Last night I watched the nightly news. I normally am on my way to work so watching the news never happens or I feel that I see enough bad stuff at work that I don't want to know what's going on in the world today.
Anyways I was watching NBC and saw this Younger women turn to fertility specialists - Nightly News with Brian Williams. I was interested at first... then a bit disgusted. I'm one of those women... and I wish I had been as aggressive as the 25 year old in the newscast - after 4 months she saw an RE and found out she wasn't ovulating. Maybe if I had been more aggressive than I already was we would have found out what was wrong from the get go rather than having so many miscarriages in one year. The part that they missed when talking about this woman was that she had a legitimate medical diagnosis and if she had waited the year that medical diagnosis would have been undiagnosed for a year before she sought help.
My time of trying before meeting the RE was 9 months. I was going to wait patiently for that year mark, but after miscarrying on clomid my doctor threw his hands up in the air and said something along the lines of "I can't fix this." Fortunately I had already set up an appointment with an RE and got in quickly - but still... what if I hadn't been as aggressive.
This news cast made me feel as if both myself and some of my friends are being too aggressive... yet they totally missed the boat. Maybe we're not being aggressive enough. I'm going to take the stance that maybe in our 20's we take our fertility for granted. We've spent years being told that if we have unprotected sex that we'll end up pregnant - so we're careful. Then once we meet the right partner or become financially stable we decide that we want to have a baby. We try. We try again... We try again and we fail, fail, fail. We get angry at ourselves, our bodies, our partners. We wait for the year to go by so we can go to our doctors and at that time they then tell us to quit charting or relax or some other assinine thing and we get irritated - try. Buy a fertility monitor and the associated sticks - have sex on demand of the peak and continue to fail fail fail. Or we succeed only to miscarry, miscarry, miscarry (sorry that's my story). We go back to the doctor - and he throws his hands up in the air and hands you a script for clomid or says I can't help you.
Eventually you end up at the RE's office. By that time maybe it's been 9 months, maybe a year, maybe longer - and what did waiting accomplish for any of us? Not a whole heck of a lot.
So impatient? I don't think so. I think I've been patient... I think most of the women I know have been patient. I think that if we hadn't become informed consumers (patients) that we wouldn't be as far as we are and that close to maybe - key word maybe finally gettinig closer to our goal.
2 comments:
I had numerous conversations after my hysteroscopy about whether or not I was being too aggressive, wanting to move on to injectables. I'm sure you were involved in more than one of those "talks".
I agree, that in most cases, women know if something is wrong that they need help with. We all know that one fruitcake who after 3 months HAS to go to the doctor b/c something HAS to be wrong since she's nt pg. Especially though when dealing with m/c's. I think it's much better to be proactive than to sit with your head in the sand.
And for what it's worth--you've got more patience in your little finger than I do in my whole body. Throughout this whole process I've been awed by how patient you've been.
Mandy - yes you were aggressive about your reproductive health - but key word but you tried like the RE's suggested. If after a few months you still weren't pregnant (you were a lucky duck) you would have been completely justified in going back there and saying wtf.
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