When I was two-and-a-half, I complained repeatedly that I had something in my eye. My folks, seeing nothing there, took me to the eye doctor, and it turned out that I needed glasses. Actually, at first they patched my stronger right eye in order to strengthen the weaker left one, *plus* gave me glasses. Yes, I was a child pirate.
When I was seventeen, I found a book on my psychology-major brother’s bookshelf, and within its pages read descriptions that reminded me of me. I took it in to my therapist (therapy was a required component of my training to be an adult New Yorker), and with her help, determined that some ways I had been feeling for years could be helped by anti-depressants.
Now I’m thirty-two, and I thought that maybe I had once again triumphed in self-diagnosis. Because, hey, if I got pregnant with Clomid (third cycle) and progesterone (first cycle), and Clomid can thin your lining, and I miscarried, and thin lining can lead to miscarriage, then maybe progesterone alone was the key to sustaining a pregnancy! Not so much. Or, at least, not the first time around. And in my impatient world, one cycle is decisive. Which is ridiculous, because if one cycle were enough to know anything about anything, then we would have stopped trying sometime early last winter. And that would have been utterly unreasonable.
So, while I may have been a toddler ophthalmologist and a teenage psychiatrist, I am not a thirty-something RE. Go figure. And, in fact, I’m thinking about going back to Clomid, in part because, well, I’m sort of afraid. Afraid that even everyone else who is struggling is going to get pregnant and leave me behind, snarky and barren, spending entire school years conjugating irregular verbs with middle-schoolers because I haven’t earned any maternity leave. Wow, that sounds bleak. I know it’s not a race, I know it, and yet…who wants to be last?
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