I am ready to scream!

Right now my blood pressure is going sky high and I'm ready to scream! I want to shake some sense into my husband! Ugh!!!! I just don't know if he is ever going to get it!!!!! I swear I get more support from two of my co-workers who are men; one in Brazil who went through IVF with his wife and has 2 children, and another guy whose wife is fighting against breast cancer. Why can't my husband step up to the plate and GET IT? Ugh!!!! Can you tell I'm about ready to throw something or punch him? I sure feel like it right now. I'm so frustrated with trying to explain biology and ART to him over and over again.

So what is behind my temper tantrum? Well I went to Dr. M today, whom we both saw back in August, and whom we both really liked. He wasn't covered by my insurance in 2007, so we had to go to a different doctor. Dr. F said that IUI wouldn't work with my husband's sperm issues and that we should do IVF. I will tell you that my husband was never on board with the IVF but I guess I twisted his arm to do it. Well it failed as we all know. Well now I have different health insurance and Dr. M is now covered so I went back to see him. Of course I begged my husband to go to the appointment, but he chose not to re-arrange his work schedule to be there. He gave me his list of questions to ask the doctor (which I thought were stupid but I said I would ask anyway). My husband puts absolutely no credence in what I have leared about my body and about reproduction through the internet. If he doesn't hear it from a doctor, then it's not really good information. Yet this is the same man who regularly disagrees with doctors, and doesn't like doctors. Anyway so my appointment with Dr. M went great - we reviewed my last IVF protocol and he told me what he would change regarding the meds. He also said that due to my age he would put back 3-4 embryos (assuming we had that many). He also will check the antral follicles at the beginning of the cycle and if there are not more than 6, then he prefers to sit out that cycle and try for the next month.

So I asked my husband's questions:

1) What are the chances of getting pregnant with just intercourse? Dr. M answered that it is around 1%. He then gave me a chart to take home and show my husband with all of the different procedures and success rates ranging from unmedicated IUI at 3% to medicated IUI 10% to 15% to IVF with ICSI at 30%.

2) Can we do unmedicated IUI? (See my husband doesn't want to deal with any drugs - he won't even take a vitamin himself). Dr. M answered yes, but that it's a numbers game and based on my age that the best bang for our buck and while we are still within the window of opportunity is IVF with ICSI.

So since I am on day 12 of my cycle, Dr. M said we could do an unmedicated IUI tomorrow and Thursday. Then if I don't get pregnant, my husband and I can decide whether we want to go forward with IVF. Dr. M offered to have a conference call with my husband early in the morning or late one evening, working around my husband's work schedule. He did an exam on me, cervical cultures, and an ultrasound and my left ovary showed a huge follicle ready to burst! Yippeee.

I left there and called my husband and told him the good news that we could do an IUI tomorrow and he could go at 6:30 am to drop off his specimen. He was excited and said we'd talk about the rest of it when he got home from work.

He got home and we sat down to discuss everything and this is where it all fell apart. So I started explaining to him what transpired at my appt. with Dr. M. I was explaining how Dr. M checks the antral follicles and if there aren't more than 6.....etc......so then my husband says "stop I'm already confused I just want to know if you asked him my questions"....I said yes I asked him your questions.....so I told him the answer about the 1% success rate with intercourse and the 3% chance with unmedicated IUI and he got all confused and defensive and wanted to know why they were so low. Well I about lost it and my voice started showing extreme frustration with him and then he asked me "where is all this frustration coming from?" I then said, well I'm stressed, and he said "oh yeah you have a really hard life"....so that's when I got up, threw the papers from the doctor in his face and told him he could read them himself jackass! I then went downstairs to hug my cat. I came back up 15 minutes later and typed up a summary of my visit with Dr. M so he could read it at his own leisure. He hasn't read it and he is now giving me the silent treatment. So at this point, I don't even know if we are going to go do the IUI tomorrow or not. Although with my stress level being so high, why even bother! Unless he gets out of his mood, I suppose we are going to throw away another month of our fertility.

I love my husband, I really do, and we have a great marriage, but this infertility crap is like a foreign language to him.....he just doesn't get it, he's taken no responsibility or made any effort to improve his own sperm and I am about ready to go find some guy off the street and take him to Dr. M to give a sperm deposit. I'm so mad I can't even cry! Even before all of this happened, I was feeling the stress - my acupuncturist noticed how stressed I was by looking at my tongue today.

I have so much more to blog about from my weekend (completely different topics), but right now I don't have the composure to write about that. I'm just really pissed off.

Prayer: Please God help me to communicate with my husband regarding our infertility. Please work on his spirit to make him more able to absorb the knowledge and more able to show me some support. Please!