It was the title that made me click over: “Want a Baby?  Stay Away From the Internet.”  Stay away from the Internet?  After doctors and nurses, men and women of the Internet have been the best, real-time resource for fertility; better than even books due to the interactive nature of the Internet.  Books give me information, but unless the author is accessible online, all questions that pop up go unanswered from the source.  Beyond that, putting my story out there on the Internet got me my final piece of my diagnosis — two clotting disorders.  If I hadn’t listed my symptoms, had another blogger read it and comment on it, and ask my doctor what he thought of her questions, I wouldn’t have thought to make an appointment with a hematologist.  My book, Navigating the Land of If, is information crowd-sourced from 1500 infertility bloggers, much of which is wisdom passed from person to person online.  The Internet is the last place I’d warn a person away from who is looking to gather information.

The Philadelphia article begins,

Quick: When should you have sex if you’re trying to get pregnant? Feel pretty sure about that answer? So did the 204 “infertile” women in a study conducted by researchers at two Australian infertility clinics. Unfortunately, almost all of them were wrong. In fact, only 13 percent of the women could identify the precise days on which they were most likely to conceive. This despite the fact that 68 percent of them insisted they’d properly and accurately timed having sex to maximize conception before seeking help at the clinics.

Oh… now I get it.  We’re all just “infertile.”  With air quotes.

Listen, it’s true — the average woman doesn’t know her cycle as well as she thinks she does, and that is due to a combination of factors including squeamish educators who want to cover the basics of reproductive science with students and move along (nothing more to see here, kids, nothing more to see) and mothers not educating their daughters on their cycle.  When I informed my OB/GYN that I was trying to get pregnant, she never sat me down and said, “let’s go over the basics of your cycle.”  So everyone assumes everyone else is educating women, and as a result, no one is educating women.

Wait, actually, scratch that.  Women are educating women.

It was Toni Weschler — who I found via the Internet — that explained the basics of my cycle in her landmark book Taking Charge of Your Fertility.  I then joined Fertility Friend, a site for and by women — on the Internet — where I charted my cycles and received feedback from their site administrators on when I was ovulating.  Once I was diagnosed as infertile, it was other women on the Resolve boards — Internet again! — that helped me interpret test results or get through my first injection.  And I was lucky enough to have infertile friends in my face-to-face world.  Can you imagine what life would have been like if I had eschewed the Internet AND knew no one else who was going through what I was going through?

Interestingly, the article itself finally makes a point at the end that the information IS to be found on the Internet, negating its own title:

Eighty-seven percent of the women in the study said that after they decided they were infertile—which is clinically defined by a lack of conception within a year of trying—they sought information on when they were most likely to conceive. The most common informational sources were the Internet and books.

So the answer isn’t avoid the Internet but jump on there sooner.  May need a change in title, Philadelphia magazine, if you truly care about women finding valuable resources and apparently correcting the “infertility” “problem.”

Updated:

I also love how the article implies that infertility is self-diagnosed (“after they decided they were infertile”).  That it’s just something you decide to be.  Where is the onus on the fertility center to actually be doing diligence as women enter?  Are we to understand that everyone who goes to this fertility center is self-diagnosed, with no extenuating issues?  Or only the 13 percent who were timing their cycles well actually have diagnosable problems?  The rest are literally problem-free except for their timing issue?  Were those 87% of patients sent away and told to try again on their own for a year once it was discovered that they didn’t know their cycle?  Or did the fertility clinic continue to treat them?

I would really love an article that presents women as intelligent vs. reducing us to hysterical, jumping-to-conclusions, clueless people.  Just one a week or so, tucked away in some dark corner of the media.

Truly, I expect the next article to be:

Women Realize They Must Put Food in Their Mouth and Chew in Order to Live.

Followed by:

Women Discover Breathing is Good For Their Bodies.

Twice in the last month, I’ve noticed that a blog I read has suddenly been deleted.  The first time, I wrote my friend — who is local — and asked her what was up.  She didn’t know that her blog was gone.  It turned out to be a glitch, and she got her blog back.  Fast forward a few days later and I clicked over from a comment to a blog that hasn’t been updated in a few weeks.  I knew there wasn’t a post in my Reader, but sometimes I’ll go to a site to make sure the Reader is updating.  The pictures were all messed up on her blog.  So I emailed her about it.

