relax and have some pineapple

It’s been 3 weeks since I went for an acupuncture appointment. I’m not sure whether I want to go back.
When my babymaking dreams were rudely shattered by the mean Dr. IVF at the first clinic I went to, I came home and started reading everything I could about this highFSH nonsense. Well, first I cried for days and waited for the end of the world. When that didn’t help, I got busy with my friend PubMed. I’m a girl that likes to back up decisions with evidence. Anecdotes, newspaper articles, old wives tales, internet bulletin boards… these may work for others. I prefer peer-reviewed publications (systematic reviews, meta-analyses, randomized-control trials…) in well respected, established journals. I can critically appraise a paper with the best of them. Funny thing is, the medical community had little hope to offer me. Shockingly, researchers aren’t tripping over themselves to figure out the hows and whys of endometriomas, high FSH, missing ovaries, and damaged tubes. I read whatever I could, and the more I read the more discouraged I became.

That’s when I turned to google (doesn’t everyone?) and internet bulletin boards. Scientific studies be damned. I was willing to try anything that might have worked for someone, somewhere, whether it was proven or not. I had previously scoffed at the airy fairy world of ‘alternative’ therapies. Unproven hooey, I would say to anyone (including my mother) when they visited a naturopath, homeopath or the like. But now that it was ME…well, proven or not, I was going to do anything I possibly could to make myself ‘better’.

So it began.
Weekly acupuncture appointments.
Daily supplements of Fish Oil, CoQ10, Royal Jelly, B complex, and aspirin
No more coffee
Cut down on sugar and wheat
The occasional shot of wheat grass (disgusting)
Organic meat and eggs
No alcohol
No tofu
Unda numbers

A good deal of this, I think, has/had to do with just wanting to feel like I’m doing something, in a situation where I have very little control. At the very least, I thought, perhaps there would be a placebo effect. I would trick myself into thinking I was getting better, and this would result is a calmer, more relaxed me. That in turn would eventually lead to a successful IVF cycle.
I’ve kept this up for two years. Has it helped? Clearly not.

I actually like my acupuncturist, and my sessions with her. She’s mildly hippy dippy, but not in a flakey way. But I’m paying for these sessions out-of-pocket, and maybe I could use this money for something more useful. Like counseling, or more vitamins, or a baby gift for my cousin (who was kind enough to send me photos of her newborn just days after I arrived home from my most recent IVF fiasco).
Or alcohol, because I’m pretty sure there’s no way I’ll make it through the rest of 2005 without a bottle of wine (or gin, or tequila) by my side.