My Yesterday in GIFs

Okay. I promise to talk about something other than hormones at some point. And soon. But today that is on my mind… and in my brain.

Jasper and I are supposed to be escalating our level of treatment. I was really excited about it too. But when I went in for my “baseline” trans-vaginal ultrasound (which is a topic of a future blog I am sure), they found a 4 cm (over 1.5 inches) cyst on my right ovary. So, this month is a no go for any hope of conception, and I get to be on a fun drug for 3 weeks to help my cyst go away.

I have Polycystic Ovarian syndrome, so I am no stranger to cysts. But, I haven’t had a big one in a while AND I have never been put on meds to get rid of them (my general practitioner just lets them burst organically … and quite painfully). I [foolishly] didn’t expect these drugs to mess with my emotions. And they do.

My ovaries and I have a love hate relationship. Basically, I would love for them to get their shit together and they hate me. Before I was really willing to be super open about my problems but still wanted my rants to go out into the cosmos, I actually got a twitter for my ovaries. And whenever they caused me great pain I would get on and write a few quips or rants.

Anyways, so back to hormones. One thing I didn’t tell you about my wonderful 10 days on Provera is that one night I woke up screaming from nightmares multiple times while I was on it. All of the dreams involved me not being able to control my body. In one I had a dream within a dream, so I woke up from nightmare in the dream and then I knew the nightmare could still get me, but I thought I was awake in bed with Jasper beside me. So, I started shaking him and trying to wake him up, but he won’t wake up. So I try to talk to him, but no noise comes out. So, I start screaming full strength with no noise coming out and panicking and practically hitting him. When I finally do get noise to come out: I am waking up in the real world while screaming. In another dream a venomous lizard is on me and I know it will bite and kill me unless I can grab it by the neck, but my arms don’t work. So, in short, I was really struggling with feeling utterly out of control of my body.

And now that I am only on like day 3 of a 21 day pill cycle, some of those issues are resurfacing. This time, I feel a little less distant from the crazy. It feels more a part of me than separate. And for some reason as I am going through this I keep thinking of The Shining. So, for your amusement: my life in Shining GIFs.

How I feel in general about these drugs:

Yesterday when I realized I forgot to order waffle fries at Waffle Champion I said “I am kinda bummed.” But this is more accurate:

I am fairly confident that this is the look I gave Jasper when he asked if I could go in to the grocery store myself.

Later I felt like being playful with Jasper and I am pretty sure I looked like this:

But if he ever got playful back I probably reacted about like this:

Later in the day when I found internal need to say something along the lines of this to Jasper:

I realized it was because I could pretty easily see this happening… and I did recently by a hatchet.

So, I basically attempted to change the script. It looked a little like this.

As mentioned in a previous post, Jasper and I are really trying to treat out bodies better and take care of ourselves. Luckily not only do I have a husband who can handle all of the crazy I put him through the whole day, but he also cares enough to call me out when I need it. When I pulled out our organic substitute for cheese-its and pulled out a handful he said “Do we need to get real food? Are you eating because you are hungry or because you are sad?”

Man, I have a good husband. We talked out my concern for brutally attacking him either verbally or physically. I mentioned it seemed stupid to talk out something that is so not me. I also mentioned I was about to watch shitty TV to further numb the crazy, and he pointed out we should find a better alternative. Something I actually like and don’t just do to avoid me.

So I played video games and it was awesome.

The end.

The Crazy Comes in Waves

I will probably go back and give you some insight into what our journey has looked like since we started trying to conceive, but for now I am going to dive right in close to the present.

Sometimes I do not ovulate (which as you can imagine does not help my fertility) and I was recently given a hormone that is given to women in order to jump them back to cycle day one (meaning: to force a period) so that they can have another shot at ovulation in a timely manner. I was placed on a 10 day cycle of said drug and had some fun side effects I would like to talk about.

