4 million!!!

Jakobe had his repeat SA and the results showed marked improvement.  OTOH the nurse was quite surprised at my excitement - she kept saying "You know this isn't good, right?" and I had to tell her that it was so much better then before I had every right to be excited.

I don't have the full report, but here are the highlights:

Semen - Normal, no White blood cells, no agglutination, PH normal, liquefaction Normal

She didn't say anything about volume or concentration

And now for the good stuff!

Morphology: 3%
Motility (rapidly forward): 50%
Total Count (my guess): 8 million
Total Motile: 4 MILLION!!!!

That's a damn sight better than 20 thousand funny shaped sperm that sit there and wiggle.


Apparently the plan is still to continue with IVF with ICSI  - but when we get a little bit closer, I think it's something we'll want to talk about.  Is there a way to split the difference?


In other news:

• I decided against ICLW this month, September is always really busy for me, and my night classes start today.
• We now have about $7500 in savings, even after we had to put $1100 of work into Jakobe's car.  Oh well, you gotta know that things like that are going to happen.
• I'm still unmotivated and a little depressed - and what's worse, I can't seem to work up the motivation to do something about it either.
• We graduated from couples Counseling - at least until we start treatments, when we might need it again. 

The power of Words

As I finished yesterday's post, I started working on this one.  Realizing that I've gone back to an IF statement instead of a WHEN statement is a bit like admitting defeat.

I don't feel like I can be sure that we're going to try and make it happen.  In the meanwhile, while Jakobe is trying to figure out how he feels, I'm trying to figure out how to be happy - no matter what it comes down to.  It's tough.  I get stopped in my tracks at least a couple of times every day.  Sometimes it's little things - like the kids down the street riding their bikes.  Usually it's the everyday things that get me.

Our counselor thinks that Jakobe is mildly depressed - and probably has been for a long time.  She also thinks that he won't be able to make a decision, or be able to ferret out how he really feels without removing the depression from the equation.  She recommended an SSRI to help get him back onto an even keel, but cautioned that it takes a month to 6 weeks for it to really start working.  When he called his doctor - they wanted to see him in the office first, before prescribing it (and that I understand completely), but he doesn't seem to have much urgency himself.  What urgency he's expressing is because I haven't been as good at hiding my impatience as I should have been.

I hate being in limbo, and the more time I spend here, the less hopeful I feel.  I keep trying to take the pressure off, because I don't feel like Jakobe needs me breathing down his neck, he's got enough to deal with.  I wonder how other people have dealt with/are dealing with all of this, and feel like they must have figured it out better than we have.

Wonky Cycle Weirdness

I owe everyone an update, and an apology for being so quiet here for the last week.  My excuse - it's been a busy couple of days, and we weren't hanging around the house much.

So apparently the end result of seeing an RE for our fertility problems is that both maintenance, and ovulation have run for the hills.  Yep - that's right, I'm not having my period, but I'm not ovulating either.  My body has decided to hang out in limbo with my brain and emotions...

It's CD37 - I told Jakobe last night that maintenance was late, and he suggested that I take a HPT this morning because the irony would be just about perfect.  Then I told him I didn't think I'd ovulated yet.  He's chalking it up to stress.  Instead of going the HPT route, I decided to just take my temp this morning (I stopped temping after the visit to the RE - really, what's the point.  Well, okay, I was going to, because I like to know when to expect mainenance, but I guess I still can.) and I came in at a whopping 96.96, so I figure that a HPT would have been a wast of time.

It's nice to think that a miracle could have occurred, but they just don't happen to us.  Nope - the gods rain shit on us.  (The gods rain shit on other people too - if you're sitting in this shit-storm with us, I'm sorry, I still can't find an umbrella.  Maybe it'll stop raining soon?)


So, now I'm here, sharing.  We're still seeing the counselor, but it doesn't feel like we're going anywhere.  We've spent a whole lot of time talking about non-IF stuff.  Not that it isn't good to talk about, just that it feels like we went there for a reason, and there's all of these things and excuses that are keeping us from actually talking about that.  Jakobe managed to write in his blog (it's at the end of the post) what he was able to say in the counselors office two weeks ago, and other than that, nothing has changed. I'm sure that we're making incremental progress toward some kind of resolution, but it doesn't really feel that way.

