The Waiting Room

I spend a lot of time these days in the Waiting Room - the physical waiting room and the metaphorical waiting room. The physical waiting room belongs to Dr. Uterus. It's tolerable as waiting rooms go (except when they had Christmas music going 24/7). I know which chair I like and that he has sucky literature (no People!) and that it is an ok place to catch up on increasing my score on BrickBreaker on my Crackberry. It is also the place for me to begin to worry about whatever is coming up because except when I was pregnant, going back is usually somewhat to highly nerve-wracking.

For as much time as I spend in Dr. Uterus' waiting room, I am always in the metaphorical Waiting Room. Waiting for a new cycle, waiting for a procedure, waiting for a pregnancy test. Waiting, waiting, waiting. I suppose everyone is waiting for something - the next weekend, the next holiday, lunch, dinner, a movie sequel. It just seems that waiting in infertility is much more agonizing and time consuming. While waiting for normal things, you can usually keep yourself nicely occupied while waiting - be it by doing work, sleeping, reading, etc.

But, waiting while you have infertility is difficult because you are reminded of your infertility just enough to make it seem like it is always there. It could be because you have to take a pill every night, you see a pregnant lady (or ladies), you get an email from a friend asking how the babymaking is going, you get Christmas cards with friends' toddlers smiling back at you. As Roseanne Roseannadanna said, "It's always something. If it's not one thing, it's another."

How do you distract yourself from infertility when there is always something around to remind you either of what you are going through or what you don't have? Sometimes it seems like a herculean task to simply not think about it 0nce for 5, 10, or 20 minutes. Work hasn't been providing the level of distraction that it normally does simply because we are between holidays and it is pretty slow. And blogging about infertility (which is so helpful) also means that there is the urge to think of new topics and blog about them lest things get stale.

Maybe I'll start doing a little trick I heard about for OCD. When you find yourself having a thought, you smack your wrist with a rubberband. It never really worked with my OCD because the concern behind the thought didn't change. But, maybe it will work with this - much like I remind myself to stop grimacing when I'm thinking (it's my vain attempt to not make the furrows between my brows even more noticeable). I hope to be able to go at least an hour without thinking about infertility. This sounds like a modest goal, but considering how time and life consuming it all is, I think it's a fair goal.