Pendragons Princess

http://www.cnn.com/2008/LIVING/personal/09/16/o.trying.to.conceive/index.html

Excerpted:

Woman endures all in trying to conceive
By Cindy Chupack

This was not something the cover story recommended, by the way.

It was a reaction to something the cover story recommended, namely that you shouldn’t eat a lot of red meat if you’re trying to get pregnant.

I was trying to get pregnant. My husband and I had been trying for two and a half years. I also had a steak on the grill that was going to be my lunch before I decided to have the gingerbread house instead.

“Trying” is a good word for this process. At first, trying just meant sex without birth control, but when you marry at 40, trying quickly becomes more trying, and eventually we had the requisite army of experts, most of whom insurance doesn’t cover, but of course, you can’t put a price on a baby.

You can put a price on not having a baby. That’s running us close to $45,000 in credit card debt.

So by the time I was reading that “Newsweek” article, I’d done it all… drugs, suppositories, IUI, IVF, that test with the blue dye, acupuncture, stinky teas, hormone injections.

Once, we were driving to see a doctor in Beverly Hills, and my husband asked what kind of doctor he was, and I said, “I don’t know, but someone said to see him, so we’re seeing him!”

It was that doctor, incidentally, who told me to visualize my husband’s face on a cartoon sperm, with arms welcoming my egg to him. We decided the guy was a quack, so I only saw him twice a week for about four months.
The thing is, when you’re racing your biological clock, people can tell you pretty much anything and you’ll do it. I still worry I need to track down some saint named Amachi so I can bring her red bananas.

Recently, a friend said something about standing on your head. He wasn’t sure if you were supposed to do it before sex, during, or just in general, but this worked for two women he knew, so I guess I have to stand on my head now. I’ll probably visualize my husband’s face on a cartoon sperm while I’m at it — not because I’m onboard with that. It’s just a hard image to shake.

So it was kind of revolutionary that for the holidays we went to Jackson Hole and we didn’t even take ovulation sticks, which might not seem crazy to the average person, but when you’re in the middle of this madness, not knowing when you’re ovulating is like not knowing where your cell phone is.

We actually got pregnant on our wedding night, and for a moment we were “those people” (you know, people who got pregnant right away, maybe even accidentally, which now seems as likely to me as accidentally finding Osama bin Laden), but back then I didn’t know any better, so we were “those people” until three months later, when we found out the baby’s head was too large, and there was fluid where there shouldn’t be, and there was a malformed heart, and the baby probably wouldn’t make it to term, and, as the doctor said, we should seriously consider termination unless we were deeply religious.

That news was hard to take, but even harder because I felt guilty. The truth is, at that time, I didn’t want to be pregnant.

We’d just gotten married. I still wasn’t sure it was going to last.

I also thought a little time as a couple would be nice since it took us 40 years to find each other. But my husband was eager to start a family, so the morning after he proposed, we were walking on the beach and I threw my birth control pills into the ocean in a dramatic display of love and good faith, and it made him so happy that I had to resist the urge to run screaming into the surf to recover them.

I’d always wanted to have a baby… in five years. I’d been saying I wanted to have a baby in five years for about 20 years. I just never felt ready. But ready or not, on day seven of our honeymoon I felt nauseous, and, thinking I had a stomach bug, I stayed in our room.

We were in South Africa on a safari, and they had warned us to keep the sliding doors to our bungalow locked because of the monkeys, but I thought they meant when we were out. And I was in, curled up in bed, when all of a sudden I heard the door open.

Then I heard this thump thump thump, and I got up and looked into the living room, and there were seven monkeys throwing food around, and they froze as if I had just walked in on a teenager’s party. And the funny thing, looking back, was that this was my fear. This is what I thought it would be like to have children. This is why I never felt ready.

My plan was to lose weight until I got pregnant (it’s supposedly healthier to get pregnant at a lower weight), but since it was taking so long to get pregnant, I ate a lot of red meat, and I lost a lot of weight. Fifty pounds, to be exact.

For the first time ever, I felt like someone who belonged in L.A. I bought a pair of skinny jeans and strutted my significantly smaller stuff down Robertson Boulevard. I felt, in a word, fabulous. So fabulous, in fact, it took me a while to notice that I wasn’t getting my period. And not for the reason I’d been hoping.

I know, by the way, that once you have a baby, this all gets put behind you. I know the end of this movie. I don’t know where or when or how. We’ve discussed donor eggs, but I don’t really like guests in my house, so in my womb — I don’t know.
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This piece, from Oprah.com, reads more like satire than anything else. I’ve heard of women desperate to squeeze one out, but really, is eating the roof of a gingerbread house considered to be some sort of New Age conception drug compared to the delicious filet mignon? (hey if this woman doesn’t want the steak I will happily take it). And what is with the 45 grand comment? One has that sort of money in the bank when one does not try to spend all of one’s savings on wanting to squeeze one out. Furthermore, that money will remain in the bank if one does not give birth to a resource gobbler. The quack doctor incident sounds like something from a Jim Varney film. Even if the story is for real and I highly doubt it is, it is written by just one more woman who has babies rabies. Thank God I will never have to worry about that sort of thing.