the game of LIFE

Ahhh..my first ever blog post. Guess I've finally joined the 21st century. Let me give you a little background...Hi! I'm Heather, I'm "The Coach's Wife". That would make my husband... The Coach. The Coach and I live in the south, he coaches college athletics, I work in college administration and we have 3 great dogs. Life is good, right? Absolutely life is good...just missing one small thing. A baby. You know, The Coach's Kid. Yeah. We need one of those. Easy enough right...go to the store, pick one out? Er, no. Better yet..grab a bottle of tequila and have a fun filled night with The Coach (when he is actually in town, that is). Sounds perfect, right? Umm..about that. We tried that for over a year--I still cringe at the sight of Jose. Wasn't working for us. We struck out. Of every inning. For a year. The ball never left the park. Scoreless after 12. You get the idea.

So, what's next you ask? Well, The Coach and I decided we needed help. A strength coach, if you will. Someone to get us through. Tell us what we had to do to make our bodies able to give us that Coach's Kid. In the Infertility world a "strength coach" is known as an RE (Reproductive Endocrinologist). Basically, you pay a doctor to get you knocked up. There goes the booze! So, in June of 2009, The Coach and I first met with our RE. Now...of course we always hoped the booze and a little well-timed fun would do the trick for us, but I guess in the back of my mind, I always knew that wouldn't cut it. You see, I've had "female problems" for years. In the form of huge, painful, obnoxious ovarian cysts. I've had to have surgery to have these buggers removed on more than one occasion. All of my surgeons and doctors had previously sworn up and down that those cysts wouldn't cause problems for The Coach and I when it came time to have a baby. Boy were they wrong.

So, in our first appointment with our RE we went over a ton of information, medical histories, goals, life plans, and on and on. Then I had an ultrasound. Guess what the ultrasound revealed? Another damn cyst. Then we knew we had to create a gameplan. We went through a whole gamete of testing, procedures and even a surgery for myself and The Coach. Then we were ready to proceed with infertility treatments. Sparing you all of the details, we did three treatments (one that involved a fertility med in the form of a pill --Clomid-- and precisely timed intercourse, another which involved Clomid and an IUI --intrauterine insemination...basically the turkey baster method and the third and final was injectable medications and the IUI) all of which resulted in negative pregnancy tests. Fantastic. Because of The Coach's job and demanding schedule, we then had to take a loooooong break for him to get through his season. Well, here we are, almost June of 2010...two years after we started trying to make that Coach's Kid and still we have nothing. Except for a few more surgical scars, tons of miles on our vehicles from trips to the RE and thousands of dollars out of our bank accounts. Fun times.

June of 2010 has also brought the end of The Coach's most recent season which has landed us right back on the treatment train. Back to our gameplan. How are we going to beat this team..this rival..this opponent called Infertility. We've scouted, we know our strengths and our weaknesses, we know where to hit Infertility hard and where a little slack can be given. We have our newest plan of attack to win this game.

So, starting tomorrow, I'll be back to shooting up. Yup, that's right, I'll be stick needles into my body...don't worry, it is just a few fertility meds..nothing serious [insert eye roll here]. Our gameplan in a nutshell: shoot up for 6 days and go back to the RE for a monitoring appointment (blood work and another ultrasound). And go from there.

That's our life in a nutshell. It is always about the game. The opponent. Being victorious. In one way or another. You know, if you really think about it, pretty much everything in life is a game. You have to know which player to put in and when. You have know which plays to run in any given circumstance. You have to know when to throw the rise ball and when to throw the curve.