Wordless Wednesday: Fog and Sun

Okay - almost wordless.  The early morning fog - and waiting for the mists to clear - really speaks to me right now.  There's a whole bright and beautiful day ahead of us - it's just hiding.

I've been thinking...

About blogging.  About what it means to me, and about how the blog community seems to have given me a lot of the support that my in-person relationships really can't.  I can't express everything I'm feeling to the people around me all the time.  I'd be a one note horn.  At the same time, having everyone out here to talk to had made me feel a lot more free about sharing in general.

Thinking about blogging came together because of several different things all at once.

Part one comes from my husband starting his own blog.  He really felt like it was doing me a lot of good, and thought that he could use an outlet himself.  I'm not sure he understands that having all of you out there reading is a big part of what helps.  Knowing I'm not alone.  Knowing that there is hope.  This blog is also a line of communication with him that is sometimes easier than talking.  He reads all of my blog posts, and so I know sometimes when I'm talking about him, I'm also talking to him.  

Part two was reading another blogger's post about how difficult it is for her to read the blogs of people who are pregnant right now, and then reading a post in response.  It made me think about how I feel about the blogs that I read where the writer is pregnant, or parenting.  Some days they're hard to read.  Most day's I'm pretty okay with it.  Part of me is jealous, but most of me is happy for them.  They're the hope part of the blogging world.  Fulfilled hopes, that allow all of us with as-of-yet unfulfilled hopes to look out and see that Yes, it can happen.

Blogging is good for me, and so is reading other blogs.  Even if I sometimes write a post like this one - get distracted - and neglect to post it for a week or two (or three).  I still feel like I did then, and it's all true.  Maybe we all just need to let it out from time to time.

Nightmares

{Warning - parts of this post are strange and disturbing, I'm not sure how I feel about sharing, so feel free to pass it up and read another post.}

I've been having strange odd dreams and nightmares for several days now.  Dreams that don't make any sense, or dreams where I behaving in ways that are completely counter to how I usually behave.They're falling into several categories:

• Strange interpersonal relationships and activities.
• Cheating Dreams
• Straight-up nightmares

Category 1 includes things like trick-or-treating, but being invited in to hang out with the guy whose door I knocked on and give him advice on mead-making or picking up a friend on a street corner, and he being glad I did so because she had called an ambulance for a ride and she felt bad.  Just nonsense stuff - usually in between the other dreams, but there all the same

Category 2 is really bothering me.  I don't know why I'm having the dreams, and I don't like the way that they make me feel both in the morning and during the dream.  I've made a bit of a joke out of them because I don't know what to do with them.  In my dreams I'm cheating on Jakobe, or have cheated on him.  I could almost understand if I was having dreams that resulted in me getting knocked up, but right now, in my dreams, when I cheat - it's with women.  While I'm dreaming I feel guilty, and I feel like I have to confess and tell Jakobe hat happened.  In my dreams I wonder if he can forgive me because more than anything I don't want to lose him. But in my dreams, I'm cheating anyway.  Then I feel guilty when I wake up.  I wonder why I'm dreaming this stuff.  I wonder what it says about me that I'm unfaithful in my dreams.

Finally there's Category 3 - the nightmares.  I cant say that they're all that scary, but they're horrifying.  Most recently: I was at a friends house, and his cat was following me around, meowing piteously and when I turned around and looked at the cat, it was trying to walk, and to follow me, but it was also carrying one of it's paws with it, and walking on the sharp ends of it's bones.  I started screaming for my friend, trying to do something about the cat, knowing that we needed to put it out of it's misery, but unable to act, only to scream for help, and no one could hear me, no one was coming.  And then the alarm went off and I had to get up.

Needless to say, my sleep hasn't been all that restful as of late.  I'm having all of these types of dreams, together, almost every night.  The ones I shared all happened on the same night.  Maybe I need to find some way to really knock myself out so that I don't dream, because I don't know what's coming next.

Photo Friday

That's right - Two Photo posts in one week.  This one has a bit of a story - get me out in nature with a camera and it's almost impossible to get me to stop.  I took this picture while Jakobe and I were on our honeymoon in Alaska last summer.  We had gone on a bicycle and brewery tour, and we biked out to the Mendenhall Glacier Visitor Center.  The Visitor Center was the halfway point - and we were running late to get back to the bikes - because I couldn't wouldn't stop taking pictures of almost everything that caught my eye.  Jakobe is very very understanding... to a point.  We make it back to the bikes on time, and had a great day, but I'm very very glad that I stopped to take this picture.

Money

Last week as I was wandering the blogosphere I came across a lot of posts about the amount of money we all spend in infertility.  And it's a lot of money.  No so much us personally - I've managed to get a lot of stuff covered by my insurance because it was basically for something else, and not for infertility specifically.    In any case, because I'm kind of an anal-retentive, details-oriented person, I just had to sit down and figure out not only what we've spent on infertility treatments/diagnosis/etc. already - but the possibilities of costs for IVF.  I think that posting our costs is a good idea in general.  It gives others an idea of what they might be looking at if they're just facing this themselves.  It also allows us to look out at others in this world and see where we are on the continuum.


I still have couple of other things to add - but I was thinking of adding them as they happen.  It's still possible right now that we're done.  Jakobe's worried that he won't feel ready to move ahead or make a decision as much as a year from now, and until then I'm in limbo.  For now - I'm just including the definite costs and estimates.

Here's the scary part:  The absolute cheapest it could be - for IVF/ICSI alone - If we were completely optimistic (And - we were right) is $13,260.  That number is more than my car and Jakobe's car put together.  It's more than our wedding was.  It's more than we owe my mom for 10% of our house.  And, if I'm honest, we're not that hopeful or optimistic.  The universe has spent enough time shitting on us that I don't think that it's about to stop and all become sunshine and roses.  So, more realistically, if we hedge our bets a little bit, the smallest amount of money we're going to spend on IVF/ICSI is $19,400, and likely to be more than that.

If you pop on over to the Money page you can see the complete breakdown.  It's big, it's bad, and it's a whole lot of "I don't want to think about that."  But I have to - because you have to walk onto the path knowing where it might lead.  And it could lead to spending a whole lot of money we don't have right now - and still having to figure out how to live our life without this dream.