Almost there

Today we got the loan check from my mom, which means that we have the money to pay for our IVF, as soon as he check completely clears.  Like Monday.  We made it!  I've never written a check that big  in my life (and still won't, we're using a cashier's check) so it's going to be awfully strange.  Scary too.  We're so close.

Anyway, I'll be posting again next week when I actually pay Dr. R's office.  and then we'll really be on our way.  BCP should start next week, if I ovulated when I think I did (and I've gotten awfully good at knowing, strange, huh?) Since I'm expecting AF around this weekend.  I've spent the last few days not working because I was very very sick - fever over 100.5, coughing, sore throat, headache, fatigue, the whole works.  I thought that it might make it a good time for me to do a lot of commenting for ICLW, and I've certainly done way more than usual, but not as much as I hoped.

**FOUL LANGUAGE WARNING**

My final bit of news is that the god-damned motherfucking douche-bag asshole pled "not guilty" today and his trial is currently set for May.  They expect it to take a week.  Time to ask for some vacation.  The prosecutor's office assures us that it will get continued, but I guess I have to be prepared anyway.

Time to scan in more receipts, I'm tracking all medical expenses this year for an income deduction...

Wordless Wednesday: buttons

These are the buttons I made for our costumes.  Yeah, I know, more pictures, but it is Wednesday.

Radcon - or how I get my geek on

I mentioned in passing that we attended a convention last weekend.  It was a science fiction and fantasy convention where I got to attend a couple of really interesting panels, one on the Kensington Runestone, and another on Victorian Medicine (we wrote down the time for the Neuroscience panel wrong, so I missed that one.)

More than a opportunity to attend panels, was the opportunity to come out of my mundane shell and get my geek on for a little while.  The theme was steam-punk, and I got to make a costume, mostly out of things I had around the house, but also some things I fabricated from scratch.  Radcon was our last hurrah, our time to be crazy before our IVF cycle, a mini-vacation that we sorely needed.  I drank too much, didn't get enough sleep, attempted to semi-supervise 5 teenagers, and had a blast.

I also got to take some pictures (it's more of an addiction) so, now I'm going to share them with you.

Jakobe and I in our costumes

Jakobe looking handsome

My baby sister in her costume

My friend made a Jetpack!

And Fire Dancers!  The name of the troupe is IGNITION.  I *sooo* want to do this...

Yay - dancing with flaming swords.

Gratitude & Secrets

Right now I am overwhelmed with gratitude, so much that it was impossible to find the words to properly express it.  It starts with me accidentally outing myself in facebook (not this blog, but our infertility)  and the responses were overwhelmingly positive.  Everyone said the right things.

After I outed myself on Tuesday one of my very good friends who doesn't live nearby anymore called me.  She wanted to cover our shortfall becasue of the change in price, as a gift.  But, she also wanted to be sure that the gift was welcome and it wouldn't make either of us uncomfortable.  I was floored/ flabbergasted/ completely astonished.  It never occurred to me that someone would do something like that for us, it certainly wasn't why I post on facebook.  I was just being emotional, and frustrated, and venting.  Wow.

I went home and discussed it with Jakobe, but he wasn't comfortable with it.  It wasn't someone that he knew as well, and he just wouldn't feel right about it.  As part of that conversation he told me it would be different if it had been one of my best friends that he knows well and that we spend a lot of time with. 

Which leads into the next thing.  While we were out at the convention this weekend, one of our close friends pulled me aside and handed me an envelope with $1000 in it, because they wanted to help.  Again, floored/flabbergasted/astonished/ in tears.  None of our close friends here at home have enough money to make a gift like that something easy for them to do.  I know how hard a decision like that would have been, and I couldn't push it back and say, no thank you, we don't really need it, because we do, and because they know it.  Their one stipulation was that I not tell Jakobe.  They felt that he would feel obligated, and that he wouldn't be able to accept it.  Since this was almost exactly what Jakobe told me, I knew they were right, but Yikes!  I am not good with secrets (at least keeping them from Jakobe), and I'm guaranteed to do something to sabotage my secret keeping.

