self fufilled

There was a time, way back when, when the blogosphere was merely a twinkle in many a nerds' eye. Sure, people were blogging here and there, but the community was much smaller, tight. No one was making a living of their random musings, as amusing as they might've been. There were no "comments". We even had to pay for the opportunity to share our private worlds (at least I did - was I a sucker?). the conquering of mt.cool was my outlet, my little corner of the interwebs. It was fun for awhile, writing whatever came to mind, sometimes autobiographical, sometimes just scribbles.

When I put pen to paper (or finger to keyboard) on March 8, 2002 and wrote "Ortho Novum 777" it never occurred to me that what seemed hypothetical would someday become fact. I never considered that I might be dooming myself with a self-fufilling prophecy of infertility yet to be unmasked. At 22 years old, unmarried and happy, I typed the following:

You were 17 and your mom finally discovered you had "gone all the way" with your boyfriend. So she took you to her OBGYN (probably a greying family man, one you didn't really want investigating your "area"), and got you on THE PILL. And every fourth Sunday since, you've gone to Walgreens and refilled that same prescription.

Imagine: years later you find yourself in a happy and surprisingly healthy relationship, and after a TV-land proposal (over dinner, ring in the champagne) you decide to take the plunge and dive right into marital bliss. But as time goes on playing happy married couple gets a little old, as it tends to, so you start thinking about the gene pool and the possibility of your top-notch contribution. Imagine your prescription running out and actually deciding not to go to Walgreens and refill it like you've done every month for 9 years. Can you fathom that first night of freedom? How dangerous you must feel, vulnerable and literally unprotected.

But now imagine that after countless nights of reckless abandon (or meticulously timed thrusts) your belly doesn't begin to swell and nothing is kicking inside you. You don't have the cravings you hear about and that spare bedroom appears more vacant than before. You begin to feel lonely at parties and empty at home. Can you fathom the frustration of finding that all this time you've been protecting against nothing?

Can you imagine how much money you've spent on useless prescriptions all these years?

I was dead-on, right down to the age the hypothetical me would be when she started TTC. My young and inexperienced mind somehow able to understand some of the devastation of infertility. But I definitely got one thing wrong. It's not the money spent on precriptions passed that gets us worried. $30 a month is nothing. But add up the tab for one IVF cycle...