I had made arrangements to go with Wendy to the knitting store to pick yarn for me to knit her daughter a scarf for Christmas. I had just finished knitting the behemoth blanket. I was very excited to return to my favorite local yarn shop for the first time since having had Sun.

We stepped into the shop, me lugging a sleeping 4-month old Sun in her carrier and Wendy holding Sam’s small hand. As usual, I heard, “Noooola!” The clerk recognizing me said, “Ooooh, you had the baby! Did Dr. Socks deliver her?” and with that she turned her head and pointed. To Dr. Socks. Who was standing in the very spot where I’d met him. Talking to a clerk about needlepoint threads.

Deep inside, I screamed. On the outside, I answered the clerk with an icy, loud, firm, “No.” I then turned to Wendy and said under my breath, “That’s him. That’s HIM. THAT’S HIM.” The blood was beating so loudly in my ears I couldn’t hear anything or concentrate on anything. Except him. I couldn’t stop looking at him. Waiting. Waiting for the right words to come to me. Waiting for him to see me. Waiting for him to see Sun. Waiting for him to realize he had been wrong. Waiting for him to speak to me.  Waiting for him to apologize.

He gave me the quickest of glances and returned to his work. Looking back, he focused an awful lot of attention on his work. He did see me, although I couldn’t tell if he’d recognized me. But then I thought, of course he recognized me! He recognized me in his office after one short meeting of him in this very shop. I’d seen him in his office no less than ten times as his patient. Was he… could he be… surely he wasn’t… IGNORING ME!?!

My mind raced. Do I SAY something? Do I NOT say something? Do I make a scene? Do I embarrass him? Will I embarrass myself? WHAT SHOULD I DO, DAMMIT! What would you have done?

What did I do? With shaky hands, I picked up Sun in her carrier and walked over to the table Socks was working over. I tapped into all the courage I could muster and called to him in a sing-song voice, “Ohh, Dooooctor Soooocks, looky what I have!!” And I rocked the carrier back and forth with a large knowing smile on my face.

He looked up, looking decidedly caught, and meekly said, “Congratulations.” Then he turned his head back down to his work.

That was it.

I didn’t know what more to do. He couldn’t think Sun was adopted; he had to have heard the conversation I had with the clerk (it’s a tiny shop). He had to know, in that moment, that my decision (against his advice) to go to a local fertility specialist had been the right thing to do. I don’t know how much he’s thought of me and my case, professionally speaking. I don’t know if he questions the diagnosis he gave me. I don’t know if he feels badly or guilty or anything at all about his care of me.

I do know that I have thought a lot about him. And the mistake he made.

In the end, I am living happily ever after. And part of doing that requires harboring no ill will. Blogging about him for the past several days forced me to deal with my feelings over the whole debacle. And I can finally say with honesty that I feel no more ill will towards Dr. Socks. I feel nothing for him at all. Plus, I learned that sharing a love of needle arts and 1850’s Victorian British novelists is not a basis for choosing a health care provider.

I have recently been writing about my time as a patient of Dr. Socks. Tomorrow’s post will likely be the last post dedicated to him.

I knew the chance of my running into him at my local yarn shop sooner or later was high. I hadn’t given much thought, however, to what I’d say to him when that day actually came.

Today, I’d tell him this:

Dr. Socks, I think you are a good gynecologist. However, you are not a fertility specialist. And you did me quite the disservice by not sending me to a specialist straight away. You should not have performed any test on me for which you needed the expertise of another doctor to interpret the results.

You relied on the radiologist’s results of my hysterosalpingogram. You admitted to me that you never looked at the HSG films yourself. You based your diagnosis of a very serious condition on that film without setting your own eyes on it because you told me you trusted the radiologist to know what he saw. Radiologists aren’t fertility specialists either. You should have had a fertility specialist look at those films before you gave me the results. Or better, you should have had a fertility specialist run the appropriate tests and not you. You should have had enough confidence in your own practice to know what you didn’t know.

