Shit Just Got Real.

Whew. What a week.

Today, Hubby and I will head to our second home these days, Dr. C.’s office, for our instructional appointment on how to shoot me up with these injections.

As a teacher, you do not have the option of taking off an hour to run to an appointment. You may only choose from 1/2 day or whole day, since it’s pointless to ask a sub to come to work for an hour. At the rate I’ve had to take time off over the past 3 years for dr. visits, hospital procedures, and miscarriage mental damage control, I’m going to have to drop our 1st baby off at daycare on the way home from the hospital so I can go into work. I won’t have any leave left.

HOWEVER, I threw caution and responsibility to the wind today and took the WHOLE day off, even though my appointment is late enough I could have opted for just the afternoon. This was mostly motivated by wanting to be home for a delivery, but also because I need a break from life…even if just a 3 hour break. 

I spent Wednesday juggling the conflicting pieces of my life…work and infertility treatment. I am not allowed, technically, to answer my phone or even have the ringer on in my classroom. On desperate phone tag days, I have occasionally ignored this, explaining to my class that I was waiting on a phone call that could only happen during school hours, then having my next door neighbor stand between our 2 classroom doors while I stepped out to take the call. Regardless of my willingness to ignore the phone rules on Wednesday, apparently my phone no longer has a signal in my classroom anyway.

So, Nurse/Practice Manager A and I played phone and email tag all day on Tuesday & Wednesday. She was trying to find out if I’d received my Lupron yet to make sure I had it in time. I had been wondering when that would happen because no one from the pharmacy had even called me to arrange payment/delivery. In the messages, she made it sound like I needed it before today’s appointment, so I went into a panic on Wednesday when I still hadn’t even heard from the company.

Finally, she found out they had processed my order at 12 on Thursday, but I needed to call right away to have it shipped out before close of business. So, I asked partner-teacher to keep an eye on the class for me and ran to the phone. 

I hated that phone call. The whole thing. How long it took (good thing my kids were working on a lengthy project), and how stupid it made me feel. Well, stupid isn’t really the right word. New. Green. Uninformed. In over my head. 

Man, can I tell you what thousands of educational acronyms, vocabulary, and processes are. What I cannot tell you is when I need the Lupron delivered. Or if I want it delivered to my house or work or the Dr.’s office. Or if the Dr.’s office has approved delivery to them instead of me.  Or what a “Sharps Container” is. Or if this is the injection that needs to be refrigerated upon delivery. Or if I can make it to my locker and back to grab my wallet while this woman puts me on hold in case I need to pay during this phone call. (Yeah, you read that right – “locker”…I have no office I can lock, no draw on a desk or filing cabinet with a lock. So I have to use one of the lockers (like the ones the kids have) to have somewhere safe for my purse with all it’s temptations for sticky fingers – wallet, phone, kindle, meds… Much like infertility, there is often dignity missing in the life of a teacher.)

Well, I can tell you the answers to those things now, but during that phone call, I felt very overwhelmed and stupid. I apologized to the woman that I was having such a hard time answering questions that only required a “yes” or a “no” because it was my first time with this kind of protocol. (If you are curious, it is Follistim that needs to be refrigerated, not Lupron. I’ll cross that delivery bridge when I get there in a couple of weeks.)

It’s my first time with a protocol at all, actually, which scares me in itself. We have entered a level of infertility that I never thought we’d experience and treatments I never thought would apply to us. Whenever I read or saw things about someone giving their wife a fertility injection in the ass cheek or things like IVF, I would think, “Well, it’s going to be difficult for us, but at least we won’t have to go that far.”  But we have. We’re injecting. And what if this doesn’t work either? What’s next? Are we going to have to go all the way to IVF? It terrifies me, to be quite honest. 

Well, I DEFINITELY made the right decision to stay home today. I only got out of bed about 45 minutes later than normal, but 45 minutes can feel like hours when you’re as tired as I always seem to be. I was feeling so pumped taking my leisurely shower, shaving my legs – Hubby will be beside himself tonight! – and dancing around under the water to upbeat music blasting away.

When I got out of the shower, I checked the front door, and sure enough – there it was. Giant box. I panicked a little at how hot the box felt after sitting in the sun, but was relieved to find cool packs on the inside of the package. I felt a mixture of curiosity and anxiety opening the box. I’ve place the items in the bathroom, now, and intend to fully ignore them until Tuesday.

I’m not feeling super down or anything, but now that the meds have arrived, I definitely don’t feel bouncy like I did this morning. Mostly I feel nauseous. Nervous about their impending presence in my life and my practice session this afternoon.

Shit just got real.