How Fantasy Football is About to Get my Clinic FIRED

I am passionately opposed to Fantasy Football, even though I am a rabid fan of the NFL. I think it’s actually the official Dumbest Thing I’ve Ever Fought With My Husband about. I hate Fantasy Football because it changes the game, which is supposed to be a team sport. And fans are supposed to be loyal devotees of ONE TEAM that they have grown up loving, and perhaps a secondary team that they developed affection for in college or whatever. Anyway, in Fantasy Football, fans get to pick and choose players from the entire NFL for their make believe teams, and their points are added up from each individuals yards or whatever.

Suddenly, people don’t feel so bad when their real team loses if their fantasy team wins — they might even have players on their fantasy team from the team playing their real life team that week. Fan fail. And players are well aware of this, making them even more statistics-obsessed, selfish players. Player fail.

In (seriously) related news, I cheated on my fertility clinic yesterday. And, although I genuinely feel guilty about it, I am this close to running off with a shiny new fertility clinic.

The problem is, and has always been, that I love my doctor. She and I shared about my lowest point, when she told me I have POF, and that I would be very unlikely to ever have a child who was genetically related to me. In that awful moment, she was the perfect doctor, sent down from heaven to be straightforward and not try to comfort me or hug me or anything icky like that. I wanted someone to just cut the crap and tell me the deal. She did that, and she gave me her email address, to boot. I love her.

I know she is knowledgeable, and I do still totally trust her. There’s just this little matter of statistics. My clinic’s statistic SUCK. Their success rate for donor egg IVF is about 15 percent lower than the average.

Initially, the sucky stats didn’t bother me much, due to my anti-Fantasy Football worldview. The last thing I wanted was a clinic that was obsessed with stats and tried to manipulate them, by turning away older women or refusing to do elective single embryo transfers.

Yesterday, though, it started to bother me A LOT. How could their numbers be so low? We are paying so much money, not to mention the emotional investment we are making — wouldn’t we be crazy to select a clinic with a low success rate?

Also, I started to contemplate doing our cycle in Boston, where our donor lives. That would actually lower the cost of the cycle somewhat, and there are several very good clinics there.

So, I called my donor coordinator and left a very straightforward message, saying that we were suddenly concerned about the low success rate and wanted to talk to her about it. It has been 24 hours, and the silence is deafening …

Killin’ Time by Writin’ Checks

So far, we have spent $5,500 on Project: Knock Me Up. We have skin in the game. We are in. We have selected a donor, who I will write about soon, and let it be known, we are ready to rock. Now, all we have to do is NOT DIE OF ANTICIPATION.

It is becoming clear to me that, for us, making babies is uncomfortably similar to renovation one’s kitchen. It will take roughly twice as long as your worst time estimate, and you will be amazed at the ways you will find to spend more than you ever dreamed along the way.

My hope, my dream, was to get some embryos up in this uterus by the end of the year. The reasons for that were many: we plan to leave our jobs and excellent health insurance so that P can go back to school, my work could downgrade my excellent health insurance Jan. 1, and I WANNA BABY NOW NOW NOW. Yeah, patience isn’t really my thing.

So, now that we plunked down $5,000 to the donor agency and $500 to the fertility clinic, delays are a-mounting, and I can see that this is about how it’s going to go.

Even if everything went exactly how I wanted, there would be miserable periods of waiting. The most famous is, of course, the two week wait between the transfer and pregnancy test. Oh, and the 9 months until we know for sure that we have a healthy baby. So, here’s where I’m going with this: in the short time that I have spent waiting so far, I have made one decision. I will be hopeful. I will believe in the process. I will celebrate every step as a step toward building our family. If it doesn’t work, I will be crushed, but I will not protect myself from that.

I don’t know how many times in my life I will get to think that I might be pregnant. I don’t know how many times I will get to share that little secret with my husband, and feel all of those possibilities in my body. From this moment in history, I don’t know if I will every get to give birth or be pregnant, but I am pretty sure I will have at least one shot to try to conceive and one little period where I can dream that it worked. I’ll take it.