But, Dr. Socks, I forgive you. Because you taught me to trust my own medical instincts. My broken wrist taught me to get a second medical opinion. You taught me that doctors won’t tell you when they are in over their heads. You taught me to be more assertive about my medical care; to question; to follow my gut and KNOW when to seek another’s professional advise. You taught me that I cannot rely on my doctor to refer me away, that I must be hyper-diligent about my own medical treatment.

And best of all, Dr. Socks, your being wrong was the best mistake for me. It FINALLY got me to the specialist that could get me pregnant with my daughter. But still, in the future, tell your patients that there is a place for fertility specialists; that women shouldn’t be reluctant to seek expert advise about an area of medicine that is highly technical and very specialized; that there is no shame in having a fertility problem. And remember, first, do your patient no harm, and that includes giving medical care beyond your expertise.

What did I actually say to him? I’ll post that tomorrow.

I mentioned in my last post my being a patient of Dr. Socks and then sleeping with a lesbian and getting pregnant. I am sure The Google will send all sorts of disappointed visitors to my site with this post, but here’s the rest of the story.

If you did not evacuate your home, your life, for a month or more following Hurricane Katrina, you cannot understand my sense of community upon my return. We had little actual damage ourselves, but the devastation was so vast that all of us were deeply impacted in many ways. And for me, like many of us, I looked for unity, community, continuity.

When I learned my OB/GYN wasn’t returning to town, I was really upset. He worked out of Memorial Hospital and that whole situation was quite distressing. I am not one to just pick any ole doc to be my OB/GYN, so losing my doctor, the doctor I’d used for over a decade, really wigged me out. I asked girlfriends who they used and whether they liked their doctors and I got a lot of lukewarm responses.

One day, I went to my favorite local yarn store. Think of “Cheers” but with yarn instead of beer. I opened the door and heard, “Noooooola!” The shop owner was helping the sole customer in the shop–a man. The one thing you see little of in a knitting shop is the male customer. You will see sad male friends and husbands looking bored silly but few actual male customers.

They were in the needlepoint section of the store looking at the needlepoint canvases and threads. Their conversation, which they included me in on, was about the sad state of medical affairs in the post-Katrina NOLA; the lack of doctors and the high need for care. I mentioned my situation with needing a new OB/GYN. And the proprietor said, “Well, Dr. Socks here is a gynecologist!” [If I told you his real name, you'd pee your pants. Trust me.]

It was a sign.

Here I was struggling to find a gynecologist I could trust and feel comfortable with. And here he was–a fellow customer of the yarn shop! It was meant to be.

So I made an appointment with him. As soon as he saw me he said, “You’re the girl from the knitting store!” His remembering me filled me with confidence in my decision. We talked about his current needlepoint project and my current knitting project. He wore pink argyle socks. Always.

At that first visit, he saw the Anthony Trollope novel in my hands and commented about his love for his work and his disapproval at Trollope’s descendant’s (Joanna Trollope’s) less high-brow work—I hadn’t know Joanna and Anthony were related! [It was at this point that I began to suspect that he was gay. Yeah, I'm slow like that.] Needle arts and Trollope? Really, it was too good to be true.

You can click here to read more of the specific details of things going wrong. Suffice to say, things went really wrong. And against Dr. Socks’ advise, I ended up seeking the help of a local fertility specialist.

Skip ahead five months later.

We were scheduled for our second in utero insemination. CS and I drove in separate cars because afterwards I was driving out of town for an overnight convention. I got to the doctor’s office first and signed in. They called my name; CS hadn’t shown up yet. I went to the exam room and CS showed up about one minute before things got underway. Four minutes later, I was lying on my back giving CS’s guys a fighting chance. CS had brought me a lemon Hubig’s pie (part of the reason he was late).

I munched and watched the clock. After 20 minutes, I jumped up and hit the road. Then I sat in a conference for the next eight hours. No lying around all day for me like I’d done the first time.

That night, I met a fellow attendee of the conference—a very good friend of mine who is also a lesbian—and one of my oldest friends. The three of us had drinks and a rich dinner. Then I went to my hotel room, the room I was sharing with my friend also attending the conference. We had asked for two double beds; we got one king. We were confident enough in ourselves, our sexuality and our significant others to know nothing would happen. So we shared a bed.

