Waiting and waiting.

Anyone who has experienced fertility problems or reproductive issues is familiar with the waiting.  EVERYTHING involves an anxiety ridden-wait in what is actually a pretty short cycle.  If you're trying to have a baby, the two-week-wait for a "Big Fat Positive" (BFF) on a pregnancy test can feel like an eternity (more so if you are waiting on results after expensive fertility treatments).  You wait for you period to start, you wait for your ovulation surge, you wait for the ability to pee on a stick.  No BFF?  Rinse and repeat.

And if you had to undergo any kind of surgery involving your ladyparts, I promise there are more waits, the most important being: when the hell will I see my period?

It was roughly a month after my D&C when I started to get a little angsty (though I admit, and you're possibly figuring out now, angsty is my normal state in life).  I was sure that I could feel myself ovulating a few weeks after the surgery, I always get pretty sharp cramps on one side, and then two weeks after that I was crampy.  In this case, crampy was good, I should expect my period.  Except it didn't show.  And two weeks after that, once again, I could feel my lopsided cramp.  And like clockwork, two weeks after that I had more cramps that totally felt like a period.  But again, nada, it was nowhere to be seen.

So of course I call my OB, who tells me that I really shouldn't worry, because a body needs time to "reset" after a D&C.  Which makes sense, but why am I cramping?  Besides. it's been over 8 weeks since my surgery. "Let's jumpstart your period," she says and she writes me a Rx for Provera, a form of progesterone.   If that doesn't work she will agree to perform a few tests on me.

So I dutifully take provera for ten days, google the shit out of it and learn that what I am doing has a fun, sporty kind of name, like something out of a fitness magazine, it's called a "Provera Challenge."  I get a grim sense of foreboding, because I have never been one for challenges.  I'm just not sporty, I can barely run three blocks, let alone marathons.  And my instincts were right, because all this challenge does is continue make me crampy.  Really motherfucking crampy.  But without blood.

So I am then brought in for an ultrasound and blood-work.  Fast forward a few days later and my doctor calls me.  'I have great news, your lining is pristine and your hormones are exactly where they need to be, your estrogen, everything, it's perfect," she says.  "Based on what I see on your ultrasound you should get your period this week.  You're just worrying too much, anxiety can really mess up your body"

I'm worrying too much.  Anxiety.  Hmmmm.  Despite the fact that multiple viewings of a dead baby on an ultrasound will do that to a girl, I embark on a regimen of exercise and massage to curb the ole nerves.  Want to guess what happens next?  Well, it doesn't involve a maxipad, that's for sure.

Friends, it's at this point that I call bullshit.  Because while I am often neurotic, I am not an idiot.  Something is wrong, and it's clearly physiological.  Every month, on the clock, I get cramps and every month they fail to bring bleeding.  It sounds like something is blocking my menstruation, right y'all?  So I type "10 weeks after D&C and no period"  into google and then start reading about something called Asherman's Syndrome...