Even though we’re currently hard at work for the next International Infertility Film Festival (July 28th in case you haven’t signed up yet. And don’t give me an excuse like “we don’t know how to make a movie” because I didn’t know how to make a movie until the great Bea took me under her wing. This is how you make a movie: you get instructions from Bea. You don’t look at them. You go and sweetly say to your husband, “you are very good at learning new software. I am terrible at learning new software. Will you please follow these instructions that Bea gave me and put the movie together?” He makes the movie and you just write the song–he’ll give you the music too–record it, and make the images in Microsoft Paint. It’s easy!)…wait, what was I saying?

Oh…right. Even though we’re making a film for that festival that pertains to the seasons, we made another film in the meantime. Strange things have happened since we last saw Infertile Myrtle. She learned that for $80 and an hour wait, anyone can go to the social security office and change their name. So she did. Her new name is Sharon Barren. And while she was there, she changed her husband’s name too. So his name is Darren Barren. Sharon and Darren Barren.

Sharon still has a uterus of doom. And she still has her squash blossoms and triangular body.

I made the movie page below so I could link to it on the sidebar. What is Uterninus’s Law, you ask? You’ll just have to wait a few more days until the movie is finished to find out. But like last time, I give you these stills until you can hear Sharon’s kicky little guitar song.

In this scene, Sharon contemplates bashing Darren over the head with her trusty guitar when he comes at her with her nightly stim injection.

In this scene, Sharon bemoans the fact that her doctor wouldn’t prescribe a painkiller for the HSG and when she cried out in pain, the radiologist hissed, “it doesn’t hurt that much!”

In this scene, Sharon tries to drown herself in a grande, decaf, no-foam, extra shot, vanilla latte.

Sharon will be in action soon when Josh finishes laying out the frames for the movie. Until then, you can sign up for the next film festival and create your own musical cartoon.

Thank you for the good thoughts about the not-so-negative betas as well as our neighbour’s divorce. I’m not sure why their divorce is making me so uneasy. We’re not particularly close with these neighbours beyond the chatting-outside-because-we’re-both-shoveling-snow kind of relationship. I was so thrown off when the man called me and started crying into the phone, telling me these intimate details about her betrayal. It just wasn’t what I was expecting at all when I picked up the phone.

And then, while everything already felt so off that day, I’m not sure why I called my nurse to ask about those old betas. I was just gathering together stuff for the appointment with the new OB and emailing with Jackie. It was strange to take out my journal and look back on those cycles.

For one of those five cycles, I had written in my journal:

I am debating whether or not to test tomorrow at 13dpo. On one hand, I will have a beta at 15 dpo so why not let myself dream a little longer? But for some reason, I think in my heart that I am pregnant.

The morning of the beta, we went to get blood drawn and since we were already awake at 7 a.m. on a Sunday morning, we decided to go to Quaker meeting. At this point in the story, you’re probably reading that last line several times since…you know…I’m a Jew. But I had always wanted to go to Quaker meeting and see what it was like, though not enough to wake up that early on a Sunday on purpose. But since we were already awake and since I was lost inside my own thoughts anyway…

Our friend (a Jewish rabbi, no less) told us about this old meetinghouse in the middle of farmland that he went to on the anniversary of his Quaker mother’s death each year. I felt very shy going inside because I really didn’t know what one was supposed to do at meeting. But if you’ve never been and if there is a rural meetinghouse near you, it is a wonderful way to spend the last few minutes dreaming before the nurse calls with a negative beta.

We sat in silence for a little more than an hour. Whenever someone was moved to speak, they stood up and said something and then sat down. I wanted to stand up and say, “I really need for this cycle to have worked. I will not be able to handle a negative beta.” But that probably wasn’t what they meant by being “moved to speak.” Judging from everyone else’s less-selfish words, thoughts on community, Christ, and peace were probably more inline with what the congregation expected to hear.

We were home for a little bit when the phone rang. And I remember standing next to the window between the kitchen and the hallway to the living room, dragging my thumbnail inside the grooves of the phone while the nurse sympathetically told me that the beta was negative and here were the new changes for the next cycle. After I sat down at the kitchen table and cried. I had been so certain when I was sitting in meeting that morning that I was pregnant. And now it turns out that something had happened–maybe not a pregnancy, but something.

We went downtown after the phone call. We bought three hats–a red one, a brown one, and a black and grey number with delicate flowers painted onto the rim. When we were paying, Josh threw in two small metal hearts from a dish next to the cash register. We hold those hearts whenever we go for treatments or when we’re waiting beta results.

