The Pineapple Peddler

Alex and I vetted a *new* (to us) IVF clinic about an hour and a half from where we live, yesterday, and I'm left with all kinds of feelings after the experience.  We drove all the way there for a "fertility evaluation" to the tune of $325 for me - which included yet another draw of my E2, FSH, and a transvaginal follicular ultrasound (which I've had what feels like 10,000x at our other RE throughout our cycles and has always been normal, but "you never know what can change" so we went ahead with it). All this is with high hopes to try something called mini-IVF or low-dose IVF to see if it will yield us better results in terms of egg quality - a theoretical approach not yet backed by research, but you have to start somewhere, right?  Few clinics are specializing in this now - this is only one of 3 within 2 hours of us recommended by our holistic health doctor (he knows of a fourth but wouldn't even tell us their name because he does not feel good about t...

While these days I feel anything but "fresh," this is more like an attempt to breathe, process and stay still in the hopes that sooner or later, I can move forward.  And in the interest of moving forward, I'm not going to attempt to pick up where I left off.  Rather, I'm going to just be.  Just write.  Just express.  Because 4 years is too damn much ground to cover. And because it's been 2 weeks that I’ve been trying to process what I need to process and I feel like I've made so little progress.  Maybe this is the answer.  And maybe I'm not the only one going through this.  And maybe this can help someone else heal too. 2 weeks and 2 days ago, we found out that our one "normal" (chromosomally-verified with PGD testing) embryo from our two IVF egg retrievals done in 2018 and 2019 and a 6-year battle with infertility, didn't make it.  We transferred her into my plush and comfy 13-mm lining on March 29, 2021, after years of hope, months of monit...