This is the 27th installment of Barren Advice. You can ask questions that are fertility or non-fertility related.

Barren Advice is posted each Tuesday-ish. 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 am looking into acupuncture. It is pretty expensive, so I would like advice from you and others on the prospects of acupuncture working for me. I have been diagnosed with PCOS and Clomid has not been successful in making me ovulate. I will be moving on soon probably to injectables and IUI cycles. Any help, any pros/cons any success stories involving acupuncture, etc. would be great! Thanks!

—He Resoreth My Soul

Unlike other alternative therapies (rubbing yam cream on your inner thighs anyone?), acupuncture has been well-studied in regards to infertility. And that could be because while it’s alternative for us, it is mainstream for a large portion of the world. And NIH simply cannot deny its success rate even though they state that it is “difficult to reconcile with contemporary biomedical information.” In other words, American doctors can’t figure out how it works based on our breadth of knowledge but they do know that it does work.

And, at the very least, it falls in the “can’t hurt” category.

Most of the studies on acupuncture and infertility have focused on IVF rather than IUI. Fertility and Sterility has released articles on utilizing acupuncture to increase the success of IVF. Acupuncture benefits have been studied for cycles where treatment fell during the luteal phase (after ovulation) as well as on the day of transfer during IVF. In both cases, pregnancy rates were higher for those who utilized acupuncture over the control group who received a placebo (non-strategically placed needles? Ouch!).

Acupuncture has also been studied in regards to male factor infertility. A recent study reported through National Institutes of Health (NIH) saw significant increases in sperm production after acupuncture was used and concluded: “acupuncture may be a useful, nontraumatic treatment for males with very poor sperm density, especially those with a history of genital tract inflammation.” Another study also reported by NIH found that not only sperm quality increased after acupuncture, but also fertilization increased.

So nothing specifically with PCOS and IUIs from a medical study, but certainly enough anecdotal evidence on the Web to warrant trying it.

All that said, just as you do diligence to find a good reproductive endocrinologist, make sure you’re comfortable with your acupuncture practitioner. In other words, go with someone licensed. The best bet is to contact your local Resolve chapter because they have lists of recommended practitioners for everything from reproductive endocrinology to acupuncturists who specifically work with infertility.

If you’ve utilized acupuncture in addition to injectable with IUI cycles, share your story below.

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. 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.

Every night around 11 p.m., right as Josh is trying to watch the Daily Show, I ask him if he wants to talk about my feelings. The answer is usually no. I thought I’d set that in the title just in case your answer is also no–either because you’re also watching the Daily Show or because you simply don’t feel like hearing about my feelings.

My feelings. Does anyone else talk about their feelings as if they are tangible entities separate from your body?

This first feeling contains children. Feel free to skip this one if you’re not up to reading it. I was the room mother last week. As room mother, I got to go to school on Friday and read a book to the class and my child got to choose the songs we sang at circle time and sit at a special snack table. It’s sort of the preschool equivalent to winning an Oscar except that every child gets to have their week.

Everyone probably has a moment in their head that they keep returning to–an image of being in this moment–when they can’t conceive. A moment they are striving to reach. For some it might be a first Christmas or bringing the baby to a big family reunion or something of that ilk.

And my moment was being the room mum.

When I imagined myself as room mum, I was actually picturing my own mother as room mum for my brother’s class back when he was in preschool. We have a video from that day of my brother sitting next to my mother while she read the class a book about a little fish named Otto. So when I pictured myself, it was with an early 80s haircut and a slightly exasperated look as my spirited child inserted extra words between every line of the book.

The date snuck up on me and I was wholly unable to absorb the idea that I had finally reached my moment. Isn’t that bizarre? I entered the room and sat down in the circle with my Fancy Nancy book. I sang the same songs that I learned in preschool and then was led to the special snack table in the front of the room.

And then it hit me as I sat down. I was there–I was right there in the moment I had been thinking about since 2001. And it’s 2009. That is a very long time to wait for a particular moment. I hate to be all dramatic, but I really felt like an internal wound had healed. There, I did it, I got all swoony and dramatic. But that’s exactly how it felt.

Which leads us to feeling number two.

I got home and realized that it was time to throw out all of my teaching materials. I kept a few documents on disc and I packed up a box of writing books. But everything else went into the garbage. It took two trips to the dump to haul away a nine year teaching career. Middle school, high school, and college. I really can’t say why I thought it was time or why I think I won’t go back to teaching. At least not teaching the subjects I was teaching.

There was a lot of hurt in those boxes. It hurt to know they were downstairs and it hurt to open them and look at my career laid out on pieces of papers. On thousands of pieces of paper. I have no regrets about leaving teaching so I can’t fully explain it. I threw them out while Josh was out of the house. I felt like I needed to do it alone. I dumped the first box angrily. And then I sat with the second box opened for a while feeling this awful wave of regret. And then I simply closed the boxes and pushed them over to the garbage pile and saved only a single picture of myself at a random graduation, my acceptance letter for my last teaching position, and a song I wrote about my students on a school trip. The hardest thing to throw out was this hand-drawn window covering that was behind my desk for six years. It was interlocking shells. Everyone would come in my room and comment on it and when I left, a fellow teacher asked if I would leave it behind. I thought I wanted it so I packed it and it felt sad to throw it out.

