Dr. Stupendous and Unsexy Sex

[September 28, 2009]

What. A fucking. Joke. That sums up our visit to the OBGYN this morning. Pardon my French, but there's no other words for it. A colossal waste of time. Actually, it's worse than just wasting our time, it's more like stealing time that can never be returned. Theft, if you will. Burglary. We'll each die an hour before we were supposed to. Before I get into that, I must back up and describe the crappy morning even before the bullshit doctor's appointment.

When I wake up, I'm grumpy. Toxic, even. This morning was no exception. A bad pattern we have in our marriage is Carey getting up before me entirely wide awake ready to attack the day with vim and vigor and often this includes a list of urgent tasks for me to do. Some times it feels like she's barking orders at me before I am even half way conscious. So the first words out of her mouth this morning are about how we need to somehow get a hold of my parents on their cruise boat to get a bank statement showing that the gift check they gave us for our house down payment has cleared. (We got an email in the middle of the night from our loan officer requesting this.) So of course I reacted like the little morning jerk-baby that I am. I defensively grumbled something about how we'll just have to wait until they return, no, I doubt they do online banking nor does Wendy have access to their account. All reasonable answers, but through a cranky-pants manner. And Carey even stopped talking to me reminding both of us that I'm just cranky and useless until I'm thoroughly awake. Which actually made me feel better so I continued to get ready for the day as per usual in a sullen state keeping to myself. Turned on the ricer, put on some clothes, brushed teeth etc. While continuing to make my lunch and dinner for the long work day, Carey suggested we leave at 8:15am. And this was the gist of the argument. I didn't feel it was necessary to leave so early because I had stuff to do to get ready for my day. She wanted to leave early, I didn't. That's the argument at its central core. You follow me? The appointment was set at 8:30am at Group Health Women's Center which is literally 1/2 a block away. I had stuff to do before we left because following the Drs appointment we had to go straight to the inspection of our new house to-be, then to work. Under normal circumstances this argument would amount to casual bickering easily forgotten when the next thing catches our attention. Rarely we'll be pissed at each other granting almost full silent treatment when the other one has to leave for work and the conflict is unresolved between us. Worst case scenario, that is. But this time was different. Carey was PISSED! She was raging mad at me. Yelling and calling me an asshole. (not her typical fighting words) She screamed that I owed her an apology and that I was insensitive to her needs, her body and so on. She blew like a volcano, man. Carey had totally lost her temper. Half awake, cranky as usual, I didn't get what was going on at first. I couldn't see why she was so up set about nothing. But really, she was nervous about the findings from the MRI. We had been waiting for two months for this so we could finally learn what our options are for making babies. And she flipped! After shrieking one more time that I had better apologize to her, despite the certainty that I had done nothing wrong, I sincerely tried to say I was sorry for not thinking of her and tried to explain I was just trying to get my stuff together before we started our day. She didn't accept my apology and yelled, "YOU WERE ONLY THINKING OF YOURSELF! YOU WEREN'T THINKING ABOUT ME AT ALL. YOU WERE ONLY THINKING ABOUT YOUR RICE!" Which now that I write it down, it's quite funny. She then stormed by me up the stairs. I said something snarky about how I tried. I apologized. It's all I could do. I guess she had decided she was going to go early to the Doctor's without me. I figured this out when she stormed out of the front door and slammed it behind her. I put on my hoody, locked the door behind me and chased her down. We walked in silence. Her fuming silence, me just irritated silence. No talking at all. No looking at each other. You know the drill. Even in the waiting room. Not a word. The nurse came and took her away first as is their protocol. At the women's center they always do this for the safety of the female patient. They get her alone and ask if she's in any kind of danger. Which in our case is amusing in that if there ever were a domestic violence call and the police came to our house and the officer had to arrest and take one of us away, my bet is it would be Carey. But with her crazy anger at me, I began to wonder what she was telling the nurse. Carey was clearly out of her mind ticked off at me. What if she made something up and they hauled me away? At least I could miss work for a day... The nurse finally came out and led me to the room. Carey was sitting up on the table with the sternest angry face she could make. The nurse left and Carey ripped into me. "You know, you call yourself a feminist, but you don't care at all about me or my body. You're sexist and being a chauvinist!" And this was as sad as it was hilarious. I immediately stood up and walked over to comfort her. She really was talking crazy. I could tell that she had brewed up that little dig to try and hurt me, but it was just too ridiculous and so far off base about what was going on that I could tell she was seriously upset. Worried about this whole Bicornuate Uterus thing fearing she would be infertile or lose more pregnancies. Those were some of the weakest fighting words I've ever heard come out of her mouth. And that worried me. You see, my girl is wicked smaht! Her verbal repartee is usually sharp and can be deadly. But this... this was sub par by most anyone's standards. An indication of a truly sad state of affairs.

