6DP3DT: Luteal Day 10

Things are Piling Up
I am supposed to have lunch with an old friend today, but I'm not quite sure I am ready to go out and mingle in the fertile world just yet. They're so naively optimistic that I would rather sit home and channel surf then endure the unknowing comments. I shirk from this interaction. I appreciate their upbeatness, but it's hard to counter the voices in my head that keep spewing out statistics to each cliche they spew out:

"You just need to relax!"
"Maybe you need to drink some wine?"
"Maybe you two just need to take a vacation?"
"Don't worry, it'll happen in time!"
"Maybe you should adopt...everyone seems to get pregnant after adopting!"
"You put how many embryos in? What if all of them grow!!!???"
"Don't worry. It'll happen when the time is right."
"Are you SURE you really want children?" (This one kills me. We've spent $25,000 trying to have a baby. YES, we are SURE we want a baby for chrissake!)
"Why don't you just get a cat instead?" (This came forth out of the mouth of my biological mother. Now you know why she gave me up for adoption?)

Each time I meet with someone and happen to mention our fertility ordeal I obtain yet a new unsettling comment to add to the list. They can't possibly know how our hopes were chopped up in little pieces in the first IVF cycle. We were naive then. We thought, no hoped, that first cycle would work. I guess we all go there, though, don't we? Julianna echoed this sentiment perfectly on her blog when she said, paraphrasing, "Everyone thinks they'll get pregnant on their first try."

I've also a tentative meeting, sometime today, with a lender friend who is going to teach me how to do loan processing, a means of filling in the dead time between house sales, but that, too, seems a bit much right now. He is more sympathetic to the cause...he seems to have a heartfelt viewpoint on the situation and takes care to not make comments that offend. But I still feel like invisible ropes have me chained to my computer chair and, when not there, to my sofa.

And although I have been laying low for six days, you think I would have kept up on things business wise. I have a home office. I should be able to get things done rather effectively. But no. I've got bills to pay, insurance issues to deal with, and I haven't touched any of it in the last week. I have been reckless.

My desk has a stack of EOBs from Health Net that are rather curious. A lady by the name of Julie Field is a patient over at Rosalind Franklin University, the lab that Dr. B uses for his tests. So Julie's lab bills and other things have been forwarded to Health Net using my subscriber ID number. I cancelled Health Net as of March 1st, but RFU continues to submit bills to Health Net on her behalf. I keep calling RFU about this, sending them faxes with copies of the EOBs, trying to help resolve this situation...but the EOBs keep showing up. The poor girl must be wondering why none of her bills are being paid. I'm sure she is near to freaking out by now.

And that's not the only weirdness. A doctor or provider by the name of Mher Babajanyan, of Diagnostic Service Group in San Jose, is now billing my insurance for $1900 worth of radiology work. Who this man is, or his company, I have no clue. But I am starting to feel that I'm being subjected to some bizarre form of health insurance identity theft. Imagine if you will, that you're a person that needs some tests to be done, or a procedure, and that you don't have any insurance. You don't care if you have a long relationship with the provider. You just need a test, a prescription, a quick fix, and you're off and running. But you're lacking insurance. No matter. Just run off and steal someone else's health insurance information and get the work done? Doctor's often don't bother to ask for identification. It's an easy scam. I only wonder if that is part of what is going on with my insurance.

On the 2WW side of things...there are still no overwhelming symptoms of impending pregnancy other than a mild cramp here and there and I wonder if that is all in my head at this point? My friend JM said that she didn't really have any signs at all with her first one until about 14 or 15 days and then it was some nausea that hit her right after she got the pregnancy test results in. She wonders, like me, if it was more mental than anything due to its timely appearance after the phone call.

Coloratura said she didn't have any symptoms at all for the first FOUR WEEKS.

One can go mad reading the posts on the boards of women touting their oh-so-obvious signs of pregnancy...and then looking at oneself and concluding, I can't possibly be pregnant because I'm clearly lacking, sign A, sign B, and sign X..."

So I am going to try to stop obsessing and just go with the process as much as I can. I don't feel that I'm stressing, but I do tend to be oblivious to my own stress at times. I don't think it's there, but I think I've lived such a stressful life that when it eases up just the tiniest bit, I suddenly feel "stress free", but in reality it's still there.

Not obsessing doesn't mean that I'm going to stop laying low and taking it easy...but it does mean that I'm going to try analyzing the hell out of every twinge.

We'll see how far I get.

I'd really love to see some serious spotting right about now.