The first noticeable side effect was some crazy mood swings. As I was experiencing them I kept trying to visualize a metaphor that helped explain it and this is the best I came up with: Imagine your normal ebb, flow, and flux is like high tide and low tide on a fairly peaceful shoreline. The effect of these hormones for me was like huge surfable waves crashing in. I knew they weren't really of me. They felt different from high and low tide… but all I could do was ride them out or get sucked under. I was thankful that I knew they were hormone related at the time so I didn't feel too crazy, but it was a less than enjoyable experience for all parties involved.

I had warned Jasper earlier in the day before St. Patrick’s day that I was having hormone related mood swings, but we still ended up having a rather ridiculous encounter later that night. A little back story here, when I was in preschool I was not wearing green on St. Patrick’s day and got pinched viciously which had left me feeling a little uneasy about the holiday ever since. This year, I had forgotten the following day was St. Patrick’s day until about 11:30 at night.

At this point I nearly panicked thinking I may not have green in my wardrobe for the following day, then I thought hits me: do I need to wear green tonight to ensure that I am not going to get pinched? So, I turn to Jasper and say, “Do you promise not to pinch me if I am not wearing green tomorrow.” To which he teasingly replies “I promise to pinch you,” which sends me into deep, genuine, and irrational fear. I run into the other room and scour both his and my side of the closet for something I can sleep in that is green.  I am throwing hangers around like a mad woman. I finally find an old light green tank top and throw it on feverishly. I walk back in the living room and sigh in relief saying “I found something green.” Jasper’s playful response, “…but that is not really like Saint Patrick’s Day green… I mean it doesn’t really count.” Which I respond to by sobbing violently while yelling “I TOLD YOU I WAS HORMONAL!!!!”

Poor Jasper had no idea what he was getting into. He immediately opens his arms to embrace me. Now, Jasper hates it when my hair is wet. I had recently showered and much earlier he had made a joking comment about not wanting me to touch him with my wet hair. So, naturally my response to his concern, compassion, and open arms is to yell “NO! I’m not allowed to touch you!” and run out of the room.

Did I mention this happened on the first day that I started to notice side effects? It didn’t get much prettier from there, folks. The next couple days, I felt constant opposites. At one point, I sat by myself trying to give words to my feelings. The best I came up with was “I want to punch someone while crying.” Later I deeply felt “I want to walk a mile while sleeping.”

If that wasn’t enough fun, two of my other main side effects were nausea and dizziness. In fact, there were multiple days that week that I was unable to drive because of how dizzy I was and days in which I was basically couch ridden because the slightest movement felt like turning my head into a spinning top. So yeah. Not a barrel of laughs.

One thing that meant an enormous amount to me that week was something Jasper said. I forget his exact words, but the conversation went something along the lines of the following.

Jasper: If I were the one that had to go through all of this, I would just be like: yeah… we're not gonna be having biological kids.

Me: Really?

Jasper: Yeah, you are a lot stronger than me.

I was really taken aback by that. Personally, I do not think I am stronger than him for a minute and most the time I feel like a wimp. Jasper always seems like he can handle anything. When he is sick I usually forget he is sick because he so chill about it, whereas I am a complainy & groany little thing. But it really means a lot to me that he thinks that about me. It makes me feel stronger. It makes me feel more hopeful. It makes me feel like I can do this.

Let me know if you have any questions about anything fertility or my life related or if there is anything in particular you’d like to see me address on here. Thanks!

I think my travel blog just became an infertility blog...

I have never been good at keeping a regular blog. I may never be. But I want to start blogging about my infertility issues. I am going to try to loosely follow Brene Brown’s guidelines of not posting anything potentially shame triggering that I haven’t processed yet with Jasper and close friends, so things on here might be time delayed. But I think this is important to talk about it.