We have been waiting for this for two months since the miscarriage. An MRI was scheduled and then an appointment set to visit the OBGYN to go over the results. That's why we were there.


[October 26, 2009]

Okay. I got a little sidetracked and wasn't able to finish that last entry in a timely manner. We bought a house and moved into it.

Basically, here's what happened: this highly regarded OBGYN, let's call her, oh, I don't know, Dr. Stupendous, didn't know how to read an MRI, the very reason we were meeting with her. She started off the appointment with these platitudes about how "normal" is relative (referring to a normal uterus) and "what is normal, really?" and "If you walked into a kindergarten class, which one would be the normal one?" Thank God she brought it to our level, otherwise we would have had no idea about what normal is...because we're retarded. To follow her stupid analogy to the end conclusion, go into a kindergarten class and the kids with only one head - those are the normal ones. Carey has an abnormal shaped uterus. Also, the Doctor's computer screen showed in red letters the results of the MRI - ABNORMAL UTERUS. Bold red letters. Good thing we don't know how to read. When she finally got to the MRI photos on her computer, she could barely navigate the findings. She definitely could find Carey's anus. She pointed that out on just about every image. The last one Carey beat her to the punch - "Yeah, and that's my butthole..." We get it Dr. Stupendous. You know how to find the sphincter on the computer screen. How about the uterus? The good doctor tried to pull up the old ultra sound images on her computer, but for some reason she just couldn't work that goll-dang computron! Gee willikers! Those things are tricky! And she really tried to cover her tracks. After fumbling around with the images she made up this line about how the MRI is good for finding out if all the other organs around the uterus were healthy. Guess what? They were! And we already knew that from the goddamned ultra sound that was taken a month before. Dr. Stupendous complained that there wasn't a front image from the MRI. What? How could there not be a front shot? It's 360 degrees. Then she recommended what she called an "old fashioned" exam called an HSG that would shoot barium into Carey's hoo-hoo while they X-ray it flowing out of her Fallopian tubes to the ovaries. This was what Carey asked her primary care physician to do even before the MRI, but she was told the MRI would be much better. Nice. Another procedure. Swell. Then our 30 minutes were up and that was that. She escorted us out of the room telling us how truly sorry she was for our situation. Needless to say, we were enraged. Livid was the word I used and the one Carey appropriated from me when she screamed at anybody and everybody at Group Health. The next day Dr. Stupendous called up Carey and they had a little talk. Not much came out of it except that the doctor was sorry and that Carey's expectations of being able to see her uterus (It's so small!) were unreasonable. Dr. Stupendous was so wrong. Wrong all over the place. Read on.

Carey had the HSG on the 15th. The bad news first. The HSG that Dr. Stupendous recommended didn't show squat. Surprise, surprise. The new radiologist, who fortunately was cool to Carey, explained that the HSG was good for determining the condition of the Fallopian tubes and ovaries, but not really the uterus. NOT THE UTERUS! (I can't even think of a long enough, angry enough, or dirty enough string of swear words to input here, so I'll just move on...) Another stupid waste of time. Stupid, stupid Doctor Stupid-ness. HOWEVER! The good news is that the radiologist offered to bring up Carey's MRI to go over it with her. Turns out the radiologist knew how to read an MRI and voila! There it was. A uterus shaped like a freaky Y heart. This was all Carey wanted. To see the severity of her bicornuate uterus. And it's severe. Carey demanded to get a second opinion from outside of GHC (which we'll be going to tomorrow) at a fertility clinic with a doctor who specializes in abnormal uteri. We've decided to drop Group Health and switch to Aetna next year.

In other news, we've had the keys to our new place for a week now. We checked the menstrual calendar we got going and Carey was supposed to be ovulating last week. So we did it 4 nights in a row and we'll see what happens. Night three was pretty hilarious, if you can appreciate how boring focused procreation is. We were exhausted from moving that day. Not so sexy. More procedural and mechanical then hot. It was on the excitement level of requesting salt during dinner. "Darling, could you pass me the salt?" "Of course, my love." Bam. Sperm deposited.