we don't need her to reproduce!"
Going through all of the testing that comes with infertility and then the treatments and procedures, I have learned way more about my bodily systems then I ever thought possible, and that was after taking anatomy and gross anatomy for 4 years in college!
When little girls answer the question, "What do you want to be when you grow up?" with the words, "A mommy," no one tells them that they should start reading up on their basal body temperature, studying their cervical mucus, looking for ovulation pain and charting their cycles. I know half of you just read that and scratched your head in confusion . . . see what I mean about the amount of stuff that women don't know about their bodies!
Another funny story courtesy of one of my doctors . . . . One of the side effects of fertility medication is often dryness "down there." So doctors, nurses, reproductive endocrinologists and infertility veterans often recommend using Robitussin to increase cervical mucus. One doctor told a patient about this little trick and sent her on her way. She came back a month or two later and the doctor asked her how the Robitussin was working. She replied that she thought it was working, but did he have anything he could recommend that was "less messy?" OK seriously, the woman was using it as lube instead of taking it orally. Can you imagine the mess that Robitussin would leave after a hot and heavy session?
Once the doc has trained you on all of those things and introduced you to the magical world of Ovulation Predictor Kits (OPK's), you get to start concentrating on the male aspect of everything. Everyone, guys and girls, think men just shoot out all these fishy looking white sperm with little eyes and smiles. Little did anyone know that now the doc is going to look at those smiling spermies and count them, dissect them, study how fast they swim, what direction they swim, and whether they can tell their heads from their, um, "tails." Then they call you and tell you that they counted many millions of sperm and you think "Rock on!" But then they tell you this is way less than what is considered normal. Really? There has got to be a man joke in all of this somewhere. You know, something along the lines of "Must be a guy thing, 10 million sperm and not one of them will stop and ask for directions!"
I have said many times over that by the time Bobby and I finally manage to conceive our children, I should at least be qualified to get certificaton as an infertility nurse somewhere. Seriously! Since beginning this journey I have become an expert on estrogen, testosterone, progesterone, and my hormone levels, I can pee on a stick while still half asleep or even in the bathroom at work, I can recognize ovulation by the pains in my abdomen, the soreness of my boobs and my temperature on any given day, I can usually guess quite accurately how many eggs I have growing in there, I know the difference between sperm count, motility and morphology, and I can give myself a shot in the thigh, hip or stomach after mixing the appropriate doses of the medication myself. Sounds like the equivilent of 4 years of college training to me!
All kidding aside, I look back over the past 6 years of our TTC journey and am amazed at how much I have learned. Not that I really wanted to learn it, and I think I would have been OK going through life not having learned these lessons, but I am still amazed at how much I didn't know about the basics of creating a new life. So now that I have my education, can I please reap some rewards? Is it too much to ask for a baby, or maybe two?
No comments:
Post a Comment