Cliff Diving

"Never, never, never give up!" ~ Winston Churchill

Oh my gosh, it has been so long since I last posted. I'm actually kind of shocked out how quickly time has swept past me. I don't have any real good excuse for not writing. I mean, I guess things had slowed down to a near slug crawl, but the slug's still crawling.

The biggest thing - the thing I should have written about when it happened - was that I fell off a cliff... it was a pretty high cliff; it was a pretty long and hard fall... and it hurt... badly. But it wasn't my whole body that took that unexpected nose-dive, it was just my fertility. I went straight from "fertile-myrtle" to menopause.

One month I was still in that fertile window of opportunity, and the next month it was if I was shot into a different orbit. The orbit of infertility.

I had always thought that menopause was a stage kind of thing. As in, you were pre-menopausal, then menopausal, then post-menopausal; that menopause lasted a few years. That even when entering menopause you still had times where you might have a period until finally after a couple of years the time came where - after one full year of not having a period - you were given the full-on title of Menopausal and then the "post" followed.

I was wrong. And it was depressing.

I'm sure at the time - and gosh, it's probably been a year-and-a-half now - I went into full-on "woe is me" syndrome, but eventually I reminded myself that I still had nine frozen eggs cryopreserved in Chicago.

And then whenever I bemoaned the fact that I had so few eggs to count on in making my dream of having a child come true, I always remembered the anesthesiologist who encountered me sobbing uncontrollably in the hallway of the clinic after my egg retrieval. When he asked what was wrong and I said that the doctor was only able to get nine viable eggs from me, he said, "It only takes one good egg to make a baby."

Presently I'm strategizing on my new game plan. I've got a lot of things to figure out. I'm 53 1/2, and, Lord, I've gotta start figuring more quickly now. 

Stay tuned: I am going to be pregnant in my 54th year.