More crazy behaviour

I'm not, as my nana would say, in the best of fettles at the moment.

A colleague and my best friend from university have just announced pregnancies - in my mate's case, it's her second.

I have done the gracious congratulations and I am happy for her, inasmuch as you can apply the word "happy" to a situation that makes you feel like you are being stabbed repeatedly in the throat with an ice pick.

I don't mean to sound like a bad friend - and in fact, it is worth saying that she is an exceptionally good one to me, because she broke the news as she knew I'd prefer her to, in an email which ended with her saying that I wasn't to feel pressured to send my congrats and that she'd understand if I needed some time before getting in touch.

Unfortunately, I read the email shortly after arriving at work one morning, and had to repair to the toilets to cry for twenty minutes before being able to control myself, but she wasn't to know that. The thoughtfulness of allowing me the privacy and reflection time afforded by an email was an extremely graceful gesture on her part. After all, she has nothing to be sorry for. This literally is just the way the cookie crumbles.

No, one of the things that makes me sad is that these circumstances have inevitably meant we've grown apart a bit. I still love her dearly and deeply, but we don't see enough of each other and try as we both might to empathise with the other, there's a slight lack of understanding between us now that can't be helped by either of us.

I can't really fathom her frustrations with the tiredness and difficulty of motherhood any more than she can imagine what it's like to yearn for pregnancy so badly that it physically hurts.

Before all this we always shared everything and went through lots of life-changing experiences together, not least preparing for our weddings, which were less than a year apart. I remember us traipsing round what felt like every wedding dress shop in Scotland and northern England, having an unseemly amount of fun. We both assumed that sharing baby stuff and all that went with it would naturally follow. But it feels like things have worked out very differently for me than they have for her.

Anyway, there was that, and then a day or two later a colleague made her announcement. She's not a colleague I know well enough that she knows about my situation, so she broke the news with chipper joy and I didn't know how to make my face make the right shapes and my mouth form the right words.

I think she was puzzled by my frosty reaction and I've agonised over whether to email her and explain myself, but have decided against it in the end. I'm sick and tired of feeling like I have to make excuses, as if I'm some irksome toddler, for a situation beyond my control that I hate, hate, hate and never wished for.

But the thing that has vexed me more than anything else of late was the remarks made by a TV presenter last Friday night, which saw the screening of the UK's biennial charity telethon Comic Relief.

The woman in question - the culprit - was Davina McCall, a woman who found fame presenting the braindead shitfest that is Big Brother. She has three children, or twelve, or eighty-seven - I can never remember as she appears to be pregnant every time she graces the screen. I'm amazed they haven't televised her squirting one out during the annual Big Brother bonanza. After all, it must be like shelling peas by now.

Anyway. Davina was presenting a link about children - babies, mostly - in Africa dying of diseases like malaria and AIDS. It was deeply, deeply upsetting television. After the film ended, up pops fucking Davina with: "This call goes out to all the mothers out there. It takes a mother to understand the suffering of these children. Come on, mums, we're all in the same boat..."

It went on and on, and I started to feel like something was crawling up my spine and setting each vertebrae on fire as it went. Because what the fuck? So because I'm barren I'm not entitled or expected to feel any sympathy at the sight of a baby dying in agony? How DARE she?

This sort of idiocy is voiced quite often, though. It's amazing, the stupidity of people. It always happens when some sort of dreadful crime is reported - a child's murder or sexual assault, say - you get these muppets showing up in TV news footage uttering ridiculous statements like "Speaking as a parent..." as if to imply that everyone without children must be sat at home silently applauding the criminal. It's sheer nonsense. It's insensitive and just basically ignorant.

I ought to pause for breath. I'm hammering the shit out of this keyboard.

My period appears to be on its way. I'm on day 37 and actually got a bit hopeful last week that our Parisian love-in might have borne fruit. I bought a two-pack of pregnancy tests in Boots after a lunchtime "craving" sent me in search of a vanilla bean smoothie, and did one of them that night, which allowed me to retain some hope by attributing the negative result to the weak evening wee brew.

By yesterday morning, still with no symptoms when really I should have sore boobs and brown drizzle by now, I did another one and got into a complete fury when it was negative. I actually managed to snap it into three pieces, sustaining minor cuts to my hand in the process.

