The Annual Christmas Letter

06 December 2010

It’s that wonderful time of the year when all the Christmas letters begin to arrive. You know the ones, where friends and family update on the exciting happenings of the year. Often they include family photos of chubby cheeked children growing bigger and bigger.

My Christmas cards pale in comparison. Usually they have a photograph on the front of some local scenery, and a brief greeting on the inside.

It got me thinking... what if I actually wrote about our year without holding back?

Dear Fertile Friends,
Wow, 2010 has been quite the ride! After 2 years of trying for a family the old fashioned way, this year was chocker block full of the fertility treatment sampler.

The new year began with fertility pills (Clomid). These innocent looking little numbers were loaded with side effects (hot flashes, moodiness, and hormonal nausea). Last winter brought the Olympics to Vancouver and brought us our own sex olympics. It was an endurance event alright! Hubs and I were on strict Dr.‘s orders to have daily intercourse for 7 days straight for 3 months. Sounds great on the surface, but I would challenge you to actually try it and get back to us with how it goes. Well, Clomid brought me morning sickness, without the pregnancy to go along with it, so it was abandoned.

Next up was an exploratory surgery (yes, they still had no idea what was wrong). So I was opened up, scoped in, up, and around, scraped out, and infused with dye... some little issues were discovered and minor repairs made, but none of this was thought should be causing so much difficulty. So after recovering from the spring cleaning, we proceeded along to the next step.

Summer inseminations it was. Now intercourse was with a lab cup for him and an ultrasound wand for me. Summer vacations? Forget it, we needed to be close to the clinic or blood lab for all of the appointments and to save money to pay for the treatments. We did manage to sneak in some local camping trips with my injections in tow.

When 3 of those failed, we figured we’d round out the year with a fall IVF cycle for good measure. Well that bombed too and despite the $4000 I injected into myself, my ovaries crapped out and laughed back at us. Now we've been benched for a few months to collect ourselves and pick up the pieces.

So that was a long way of saying we are having a childless Christmas again this year. Since we don’t have a family, we don't have any family photos to include, but I'm enclosing some photos from my laparoscopy. It might look nice on your fridge, sort of like abstract ART.

Please wish us a happy and fertile new year for 2011. More surgery and IVF are on tap, so you can look forward to more tales in next year’s letter. We will never say no to cash gifts. Sorry we won’t be sending you anything this year, we are completely broke. We even cheaped out on stamps and are sending this by e-mail.

Merry Christmas to you and yours!

Your infertile friends,
SD & Hubs