With the divorcing couple next door, I think we’re thrown off by the proximity to all of this anger. On Saturday morning, they were having a fight and I could hear the wife screaming. She had gotten to that point where she was so enraged that her words were unintelligible–it was just a throat-tearing shriek. We’ve seen them a few times outside and we never know what to say–if she knows how much we know and if he wants to forget how much he told me. The man isn’t living in the house anymore and we’re not sure where he is staying. He was gone for a few days, but I’ve now seen him a few times–he comes back to the house at odd hours. It’s the strangeness of being home during the day and watching things unfold whereas if I worked outside the house, I probably would miss these small pieces.

If they lived a few streets away, it would have been something I had thought about for a few hours that morning and forgotten as I went about my day. But since they live next door, it’s this constant reminder that you never know what goes on behind closed doors. Unless they’re having their fight in the backyard and screaming as if the words are barreling out of her throat like a gun going off.

Musings on last week.

What do you do with betas of 5? At my clinic, they call you and simply say, “I’m sorry, it was negative. So I’ll transfer you to the front desk and you can schedule an appointment for day 3 bloodwork.” My nurse generally went through changes in the upcoming cycle that my doctor had listed in my chart as a “next step.” Anything less than 10 gets a “negative.” Anything over 10 gets a number and a follow up appointment for a second beta.

I never questioned it.

Recently, I was talking to research chickie extraordinary, Jackie, who has the unique position of holding a PhD in endocrinology and physiology while going through treatments and she told me that it’s possible for an embryo to secrete a small amount of hCG after fertilization but prior to implantation. In other words, my betas of 5 could mean that fertilization took place, but not implantation.

Why are these cycles written off instead of being considered as a small piece of a larger puzzle? I know the answer is that my doctor probably doesn’t have as much energy to scrutinize my individual case as I do. He probably looks for the big clues, treats the obvious problems.

But what do I do with betas of 5?

I don’t mean in the emotional sense–a negative is a negative. But in the puzzley sense? Do I throw out these betas too? Do I become assertive and discuss my own thoughts? Do my thoughts count for anything because I am an emotional infertile woman who is way too close to her cycle to see it clearly?

And what does it mean when I look back now, finding out three years down the line that a beta was a 5 instead of the assumed zero and see that I wrote in my journal that intuitively, I thought I was pregnant. I was sure I was pregnant.

After my daughter actually made good on her threat to “scream in shul” (which makes me gulp since she also threatened to treyf my kitchen and eat toilet paper this week when I wouldn’t give her jelly beans), Josh took them into the hallway and I was left during the Torah service with my Etz Hayim. Just me and a Tanakh. And a body gearing up to ovulate. And I did it.

I flipped over to the barren chickies in the beginning of the book.

The first time we were going through treatments, I spent every Saturday in shul not reading the portion we were actually learning and instead rereading the stories of Sarah, Rebecca, and Rachel. It’s sort of like reading blogs that are never updated. Sarah laughing over finally getting a BFP. Rebecca worrying about miscarriage with her twins. The strain on Rachel’s marriage as she lashes out in desperation. I’ve read their stories so many times, went over the meager information about their stats so many times, wondered if I could get through decades of infertility like Sarah all the while knowing that as much as I would hate myself for it, I would have run off fertile Hagar as well.

The first time through treatments, I was so focused on having a child that I never noticed the structure of the family or the number of pregnancies. I thought once motherhood was obtained, many of those feelings about infertility would fly out the window. Turned out, like many other things in life such as the aesthetics my 8th grade hairstyle or the sanity of my grad school boyfriend, that I was wrong.

Sarah, the first woman in the troika, had one pregnancy and one child. Rebecca, the second woman, had one pregnancy but fraternal twin boys. Rachel, the one I related to the most of the three women, had two pregnancies. Etz Hayim points out her desire to have children was so strong that after going through one of the most painful sensations in existence, she immediately wanted to go through it again for another child.

What does all of this mean? I’m not sure. I thought it was interesting that I only noticed it now. I thought it was interesting that each woman has a different family structure once childlessness was resolved (and to take this a step further, the other Emaot–or mothers–of Infertility in the Torah, each have a different family structure too. Hannah finally has a child, but the child leaves her home. And Michal never gives birth, but instead adopts her sister’s five children when her sister dies therefore becoming a mother to five in one fell swoop). I thought it was interesting that I hadn’t turned back to those pages until today.

My daughter returned to the sanctuary after I moved seats to get away from the two annoying men who were carrying on a long conversation about their golf game. There was a space next to the window and she danced wildly to the entire spoken Amidah, punching the air with every “Baruch ata Adonoi…” She threw her head back and spun around, clapping her hands as if the Shabbat spirit had entered her body and she was looking for a few snakes to pick up and prove it. It made me wonder about Sarah, whether she tried again so she could live through the wild-dancing-in-shul years one more time but was ultimately unsuccessful. It made me wonder about Rebecca and whether she always felt like she missed out on something by building her family all at once. It made me understand Rachel and why she needed to try again.