Turn and face the strain

Do you know what’s weird?

Waking up at 2am to pee, getting back in bed after you struggle to make room next to the dog, and staring wide eyed at the shadows on the ceiling in stark realization that your life is ending. I imagine if you knew the approximate date of your death it would feel somewhat like this. Only, granted, much worse.

This is me circa 2am, most nights.

And this is me in general: nary a good thing can happen without a moment of intense grief for what’s lost.

But to step back a bit, truth is I have been done with this part of my life for awhile now. Seriously, good bye. The last five years have been mostly too much work that was too hard combined with too much cancer and death in my family. Very little of the real work of my life got done because all I could do was trudge through another day of just making sure, in all seriousness, that nobody on my professional watch was going to kill themselves or get beaten, and if I wasn’t the world’s most miraculous therapist, so be it. Happily, everybody was left standing by the end of my clinical tenure this past March. Yeah I know. Go, me.

From January 2005 I’ve been trying to get pregnant, knowing full well that there was no way my body would bring forth a baby while I was under that kind of stress. It looks as though science is backing me on this one – there’s a study that says stress plays a role in up to 30% of infertility cases. To prove my point, about six months after my father-in-law died I got pregnant. I thought, yep, see, now that I’m not in acute grief I can conceive.

But just to keep me in the theme of depressing life shit, my pregnancy was ectopic. Stuck on the off-ramp, so to speak. And for a further dose of cruel poetic irony, I had to be treated with Methotraxate – a popular cancer drug – to end the pregnancy, otherwise it ran the risk of ending me.

With the ectopic pregnancy so went my chances for any kind of natural conception. And then it was onto the IVF ordeal, which began in July of 2007 and finally worked in June 2008. That was – holy crap in a handbasket – five months ago.

In any case, you know what I have say to the past five years of my life? SEE YOU IN HELL, BITCHES!

Sitting here thinking about all of this, on the eve of the most important election of my lifetime, I am realizing that if life-as-I-know-it changes as radically as I believe it will, I’m very much okay with that.

And so are Doot and Bing.