It ate me alive all weekend.  I couldn't figure out how to explain the extra money, and I couldn't figure out how to tell him about it.  At one point I came up with a hare-brained scheme to be able to hide it from him, but I was also aware that it would mean that I would have to keep the secret forever.  That sounded really hard, so after I had lunch with my sisters, I spent my whole drive home in the car trying to think of how I could keep my promise not to tell him, and how I could tell him about the money and not have to hide it from him.  In the end I decided I would ask him to not try and figure out who it was from. 

Turns out, I had already sabotaged myself.  I left the envelope of money on the table in the front room, and he was supposed to be picking up around the house while I was at lunch.  He found the money.  Unfortunately, I think that part of him believes that I was never going to tell him.  He's wrong,  it was so hard to keep that secret for a few days, I don't know how I could have done it for any length of time.  The only secrets I successfully keep are what his birthday and Christmas presents are going to be, and those are surprises (and good ones) and not really secrets..

I want to say thank you, and thank you isn't enough, I want to say that the giving of this gift has changed my life, not because I couldn't have found a way without it, but because it makes me look at the world in a different way, because it makes me realize that people are even better than I gave them credit for.  Thank you for making me feel like I am one of the luckiest people in the world, and one of the richest, with a wealth beyond words or explanation.  Thank you.

Straight up Potholes

For those of you who live in places where there is a regular freeze/thaw cycle all winter, you will be familiar with the bane of winter driving otherwise known as the pothole.  The city I live in is notorious for its absolutely horrendous pothole problem, and right now it’s at its worst.  To help you understand exactly how bad our pothole problem can be, several years ago on my way to work, I hit a pothole.  It bent the suspension and frame of my car (I can’t say that the car was all that rugged either…)   Why am I telling you all about potholes?  Because my unexpected bumps in the road from the other day weren’t just bumps… they were the cracked pavement right before a giant pothole appears in the street.  On Saturday, we had our pothole.

 

Turns out, my car overheated because the cylinder gasket was failing.  Apparently the clue was that it looked like someone had vacuumed out the air/water in the upper radiator hose.  I took a picture of it, because I thought it could help them diagnose it.  I was right.   This is not a good thing; in fact, I think you can find it in:  The Book Of Bad: Car Edition on page 1 or 2.  Without the gasket, your car doesn’t work.  It overheats, and dumps exhaust into your cooling system.  Plus – the gasket is in the middle of your engine, so you have to take the engine half apart to fix it.  And, if that wasn’t enough, there’s the possibility that you’ve warped your cylinder heads and that they have to be machined.

Needless to say, fixing this problem isn’t cheap.  We had $12,500 in our IVF fund, and were expecting about $3,000 more this week, bringing us very close to the $16,300 that we needed to be able to pay up front for IVF.  But – fixing the car will be about $2,000, which is a lot more than we had hoped.  I have been trying all this time to be able to pay for the majority of our treatment with cash and reimbursements, and now that’s a little bit out of reach.  Especially since the amount I’ve quoted above doesn’t include any of the medications, or the anesthesia… it’s just IVF and ICSI.  We have enough available credit to forge ahead anyway (mostly because the total balance on our credit cards is less than $300), but it wasn’t really what I wanted to do.  It sucks.

I had a really hard time Saturday afternoon; because after the mechanic called Jakobe said that we needed to talk and that we shouldn’t make any decisions right away.  I thought he was talking about postponing IVF, and I had a mini freak-out in my head.  Turns out that what he meant was that we had to decide how we were going to pay for it: with cash or with credit…  I think we should pay with my new rewards card, and then we should pay off the rewards card with our cash.  Keeps us out of the hole, and gets us frequent flyer miles.

One of the things I said to Jakobe while we were talking is that now that we’ve started the ball rolling, I don’t think I can stop.  Postponing things again would be extremely hard for me.  In response he said that even while we were on hold, I couldn’t let go. So we aren’t changing our plan to go ahead with the April IVF cycle, just having to re-think how we’re paying for it.

Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead.