Somehow I forgot that it was Memorial Day weekend. I thought it was next weekend. Then someone mentioned the pool opened this weekend and then I read Luna’s post and then I said, “oh!”

If you missed the post below this one, go over and read it and spread the word. I’ll remind you a lot next week so we can coordinate our efforts and time this properly. Allison is going to write an “on” post to go up at 00:00 GMT on the 29th. We’ll have 24 hours to get as many people as we can to visit her blog on that day. When her counter switches over, she’ll put up an “off” post so we know it was a success. Remember, next Thursday the 29th. Take the graphic, spread the word. It’s such a simple thing we can do.

Show and Tell is happening again on Sunday (as it will happen every week). What will I show this week? The ballpoint pen I love enough to buy in bulk at Costco? A photograph of me at age 8? The glasses that I never wear anymore even though I love the frames? And what will you show? I’ll post the thread late on Saturday and you can post any time over the weekend or Monday (once it gets to be Tuesday, you should probably just save the post to put up the next week. See, isn’t this nice? You can do your posts ahead of time and always know that you have at least one post to write each week).

On Sunday, just leave a link to your Show and Tell post in the comment section and I’ll keep moving people into the body of the post. Can I just say one more time how much I love Show and Tell? I loved seeing all of these random things and these brief posts about tangible objects that have so much meaning in your world. It just came to me what I’m showing this week. But you’ll have to wait until Sunday to find out.

This Sunday is also the start date of NaComLeavMo. The list is open until May 24th at 11:59 p.m. EST. So if you haven’t signed up yet, go do so. And if you have, start commenting this weekend.

I ask you to do a lot. This time, it is simply a small click. Perhaps more than once during the day, maybe moving around to different computers if you work in a space with multiple computers. I, for one, am hitting a local library where I can log-on each computer and click once.

It is such an enormously small thing–a click.

The day that Allison lost Zoë is forever marked her “best day ever” on WordPress because it is the day that the most people visited her blog. For her own emotional well-being, she needs this post to be taken off her blog dashboard. The way to do that is to create a new record for visits to her blog.

On Thursday, May 29, please click on Allison’s blog, Our Own Creation, and help replace that post with whatever is currently up on her blog that day. Everyone needs to visit on the same day–May 29th–because if we simply click throughout the week, it won’t bump the day she lost Zoë from that section of the dashboard. I am writing this now to give us time to spread the word. Take the graphic I created and place it on your own blog. Don’t worry–I’ll remind you to click that day.

We need 2,350 people to visit Our Own Creation on May 29th. We need 1,785 people visit Sweet Zoë.

We just raised $3000 for a FET. We can raise a couple thousand hits. Are you with me?

Can this be U.T.E.R.U.S.’s last spring fling before we have a quick nap? Isn’t it all about sending love when it really comes down to it? Reminding a person that they’re never alone in all of this?

Just to be all sexist for a moment, men talk and women do. A few months ago, we lamented the fact that it was going to take years for Cali to raise the $3000 needed for her FET. It was April 1st. Today, May 22nd, Cali now has the money needed and the FET scheduled for July. It took us 52 days. I think we can safely say that women rock.

What happens now? We breathe for a second, Helen and Jen crack their typing knuckles since they entered a shitload of information into eBay, and we keep going. If you would like to participate in the planning and execution of the next fundraisers, sign up for the listserv. We will start brainstorming the next recipient(s) soon.

In the meantime, I am continuously putting up the ad space on my right sidebar for bidding even between recipients. The money made will simply sit in the fund and give us a leg-up for the next round.

An enormous thank you to everyone who joined in and helped. It is seriously amazing what women can do.

When I was in middle school, I was allowed to choose two nights each week to stay up a bit later and I always picked Tuesday, the reason being that Thirtysomething aired that night. Thirty seemed such an in-between age. It wasn’t cool like twenty or responsible like forty. My cousin was in his thirties at the time and I remember thinking, “what a boring time–you’re not set.”

What did I mean by set? I have no idea what I thought was going to be so precarious about my thirties. The characters of Thirtysomething were married and had kids and had careers–I’m still not sure why I thought crossing over into your forties would be so different. But I did.