She warned me that (1) she snores loudly and (2) she has the tendency to have women who are trying to get pregnant that are near her find themselves pregnant. “One night with me, you’ll be pregnant,” she exclaimed.

That night, she did not snore. But I DID get pregnant.

co·in·ci·dence /koʊˈɪnsɪdəns/ Pronunciation Key - Show Spelled Pronunciation(koh-in-si-duh ns) –noun

syn·chro·nic·i·ty (sĭng’krə-nĭs’ĭ-tē, sĭn’-) -noun

1. The state or fact of being synchronous or simultaneous;
synchronism.
2. Coincidence of events that seem to be meaningfully related,
conceived in Jungian theory as an explanatory principle on the
same order as causality.

* * * * *

I was watching a murder mystery show the other day and one of the detectives said about clues, “I don’t believe in coincidence.” And that got me thinking. Do I, really, believe in coincidence? In synchronicity?

This past Monday and Tuesday, I posted about a senior partner that died over five years ago. He isn’t mentioned much at my firm these days. Wednesday, while at the office, one of the attorneys I work with brought him up—he’d gotten a piece of mail addressed to the deceased partner on Tuesday.

Or the day of the deceased partner’s funeral, when I was stuck recalling to the IRS how I had calculated this crazy tax loss deduction for a client and after eight hours of not recalling it or being able to get my math to work, I asked the deceased partner to give me the answer and within minutes the answer came.

Or post-Katrina when I needed a new OB/GYN (mine fled to Atlanta never to return) and I found myself in my favorite knitting store and was introduced to Dr. Socks, an OB/GYN. I saw this as a sign. I became a patient of Dr. Socks, and it was the biggest mistake of my life. Or was it? He misdiagnosed me (or the radiologist did and my doc didn’t actually look at the films himself to realize the radiologist was wrong) and sent me down a spiral I wish I never see the depths of again. But that led me to the fertility specialist that gave me Sun.

Or the first date I had with Captain Sarcastic. He saw Hunter Thompson’s “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas” on my bookcase and asked me to marry him. I said no. Two years later he’d ask again and I’d say yes.

Or the night I slept with a lesbian and got pregnant.

As a student of law, you learn to look for the “but for” in strings of events. As a genealogist, you look for things to ring a bell: a name on a gravestone, a date on a ship’s log. As someone who is logical and methodical, I tend to look for threads. But, to be honest, as I get older I tend not to give meaning to coincidences. I tend to be of the persuasion that if you look for some “deeper meaning,” some “sign,” you’ll usually think you see it. But that doesn’t give things independent meaning. Sometimes two roads intersecting are just two roads intersecting and not a sign to take a turn.

And I also think that believing in synchronicity discounts a person’s ability to discern. Like that dead partner giving me the answer? A miracle? Or just me finally giving my mind a rest from the stresses of that crazy week for me to refocus and see things clearly? Or my journey with getting to the fertility doctor? I’d already been referred to that doctor and even been to his office but I hadn’t been ready to accept that I had an “infertility problem.” By the time I had dealt with the aftermath of Katrina and the debacle of Dr. Socks, I was in a different mental and emotional state. I was ready to be rational and seek help for a physical problem. CS asking me to marry him on our first date? Frankly, it creeped me out and made me think he was a bit desperate. But I liked that he at least liked HST and I kept an open mind about him. Me sleeping with a lesbian and getting pregnant? Well, that one really is just a coincidence as I’d had an in utero insemination earlier that day. Don’t get worked up—we shared a bed, not sex, at an out of town conference. But.

But what do you feel? Do you believe in coincidence or synchronicity? If so, what’s the coincidence that convinced you they have meaning? If not, why not? Post about it and leave a link to your post here with Mr. Linky so we can all read about it. Don’t let me hear the crickets on this one! I’m really curious.

CS and I are talking about whether to do fertility treatment again for another baby. He reminds me of the stress I endured the first round; the pain with ovarian cysts; the emotional highs and lows.

The fertility treatment we went through, looking back, was not a bad experience. Ok, that first vaginal ultrasound was, er, unexpected. And all modesty ends up checked at the door. But it was all handled very professionally. And the results! We conceived a singleton in five months and had no miscarriages or other negative doings.

