As I waited patiently for my next period to come so I could call and schedule surgery, after being denied it when I called during the last one, life decided to throw me a small curveball in the form of tripping down my basement steps and breaking my foot. I actually only tripped down one step. I was carrying several shopping bags and couldn't see in front of me and thought I was at the floor level when really I had one more step to go. So I stepped forward and just fell, my poor lateral left foot taking the brunt of the accident.
Nicole said I never cry, so that's how she knew something was really wrong. Well, to be more accurate, I cry at the drop of a hat when it comes to emotional triggers, but am pretty stoic with physical pain and discomfort. Not that I don't feel it, I'm just used to handling it internally and am not so expressive about it. So when Nicole saw me crying and unmoving on the floor of the basement after she heard the thud, she told me I really should stay home and ice and elevate my foot. I protested, much as I did in 5th grade when I got hit in the head with a baseball bat and was devastated when my father showed up to take me home. Stoic, I tell you. Or maybe stubborn. But when I touched my foot in preparation to put on my rain boots, it was so tender that I winced, and I agreed to stay home. When it didn't get any better in the next hour or so, Nicole offered to come home from work and take me to urgent care, where x-rays revealed a clean and complete fracture of my fifth metatarsal. An orthopedist visit followed, where I was put in a boot and instructed not to go to work and to stay off my feet for at least two weeks, when I will come in for more x-rays and a re-evaluation.
My devastation was twofold. First, I worried that this might interfere with my ability to get surgery for yet another month, and I am just so done with dragging this out. However, many people have since told me that it should not be a barrier, as it would be mostly healed by then and I am not on any pain medication.
Second and more upsetting is that I have been working for years to accrue the maximum amount of paid leave I can have for maternity leave. We don't get any paid maternity leave, but can take up to six months off with our position guaranteed upon our return, so I want to take as much paid time as I can. This means having my annual vacation of five weeks, two vacation weeks I can roll over, my "sick bank" which is maxed out at five weeks, my regular accrued sick time which is maxed out at five weeks, and one week of emergency time. This comes to a grand total of 18 weeks paid. I have worked very hard to get to this. I have been a miser with how much vacation time I will take for any given event, making sure for the past two years that I keep two weeks to roll over, never knowing for sure which year will be "the year." I have been using my sick time very sparingly so that it has time to renew. And now I'm dipping into it for a stupid, preventable foot injury.
I know that I need to follow doctor's orders so that I heal properly and am not followed by this for the rest of my life. I know this. But if I have anything less than 18 paid weeks to take off with my new baby, I am going to be heartbroken. That's not much time as it is. If I could afford to, I would be taking off the first two or three years!
I started my period while in South Carolina this weekend visiting my family. I called the clinic Friday and attempted to schedule my surgery, which should happen between the eight and tenth day of my cycle. The eight day would be this Thursday, and the ninth would be Friday. The tenth would be unavailable because it's a weekend. So apparently my doctor felt that it was too risky to schedule for Thursday, that I might still be on my period since it lasts seven to eight days. So she scheduled me for the following Friday, December 27, and stated I would need to get on the birth control pill to prevent me from ovulating before then. (Why didn't she just do this last month when she couldn't schedule me within that ideal time frame, instead of making me wait another month just to end up in the same predicament??) I was told that I needed to start the pill no later than Monday night for it to work this cycle, and that I would need to get a pregnancy test and a blood pressure reading before they would prescribe it. So Monday, with just a couple hours before we needed to be on the road to the airport, I was at a CVS Minute Clinic peeing in a cup for a pregnancy test that was pointless in a same-sex relationship and then picking up a prescription for birth control.
Birth control. I haven't been on it since I was 22. I spent that New Year's of 2005/2006 in a hospital bed after having surgery for second degree burns on both my hands. I begged for a new round of birth control pills rather than starting the placebos so that I wouldn't have to get my period while my mother was tending to my every physical need. The hospital either wouldn't do this or didn't do it in time, or maybe I was too groggy to remember to follow up. I didn't bother taking the placebos while I was recovering and drugged up on pain medications, and I just never started back up with the pill.
I told my boyfriend of six years that I had been ambivalent about it for the past year, knowing that the risks get higher the longer you're on it (at 22 I'd been on it five years already, and the risks increase at ten). I'd also become much more natural-minded in general the past couple of years and didn't like the idea of messing with my body's natural rhythms. It hadn't sat right with me for many months, and I felt so good about coming off of it and restoring my body's natural processes. My boyfriend was a little upset, as he had never wanted to use condoms, and I told him he'd have to figure that out, that I was not putting my body through all this for the very rare sex we had while I was going to school in New York and he was still in South Carolina. I was tired of the burden and the effects all landing on me. It was an empowering decision, and for a long time I loved getting my period every month knowing it was a REAL period, knowing that I was likely ovulating as I should be.
And now at 30, in a same-sex relationship and wanting to conceive a child, I am going back on it. Oh the irony.
I shuddered as I took that first pill and just reminded myself of the end goal - not just a baby, but a family. Then today I remembered suddenly around 11:00 that I had to go take another. I panicked for a bit at the thought that I'd almost forgotten. And immediately hated that I was eager to suppress ovulation. It just feels so against what I want to be doing right now!
Then this afternoon I started feeling nauseous. I was thinking about how terrible it would be if I'm sick for this surgery, or even for the presurgical testing I have to go in for this Friday. Then as Nicole dished out dinner, the smell of the roasted potatoes made me feel nauseous even as my stomach rumbled with hunger. I was bewildered; how could I be well enough to be hungry but feel so turned off at the thought of food? That's when it hit me. I remembered that this is a side effect of the pill, and it kind of made me angry. I'm not feeling sick because a bug got me, and certainly not because something beautiful is happening inside my body. I'm feeling sick because I'm giving myself hormones and messing with my system. Ughhhhh.
To keep my spirits up, I just have to look forward. I have to picture that in a month I will be off this thing again, and that my body will be cleaned up and ready to grow life. I won't be discouraged. You're worth it.
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