I am trying to be honest about my journey. I want to be honest for a few reasons. One of which is, in some ways I still feel like we are living in the 1950s when it comes to sweeping certain emotions and journeys under the rug. Infertility is a surprisingly common struggle, but it still gets swept under a lot. Another reason I am wanting to do this is just as a way to process and vent to get through it.

Infertility is a struggle that brings up a lot of shame. I for one was really surprised at how much shame I felt and struggled with in response to my infertility problems. In the media and in society being a woman is so synonymous with being the one who brings life into the world (either that or being a sex object but that is a whole different rant), that a part of me felt less than a woman and less than a person as I was dealing with the initial shocks of hearing the news. I would never in my life think that of someone else, but I often treat myself much worse than I treat others. That is an issue that has come to a head through this emotional struggle, and I am truly thankful for it. I am learning self-compassion because my lack of it became so glaringly obvious it was impossible to ignore.

Not only does it bring up personal issues of shame, but it brings a lot of shaming from others (mostly accidental… at least I hope). When people see you in a struggle they feel they can’t relate to, they often say hurtful things. They are often trying to help by fixing the problem. But here’s the deal: I can’t fix this, you can’t fix this, and that has to be okay. You can sit with me in this grief, but please don’t try to fix it. If you are not my God or my reproductive endocrinologist, I am not looking for that from you. Advice, as well meaning as can be, can feel really blaming or condescending. I know you may not hear it when you say it, but that is honestly part of the reason I want to be a part of the open dialogue about this. If you are afraid of a misstep, feel free to make it with me. The more we talk about this the more likely we are to make some mistakes in the dialogue, but I am making a promise right now to address it (if I think it is helpful to do so) and to forgive you if I get hurt. There is no real way to learn how to talk about this other than talking about it.

I want this process to be easier for others starting this journey 10 or 20 years from now. I know it is still going to hurt. I am not a medical doctor so I can’t help on that end, but I am comfortable being open about it. My hope is the more people know about the prevalence of infertility issues and understand what that journey looks and feels like and what we need in the midst of this journey, the better we as a society can respond this over time. Infertility, like any issue that involves grieving or like any medical problem, can look different for different people. And a lot of people that chose to go through infertility treatments will likely be a lot less whiny than me. I am not a stiff upper lip kinda gal. I will rant and rail, but I will get through it.

Feel free to read this or not read it as much as you want. But I am putting this out here and hoping for the best.

Why I am fat and what I am going to do about it…

I have long had an unhealthy relationship with myself. Listening to and reading Brene Brown’s research, books, and lectures on shame has been very enlightening. I am also working on reading “Healing the Shame that Binds You” and about 100 other psychology texts that touch on this subject in various degrees. These books, the Bible, and the some soul searching has lead me to look back on my recent shame path and I’d like to share my story.

The “Early” Years: Emotional Component

I struggle with co-dependency. I grew up delighting at stories of martyrdom. I was a little girl dreaming of dieing brutally for some excellent cause (preferable for God or saving other people from some evil or both). I remember in maybe early middle school thinking to myself “there are so many people in the world, how can I ever help them all??” and that overwhelming thought nearly giving me a panic attack. The concept “I am third” seemed so beautiful and perfect to me (Treating God as first priority, and others as second priority, and yourself as third).  IT wasn’t that I thought I was worse than others… at least not consciously. It was that I thought that ideally all people, especially Christian people, would serve one another and then everyone would be taken care of and loved. At least, that was the idea. Over time, if not at the beginning this overwhelming sense of needing to take care of others diminished who I am and who I ought to be and my on going journey out of it is a life saving one.

