Infertility Rehab

a blog by Lori Shandle-Fox, Laughing IS Conceivable, September 18, 2011

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Often around holidays, I write about the emotional ups and downs infertile people go through. But of course, there doesn't have to be a holiday or birthday or family gathering. When you're trying to cope with infertility, your average Tuesday can put you over the edge. 

("The edge, the edge, the edge, the edge"… Damn that Lady Gaga. I can't get that song out of my head.) 

I think the problem is that we're all walking around like a raw nerve just expecting someone to poke us.   

I feel like we spend every paranoid waking moment with our ears perked up and eyes constantly moving left and right like a Felix the Cat clock just waiting for someone to say something hurtful or offensive to our very sensitive infertile selves.

"Why don't you have kids?"

"Why are you waiting so long to have a baby?"

"Why can't you just be thankful for what you have?"

"Maybe it's just not meant to be."

We're fragile.  We need to be protected from the evil world around us. We should all be gently locked away together in a safe, caring, facility until this whole ugly infertility business is over. Like Fertility Rehab.

Of course in this fertility rehab facility, nobody would be trying to talk us out of taking our (fertility) drugs. In fact, they'd be providing them … and helping us shoot up. So I guess it would be somewhere between fertility rehab and an insane asylum. (The rubber walls would feel soothing against our raw nerves.)

"Here's your afternoon dose. This one will help you ovulate. And this one will help the anger issues that you have with your sister — you know, the one who has five kids with four different baby-daddies."

There would be therapy sessions:

1. "Hormone therapy" at 1 p.m.
2. "Talk therapy" at 2 p.m. Today's topic: "Why I hate everyone's face" 
3. "Making sock puppets (using construction paper instead of sharp buttons for eyes)" at 3 p.m. 

And in the nurses' lounge, the north wall would be taken up completely with a blackboard that read:

Please remember that our residents are very sensitive. The following words are not permitted within two hundred yards of this facility:

Pregnant, conceive, conception, sex, fertility, infertility, fallopian, filipino, tubes, test tubes, toothpaste tubes, uterus, urine, pee stick, pissy, eggs, bacon, toast, sperm, spam (neither the email nor the Hormel type), men, women, Christmas, grass, styrofoam, potato chips, moon pie, giraffe …" (continued on the back)

I imagine all the staff would be instructed to talk to us like on that Twilight Zone episode. You know, the one with the kid who could make people who didn't think nice things about him disappear into a cornfield.

"You're a nice fertility patient. Aren't you a good fertility patient? And I'm a good nurse. You like me Lori, don't you?"  

Or … maybe we could all somehow pool the energy from our unbalanced, hormone-invaded brains to do like the kid did on the show … Make all the people who are on our last raw nerve disappear into a cornfield. 

The only ones I would feel sorry for are the good people of Iowa and Nebraska whose crops would be ruined by a bunch of irritating losers landing in them.