The next day, I clicked over again to see if the picture thing had resolved itself, and HER WHOLE BLOG WAS GONE.  While I was waiting to hear back from her on email, it drove the point home of how someone online could just disappear into thin air.  It’s not that people don’t go missing from the face-to-face world, but it is so easy online to just delete and move on, dropping an email address or url.  Though that seemed out of character for the blogger, so as I baked muffins, I started thinking through a much more likely scenario: she had been kidnapped.  Yes, and the kidnappers had forced her to delete her blog to prove to her family just how serious they were about the ransom.  And now it was up to me to contact the authorities and tell them that she has been kidnapped by blog-deleting psychopaths!

Uh… and then she wrote and told me that the blog was back up.

I did make her promise that she would let me know if she was ever going to ditch her blog for real (vs. computer glitch), but it sort of brought to mind how far is too far in trying to get in touch with a blogger who has deleted her blog?  The act of deleting may signal a break from all the readers OR I know plenty of people who have deleted their blog yet we still remain in contact via email or Facebook.  Part of the question is answered by how close you are with the blogger.  Do you have a friendship that exists off-line?  Then you’ll probably have a few avenues through which to reach the person.  But what about all the people you only know online?

Emailing to ask if everything is okay is clearly (in my mind) within the realm of appropriate reach because I often email with this blogger.  But what if she hadn’t responded or if she had ditched that email address too, would it have been okay to contact her via Facebook?  Is that going too far into the privacy of someone you know online to friend them on Facebook after they delete their blog?  Can I tweet her?  What if you had the person’s address — send a letter?  Or is the only proper response to let that person drift away and disappear into the ether?

How much is too much when reaching out to a blogging friend?

Food for thought.

*******

And now the blogs…

But first, second helpings of the posts that appeared in the open comment thread last week as well as the week before.  In order to read the description before clicking over, please return to the open thread:

• “Grief” (Growing Griswolds)
• “Two Hundred and Eightieth Day” (Bébé Suisse)
• “It’s Right There” (Hope, Trust & Truth)
• “In Sanguine, Veritas” (The Infertility Voice)
• “Twenty Years Ago” (Hobbit-ish Thoughts and Ramblings)
• “The Not Wasted Life” (My Three Ring Circus)
• “Just One Baby” (MissConception)
• “Knocked Over: On Biology, Magical Thinking, and Choice” (The Rumpus)
• “Back to School” (Certainly Not Cool Enough to Blog)
• “Sleep, Eat, Love” (Kmina’s Blog)

Okay, now my choices this week.

Mrsfit Mrs has a post on the fifth anniversary of family building that I love.  I love it for its unflinching honesty.  It is about looking back on what she has come through (seven losses to get to her daughter) as well as where she is going, all the while being true to herself and open with her readers who have been along for the ride.  I love the twist of understanding in this thoughts: “With RPL, the hazard is that I shared pregnancies with many of you who hold some-number-of-month old babe in arms right now. I did my best to forget that, even if I’m keenly aware of each of my sisters who lost their hopeful starts as mine endured.”

Ginger and Lime has a post that starts with injections and ends with an admittance that she doesn’t believe IVF will work for her.  She writes: “Most of the bloggers I started following in March 2010 (when I fired up The Intertubes for the first time) are now parents. While I was treading water, doing absolutely nothing due to my own potent combination of depression, anxiety, and no reasonable way to pay for treatments, you all were out there fighting. I vacillate between seeing your successes as inspirational (“if she can do it, maybe I can too”) and seeing them as tick marks on some Cosmic Scoreboard for a game that I am never going to win.”  Again, I was drawn to this post too for its unflinching honesty.  It takes a lot of bravery to state your truth (though I hope she is proven wrong and it does work).

More Room in My Heart also has a post about starting up IVF again to add to her family and how it is different this time around.  She admits, “I found myself wanting to tell the nurses in a bragging sort of way…this is my 6th fresh cycle…I could do this in my sleep…but who wants to brag about that?  Someone insecure? Someone wanting validation? Someone not wanting to be one of the women in the waiting room anxious about the process? Someone who accepts and knows the process, no hand holding or coddling necessary?”  Go over to read the whole post.

