Saturday, December 13, 2008

Ai Yi Yi!

Take a swan and wring its neck. Skin the bird and, under a full moon, lay its skin in a shallow hole with the feathers face-up. Add eggs -- five for every child you want to bear. Atop each egg, place the talon of a blackbird and a black stone. Circle the hole three times, clockwise, then close it with a clod of earth. 

That's an ancient witches' spell to help women become pregnant, from the latest issue of Archaeology magazine

I thought about this today because I'm getting ready for another round of intrauterine insemination (IUI -- or as my mother calls it, "Ai yi yi!"). Only instead of wringing swans' necks and putting blackbird talons and black stones on eggs, I'm taking four vials of Repronex, mixing it with saline solution and injecting myself in the stomach. 

After five days of doing this, I'll go to the doctor for some exams and he'll give me a pre-filled syringe of Ovidrel to take home to inject myself with. Then I'll go back to his office the next day for the insemination. 

I hope it works this time. The injections aren't nearly as bad as I thought they'd be, but the whole thing is expensive -- though cheap compared to IVF -- and I just want it to be over. 

Oh -- the end of the witches' spell goes: 

As soon as you are with child, empty the hole, or terrible things will come to pass. 



4 comments:

Anonymous said...

are you trying to be pg again? really?

Joan Novark said...

Yes - we decided we didn't want Snookums to be an only child. Unfortunately now because of the prostate cancer, we have to go the IUI route. Keep your fingers crossed!

Joseph LeMay said...

What happens when you have prostate cancer that makes it difficult to have kids?

Joan Novark said...

If you treat the cancer by having your prostate surgically removed (as my husband did last year), then you still produce sperm but you no longer ejaculate, so you're sterile. Fortunately we banked sperm. If you run out of sperm samples, you can also have an operation to have the sperm removed directly from the testicles. Hopefully it won't get to that point...