Spin Me Right Round, Baby

After all of the shots, the trips to the clinic, the ultrasounds and blood draws and phone calls from nurses, it seems incongruous that the final act of an IUI cycle is a five-minute procedure which feels like nothing more than a pap smear, a 15-minute wait on the table and a hurry-on-your-way. Talk about anti-climactic. It's like training for a marathon, running it and then coming home not to a congratulations party with all your friends but to a night of sitting your couch watching PBS while eating dry toast. You think, was that it?

The silence that follows the initial flurry of activity is deafening. Because no matter how stressful it is to anticipate how many follicles will show up on the screen in the morning and what the nurse might say when she calls you in the afternoon, at least you are taking action, doing something. It feels like progress. You can have hope, because your chance is still ahead of you, unmarred by the doubts in your head and the symptoms -- or lack thereof-- in your body. And the idea that in the moments, the hours and the days that follow there is not some definitive sign, some message from the heavens, some clear and unmistakable symptom that tells you whether you are or are not in fact pregnant as a result -- it seems impossibly cruel.

This is what brings you down from the high of finally reaching the end of a cycle, successfully, with two eggs to fertilize, to the angst-filled low of the two-week wait. It's the emotional tail-chasing that really gets to you. In no time at all, I go from a mantra of "I am going to be a mother. This could really work," to waving the white flag, ready to accept the defeat of another failed cycle. The disbelieving voice in my head says that I would feel it in my bones if it had worked. That the IUI was poorly timed, that I should have done two. That the sperm count was too low. That I've been too tense. Too pessimistic. Thought too much about it. Thinking that, I try to push myself back to optimistic -- or at least neutral -- ground. Around and around it goes.

Despite my best efforts, my prayers, my good luck charms, I can't seem to settle into this two-week wait. I know that some women are able to look at the wait as two weeks of assuming, against all odds, that they are pregnant. Seems like an unattainable ideal rife with so much potential disappointment. But maybe if I can find a way to stop my head from spinning I can at least inch a little bit closer to the possibility.