Lastly, Certainly Not Cool Enough to Blog has a must-read post that is a reminder to all that there is always another way a day or event is viewed, the underside that we often forget as we glance at the exterior.  She discusses the endless stream of back-to-school posts and how while she doesn’t begrudge those writers their thoughts, she explains how those posts affect her as she moves through life without her son.  She doesn’t ask to be remembered out of obligation or on special occasions, but rather to have the inquiries to her emotional space come on those ordinary days when she is deeply missing her boy.  She explains, “But maybe once in a blue moon; just a quiet nod to the ongoing agony of loss that ebbs and flows as life marches on. Especially as life marches on.”

The roundup to the Roundup: How far is too far to go to contact a friend you met online?  And lots of great posts to read.  So what did you find this week?  Please use a permalink to the blog post (written between August 31st and September 7th) and not the blog’s main url. Not understanding why I’m asking you what you found this week?  Read the original open thread post here.

I am writing this post on the back page of a book.  I won’t name the book lest the author feel offended that I’m using the blank pages in the back to record a blog post that I’ll type into the computer later.  The twins and Josh are still jumping waves in the water, but I came back to the beach blanket because I didn’t feel like getting wet.  But now watching them from a distance, I wonder if I am sucking every last bit of marrow from this trip.  On one hand, I don’t want to be in the water — I know this.  But on the other, I don’t want to miss out on anything.  So I’m not really relaxing because in an effort to come back to the beach blanket and relax in the sun, I am worrying that by relaxing, I am missing out on things.  And the cycle continues.

*******

Last night, when I lay down in the hotel bed, I thought about how hotels are a disgusting concept.  Other people have slept on this mattress, on these sheets (which have been washed… I hope… but still), with this blanket.  That person could have open, festering, oozing sores all over their legs, and now I am lying where their legs have been, their filthy, pus-covered legs.

And can we talk about restaurants?  Who thought restaurants were a good idea?  Hey, let’s all sit down and stick the exact same fork in our mouths, cleaned only by some hot water and soap between usage.  That very same fork could have been slathered with mayonnaise in its last go-around from plate to mouth.

I am very good at coming up with disturbing thoughts to distract me from what I really don’t want to think about which is the end of summer.

*******

There is a photograph by John Gaunt that won the Pulitzer in 1955 called “Tragedy by the Sea” which depicts a couple standing by the water’s edge after their child has been swept out into the ocean and drowned.  I don’t know why it is so hard to talk about this photograph.  I have written and crossed out a half-dozen sentences.  All I can say is this: I believe there are things that shouldn’t be photographed because only the subject of the photo can truly know if they are okay with that intrusion, and unless it is a self-portrait, the subject cannot actually be the one controlling the camera.  That picture depicts a moment that is too horrific to look at head-on.  I find that I can’t look at it.

I think about that photograph whenever we come to the beach and it is semi-empty.  You can take photos on a day like today and keep the shot close-in, and it looks as if you are alone on the beach.  I was standing by the water and this little boy was running ahead of his father, zig zagging in and out of the water without any thought to the consequences of the waves.  The father paused next to me as his son stopped running to splash in one place for a moment, and I commented that he was fearless.  The dad gave a small laugh and shrugged as if to say, “obviously” as the boy took off for deeper water again.

I don’t even know how this ties into everything else going through my mind except that it seemed important to note.

*******

I feel like I didn’t get enough time this summer.  It’s greed.  I can’t point to one day that we frittered away, but I feel as if I didn’t use my time well enough.  I am plagued by the idea of enoughness.  There was a new beach I heard about that we never found time to visit.  It feels like I didn’t do enough this summer if we never got to that beach.  And yet I can’t point at any particular day and say, “see, you wasted that time.”  Because every day felt full.  We saw friends and family and hung out at the pool (not enough though!) and did a brief stint at camp and took some trips.  We would have had to give up something in order to get to that beach, and I can’t imagine what we should have given up.

I am really not ready for school to begin.  Summer feels like dry sand that escapes between your fingers.  There’s no way to hold it, no way to build anything with it.

*******

The family next to us built this gorgeous car out of sand; one of those spectacular beach sculptures that took hours to make.  I watched the father direct the effort, alternating between pouring water and shaping sand.  The car was big enough for one person to sit inside behind the sand steering wheel.

Right before they left the beach, they whole family took great pleasure in stomping it back into a heap of sand.  “Stamp down that wheel!” the dad ordered his son who obliged, jumping up and down on the circular sand wheel until it disintegrated.  “And that other one!”

