Yup, heard from Annoying Out of Town Clinic today. (Yeah, most of you know their name. But I’m demoting them, they don’t get to have a name with me anymore, they are nothing to me.)

Yup, it went exactly as expected. “We did an internal review, we did everything we were supposed to at every step, all Is were dotted, all Ts were crossed, yada yada yada, sorry dude.”

I plan to get copies of this internal investigation. I would like to see the signatures at each point. And I plan to do the same here at the local clinic too.

Now I just don’t know what to do next. Our plan was, perhaps, DE here at local clinic. I had confidence in the doctor and the lab. Now, not so much confidence. I don’t really want to do a donor cycle away from home. And there’s no one here I trust. It’s a conundrum.

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NaComLeavMo

So at first I wanted to be an iron commenter but I quickly learned that I am hardpressed to get in my 5+1 comments each day for a total of 42 a week. 214 or whatever a week is just NOT going to happen in Kateland! So in addition to returning comments and visitng blogs of everyone I can track who comes here, I’ve just been randomly clicking on Mel’s list. And today I swear everyone I clicked on was someone who had crossed over to the other side. I’m really happy for them all, but dang! What are the odds? Nevertheless, I have found some cool blogs written by great women (and men!) so I am really enjoying NCLM. Hard to believe at this time last year I had not yet started my blog and was not part of this group. At least SOMEthing hass changed for the better!!

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Small piece of good news: We’re finally reaching a settlement in a lawsuit that has been dragging on for more than two years. Right after our first IVF, in fact, I think it was the day of the beta, Mike was driving to work around midday after having driven me to the RE apppointment and then home again (I was taking the day off to eat raw cookie dough) and he got rear-ended. Totalled the car, he was not badly injured but his back and neck — as anyone who’s been in that kind of wreck can attest to — were kinda messed up. The whole legal system for things like this is just so whacked I can’t even stand it. It’s total BS from start to finish.  But happily it is drawing to a close and we are reasonably satisfied. As much as we can be, anyway.

So today Mike had to take a really shitty phone call from Annoying Out of Town Clinic, but yesterday he got a good call from the lawyer. After my bro’s car axi this week we still are not breaking even, but it is getting closer. I bought some lotto tix today, if anyone out there in KarmaLand wants to set things straight here’s a fine opportunity…..

 

You would think there would be a finite amount of crap allowed to be in one person’s life. Once you reach the limit, ok, no more crap for a while, you wait for the crap level to go down a bit before adding more crap. But no, that’s not how it works.

My brother and SIL were in a car accident this afternoon. They are ok, but SIL was taken in an ambulance, never a good thing, and released from hospital a few hours later after tests, x-rays, etc. Both are fine but poor SIL is going to be very sore for a while. Could you send her a prayer if you have one to spare? Or if, like me, you’re not so much the praying type, send her a few good thoughts or positive vibes?

As for us, we are still chugging along. Mike has been in touch with Cornell and they are looking into the — what to call it? the mess? the incident? the disaster? We need to schedule a WTF with the local doctor but I am reluctant to do that until we know what we want to do next. Right now we are pretty stymied. We honestly never expected our FET to work. But we didn’t expect to go the way it did, so we are more wiped out than we anticipated.

Last night Mike was channel surfing after dinner and landed in the middle of a Shrek movie. He asked if it was ok to leave it there. I nodded, then looked up. The scene was a freaking BABY SHOWER FOR A PREGNANT OGRE!!! Are you KIDDING me? There is no escape.

….the mice will play!

My boss is out, and here I am posting from work! Bad Kate!

But I just wanted to remind everyone to go here for A New Day. Not that you need reminding. I’m making all my podmates here at work go too.

Wow, I have a new record of blog hits in a day and many many wonderful comments. What a wonderful — well, I hate the word “community”, but what a wonderful POSSE I am privileged to be a part of.

Thank you all for visiting me and supporting me through comments or even just lurking. My goal is to get back with every single commenter (and NaComLeavMo is a great time for all this, I get credit for doing what I would do anyway!) but it may take me a few days, I only have a little time for blogs in the evening (I can lurk at work but can’t write or comment much there…)

We are still taking tiny steps at this point. Mike called the FET coordinator at Cornell and I emailed my doc. No responses today; no surprise. We will just follow through methodically. And my mom works in a law office so if we need a friendly (ha!) letter on lawyer’s stationary we have someone who will likely be able to help us. Those of you who noted we are not the suing type are correct. But we want answers and we want to be sure procedures are created or followed so no other embryos suffer this fate.

p.s. — Do y’all think it is bad that I am not using a pseudonym for this clinic? But then, my identity is not secret either since my story went in the newspaper. And I try to never say anything here I wouldn’t say to anyone’s face…

i meant to put this in my last post but i am so out of it i forgot.

kymberli, thank you so very much for the pink rose award. i too am not much for pink, but a pink rose is a lovely thing. i love the thought you put behind this award and that you sent it to me means a lot. i will be proud to pass it on. (sad that anyone NEEDS it, but you know what i mean)

and i hope your transfer today went swimmingly.

much love, kate

This is going to be a real short post today because AF came this afternoon, and if you’ve ever been on Estrace for two months you can imagine how much fun THAT is. I left work early b/c the cramps are fricking killing me.

But I wanted to tell you all thank you for the sweet sweet comments and encouragement. And for your anger on my behalf. I’m still so numb I can barely rustle up any anger so appreciate you doing it for me!

Frankly, I expect no compensation. I have heard of this happening before. Usually each lab blames the other, there’s no proof anywhere, and the patient is just screwed, sorry ma’am. We’ll try, of course, but expect nothing. I can tell you though, there is no way in hell we are paying that frozen embryo storage bill. $500 for storing nothing? Uh-uh, don’t think so. They better buy a big box of forever stamps, because they can keep sending us that bill forever and we aren’t going to pay it. What can they do to us? Put it on our credit report? We already have a home and a mortgage and a HELOC. We already have all the credit cards we need. They can’t hurt us any more than they already have.