But do it all again? I still can’t get behind the idea. Here’s my problems:

1. It is a huge commitment of time. We were in that doctor’s office at least twice a week (sometimes far more than that) and each visit was at least an hour. And he saw patients trying to conceive in the afternoon (and the pregnant ones in the morning–conscientious, eh?) but not after 2:30. I was leaving work early all the time. It was not easy.

2. It is expensive. We went from clomid to the injectables, and did two intra-uterine inseminations (IUI). We spent several hundred to a few thousand dollars each month. And each step, I’d say, “This, but no more.” Clomid, but not injectables. Injectables but not inseminations. IUI but not in vitro fertilization. We got pregnant before I actually had to decide on an IVF. Knowing what I know now, I’d probably have done that too. That is serious coin. At last count, an IVF through my doc was in the neighborhood of $15,000 a pop. None of these expenses were covered by insurance.

(As an aside, if you don’t like needles, don’t consider fertility treatment. They take your blood every visit, and the injectables are just that–shots you give yourself, or in my situation, shots your husband gives you.)

3. The fear I have already discussed about multiples.

And then, add to that list my new concerns:

1. Being pregnant again. I worried so much when I was pregnant. Far more than I do as a mother. Plus, I ain’t getting younger and it gets scarier as I get older. And maternity clothes and back pain again? Not interested.

2. Delivering a baby was no walk in the park. Anesthesia and me, not friends. And the odds are that I’d need to do another c-section. Sliced open like a fillet-o-fish whilst awake. I shudder thinking about it.

3. Re-adjusting to getting a newborn to nurse again? Enduring those sleepless first three months? I love Sun. I cherish every experience I have with her. From her umbilical cord falling off to the countless problems we had getting her to nurse. Her first exploding diaper while Daddy was away for the first time, dealing with her hemangioma. All of it is a gift. I wouldn’t trade one minute, one memory, for anything.

But the stress of fertility treatment, the concern of multiples, the worry of a pregnancy, and the sleeplessness of a newborn really make me stop in my tracks. I know CS wants another child. He’d be okay with multiples. So it’s really up to me.

For now, all I can tell CS is, I’m not ready.

With Sun being all of six months old already, and the holidays under my belt, I have been asked recently if Sun will have a sibling. My answer to this question is a simple one. I tell the inquiring party that it isn’t up to me, it’s up to my aging ovaries.

No one in my family knows what CS and I went through to get pregnant with Sun. Brandy’s blog reminds me of it all. Unless you experience a fertility problem, trust me, you cannot understand it.

And so the question CS and I have considered is, would we, will we, do it all again? I say today that I don’t think we will. Not because it was too stressful (and boy was it!), because having had such a success and now knowing how it works, I’d think the second time around would be less stressful.

My main reason to not do it again can be said with one word: multiples. When you do fertility treatment, you see a lot of pictures of babies on the walls–babies the specialist helped bring about. And if you look close, you see a lot of twins and triplets. So many, in fact, that there are more multiples on the walls than singletons.

And when we went through the fertility treatment, twins or triplets were a bit daunting, but we were willing to run the risk. We ideally wanted two children, so twins might actually have worked just fine (two for the price of one!).

But now that we have Sun, we have to think, what if we had multiples now? Would we want that? And truth be told, I’d rather have an only child than one older child and a set of multiples. That’s just being honest with who CS and I are. And sure, we could adopt a single baby the second time around. But, again, just being honest, I don’t have this strong desire to have a second child.

We’ve decided to let things go naturally. If I get pregnant, good; if not, so be it. I don’t expect it to happen. But maybe down the line when Sun is a bit older that urge to have a second child might grow. One thing fertility treatment has taught me is that you don’t know where that line in the sand really is until you are pushed right up to it. And somehow, inch by inch, that line gets pushed.

CS and I had dinner last night with a friend who confided that she is going through a difficult time. And I recognized something awful in her eyes: deep, raw pain. And it immediately took me to a place of reserved pain that I involuntarily hold within. I had intended not to blog about this issue of mine for various personal reasons. But last night made me rethink that decision at least a bit to discuss the issue of the universality of pain.