What a waste, I thought, watching them destroy what took hours to build and could have been enjoyed by others on the beach after they left.  It would be like writing this and then ripping the pages out of the back of the book and throwing them in the ocean instead of posting it.  Even if I don’t need these words or thoughts anymore, surely someone else can use them.

As I was writing this, a new family sat down in the vacated space.  They turned the remains into a sand hammock, and two teenage girls just slipped in to read their books.  The cycle of sand continues.

*******

[Written Now] This was a strange exercise; writing a blog post in the back of a book and transferring it to the screen now that I’m home and back in front of a computer.  Writing long-hand (beyond jotting down notes) feels a bit stilted now, yet I couldn’t control where I was when all these thoughts started tumbling around in my head.

The ChickieNob saw me writing in the book and sucked in her breath to scold me, “ooooooooooooh, you’re writing in a book!”

She’s seen me write in books dozens of times.  I am a firm believer in book writing, especially the margins.  It’s one of the things I hate about e-books.  I don’t just like to see my words when I look back at books; I like to see my handwriting.  Was I writing so quickly to get the thoughts down that they’re messy?  Did I take the time to neatly write down the note?

We’re always taught not to write in books, and there are a few that are too precious to me to cover in ink, but for the most part, I believe reading books should be a full body experience; not just utilizing the eyes or ears, but smelling the paper, touching the pen to the page.  Reading just the words on the page never feels like enough.  My whole being has to be in it.

There is this movie that I saw once that I always forget the name to and then remember at the most inopportune times (such as in a kayak hanging upside down in the water without a pen in sight).  The last time this occurred it was 1 am, and I was trying to remember the name instead of sleeping. I rolled over in bed and whispered the question to Josh who whispered back Big Fish because he is patient like that.  And I took a moment to write the movie name on a post-it note so it would be accessible the next time 1 am struck and I was struggling to remember the name.  My gift to Josh for his patience.

The thing I remember most about this movie was sobbing.  Crying so hard as I left the theater that I couldn’t breathe as we crossed the lot, and I had to pause outside the car to try to calm down before I could sit in the front seat.  It was one of those cries where you have a headache the rest of the day, and your lower lids puff out.  To this day, I can’t remember what upset me about that film, but in the moment, it felt like the hardest thing I had ever watched.

What I do remember from the movie is a witch with an eye that you could look into and see how you would die.  Not just how you would die, but you would see yourself in the moment, so you would know your age, whether you were in pain, if you were alone.  For years after seeing this film, I would think about that witch eye and wonder what I would do if I were facing that witch.  Would I ask her to lift her eye patch? (As you can imagine, an eye like that must be kept under a patch lest the woman buying a cantaloupe next to you in the produce aisle would learn as she glances your way that she is going to drown in a boating accident about two years from now.)  Would I be able to walk away from that knowledge knowing the information is right there for the taking?

Because I fear that I’m the sort who can’t really walk away from information, even in knowing that being cognizant of your death date could bring more stress than comfort.  If I saw that I was going to die in my nineties with Josh by my side, and the twins and their children gathered at the end of the bed, I might go through life a tad more relaxed.  But if I saw that I looked about a year older when the witch lifted up her patch, and I was dying alone, bleeding to death in an alleyway, I might not really enjoy the last twelve months of my life, especially those moments when I start to walk down an alleyway and realize exactly where I am.

A few friends and I were musing this weekend about whether or not we’d want to know how our infertility journey turned out before we started trying to conceive.  The obvious answer is yes because you’d save yourself time and heartache.  Of course I would have gone through treatments differently if I had known that I would have the twins.  Such a large portion of the stress of infertility is the not knowing and facing down the possibility that despite all the money, time, physical discomfort you throw at the problem, you might still end up not holding your child.  If there had been an RE with an eye patch whose eye could have told me that everything would turn out fine if I could just endure the two years, I would have taken that spoiler in a heartbeat.

The other side of this is much heavier.  Would you believe what you saw if you didn’t get the happy ending you wanted?  I’m not sure I could just shrug and accept my fate if I saw in the RE’s eyeball that I was still childless at 50.  And that seems ridiculous — to believe it if it tells me what I want to see and to ignore the information if it tells me something I don’t want to be true.  But I don’t think I could blindly let go of the dream of parenthood, even if an RE witch showed me that it wasn’t going to happen.  And how maddening would that be?  To be holding that information and ignoring that information?  At least when you’re trying and have failed cycles, you can know that you made the choices you made in the cycle to the best of your ability with what you knew in the moment.  I wouldn’t feel that same peace with those failed cycles if I knew that the RE witch’s eye had told me pointblank that it wasn’t going to work.