It's coming to something when you think that a single pink line in a plastic window looks smug.

My plan is to give Clomid a whirl when my period eventually does descend. It can't hurt, and I clearly haven't ovulated since this cycle has grown to epic lengths and those tend to be anovulatory.

I just hope they don't grill me too much about my emotional wellbeing when I present myself at the clinic. I'm too near tears on this most of the time to be able to lie convincingly. And while I very much think I should explore the avenue of infertility counselling, I don't particularly want to stall the process any further by making the clinic think I need to be psychoanalysed before commencing medication.

It's just as well they can't see me in my own time, mind you. I do the strangest things. If the destructiveness with the pregnancy test above isn't odd enough, try this for size as a parting shot: I had a bath an hour or so ago. Standing up to dry myself gives me a full frontal view in my bathroom mirror. I stood there and sang the following in a crazy falsetto to my lower abdomen whilst whacking it with the towel: "Look at you, you pathetic piece of shit that doesn't work."

Now that's not right.

The perils of breaking my testing routine

By golly, I'm cross about loads of things just now.

In the main, as ever, my rage has to do with my own body. That period I mentioned last time left after just one day, and is yet to return. I feel bloated and "unclean", in that I feel like I've not had a good clear-out for a bit.

I got spectacularly drunk on Friday night, and ended up maudlin and weepy about various things. I also ended up very hungover on Saturday. More hungover - and certainly more sick to my stomach - than I deserved to be for the amount I'd drunk. When I was still hugging the porcelain at 7pm, hubby suggested - as he is wont to do when I display ANY symptom more dramatic than a mild headache - that perhaps I was pregnant.

I dismissed such tomfoolery as the musings of a madman, but it did get me thinking that it was weird to have bleeding at 26 days and then ZIP. So, like a foolish bitch, I bought a test. (Can you sense where this is going?)

Anyway, a horrid experience ensued this morning. I actually watched the progress of the dye across the windows of the test - as I've said before, I tend not to do this, preferring to pee on the test then quickly hide it under a piece of loo roll so I can enjoy what I like to call "the shower of hope". (That's before emerging, reviewing the blank windows, and collapsing onto "the toilet of despair", naturally.)

This morning I didn't. I sat on the loo and stared dolefully at the windows as the dye crept across them. And then nearly swallowed my tongue. Because - it was a ClearBlue test, the kind that forms a blue cross if it's positive - both axes of the cross started to show.

I was honestly nearly sick. Hubby had a day off today and he was still asleep at this point. I started preparing my speech, which I decided was going to begin with the words: "You need to wake up FUCKING FAST!"

For whatever reason - incredulity, I think - I decided to leave it and have the shower, which, going by past experiences, should have been "the shower of joy" but actually felt more like "the shower of bone-melting terror at what I might have done to this potential baby by having so much white wine on Friday night".

But then I got out and looked again. This time I was met with the familiar sight of a totally blank emptiness where the vertical cross should be. Holding it to the light and the weak dawn in the window revealed it to be utterly negative.

I didn't cry. I don't think I'd ever believed the line in the first place. I just disposed of the stick, got dressed and went to work without saying a word to my still sleeping hubby. I did look up false positives on t'interweb and learned that often the line "lights up" as the dye makes its initial progress across the windows. Indeed, it's something I'd probably have experienced before now had I not adopted this silly test-taking routine.

I shall be going back to said routine, though. I can't go through that again.

Some dark nights of the soul

So I'm not doing so well. My period still hasn't come and coping with the will it/won't it stress is becoming increasingly tough.

It's 35 days now. Tomorrow it'll be a week late. I'm really, really scared to do another test. After the last one, I sort of swore off the evils of pregnancy tests as it's just too depressing. I can feel my pee retreating back up my urethra every time I even consider the one remaining in my bathroom.

I'm still so desperately hopeful. This month really feels like a last chance saloon, for so many reasons. It's the last cycle before it's been two years. It's the last cycle before the dreaded HSG. And sometimes I think that it's the last cycle before I totally lose my mind.

Symptom-wise, it's really difficult to tell whether I have anything to hope for or whether it's just pre-menstrual stuff. I've got really sore boobs. They're spiky and sort of prickly when I lie on my tummy. If I lean over when I'm not wearing a bra, they reeeeally ache. And leaping about on Easter Monday doing my Elle McPherson video (yes, my life is THAT tragic) I had to hold them.

