The Elephant in the Room

It's been a difficult week with my little brother's announcement.  I've received calls and a visit from my mother. Outside of the first phone call, we simply are not discussing the elephant in the room.  I don't bring it up and she doesn't bring it up. I love the communication in our family: unpleasantness is avoided like the plague.  Mother wants to know all about what we're trying to do to get pregnant now.  I guess I gotta keep pace.  I've received a few texts from my brother, but definitely not about the so-called elephant.   I also ran into my uncle while out to lunch with DH this week.  "Great news about your brother, right?", he says.  "Yeah", I say.  He responds, "Maybe they can have two and send one up your way."  "Yeah", I say, "A regular baby factory".  He meant well anyway.

I told a few of my co-workers about my brother's great news.  The ones that know our predicament (if you want to call it that) had sympathy written all over their faces.  I only almost-cried one time when my co-worker said she wanted to give me a hug when I told her.  I hate hugs.  Nothing but emotional trouble.  I said thanks and promptly turned around to my computer and suddenly became engrossed in work.  Ugh.  I just want to curl up in bed and ignore everything and everyone.  But, alas, life goes on.  One must eat, sleep, go to work and make an effort.  Put on a [relatively] happy face.  So I do. 

In other news, DH's MRI scan of his pituitary gland came back completely "normal".  Whatever that means.  This is good, in a way.  At least if there was something abnormal with it, we could have found some sort of a culprit.  The DNA results of his semen analysis came back as expected: kinda crappy.  They test the damage and they test the immaturity of the DNA.  They want both to be less than 15%.  DH's damage was at about 16% and immaturity was at about 22%.  Not surprising since the immaturity goes hand in hand with morphology - and his sits at 1%. After telling DH all of this, I laid it out there:  I'm willing to go through IVF one more time, but after that, I'm done.  We'll look to donor sperm or something else if the IVF doesn't work again.

That being said, DH had bloodwork drawn on Friday and then gets the exciting task of doing a 24 hour urine test tomorrow, Sunday.  He has a big, orange jug that he gets to piss in all day.  He then will slug and slosh the jug o' pee up to the lab on Monday morning.  Ah, what we put ourselves through.  It still boggles my mind.  The nurse I talked to said they would review the results next week and come up with some sort of "plan of action" for us.  We'll just have to wait and see what they come up with.