More tomorrow, maybe. I have to go take 15 advil or so and then come out of lurkdom and leave a few comments. Hugs and kisses to you all. xoxo!!!

… did it really happen?

I have always been the sort of person who needs to share my experiences in order to validate them. I didn’t always know why I did that, I just knew I had to tell someone. As I got older I realized what I was doing, and that many other people don’t need to do this. Their experiences are theirs whether anyone knows about them or not. I don’t know why I have this need to share. It’s not that I seek approval (though sometimes I do). It’s that things truly don’t seem REAL to me until I have told someone else.

So, if I am keeping something to myself, it means I don’t want it to be real. I don’t WANT it to be validated. If it’s a secret it didn’t happen.

I haven’t mentioned this on my blog or to anyone IRL; the only person who knows is Mike because he was there. My FET not only went poorly in many ways, as I have already described. But there is one other thing that made it awful that I haven’t even been able to put into words. That I have refused to say out loud.

Someone lost my embryo from Cornell.

My very best shot at having a bio baby was just, well, lost. Scraped into the red bio-hazard trash can. The embryologist at the clinic where I did the FET told me he looked and looked and looked for it but it wasn’t in the straw that was sent down from Cornell. I won’t mentioned we paid a THOUSAND fricking dollars for Cornell to prepare that embryo for transport (not counting the $500 Fed-Ex bill), or that we just received a bill for $500 for storing it. The money stings, but it isn’t the money. It’s the lost opportunity. Either Cornell didn’t properly store it or didn’t properly prepare it for transport, or the embryologist here overlooked it. Either way, it is too horrible. My baby was dumped in the trash. I have always wondered how people could lose their children at the mall. And now mine was lost in a stupid petri dish. It was there. A perfect blastocyst. And then — it wasn’t.

So we did transfer two blasts; they were from a crappy cycle and we all knew they weren’t going to be viable. In fact, for a while I wanted to save the Cornell embie and just use the others, do the Cornell one later. But my local RE said he didn’t want to do that, no point, the others were too bad quality, blah blah blah. And in the end, that’s what we did anyway. Except now my hope of still having that one in pocket is gone too.

Through all this IF bullshit from beginning to end, I have tried to make decisions that would leave me feeling later that I had no regrets. And now, when it is all over — I am left with regret. If I had stuck to my guns and not moved the Cornell embie here, I would still have a chance. I could do another FET. I could bring it down here later, or I could go up there and do an out-of-town FET. WHY didn’t I insist? WHAT happened to that embryo? What is so fricking wrong with me, how am I so terrible, why can’t this one very normal natural thing just freaking g**damn HAPPEN for me?

So, there. I said it. It’s real. And it sucks.

Yes, I am a lurker extraordinaire. I’m shy, even online. But I’m going to give it a try. I think I’m going to have to get up earlier to read this many blogs this regularly.

So if anyone new finds me thru NaComLeavMo, welcome and thanks for stopping by. Normally I’d have refreshments for guests — so imagine yourself munching a warm homemade chocolate chip cookie while you’re here. Or if you hate sweets, I make a mean curry dip. It’s good with veggies or crackers. So you can try that instead.

ETA: After about 15 failed attempts to add Mel’s cool NCLM icon, I give up. But if you’re here, you probably know how to find it. If you have no clue what I’m talking about, go visit the Stirrup Queens.

i found a three-year-old internet cheapie pee stick this morning and was somehow possessed, after noticing a small but bright red bit of spotting, to eek out three drops of urine, which is enough to get a perfect control line to contrast with the blinding white strip of the stick.

so when The Call came this afternoon, i already knew.

but it is no easier to take.

Tomorrow’s our 10th anniversary. I don’t have any wedding pictures on the computer to share because that was so long ago it was pretty much before digital and I haven’t gotten around to actually scanning any in. But here’s one I love of the two of us on vacation in Greece a couple of years ago (in between our first and second IVFs, I might add).

I met my sweetie when I interviewed for my first job out of college. It was at a newspaper. I was going for a copy editing job, he was the night cops reporter. We met in the pressroom where they were having a party for a pressman named Joe Bob or some such (this was in South Carolina) who had been a pressman for 50 years. Someone handed me cake, I took a bite, and Mike came up and introduced himself. I had blue frosting on my teeth.

I got the job, and a week or two in, my boss had a party to welcome me and another girl, and say goodbye to the two short-timers. I met MIke again there, we talked all nght to no one but each other (while his friends Eric and Kathleen were making faces at him behind my back and throwing popcorn at him). He asked me to join the three of them the next day for a film festival in Atlanta (2 hour road trip). I said what the hell — and we have been pretty much inseparable ever since.

That was 14 years ago. We took it slow, though we always knew we’d be staying together. After a few years we moved to Fort Myers, Fla., for better jobs, and in 1998 we got married on Sanibel Island. We had just moved the month before to the Tampa area, so we had to travel back down for the wedding. We were blessed to see dolphins jumping and pelicans diving just before the ceremony. It was a lovely wedding and all our friends and family were there.

At the end of the night, I had a spider in my dress (scared the CRAP out of me but is supposed to be good luck, whose mama thought THAT one up real quick for a freaked-out bride?) and no hotel room due to a mix-up. We went back to the hotel where the rest of our peeps wre staying, booted someone out of their room — and the rest is history.

This IF experience has been total bullshit from Day One, and it breaks my heart that this person I love so much has to suffer so. But there’s no one I’d rather have by my side than my dear dear husband.