In some ways, it feels like there's a lot riding on this cycle. It's my last chance to be pregnant on my miscarried pregnancy's due date. It's our last natural cycle before moving onto Femara and monitoring. And if we actually conceived this month, my due date will be my best friend's birthday. Seeing those two lines next week would just be a huge sigh of relief in so many ways. But I'm strangely calm this week, and I'm not sure whether it's the careful attention I've been paying to my health, an answered prayer for peace and tranquility, or just a sign of absolute surrender. One can only grieve at a fever pitch for so long, I suppose. It's like a baby crying - eventually they tire themselves out and just relax into sleep.

My nephew is scheduled to arrive on Friday - his mom had a c-section with my niece, so they've planned a second c-section for this little guy. My husband and I are driving up to see them the day after he's born. I have to say, I have dreaded this day for so long. I felt like -how am I supposed to see and hold and love this baby, knowing that - had things been different - I would have been enormously pregnant right now with his would-be cousin? How do I congratulate my brother and sister in law when I'm just seething with jealousy? And how am I ever going to be able to put on a happy face for this whole thing?

But now that he's almost here, I honestly don't feel anything but joy. My tiny, lovely nephew is a completely different baby than the one that I lost. He's not a symbol of everything I don't have, or everything that might have been - he's just a baby. And I really can't wait to meet him. I can't wait to be his auntie and give him snuggles and kisses and spoil him rotten. I'm so excited and happy that, just like with his adorable and sweet older sister, I'm going to have the privilege of being his aunt. It's going to be awesome, I just know it.

In the meantime, I've been thinking about what I want to do to mark my would-have-been due date on August 1st. I know I definitely want to write a letter to the son that we're missing, but I'm also feeling a need to have some sort of ritual. I could go to church and say a rosary... spend some time in the botanic gardens... go to the beach and dip myself in the ocean and contemplate the infinite. None of that stuff really feels right, though. So I'm hoping it will come to me. Until it does, I'm just so grateful for this newfound sense of peace. I hope it lasts for a very long time.

A few nights ago, I had a really vivid dream that I was asked to read an essay I'd written about my miscarriage to a convention of mothers. As I was walking into the convention hall, a volunteer stopped me and asked me how many children I had. "Oh, none," I said, "I'm not a mother, I'm just here to read this story about my miscarriage." "Honey," she replied, "you might not have any living children, but you're still a mother. You belong here just as much as any of the other mothers do." Then, when it was time for me to go on stage and read my story, I couldn't find it - but my husband showed up, and a bunch of my friends, and they were all telling me to just go up there and wing it. "Just speak from your heart," one said, "and trust your instincts. You'll know what to do. The words will come."

Today is cycle day 20 and I just got my first ever completely positive OPK this morning. I'm a little worried that I seem to be ovulating later and later every cycle, but this will be our last natural cycle before moving on to Femara anyway, so I'm not stressing about it too much.

I'm also really enjoying my new health kick! I don't know whether I've lost any weight yet, but I definitely feel good. Nourished, peaceful... open.  

The appointment with the fertility doctor went really well - I liked him a lot, actually. He seems pretty willing to be as aggressive or as relaxed as we want... With the caveat that I need to lose thirty pounds before he brings out the big guns. To that end, he referred me to the center's nutritionist, who I called to set up a consultation and then found out that she charges $395 for the first visit. Three hundred and ninety five American dollars. Yeesh. If I visit her, I'll definitely be losing weight... Because I won't be able to afford food.

But, you know, everything seems like it's going okay. I'll be starting a monitored Femara cycle next month, and hopefully along with whatever weight loss I can muster up, our rainbow baby will be on the way before we know it.

Today's cycle day 3, and I went into our lovely new fertility center for some blood work before my appointment next week. It made my husband wonder about how he'll have to go about providing his own, uh, sample:

And of course, he wanted to check up on me and see how everything went:

I'm a lucky, lucky girl.

(And I just realized that the burger chain is actually just "Five Guys," not "Five Guys From Brooklyn." I think I was mixing it up with the produce stand, "Three Guys From Brooklyn." I should probably clear that up with my husband, too, because now instead of being a funny joke, it just sounds oddly specific... Ha!)

No dice

Let's Make a Baby, Season 2, Episode 4: yet another big fat negative.

"Oh man," my husband said, "all that work for nothing!"

Thanks, honey.