A week before Katrina hit, CS and I went to my gynecologist to discuss with him the fact that I’d been off birth control for over a year and had not gotten pregnant. That was the first day the “F word” was thrown out to me–we had a fertility problem. I shut down before we reached the elevator. My doctor referred us to a fertility specialist. I had previously decided that I was not one of those people who’d ever go through the hormone treatments and shots and in vitro. I didn’t want to know who had the problem–CS or me. This was the end of the line for me. I walked out of that office and into my own personal storm. Then Katrina hit and made it easy to ignore this “problem.”

Upon returning to New Orleans, my trusted gynecologist, along with countless other doctors, had relocated out of state. Not knowing what step to take, I made an appointment with the fertility doctor my gynecologist had recommended. I was not ready for this, though, and stormed out of the waiting room unable even to complete the new patient forms. What did me in? The question of whether this problem was negatively affecting my marriage. It was.

I decided I’d start over. I found a new gynecologist–one that would do the initial screening some gynecologists do prior to sending their patients off to a specialist. This felt safe. To make a very long story short, he diagnosed me as having a “T”-shaped uterus. He didn’t know what caused this deformity, other than I was born with a defunct uterus. He explained that getting pregnant would be extremely difficult and maintaining a pregnancy would be all but impossible.

My world fell apart. Completely. It was like Hurricane Katrina ravaged the insides of my body and no one knew. The fault was mine, not CS’s. My body had failed me; I had failed myself. My shock, disappointment, and pain were palpable. I could barely function. Work was the only thing I even attempted to focus on, and, I assure you, that was very difficult. Most days, it was all I could do just to get out of bed, bathe and put clothes on (and some days I failed even at this). I had never felt depression the way I felt this.

Then I was told that a relative was pregnant. And a good friend’s wife. Understandably, I did not handle this type of news well. My family was never brought in on our secret. It was way too painful to explain to them, so instead I wore a mask when I could not avoid them. A few very close friends who had had their own problems in having a child were told, and these friends became my lifeline during this very trying time. The despair was all I knew. I was upset and embarrassed and ashamed. I felt cheated and angry and at the same time deserving of this shit. I mean, wasn’t I the one that had said a decade ago that I never wanted children? Wasn’t I the one that put my education and career before settling down and having a child?

Then my gynecologist recommended that I see a specialist in New York to perform surgery to “stretch” my uterus. This was out of the question for me. It would not be covered by our insurance and I suspected it wouldn’t do any good anyway. If we were going to spend copious amounts of money (or, to state more accurately, go into serious debt) on having a child, it would be in the way of adoption–where we’d be guaranteed a child in the end. But I was struggling with the idea of adoption as well. It was my guilt in not being able to give CS “a child of his own.” I got really good at beating myself up.

Again, long story short, against the advice of my gynecologist, I made another appointment with the local fertility doctor recommended by my previous gynecologist. I wanted to know with certainty that, as I suspected, there was no hope. If, however, he agreed with my new gynecologist that surgery was a viable option, then maybe I needed to reconsider it.

At our first visit with the fertility doctor, he looked at my HSG (hysterosalpingogram) film and said this to me: “Your uterus is ‘T-ish’ shaped. It isn’t technically T-shaped. I see them regularly; this is not one.” I didn’t believe what I had heard; I couldn’t believe it; I wouldn’t believe it. Omitting the details, after 5 months of fertility treatment, I was pregnant. And it is with great relief that I can report that things have gone quite smoothly in my pregnancy.

Now, there is a LOT I can (and, in time, will) write about this whole experience. But the part that sticks in my throat, and I suspect always will, is that pain. All my heart-wrenching pain came to the surface last night when I saw that similar look of pain in my friend’s eyes. The reason for her pain may have been different, but the depth of her pain was the same. I know because once you experience pain that deeply, you can recognize it in another. It’s universal.

I know that her pain is her own, and my pain is my own. And neither of us will ever really know the dark corners of each other’s suffering. But I equally know that real pain, raw pain is universal. And I have learned that the best salve for this type of pain is the help and support of your close and trusted friends.