Bleu and I constantly talk about getting our hands on old episodes of Thirtysomething to see how we process the same episodes twenty years older. In my mind, they remain impossibly realistic–this was how I believed adults acted; the things they thought about, the problems they grappled with.

And yet, as a current thirtysomething, there is a storyline that I don’t remember them ever covering–the adult who still feels like a child. Someone like me who wrote a note to my co-volunteer this weekend and explained that I could fixed the document, but I’d have to go ask my dad for help. Or who calls my mother on a daily basis to ask my how-to questions. I am in the center of my thirties–about to add another year to my age in two weeks time–and I don’t feel like an adult in the thirtysomething sense of the word. I don’t feel like I am currently as old nor as responsible as Hope and Michael or Elliot and Nancy. I don’t feel like I could handle things as they handled things and I have no memory of them calling their own parents as frequently as I call mine. I still feel like a child even though I am raising children. Even though in my circle of friends we have weathered all the hot topics covered on the television show–death, divorce, illness, career-change, job loss.

There was a time this week when I was looking at the blogosphere as a whole, thinking about the things individuals are grappling with–health issues, parental death, loss of spouse, divorce. And it all seemed so old. I was thinking at first what is up with the world that all of these things are scootching younger and younger. And then I realized that I was at that age–that age where these things happen. Yes I feel so incredibly young even if my numerical age and the grey hair belies that.

I’m not sure when the shift occurs–when you move from the dependency I saw inherent in your twenties (though my middle school aged eyes) to the responsibility I believed existed in every fortysomething.

I am letting my hair currently go grey. I’m not sure if this is a permanent decision or one I’ll change my mind on down the road. I don’t particularly like the grey streaks through my hair, but I also don’t like the idea of covering them up and pretending that it didn’t happen. I was having my hair done for my sister’s wedding and the hairdresser offered to cover up the grey with a quick rinse. I told her I wasn’t interested and I was going to let me hair go grey with time. She looked at me semi-horrified and said, “why?” I didn’t really have an answer, it was just a gut decision.

When we got in the car, the ChickieNob said out of nowhere, “I love your grey hairs.”

It made me wonder how she’ll see this age when she is in middle school and her cousins are thirtysomethings and that time period seems impossibly far away.

This is the fifth installment of Barren Advice. You can ask questions that are fertility or non-fertility related.

Barren Advice is posted each Tuesday. If you have your own question for Barren Advice, click here to learn how to submit. Please weigh in with your own thoughts in the comment section and indicate which question you’re addressing if there are multiple questions in the post.

Dear Mel:

I have a history of recurrent pregnancy loss and am currently 5 weeks pregnant. I’m taking 200mg prometrium suppositories three times a day. If this pregnancy fails, will the prometrium cause a missed miscarriage?

–Antigone from Antigone Lost

It’s a complicated question because not only does every body respond differently to the medication, but so many other elements–both known and unknown–contribute to how our body deals with a loss. Boiling it down to the most basic level, Prometrium does not trump all other functions or hormones. It is not powerful enough to hold the body at bay: there are women who bleed regardless of Prometrium (either related or not related to a loss) and there are those who do not.

Prometrium definitely can delay a period if the cycle is going to end regardless, which is why REs run a beta at the end of the cycle to know definitively your status before stopping the medication. There are those who are given the advice to keep taking Prometrium until their period arrives, but this isn’t the correct use for the drug. Prometrium may not delay a period in everyone but as a progesterone supplement, it will certainly delay a period in a large portion of women since the drop in progesterone is one of the signals to your uterus to lose that uterine lining.

With loss: if one of the reasons for early loss is low progesterone, then Prometrium can aid the body in maintaining the pregnancy. If the reason for early loss is not tied to low progesterone, taking additional supplements is not going to maintain the pregnancy. Which is when we come to the situation you asked about–can Prometrium cause a missed miscarriage; in other words, can Prometrium keep the body from letting go of an embryo that is already lost?

I consulted with a doctor to answer this question and these are her thoughts:

Generally progesterone, either natural or artificial, simulates a luteal phase. This phase promotes a secretory endometrium in the normal menstrual cycle which is best for implantation.