I know it's still pretty early, but the statistics get pretty depressing from here. According to my new favorite book, The Impatient Woman's Guide to Getting Pregnant, the great majority of women under 35 who are having well-timed intercourse will be pregnant at the end of four cycles. It's not exactly the kiss of death that I'm not knocked up yet, and it's way too early still to use the "infertility" word, but I do think it's time to get the ball rolling on figuring out whether we'll be able to achieve a healthy pregnancy without intervention. So I made an appointment with a well-respected fertility doctor for the end of next month, and I have to say, I feel incredibly relieved already. If there's something capital-letters WRONG, he should be able to figure it out - and if there's not, then I'm okay with baby-dancing away the next six months on our own, knowing that we should hit the jackpot eventually. Also, my former due date is rapidly approaching - as is the birth of my nephew a few days before said due date - and I would really like to be able to approach those dates with as much optimism and positivity as possible. Having a plan of action and knowing that I'm literally doing everything within my power to get myself preggo will really help, I think.

My husband asked how I decided on this particular doctor. First, it's because he takes our insurance, and second, it's because his rock-star colleague didn't have any openings for new patients until October - but most of all, it's because I really like his blog. In one entry where he was discussing some of his own medical history, he called a doctor an asshole. I wanted to reach through the computer and high-five him! Anyone who can give it to you straight like that is bound to be pretty awesome.

Apparently, there's a rumor going around my office that I'm pregnant - three people have come up to me in the last few days to say, "Congratulations! I didn't know that you were expecting!" Argh.

The first two times, I just said, "Huh? No, I'm not, but thanks - I'll let you know when I am." Finally, this morning, I pulled the congratulator aside and said, "I'm not expecting. Can I ask where you heard that?" She told me, and I said, "I was pregnant, but now I'm not anymore and it's difficult for me to hear that. Would you mind letting folks know that the rumor isn't true so that I don't have to hear it anymore?" She was really sympathetic and told me she'd set the record straight.

I suspect that the source was one of our receptionists - in December, I had a bunch of packages delivered from maternity clothing stores, and whoever signed from them probably assumed that in a few months, it would be public knowledge. Unfortunately, rather than being eight months pregnant right now, I'm... just not.

So until the news makes it's way through the grapevine, I'm trying to figure out what I can do so that everyone knows I'm not knocked up. Here's what I've got so far:

- Walking around the office swigging from a bottle of tequila. (Pro: will be nice and drunk for any more awkward congratulatory incidents. Con: might get shipped off to rehab for openly boozing during work hours.)
- Throw a "Soft Cheese and Tuna Salad Party" in the conference room. (Pro: delicious snacks! Con: everyone will hate me for stinking up the joint.)
- Post my Fertility Friend chart on my office door. (Pro: everyone will know they should be extra nice to me during PMS week. Con: everything else.)

Any ideas?

I guess I really am an ultrasound junkie...

Wednesday afternoon, I started feeling a stabbing pain in my lower left abdomen - right around where I usually feel ovulation pain but way too early to be ovulation. It got slowly worse as the day progressed, and by the time I got home from work, I was doubled over in pain. I called my aunt, who is an ER nurse, and asked her what she thought I should do. She asked me a couple of questions and then said I should head to the emergency room just in case it was ovarian torsion or - unlikely, but because my last period was pretty short, a horrible possibility - an ectopic pregnancy. (Spoiler alert: it was neither.)

I went to the nearest hospital and was seen almost immediately - I guess they don't fuck around when it comes to possible ectopics. Pretty quickly, they ruled out pregnancy with a pee stick followed by a blood test and then the doctor ordered an ultrasound to see whether or not my ovary was about to explode. They wheeled me up to the radiology department on my stretcher - I volunteered to walk, but no dice - and then I got to watch as the technician scanned me and found two perfectly normal ovaries and a nice, plush uterine lining. It was such a relief to have a normal ultrasound result for once. Usually, looking at one of those black and white screens is the immediate precursor to some bad news, but this time it was all good.

The doctor thinks it was probably something gastro-intestinal, and told me I could either stick around for a CAT scan or just go home and follow up with a gastroenterologist. I chose the latter. As long as my reproductive organs were not on the verge of explosion, I was happy to hang out in my own comfy bed until the pain passed. (Which it did, sometime the next morning.)

Going through the panic, though, really strengthened my resolve not to do any more unmonitored Clomid cycles. It just makes me too anxious that something is going to go wrong. And since my ovaries looked pretty good on their own, maybe I really won't need it after all.