Introductions and explanations

I never imagined I would be a blogger, because my routine life, with its usual romantic/professional ups and downs never offered much to talk about.  Its been a fairly nice life to live, but making it engaging enough for a virtual audience would be a job for a true writer.  Which I'm most definitely not.  However, when I began  TTC as a single woman, all of that changed because I realized I needed people willing to listen and virtually pat me on the back as I go along this not-so-straightforward journey.

I had decided that if I had not met the right guy by the time I turned 30, I'd have a child by myself.  A pretty shocking and unusual idea for an Indian girl, but its one that I was oddly comfortable with from the start. Getting here has not been as easy or uncomplicated as these 2 sentences make them out to be, with plenty of tear-soaked pillows along the way. But still, here I am, at peace and even excited about the concept, although 10 years ago it would have seemed like something from a bad dream. 


My desire to be a single mother has been mostly secret. My employer or colleagues at work have no idea. A few of my close friends know, but its just a handful.  My immediate family does too, and they are incredibly supporting given the circumstances.  Problem is, we TTCers tend to be obsessed with this process.  Only women going through (or who have gone through) the TTC process will be even mildly interested in our lengthy regurgitations.  The others are a different cup of tea.  When you first break the news to them, you can have them in thrall for at least half an hour.  After that (if its not your poor, loving mother), you get a few minutes of an interested audience to provide a pithy progress report.  They care, make no mistake about it, but oddly enough, are not willing to listen to your every thought on the topic.  I was utterly and completely ok with this when the going was easy- now things are different.

My journey so far- I'm 30 years old and come from a family of of disgustingly good fertility.   Every test ever run on me looks fine, and I ovulate regularly. On April 17th (a date etched in my memory) I had my first IUI. 10 days later, a second beautiful (and terrifying) line appeared on my pregnancy stick. Thereafter I was in comfortable-and-happy pregnant woman land until my 12 week ultrasound where a doctor found that the my baby whose heart had been beating merrily 4.5 weeks ago was now shrunken and dead.  It was like being slapped in the face really, really, REALLY hard.  There are far worse things that have happened to people and so far I've been blessed in many ways in this process, but it was devastating anyway.

Almost 7 weeks later, I'm in a cycle I want to use to get pregnant. I'm changing REs and have an appointment with a new practice which is reputed to be wonderfully attentive (the doctors do the inseminations themselves) and they are supposed to actually listen  to you- shocking indeed. I'm pretty sure I will ovulate on the 3rd or 4th of September. I'm terrified to try again, yet terrified of waiting to know whether I am one of those who will have problems carrying children.  My baby had normal chromosomes, and for a while, all of it looked perfect. Why pregnancies fail are a mystery.  For somebody who is an scientist with a halfway decent understanding of the human body, having a mile-long list of possibilities of why this happened, but no real answers is agony. It might happen again. And again and again. Or it never might. If it does though, I think being able to talk about it more might help.

I need a boatload of editing, and I promise to make the next posts shorter. I'll get better with time, I hope. Thanks for reading.