High School: Physical component

When I hit puberty I started hating my body. When I got thick thighs in 5^th grade, I vowed to never wear shorts again… and I didn’t for years. By the time I reached high school my physical self-loathing was at a fever pitch. Though I knew I was an intelligent person, I placed too much stock in what my appearance meant for my worth as a person… If I wasn’t pretty (read: skinny) then I wasn’t enough. I basically tried to be anorexic… but I went to food for comfort when feeling shame: so I ended up in a weird place that I shall quasi-bulimia.  I would compulsively eat for comfort… then I would eat very little for days and exercise abundantly… I wouldn’t let myself go to sleep some nights until I did 500 sit ups, and my eyes would get blurry and splotchy in the process.  Then I wouldn’t work out for weeks and try to not eat. Then I would eat like a dinosaur. It was a horrible relationship to food. I felt so less than. I felt shame. And I tried to use food or lack of food to numb the shame. And I would try to use the shame associated with my body image to motivate weight loss… but shame is not motivating. It is debilitating.

Pretty soon I decided to hell with that and virtually banned myself from working out and dieting to avoid slipping back in there. During this yoyo time I was in an incredibly unhealthy dating relationship that absolutely made me fed my feelings of shame and not being worthwhile.

College: Trying to shift focus

My college years were my years to do some soul searching and over working. I didn’t really date much until I met Jasper, just causal quasi-dating. I tried to take the focus off of my body, I would work out or not work out, but tried to not put my worth it in it… but I still felt shame about it. I once took 21 hours in one semester (spit between 2 different universities) while interning at a rehab and living in a commune…. So, I would say that my type A personality won over my self-care in large part. I still had an external focus. I was not great with boundaries. And while I was getting stronger and more self aware, I still really felt that I need to be efficient and helping everyone all the time to be worthwhile thing.

I had so many conditions of worth. I would say my worth is in God, but it was really in giving, or being efficient or having my shit together, or my relationships, or being cute or any range of things that are not truly internal but based on actions that I constantly had to be working on, not an internal innate worth. Feeling like you constantly need to do more to warrant your existence, does not make for a satisfied, thankful, or even worthwhile life.

Marriage: A New Era

Jasper and I met and got married. I kept gaining weight. This was partially because I was working in an environment that did not encourage self-care though they paid lip service to it. They constantly asked more of me. And for a while I constantly kept giving. The more I give recklessly the less I would take care of me, the less I would watch what I ate, the more I would stress eat, the less I would do the things that relaxed me, etc. It is like I only had so much attention and I didn’t feel that I deserved any of it. I also seemed to think, hey Jasper things I am cute and like that I am “thick” so why not another piece of pizza? Jasper was a rock star who constantly would confront my warped perceptions of self. He would ask me why I have so much empathy for others, but none for myself. Why I assume the best of others, but the worst of myself. These were things I really had never thought about.

A year into our marriage I went off hormonal birth control and we started trying to have a baby. I swiftly stopped having a period and started gaining weight. I was convinced I was pregnant. After not having a period for 3 month, but not getting positive pregnancy tests, insisted on getting an ultrasound. I still believed I was pregnant, but that was squashed when I asked the ultrasound tech how it looked and he said “your uterus looks normal, but we need to get another look at your ovaries… one of them is about twice the size of the other.”

Long story made slightly shorter: I got diagnosed with Polycystic Ovarian Syndrome (PCOS). PCOS is a hormone disorder that causes virtually uncontrollable weight gain, is a leading cause of infertility, and has horrible health risks associated with it that now make me very high risk for diabetes, heart disease and a slew of other problems. I eventually got put on Metformin, a pill typically given to people with diabetes but can help curb my weight gain and potentially regulate my cycle. But, crappy self-care Deah would sometimes forget to take the pills…

At any rate, by the time my weight stopped ballooning for a moment, I had a vibrant new set of stretchmarks and hated my body anew. The dark comedy that I thought I was pregnant, got stretchmarks on my stomach, and then found out it was caused by the thing that would potentially keep me from ever having children was not lost on me.