I've gone back to saying "if we have kids someday, then..."

Counseling

I wasn't sure how I was going to write about this.  A lot of it isn't my story to tell, it's Jakobe's but I'm not sure that he's ready to tell it yet.  We've been to two counseling sessions now.  The second one was Sunday.  Every time we go I learn something about how Jakobe is feeling that I didn't really understand before.  And - our counselor is willing and able to ask questions that I can't, either because I'm afraid that they'll hurt him, or because I'm afraid that the answers will hurt me.

The one that stands out this week was the question of if, divorced from the infertility, and divorced from what I want, he wanted children.

He couldn't answer the question.


I don't know how this makes me feel.  Part of me feels like this is something I should have known, and part of me feels like this is something he should have told me.  But, I think that sometimes he tells me what he thinks I want to hear.  Sometimes I think I do the same to him.

He told me Sunday that he wished that we knew about this before we started dating.  I don't know how to tell him that there's no part of me that wishes the same thing.  I don't trust myself enough to think that I wouldn't have made one of the biggest mistakes of my life, and passed on the life I have with him.  And that makes me feel like a horrible person.  I know that he thinks that it just means that he would have had more time to deal with this - and that he wouldn't feel like he was letting me down because I would have known what we were getting in to.  I guess that's one way to look at it.  I can't look at it that way.  I'm glad that we didn't know, because I'm glad every day that I gave him a chance, I'm glad every day that I fell in love with him, and I'm glad every day that he felt the same way.  I am thankful every day that he loves me.

I don't know that I tell him that enough.  I know that I'm the one who needs to talk, but at the same time, I'm the one who has a hard time talking.  I'm an action person, I want to fix things, or deal with them.  I want to make a plan and move on - and right now, that's not what Jakobe needs.  He needs someone who can help him walk through the labyrinth of feelings and cultural values, someone who can help him avoid pitfalls and land mines, and come out whole on the other side.  I'm trying to be that person, and when I suck at it, I'm hoping that waiting, and letting the counselor help us will make up for my lack.

Just a quick Hello

I wasn't sure if I was going to do IComLeavWe this month.  I'm not sure of too much around here.  The last two weeks have been on the difficult side.  Jakobe and I really aren't talking much about infertility.  I can't say that we're spending much time talking about anything of importance, except for when we're with the counselor. So - I haven't necessarily had much to share.  For ICLW visitors - Welcome... Please check out the page I have just for you.

Last night was rough.  And I'm a bit stuck.  Jakobe doesn't want me to censor myself here, but at the same time, since I know he'll be reading, I've been holding back on a couple of posts.  Even posting feels like pushing the issue right now. I think that they'll be forthcoming anyway. As I was preparing this post last night, he came and read it over my shoulder..  He said we could talk, and we did, a little bit, but I'm still lost.  I guess I'll leave you all with a question, and hope that you can help me answer it.

How can I help him deal with what MFI means for him?

This weekend

I'm sitting here on the couch in the living room, almost to tired to think, but I figured I owed all of  you a bit of an update.  I'll share more about the laundry room renovation later, probably when it's done and we've got some after shots to go with the before in a in progress shots that I took this weekend.  Suffice to say we tore down and out several shelving units and in the end took about 850 lbs of stuff to the waste-to-energy plant.

The counseling session went well.  I think we were both able to say things while we were there that we haven't really been able to say directly to each other.  We go back next Sunday.  I know that we were scheduled for an hour this weekend - and we were there for two hours.  Lots of talking.  No crying, and then when we were done we've decided to table a lot of the hard stuff until next weekend.  We don't want to chance fighting about it, and it's still pretty raw.

I learned that even asking Jakobe to keep an open mind about changing his mind on DS is stressing him out.  It's off the table.  I won't ask him to think about it, and I won't ask him to do it.  It's not worth the pain and anxiety it's causing him.  I'm not sure he fully realized that I meant it 100% when I said it yesterday, but I do.  I won't tear him apart over it, it's not fair.