Two mornings this week, including this morning, I've woken up utterly convinced that my period has come. It generally comes overnight - I wake up with cramps and then when I go to the loo, there it is. This morning I woke at 6am with dull cramps coming in waves. They weren't as bad as usual but I also felt a sort of wetness, and I was just certain. I was like a dead woman walking heading to the bathroom. But there was nothing there.

It's got to the point that every time I go to the loo, I sit there praying and begging whatever powers exist for it not to have come. Then when I wipe and there's nothing, it's like I've received a stay of execution. I'm sure I sound ridiculously over-dramatic, but that's how I feel.

I've had some bleak nights this week. I've gone through five or six nights of having really vivid dreams. Some are nightmares - hubby and I have been watching the box set DVD of Twin Peaks, and it's pant-wettingly scary. In fact as I sit typing this, in broad daylight, I'm trying not to glance out the door and down the stairwell as I'm pretty sure the evil BOB will be climbing towards me if I do.

Other dreams are just weird. Last night I dreamt that my mum and I were on a weird journey where we had to clamber over all these round hillocks. Not hills or mountains - just these odd grassy knolls that kept appearing in our path. It was hard work but after each hillock we'd arrive at a nice house and be able to rest before having to climb over another one. If any aspiring dream interpreters can shed some light on what in the name of giddy fuck this might mean, I'd be interested to hear it!

My period must be on its way. I mean, it just must be. Right now I've still got the grumbly feeling low in my tummy. I bet it'll come tomorrow.

Why can't I get pregnant? Why? I'm so very, very sick of all this.

Hope is a good thing, maybe the best of things...

After a fantastic reunion weekend in my university town, and two days into a restorative week off work, I find myself in the unfamiliar position of feeling quite good.

The weekend comprised lots of reminiscing, lots of good food, a decent amount of gin (but not so much that the days were blighted by hangovers), and a healthy dose of proper laughing. The fact I've returned home to a week's holiday rather than to the usual routine means I've held on to the happy hormones, too, instead of going back to my ranty, miserable self immediately.

As a result, things have been calm between hubby and me, and I find myself in this weirdly positive frame of mind. I can't really put it into words other than that I feel we've turned a corner of some sort.

Which is daft, as we haven't - still no HSG summons or other correspondence from the hospital, so we're no further forward. It's looking like we'll have to cancel our April follow-up at the clinic, since they told me not to darken their door again till I'd had the HSG.

So why the optimism? I'm stupidly trying to over-analyse what's probably just a serotonin hangover from a fun weekend. But the Thing - the Thing I'm thinking all the time but have avoided saying for four paragraphs of drivel because I'm scared to voice it - is that I feel really, properly hopeful this month, for the first time in ages.

What I mean is that I feel genuine excitement that it might have worked. I obviously feel what you could broadly label as "hope" every month, but usually it's competing with my own deep-down knowledge that my period's on its way. This cycle feels different, and I want to believe so much that it feels different because I feel different, and that I feel different because, actually, I'm pregnant.

God, typing those words is so amazing... if only it were true.

OK, so the logistics. Right now I'm 23 days into my cycle. Were I following a 28-day pattern, my period would be due on Easter Sunday. (What IS it with my cycle and big calendar events, by the way? Luckily I'm not religious so Easter Sunday means little to me other than an excuse for a roast dinner at my mum's and some chocolate. But even so, that's Christmas Day, my birthday and Easter that have coincided with cycle day 28 so far this year. I daren't count forward to our June wedding anniversary...)

Have I ovulated? No idea. TMI alert: I did notice, about 10 days ago, some suspiciously egg-whitey stuff that COULD have been the "cervical mucus" they tell you is a sign. But I symptom spot so dementedly often that it's hard to recall with any degree of accuracy what was real, what was imagined and what was simply dreamt. I found an old ovulation test yesterday and peed on it out of interest - it came up with a faint line to show I had some luteinising hormone, but it wasn't darker than the control line.

Have we tried enough? Well, we've not been as rampant as last month - basically because we're both still knackered - but we've managed it every three/four days or so between my period drying up and now. However, last week, we did it on Thursday night and then, with me being away, not again till last night, so there's a good chance we missed ovulation altogether.

