The electronic age

Tomorrow we'll do our first insemination of the cycle.  Or anyway we should.  Heather is on Day 12, has copious white mucus, and there are two vials of wildly expensive sperm waiting at the clinic, so if there's no egg-with-dot sign tomorrow, we're still doing it.

This is partially, I admit, to please Nurse Nina.  Whether it's caution, or even lack of affect, at her end, I constantly feel she's questioning us and our judgment.  Sometimes there are flashes of the positive-- saying that the labs look good-- and then the status quo reasserts itself when she says the labs indicate Heather is not ovulating regularly.  Even after we resolved that the labs were, in fact, showing that Heather's ovulation was just fine, Nina asked when we next planned to try, and I wanted to shout, "Now!"

Neither H nor I has ever excelled at patience-- or at giving up control-- so, when we inseminated the first time, it was because we wanted a baby right then.  There was never any "it's the journey, not the destination" philosophy in the mix.  Heather is barely interested in being pregnant.  That Nina is the source of delay makes her, inevitably, our antagonist in the story, and when the hormone labs came back looking good, it only affirmed our original frustration at the two-month lag time.  I think Heather felt the same way when I told her to wait a day before buying an appliance set: when she decides she wants something, she's ready to make it happen.

I tried to soft-pedal the "now!" when I replied to Nurse Nina, but she was offended, I think, that I interpreted her comments as a suggestion we wait even longer.  Maybe she doesn't realize that her deliberateness reads, to us, as a stream of negativity.  Even after giving us the go-ahead, she's made detailed inquiries about how our fertility monitor works, how Heather's current cervical appearance compares to its appearance over the past several ovulations, and what it is I thought the monitor was indicating.  GodDAMN it.

Also: Nina likes using the phone.  I do not.  It makes me uncomfortable.  Even my preferred method of communication isn't up to her standards.

I stayed home with stomach issues today, and this afternoon I dreamed I was downtown with my mom and sister, hiding from them.  I'm not sure why, only that I knew I had to eventually give in by joining them again so we could all go home.  When I woke up, I felt as though it was part of the baby-talk evasion, and that I can never really keep it to myself.  In the end, Mom hugged me, but I still felt tense.