Testing....Testing

Greetings, ladies o the interwebs!

Okay, here's the thing.  I have been in a bit of a skunky funk as of late, hence the radio silence.   I have decided to swim in it until my fingers get all pruney because I find that if you force yourself to ignore a wee bit o depression it tends to hang out a little longer and beg with increasing patheticness for your attention (it has a low self esteem, after all, that depression).  Sort of like if you're driving in snow and your car decides to skid - you're supposed to just take your hands off the steering wheel and let it slide because if you went with your intuition and fought it too hard you're much more likely to end up mangled.  So there we have it.  I'm sure it will get bored with me soon and move on to some other lady who will play hard to get.

I also did something tragically old lady to my right knee, so this week I've been additionally holed up in a knee brace.  No idea what I did, I have bad knees to begin with so I'm used to just having a few off days with them, but one of them has decided to go above and beyond as of late so I ended up in urgent care on Monday.  Nothing broken in the xrays, had to get an MRI last night.

It is official, apart from having my anonymous torso and/or fanny used as background in one of those local news stories on America's problem with obesity, waiting rooms are at the top of my ridiculous-nightmare list.

I had an appointment at 5:45, they called at 5 to let me know they were running a half hour behind, could I show up at 6 for a 6:15 appointment.  Fine.

I drive my gimp self there, pull into a huge medical center with a pay ticket.  It is abandoned - no one is there, google maps has betrayed me.  It looks like every dark parking lot in every lifetime movie involving rape, and I am literally quivering as I get out of the car to verify this is the wrong building.  Thank the heavens it doesn't make me pay to get out, so I pull into the next large medical building (google maps should just be a little off, after all).  Again, a paid parking lot and now I am mysteriously at a ghetto fabulous hospital diving off the side of the road to get away from ambulances.  I call the place where I have an appointment, they basically say 'oh no, silly, we are located in a tiny shack behind the CVS across the street where people go to fill their prescriptions for bloodlust and murder'.

I charm the lady manning this pay booth into letting me out, finally arrive at the right shack.

The place wreaks of cat litter boxes long abandoned and the cheapest dollar-store cleaning solutions.  I spend my evening trying not to itch.  The woman informs me that my appointment will start 30-40 minutes from now.

There is one woman in the waiting room aside from me, and she is either sleeping or dead.  This is never a good sign, and I spent my hour in the waiting room occasionally checking to see if she's breathing because I don't want to be that blurred out asshole on the news in the waiting room with some seriously ill person who has died without the medical personnel realizing it.

Meanwhile, the medical personnel is eating their dinner and discussing cats (could this be where the litter box smell is coming from?)  One sad woman spends 15 minutes going through the many pictures on her phone, and explaining the many subtle layers to the psychology of each of her kitties.  They are the loudest chewers on the planet - the only sound apart from meowing-in-my-head is chewing, like an angry army of vaginas marching through mud.

I am literally in the middle of the ghetto, waiting for some guy to take me behind a paisley curtain and ask me to disrobe.  I realize I may not be in a medical office at all but rather some dude's basement.

15 minutes before my appointment the chewing stops and cat lady decides to put on the tv, on a marathon of two and a half men.  It occurs to me maybe I'm not in some dude's basement but I'm in fact in hell.

They finally do my loud ass MRI, and the one poor bastard actually working there is the one poor bastard operating the one poor MRI machine.  Note:  You cannot call yourself an imaging center, you are more of an image center.

Today is the day I'm to get back up on my diet horse and get this TTC thing back on track, as my depression and I have gained approximately 4,000 lbs.  Suffice it to say this has not put me in the mood for it.

In better news, Bubba failed his super-duper fancy shmancy sperm test in Massachusetts. I am seriously delighted by this.

As a recap, we've been trying 3 years, had our first IVF in June with poor fertilization (and yes we had ICSI) - 1 out of 10 fertilized, ended in a chemical pregnancy.  Could've been a fluke, sure.

Dr. Kickass was dumbfounded and took it personally.  He had another Doctor test for DNA fragmentation, gratis, and we passed.  He happened to be aware of a study - a study - going on in Mass.  I repeat, not common knowledge or a common practice, a fucking study.  Basically, some men are missing a protein in their sperm that tells the egg that it's there and to start doing it's thing. Their sperm samples will look amazing (Bub's looks like he could impregnate a village), and you would be classified as 'unexplained' because everybody looks fancy.  Unless of course, you get all the way to IVF and have some fishy fertilization issues, and your Doc is aware of this study.

So Dr. Kickass pulled some strings, and got Bub into the study.  So Christmas day Bub flew up to Mass from where we were visiting in DC, made a cup his bitch on the morning of the 26th, drove back to MD in the snow. We were told it would be 3 weeks to get the results.

So yesterday Dr. K called, and said that they had the results - Bub is missing the protein.  So when we do IVF again (April?  May?  Girlfriend's gotta get her shit together) we will have fancy shmancy IVF where they not only do ICSI, but put the protein into the dishes themselves to get the party started.

I am tickled by this news... Reason being, at least there's an explanation for what's going on. And it is somewhat liberating way down the line here to know 'oh you were never going to get pregnant with Clomid, or IUI, or your first IVF.. you were always going to end up here.  And you're lucky because your Doctor knew to test for this thing that most people aren't even aware of".

So I'm stoked.  We'll have a summit on where the hell we go from here, but we have someplace to go, is my point.

Bub asked when he was in Mass how many people have this protein deficiency and they said, basically that they had no idea - it could be a lot a lot a lot.

So I am super excited and grateful... On the other hand, how many women who have gotten A++'s on all their tests and their husbands tests, have this problem and will never know or get tested for it? Because you would literally never know that this was going on unless you got to IVF and had poor fertilization, and then your Doctor could just be dumbfounded as opposed to suggesting testing for this.  I mean, this is at best a tiny chunk and at worst a huge chunk of the explanation for the 'unexplained infertility'.

So anyhoo - putting this out into the ether so if someone has 'poor fertilization' they can look this up and shoot me a message so we can chitter chatter.

Never been so happy to flunk a test.