So what next? I have zero symptoms except for vaguely tingly boobs, but that's about normal for this point in the month. It's way too early for symptoms anyway. What I need to do is decide whether I should use either of the early-response pregnancy tests sitting in my bathroom any time soon.

I don't want to do them and lose this nice feeling. I haven't felt upbeat for so very long. But equally, it seems somehow horribly foolish and embarrassing to walk about the place feeling all jaunty and hopeful if there's no reason to.

Does that make sense anywhere other than in my own head?!

Testing, testing

I peed on a stick again this morning, in a display of flagrant disregard for economic prudence.

Wasting two tests in one week when I categorically know I'm not pregnant is really silly, but I helped my friend move house earlier today and knew I'd be lifting a lot of heavy boxes, so I had to be sure. It would have been more foolish not to check. Or at least that's what I've told myself to justify my profligacy.

I knew the test would be negative, and of course it was. In fact, I didn't take it as diligently as I usually do. My pre-test preparations usually involve re-reading the instructions (which I could probably quote verbatim right now, having studied them so many times, but there's that pesky obsessive-compulsive streak again. I'm like the smug kid in the exam who knows the set text off by heart but still takes the time to read through it carefully, while everyone else is flipping through pages and scratching answers into the paper with increasing hysteria).

I take extra care to pee only onto the furry bit at the end, for exactly the recommended number of seconds, and ensure I keep the test pointing downwards until I've replaced the cap. My OCD streak then flashes once more, as I have a habit of placing the test reverently on the bathroom floor and covering it with a towel or a piece of loo roll until sufficient time has elapsed that I may look at the result. I find this method allows me to hope for longer. It's just too depressing to watch the non-development of the blue cross in the window, because I understand from women who've had positive tests that the relevant line appears IMMEDIATELY, in bold technicolour.

Anyway, this morning's session had none of this assiduous attention to detail. I splashed wee onto the stick - all of it, not just the fuzzy bit; it was like Niagara Falls in a hurricane - with an attitude of brazen indifference. I hurled the test onto the floor in a cavalier fashion, and gave it a hard stare that would have made Paddington proud as the blank window stayed blank. I then snorted, chucked it in the bin, ripped the cardboard packet in half for good measure, and jumped into the shower. For all that, though, I still cried.

A big, fat birthday negative

Reader, I peed. I answered my "to pee, or not to pee" question in the affirmative. I got up for work this morning, went into the bathroom and, with the calculated cunning of a serial killer, turned on the shower so hubby wouldn't hear the cellophane rustling. (Pound signs spin behind his eyes in the manner of a fruit machine whenever I "waste" a test.)

It was negative. Of course it was. I didn't actually get upset - I knew it would be, and when it was, there was just a feeling of "ok - that's done". Didn't cry at all.

Instead, I gathered myself together, went to work and had a good day - really nice lunch, plenty of chocolate - and I was doing fine until Counting Crows' 'The Long December' came on my iPod on the way home. At the line "maybe this year will be better than the last" I surprised and embarrassed myself by finding that my eyes were suddenly swimming.

Perhaps I'm pre-menstrual. I mean to ease the pain by imbibing much red wine, and perhaps a cheeky gin and tonic, later tonight. Guilt-free alcohol consumption is a small consolation for the blank pregnancy test currently lying in the bathroom bin, but whatever gets you through the night...

I've got a problem with my Wii

No, what follows is not one of my typically scatological rants. Hubby bought me a Nintendo Wii for my birthday - a present that was not, I suspect, entirely selfless, but I have to say I love it.

I had requested one in the hope that it'd help me banish the bingo wings I've developed since we got married; if muscle pain is an accurate gauge, the plan's working. I played with it late into Saturday night - now I can barely type, and audibly grimaced whilst reaching up for a hand-hold on the train home tonight. Which alarmed the man next to me.

(That we spent Saturday evening avidly playing with a Wii is evidence of how interesting our sex life is at this point in the month, when it no longer matters. The activities we'll consider on the tacit understanding that we won't have to have sex are increasingly preposterous. I fear it can only be a matter of time before the evenings find me embroidering and him gluing together a miniature replica of the HMS Ark Royal.)

