Wednesday, October 04, 2006

I feel pukey, oh so pukey...

I f'ing HATE estrogen.

It's the middle of the night and I'm up. Why, you ask? Well, because I'm too nauseous and heartburn-y to sleep. Throw in a couple of sore boobies and when I should be obsessively analyzing symptoms, instead I'm cursing the estrogen.*

DocP wants me to go through this again. He sees nothing wrong with the combination of clomid and estrogen. I'd like to ask him if he's ever tweaked his own hormones so much that he felt sick for weeks on end... or if that would be acceptable to him... but I'm almost afraid to. There's this feeling that when it comes to infertility, one needs to stick it out through the uncomfortable, the embarrassing and the downright painful.

Which is stupid, really - if I were taking any other medication that made me feel this rotten for weeks, I'd be marching in to my doctor asking for a new prescription without a second thought. So why do I feel like this is different?

I've said ad nauseam (ooooh - bad pun, bad pun) infertility is a medical condition. Treatment should be a given, not a privilege.. and yet I treat it like my doctors are doing me some huge favor by treating me. Why am I afraid that if I say "hey, I can't take the side effects" they're going to tell me that I'm just not cut out for this, not worthy of another child because of my own inner wuss?

If I read any of your blogs and saw that your doctor was dismissing a legitimate concern about how you felt while taking a specific med, I'd be angry for you. If you were beating yourself up about stopping a drug because of a side effect, I'd be all about reassuring you that infertility is miserable enough without adding more misery, and giving assvice. Get a second opinion, there's another way... you can do this!

.. and yet I think it's ok for me to go through this again, when I know that there's another way. I have options. I even have a doctor who's willing to explore those options (even if his partner is not). I'm just so afraid that if I take that route and become too pushy or demanding, I'll hear those dreaded words (again): I would not be willing to treat you.**

Deep breath in, repeat: medical condition, not privilege.




*I obsessively analyzed the first month this happened. I'm older and wiser now (two months later) and know it's estrogen... so I don't even get the fun of wondering "what if ...?"

**many moons ago, I had my very first consult with an RE... for various reasons, she decided I was not the kind of patient she wanted. That scared me out of even asking for tests for years...

2 comments:

Krista said...

I can't believe an RE would tell you that she wouldn't treat you after an initial consult. Without doing any tests to see what was wrong or how complicated it might be. I am outraged at that.

Go to the doctor and say look, I COULD tough it out if this is all that is available but I would much rather try something else and see if I could make this already difficult process a little easier. Of course that's just assvice and nothing you don't already know.

DD said...

As long as most insurance companies consider "fertility" as a privelage, then doctor's will continue treating infertility as a "voluntary treatment".

Don't get me started on how angry I get when I hear stories about people who smoked all their lives and now have lung cancer and expect the state to support their treatment because they only have enough money at the end of the month to buy more effen cigarettes!

Boy, was that a segway or what?