The practice of giving progesterone in early pregnancy in the face of low progesterone levels is supposed to decrease the likelihood of loss due to poor implantation or poor development of a nice hospitable lining. The lining matures under progesterone’s influence.

So about missed miscarriage. Progesterone can indeed make it more likely that you will not bleed after a 1st trimester loss, but it is not the only factor since people not on exogenous progesterone still have missed miscarriages until the conceptus stops producing enough hormone to trigger the uterus to expel the tissue.

Thus progesterone can make it more likely but it is not the only factor.

And I’ll just add that I hope this isn’t a situation you have to deal with this pregnancy. Sending many good thoughts to you.

Dear Mel:

Lately, I have been really trying to read a lot more blogs, be present, be available to other women who struggled with IF or are still struggling. In doing that, I knew that I would be reading things that would be about things not quite working out for some couples. I thought I was really ok with that, when we were still struggling I know that some people wouldn’t want to read about how we our IUIs failed or the decision we came to try IVF. I know that in the world of IF–as in the greater world–there would be stories of success and stories of failure. I am, by heart, very sentimental and emotional and in knowing that about myself, I knew that reading about both the good and bad would touch my heart for lots of different reasons. I guess what I am trying to say is that I thought I was prepared for the failure stories and could read them with a heart that could take it. I am not so sure these days (and it really bothers me).

I am feeling a whole lot of survivor guilt, enough that I am crying almost daily about other couples and their losses. I wonder if I should step back from the blogs and then I feel even more guilt, because I truly want to “be there” for other women, to show them the same kind of support they showed me. Yet, when I read about the losses, I can’t comment, there is nothing in my heart or mind that is good enough to say and I can’t just forget them.

–Anonymous

When the war started a few years ago, I stopped reading the newspaper and listening to NPR. It was too upsetting and it was affecting my whole day. The decision was definitely the best choice for my mental health. But how could I not think of the people who were over in Iraq who didn’t have the choice to flip off a radio or stop buying the newspaper? The ones who couldn’t blot out reality and go about their day–those serving our country or living in Iraq or the people they left behind at home? It felt like by not reading or keeping up with the news, I was turning my back on them. And certainly, there are those who will still agree with that statement regardless of what I write after this point.

My lack of newspaper reading is different from my unwillingness to watch movies that scare me including war movies, stories about serial killers, or child endangerment. I know my limits and I know how things affect me. And while some movies are not placed out there for entertainment value but to raise questions, awareness, and conversation, I still cannot take partake in watching them. Yet I don’t feel badly about this even if I’m not supporting film makers or actors by carrying through on this decision–and they’re real people too. It just feels different somehow.

As much as we are a community and part of being a community is taking support and giving support, at the end of the day, we also have to be for ourselves. Which is why I always believe that a person needs to do what a person needs to do in order to keep putting one foot in front of the other. If the stories of loss or cycle failure are affecting your day and the way you are living your life and the idea has already come to you that you may be better off stepping away, I would recommend stepping away. Either temporarily or permanently–whichever one brings you greater peace of heart.

At the same time, I return to the newspaper and film boycott. There is more than one way to support a person or group of people and I think that a one-size-fits-all approach only builds guilt. Some people are wealthy and can afford to contribute financially to causes and others feel guilty when they
receive the same request for funds yet can’t afford to participate. At the same time, some people have an abundance of creative energy and are great about pulling together a fundraiser whereas others simply don’t excel in that area. I can support our troop by reading about the war, or I can participate in numerous programs established to support the troops or their families back home.

Reading their blog is simply one way to support a person. But there are so many other things you can do that also show support or bring comfort. It is harder to come up with a unique way to support a specific person–in other words, not a random group of those experiencing loss but specific people who are currently experiencing a loss who supported you through IVF. Harder, but not impossible. And sometimes, it simply takes time for the good idea to come to you, but I trust that it will.

No really, the beauty of a blog advice column is that you get to weigh in with your two cents too. Let the questioner know if you support the advice, add to the response, or dispute it completely.

Leave a comment in the reaction box below–only keep in mind that conflicting advice is embraced and rudeness is not. Make sure you indicate which advice you’re addressing by numbering your comment with a 1 or 2. Want to ask your own question? Click here to see what you need to send in order to be included in a future Tuesday’s installment of Barren Advice.