Being on the same page about IVF.

Long, but it looks like I gave some bad impressions in my last few posts.

Neither my husband nor I am "okay" with IVF. We're not going to be okay with it in 3 months, we're not going to be okay with it in a year. Sometimes you can accept something that you do not want because it leads to something that you want more. I do not want infertility. I don't want to inject myself with thousands of dollars in hormones. I would rather have not been 8months pregnant in the dead of summer and I certainly did not want to be told that I might repeatedly miscarry even if we do manage to get me pregnant.

I'm not okay with it. I'm certainly not happy about it... and I don't expect my husband to be okay with it either. I would rather he be honest about his fears so that we can figure out if the good of having a baby outweighs the really shitty aspects of what we've been forced to accept.

 He's afraid that I will die in childbirth or in a miscarriage. I'm afraid that the hormones (from IVF or even just from pregnancy) will make me so crazy that he will never be able to look at me the same afterward. We don't share those fears and we can't comfort each other that they're meaningless. We're not going to get over them. They're the kind of fears that we didn't look at very hard when we were just having sex and hoping... but that we've both had to face up to once we started paying a doc to try to knock me up.

We both want a child and the RE has told us that IVF is our best (and maybe only) chance at that. The good (a child) outweighs the fears- barely. It means that when things change drastically- that the fears are still going to pop up. That he or I panic "oh ***, what are we doing?". When that happens- he throws money problems into the conversation and I spent an hour or two trying to convince him that I don't care about kids as long as I've got him. Both rational arguments... that we finished over a year ago. He wants kids too (so I don't need to offer not to have them for his sake) and the money isn't actually a problem (it's just easy to use). Once we realize we're doing it again- we admit the real problem and have to decide if we can get over it this time.

It's complicated. We've always had a complicated relationship though. Sometimes it may sound like I'm bullying him because I tend to take the lead. He's not as weak as that though. This is his choice, he had the final decision. Has always had the final decision. No tears, no weeping, no begging or pleading from my end. I wouldn't leave him or even censure him if he thought that IVF was too far. Some part of me would be relieved that it was over. But when it came down to it- he wasn't ready to give up the idea of children.

So we're going to go through with IVF after a month of trying naturally. Just in case the semen analysis was wrong. He's having a hard time reconciling a bad SA with feeling healthy but isn't willing to go through it again just to get another confirmation. Then we start BC in July to stim in August. It's a compromise, but not a big one. I'd have been willing to try more months naturally if he'd been willing to go in for another SA- maybe one from home (the office creeps him out), maybe try a few non-medical things to see if we could get his numbers up. But it's just stalling because he doesn't want to believe the results and he doesn't want to try to change the results. Nothing's going to change in that case. He proposed the compromise, I agreed. Everyone's as happy as we're going to be given the hand we've been dealt.

It was a bit hard to detail that out when I was still reeling a bit from him finally making the choice. But we're very much on the same page- It's just not the page we wanted to be on.