I have a lot more thoughts about things we threw out from the storage room as well as an impromptu trip to Ikea. I think the whole purging and redecorating are baby steps towards something. The point is not entirely clear so I think I need to still sit with it for a few days.

Housekeeping:

If you signed up for the IComLeavWe list and you haven’t been moved up to the main post (and it has been over 24 hours), there is a good reason. You don’t have the current pink icon on your blog. There are about 11 people in that position right now. Why do you have to add the icon? Well, it’s two-fold. One, it gives more people a chance to find the list and join along. But the more important reason is that there is a long gap between sign-up and the start date for the commenting week. The icon on your blog serves as a visual reminder since I can’t send out an email to everyone as I do with the book club when the post date is approaching. Seeing it there better ensures that people who sign up also participate when the time comes to do the commenting. So make sure you put on the icon either before you leave your comment or immediately after. And if you just checked the list and realized you’re not on it, add the icon and let me know it’s up.

I am still working on the Creme de la Creme. I’m much slower getting blurbs up on the list that come in after the due date (this year, it was December 19th). Sorry.

Bloglines seems to not be updating or finding a feed for Lost and Found (it may also be the case for this blog too, though I’ve only heard about in regards to Lost and Found). I’m not sure why it’s not working and I haven’t gotten a clear answer on what is wrong with the RSS feed or why it suddenly stopped working. I don’t have a great solution beyond the email sign-up (it’s on the right sidebar). It will send you a link to the current post every afternoon. But other than that, I’m not sure how to fix it because I’ve tried everything they’ve suggested.

Thank you for listening to my housekeeping items and my feelings. Perhaps I won’t need to bother Josh tonight.

Show and Tell is wasted on elementary schoolers. Join several dozen bloggers weekly to show off an item, tell a story, and get the attention of the class. In other words, this is Show and Tell 2.0. Everyone is welcome to join, even if you have never posted before and just found out about Show and Tell for the first time today. So yank out a photo of the worst bridesmaid’s dress you ever wore and tell us the story; show off the homemade soup you cooked last night; or tell us all about the scarf you made for your first knitting project. Details on how to participate are located at the bottom of this post.

Let’s begin.

I am completely stealing this from Julie from A Little Pregnant. She started (I think she started?) a new list called 15 Things about You (get it, instead of 25 Things about Me). Since it would be sort of impossible to click around and guess about blog readership, I’m using my Facebook group to compile my list of 15 things. If you want to join me on Facebook, make sure you include your blog name in your friend request since I won’t accept people I don’t know at all.

1. 5 of my Facebook friends have their name on my Ketubah (a Jewish marriage contract).

2. I always imagine one person on the list as a cigarette-smoking Barbie even though I now know what she looks like.

3. One friend lived in the same building in Sunderland, MA but we didn’t know each other back then.

4. I had a secret crush on one friend back when we were in school.

5. One friend is the greatest travel partner in the world. Er…I mean, after Josh.

6. One person on the list stole my ring when we were five years old.

7. I was with two people on the list the night A.W. lost her virginity in the next room.

8. When I was 8 years old, I ran through the wishing tree at camp (you were granted one wish by the wishing tree each summer). I wished that when I grew up, a certain boy at camp would kiss me. I took this photo after I told my friends about my wish. They all told me I was stupid and wasted my wish because that boy was never ever going to kiss me because he was so much older than we were.

I didn’t see him again for eight years and we didn’t keep in touch. One day, we ended up back in the same place at the same time and he kissed me while we were sitting on a rock in the river. He didn’t remember me, though I put together who he was about 3 minutes before he kissed me. I tell you this story now because he is a friend of mine on Facebook.

9. One person on the list made me a gorgeous ceramic pomegranate necklace.

10. One person on the list knows the nickname my husband had for me on his old blog.

11. 6 people on the list visited the twins when they were in the NICU. 5 of them are family.

12. 5 people on the list made me love Tina Turner.

13. One person on the list was on the cover of the Onion because I didn’t feel like having my picture taken that night and she was overseas and therefore couldn’t protest. The photo I chose of her was taken a few seconds after she fell through the cushions on our trick sofa. Our friend at the Onion needed a picture of an angry-looking girl.

14. One person on the list is the reason I went to BlogHer last summer.

15. One person on the list has a defunct blog that I miss greatly. Sometimes I click over even though I know she has stopped updating it. I hate it when blogs close.

What are you showing today?

Click here or scroll down to the bottom of this post if this is your first time joining along (hint: link to the permalink for the post, not the main url for your blog and use your blog’s name, not your name). The list is open from now until late Tuesday night and a new one is posted every week.

I didn’t think that I’d ever say this since the start of the relationship was so seeped in infatuation, but the addition of Facebook has been the straw that has broken the online camel’s back. There are now way too many spaces to communicate or read and in doing so, too many words slip through the cracks.

