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Holy mother of god.  We are DONE.

That "done" is a selfish one.  It's big for me, though: all the tests are done, all the results have safely arrived in Nashville, and we are going to the IVF class on the 23rd.  Monday, there's nobody I have to call, nothing I have to fax, and I'm not waiting on anyone else to do anything, either.  It's DONE.



Now, seriously, we're not done by any means, but we're done with what seemed like unending administrative barriers between us and the actual IVF procedure.  We're just twiddling our fingers for the next week and a half-- Heather keeps saying she wishes the class was this week-- but I feel that same sense of hope and lightness that I do during the two-week wait.  We have no responsibility, nothing to chart...

Fuck it, I'm just going to go ahead and toot my own horn.  I fucking worked to get here.  This has been exhausting.  I'm so sick of leaving messages and reporting back to Heather on the results, then fielding her complaints about how Dr. King's clinic sucks.  I don't mind going to appointments, but I fucking hate making them.  The fact that I frogger-ed my way through the administrative maze represents a triumph of the highest degree.  Past the lesbian consultations, through the bogs of cervical monitoring, past the failed charting, past the successful charting, past all my anxiety about fertility drugs, past the offers of free sperm, and now-- my very favorite-- past the tests.

I had made a special trip Friday morning to my doctor's office to pick up test results which, because they included HIV tests, could not be faxed or mailed.  Fuck it.  I was delighted, honestly, to have control of the faxing myself, instead of the whole "Did you send this yet?  Did you have the fax number?" business. It took another four phone calls to make sure all the tests made it to Nashville, and I stopped worrying about leaving my desk to talk about blood work.

Fuck it.  I made the appointment.  It's just a week and a half till we spend four hours with other desperate couples, testing syringes.  A couple hours later, we see a counselor who's supposed to decide if we'll be well-adjusted parents-- or, I guess, if we're going to destroy each other from the tension of this process-- and then we can drive back home, crash out, and go back to work.  Then I guess we wait till she gets her next period.

Heather researched and found the IVF procedure has a low fatality rate.  I researched and found that one of her drugs is also used to treat prostate cancer.  Fuck it.