I thought about how much I dislike spoilers when I’m watching a show, even though I can’t help looking at them.  I read a bunch of spoilers for House and immediately regretted it afterward.  I wanted to unknow the plotlines and obviously couldn’t.  And it did make watching the show a little less enjoyable.  For me, that is.  I know there are others out there who love spoilers and can’t imagine watching a show without trying to guess how everything will turn out.  Perhaps it’s also fitting that I am not one for reading mysteries.  I don’t really like to spend the book trying to suss out what will happen next.  I prefer to have my stories fed to me.

But knowing whether or not I’d become a parent (and a parent to how many, or to know how many would not make it to term) goes beyond television spoilers or something akin to receiving a list of your Christmas presents on December 20th.  Because while that one Christmas would be difficult if you knew five days beforehand that you’d be receiving a pair of socks and a dictionary instead of the bicycle you thought Santa would bring, you would also know that there were still Christmases down the road, even if they felt simultaneously very far away.

Parenthood isn’t something transient, something that comes around yearly or a gift that will be consumed or used and set aside with the arrival of next shiny thing.  I would come into that vision that I saw in the RE witch’s eye knowing how I wanted to see myself in relation to the world; to the larger community of people around me.  And if I didn’t see what I wanted to see, I would need to reconcile that without having any time to process it, to see the information coming at me.  It’s not that the transformation would be any easier.  In the end, it wouldn’t be.  Changing course with how I thought life would unfold would be impossibly difficult regardless of whether I had years to come to that knowledge or seconds.  But if given the choice — and this is personal to me — I would take the slow creep over the hard slap.

As I’ve always said, infertility isn’t life threatening, but it is lifestyle threatening.  And I think I would drive myself mad knowing the information was right underneath that RE’s eye patch, and also know that seeing what was under there could either be the salvation or the undoing of me, with the undoing of me perhaps weighing heavier in the choice.

Which leads us to you.  If you were facing the witch RE, would you allow her to lift up her eye patch and show you your parenting future?  Would you believe what you saw or would the knowledge just drive you mad, making not peeking into the eye the better option?

The news popped into my email box while I was on the phone with a friend.  “Oh,” I cried out.  “Woody Harrelson is dead.”  We spent a moment reflecting on the career of Woody Harrelson and talked about how sad it must be for his family.  After the phone call, I realized that it was strange that the same news hadn’t popped up as a CNN or New York Times alert, so I Googled “Woody Harrelson” and found that nothing had been written about his death apart from social media.  Which is when I Googled “Woody Harrelson dead” and discovered the long-trending social media story declaring Woody Harrelson dead that won’t die itself.

Which begs the question: why does social media want to kill off Woody Harrelson?

He’s certainly not the only celebrity whose demise has been listed and then retracted on Twitter or Facebook time and time again.  Bill Cosby pops up a lot.  I’ve seen Eddie Murphy trend.  Vanilla Ice is still here even though he was reported gone.  Justin Bieber dies constantly.  Lindsay Lohan.  Paris Hilton.  Christian Slater.

It’s been mused on before that the creation of the 24-hour news cycle brings with it the picking over of every tiny details of a quote or moment in order to fill the time.  Where we used to get the big news all in one chunk at the beginning or end of the day, we now have commentator after commentator not only giving you the news but how you should process the news, how this news compares with that news, and moreover, giving us news that isn’t really news.

Has the 24-hour conversation on social media done the same thing?

While social media is great for disseminating news quickly and blogs are a wonderful tool for reflecting on events, are we also becoming a bit vulture-like, circling the skies looking for something to feast on verbally?  If the conversation lulls for a bit, do we start itching, thinking of the next thing to discuss to keep that human connection going?  And are we so hungry for a story that we create one if there isn’t something around to entertain us for the moment?

Sometimes I write because I have something to say, and sometimes I write because I want to talk.  In the same way that sometimes I eat because I’m hungry, and sometimes I eat because I feel like having food in my mouth.  So I definitely understand that desire to find something to write about.

Food for thought.

Cross-posted with BlogHer