There’s email–I have three accounts–the normal one, one for family and a few friends, and one for volunteer work/listservs. There is Google Reader which can grow by 100 posts or more per day. If I take off a few days to do a big work project, I come back to several hundred unread posts. There have been times when I’ve had to declare bankruptcy and start from scratch. Oh and there are my own blogs–LFCA and here–that require upkeep. Not just posts, but updating the blogroll daily or pruning dead links.

There is Twitter–and I should warn that I rarely remember to look at the @replies so it is a terrible way to reach me–and now emails coming in through Facebook. I am a huge lover of Facebook, though I think I love it because I use it sparingly. I don’t see every status update. I tend to turn it on and off throughout the day so I catch whatever is on at the time and then I usually go around to a few profile pages to see what friends and family are up to over the course of the week. But please don’t count on me to have seen an update–I beg you to email it out if it’s important.

Oh, and then on top of this is the fact that I squeeze my computer usage into certain hours of the day. Too many places to check and too much information to read. I am going into overload.

Therefore, I am stating it here: the best way to reach me, communicate with me, get me to do something is to send it via email. Or, if you don’t need support from me but want it from the greater community, put in on the LFCA.

The item I love the post is the LFCA because even on days that I can’t get to Google Reader, I see a lot of stuff that is happening across the blogosphere as I put it together. Please send in your news–I’m sure I’m not the only one who uses it to play catch-up from time to time. Don’t wait for someone else to send it in; just fill out the form. Each day, there are a few cases where I’ll get the same news in triplicate. I just delete the two additional ones and post the news. Much better to receive it six times in one day than to not receive it at all. And if you want support, it’s there for the taking.

And, as a public service announcement, if you are reading it, please take the time to click through and leave a few comments. Choose a section that speaks to you in the moment and make a point to click on a few items and leave comments.

I think I balance email, blog reading, blog writing, and occasional Facebook/Twitter well. Trying to keep all open at once has been head-exploding. How do you balance your online time? Are there sites that have helped you organize the multitude of places where information is coming in?

Here is the master list for the seventeenth tour of the Barren Bitches Book Brigade. What is the Barren Bitches Book Brigade? It’s a book club from the comfort of your own living room. The book club is conducted entirely online and open to anyone (male or female) in the infertility/pregnancy loss/assisted conception/adoption/parenting-after-infertility world (as well as any other related category I inadvertently left off the list). It is called a book tour because everyone reads the same book and then poses a question to the group. Participants choose a few questions to answer and then post their response on their blog. Readers can jump from blog to blog, commenting along the way. We read both fiction and non-fiction.

Anyone can jump aboard–it’s a book club where you can drop in and out as you wish and all in the community are welcome.

Book: Never Let Me Go
Author: Kazuo Ishiguro
Start Date: January 21
Question Due: March 4
Question List Sent Out: March 6
Post Date: March 9
(need an explanation of how a book tour works? Click here to go to a list of posts on the past book tours as well as information about future tours.)
Something New: the participants on this tour will choose the next book and will vote on it right before Thanksgiving.

About Never Let Me Go: It is impossible to describe the book without ruining the surprise and hopefully, you will not Google it or look up information before starting to read it because it is best if you go in knowing nothing, but in case you need a reason to read it, it has won a lot of awards and pretty much rocked my world.

Barren Bitches Book Brigade List (The blogs below are participating on this current book tour. On March 9, you’ll be able to jump from post to post to read a plethora of opinions and thoughts on Never Let Me Go. I will keep adding to this list until 11 p.m. on March 4. The list is currently open)

Stirrup Queens and Sperm Palace Jesters
Slaying, Blogging, Whatever…
The Road Less Travelled
An Unwanted Path
Baby Smiling in Back Seat
The Fertile Infertile
Mommy In Waiting
Aurelia Ann
Destined to be an Old Woman with No Regrets
Dittmer Digest
So It Goes

Not on the list and want to join? Drop me an email at thetowncriers@gmail.com. You can add yourself up until 11 p.m. on March 4.

How the book tour works:

(1) leave a comment or send me an email (thetowncriers@gmail.com) saying that you’re interested in participating. I need your blog name, blog url, and email address.

(2) read Never Let Me Go by March 4 (or at least enough of it in order to ask a question to the group).

(3) create a single question that would kick off a discussion (in other words, any question that leads to more than a “yes” or “no” answer where someone can express their opinion) and mail it to me on March 4 (or any time beforehand). I will send you a reminder email close to the date. Click here to see sample questions from tour #4.

(4) on March 6, I will send you a list of possible questions. Everyone will choose 3 questions off the list and answer them in a blog entry.

(5) on March 9, people will begin to post their entry. Each day, I will post a linked list of all the people putting up their entry that day so people can go around and read the entries and comment (start a discussion back and forth in the comments section). Reading the entries and commenting on the posts is the best part of the tour–by the end of the week, you should have a comment from every participant (and maybe even a few new permanent blog readers).