It's also extremely good for venting frustrations, both of the fertility and general variety. The boxing game in particular excels in this respect. Selecting that option in the Sport menu for the first time, I amazed (and frightened) hubby by flooring my large, male opponent within seconds. Twice in a row.

"Whoa, take it easy," hubby said in a vaguely uneasy voice. "Who are you visualising?!"

I expect he thought I'd name my psychotic ex-boss. I expect he thought I'd name a living entity. He was clearly not expecting me to name my own sexual organs.

"Oh, my ovaries," I said. "Them and my uterus. Basically the whole sorry collection."

Anyway, to the point of this entry: I bought the test. I just sort of found myself in Boots after work, with it in my hand. (I actually had to hide amongst the multivitamins for a bit, as a colleague was paying at the till, and I didn't want to start a rumour - particularly not one that's likely to be unfounded.)

I've not yet decided whether I'll actually do it in the morning or wait and see if my period's late. To pee, or not to pee - that is the question.

Wishing and hoping

As the days count down towards both my 29th birthday and day 28 of this cycle, both of which occur on Tuesday, I find myself in the familiar territory of hoping against all odds that we have conceived this month.

Even though I haven't had a 28-day cycle since I came off the Pill (the best I've managed is 33), it's entrenched in my psyche that day 28 is the day on which it is reasonable to start thinking about pregnancy tests.

I used to be able to set my watch by my period. It would come at 10am on cycle day 28, come rain, shine or, indeed, prospect of sex. That I once had such a reliably regular cycle is the one thing that makes me doubt the fertility clinic's current draft diagnosis of PCOS. I just don't understand how I could have developed the condition and not known anything about it throughout my teens and early twenties - even during the prolonged, erm, periods (sorry) when I wasn't on the Pill.

So even though Tuesday is unlikely to bring my period along with my birthday cards, I can't help but wonder. Despite the cynicism borne of 22 months of disappointment - despite even my own better judgment - I have started symptom spotting. Every pelvic twinge, every grumbling cramp nearly reduces me to tears as I assume it heralds the arrival of my period; meanwhile, every passing moment of nausea, feeling of lethargy or tender ache in my boobs brings with it a stab of fierce, almost painful hope. To hope so hard is physically and emotionally exhausting.

I haven't done a pregnancy test yet. I haven't even bought one. (If I added up how much I've spent on pregnancy tests over the past 22 months, it would approach a monthly mortgage repayment and probably induce heart failure in my frugal husband.)

I have a vague plan of doing a test on the morning of my birthday. I'm fully aware this could spoil the day - it spoiled Christmas Day, which also happened to be cycle day 28. But I'm willing to accept the high probability of starting my 30th year in tears on the loo with a blank-windowed plastic stick in my hand. I'm willing to accept it because of the payoff if things turn out differently.

I'm not even going to try to put into words how wonderful it would be if I got a positive result - all I can see when I try to visualise it is the word JOY written across the sky.

The barren woman's hate list - item #3: pregnancy tests

It's amazing the amount of vitriol and bitterness I can feel towards an inanimate bit of plastic. But by God do I despise these things.

The digital ones are worst - there's something so nasty and final about reading the words "Not pregnant", and you can't exactly hold them up to the light in the hope the "Not" will vanish - but their prohibitive cost means I've only graced them with my hCG-less wee once or twice. (When feeling flush, kerboom. See what I did there?)

I don't have a favourite brand - again, cost means I usually resort to Boots' or Sainsbury's own - but I definitely prefer the ones you can pee directly onto. Clarting around with a small pot and a lively stream of wee without my contacts in is not among my top-choice ways to start the day.

What I hate most about pregnancy tests is how soul-destroying it is to "fail" one. Because my periods are so irregular, there's often the temptation "just to check". Every time I say I'm not going to do one, but every time I wake up at 5am and brew a wee knowing full well I'm going to tiptoe to the bathroom, turn on the tap so hubby doesn't hear the cellophane rustling, and pee on a stick to my heart's content.

There's the brilliant moment where you're waiting for it to work - I usually cover it with a bit of bog roll so I can hope for longer - when you imagine what the joy would be like were it to be positive.

But then there's the inevitable blank result window, and every time sees me squinting and scrutinising it pathetically, holding it to the bathroom light in my desperation to see a line that never has been and probably never will be there.