2013: Year of Despair

For the first half of 2013 I did not have a job (although I tried and failed at starting an art business) and was not in school. I felt compelled to take some time off for self care, but what I found was that I hardly knew where to start. Sure, I painted and spent time with people, but I felt utterly worthless because despite my self-delusion that it was otherwise my perceived worth was in my efficiency and/or in what I could do for others.  Add onto that the shame I felt at being barren, and the deaths of several loved ones that year, and I was in a very dark place. The one thing I can hold onto about this year, is that my shame became so overwhelming that it could not be ignored. For the first time in my life, I started hiding because of my shame. I would shirk from encounters and opportunities because I just thought I would probably fail because I was so suckie. It was a horrible place to be, but it made me name my demon. And it continues to do so.

Later in the year (after countless tests on both of us and a surgery on my lady parts), we also found out that there is something wrong on Jasper’s end fertility-wise. As heartbreaking as this is and was, it was also a little freeing. “It isn’t my fault” could be internalized completely… I would never ever blame another human being for their infertility. The thought would never occur to me. But as Jasper has been so kind to notice, I have no mercy for me. Only wrath. So, when there was something wrong on Jasper’s side even he said something like “I prayed that if there was something else it would be on my end. Because I wouldn’t blame myself like you do.” (BLESS HIM).

This year, I have actively had to say to myself, if someone else was going through this, how would I feel for them? What would I say to them? And let myself feel those things and say those things to myself. It might be sad that is how I have to do it, but I am just glad that I found a way to be loving and generous to myself.

Bringing it together

Rambling is sort of my style, so I am sorry if I lost you along the way. I have treated myself and my body like a pile of rubbish and the dumpster to keep it in. Early on in my life I connected to the part about God loving people and blessing them, but not about that part of Him where he knows himself and his worth. Jesus took care of himself. Jesus sought alone time for prayer and reflection. He had an inner sanctum of friends. He never said “I am a piece of shit” (which is a favorite of my automatic inner dialogue). In fact the Bible says “No one hates his own body but feeds and cares for it, just as Christ cares for his church. And we are the members of his body” (somewhere in Eph 5) and time and time again refers to his people and his church as his body and talks about how Christ treats his body and cares for it. It talks about how he cleans his body to that he can present it to himself without blemish. Elsewhere it says (forgive the mixed metaphor as here he is referring to his church and his body as his children) “ “Which of you, if your son asks for bread, will give him a stone?  Or if he asks for a fish, will give him a snake?  If you, then, though you are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in heaven give good gifts to those who ask him!” (Matthew 7). These are metaphors because we are supposed to relate to them, but I could not be more far removed from having this metaphor apply to me. Christ calls us his body and treats us well. HE loves us and gives us what we need. I treat my soul and my body in a way that should make any human shudder.  Why do I say that I want to emulate Christ, but when it comes to treating myself and my body well I could not be further from his image?

So, I have started to change. And it feels good. From this moment on, I want to love my body. And I don’t mean love like the feeling. I mean love like the action, which is the only love worth talking about. I want to chose to love myself and my body. I want to see those stretchmarks on my stomach and still smile. I want no conditions of worth. God had called me worthy. I am now worthy.

Right now I weigh about 215 pounds. This is hands down the most I have ever weighed. And that is okay. I need to be okay with who I am now, and choose to love it. I need to chose the body I have, from my awesome boobs to my stomach stretchmarks, from my blue eyes to my spider veins, from my curly hair to my cellulite. This is me. All of me. I have flaws inside and out. I can love others flaws and all. It is time for me to love me flaws and all.

So, yes, I want to love every pound of my 215 pounds as they are now, but I want to start actively treating my body with love and respect. I want to eat well, because my body wants and needs nutrients... and when I need bread God doesn't give me a rock. I want to work out, not because I need to fit some image of beauty, and not even because I don’t want to get diabetes, but because I want to love my body like Christ loves his. I need to love and respect my inner self, flaws and all, because though Christ humbled himself and was treated like refuse he never lost his inner self-worth, he never succumbed to shame. I wanna be more like him in every way. And this year, I think that means learning to love and respect myself in a new way.