It just doesn’t pay to be a nice person.

An old co-worker, Steve, called me earlier this year and asked if I would be interested in a 3 month contract job working for him at a property. I agreed and was able to fit it into my life as a Realtor. It ended up being a decent stint and I met some interesting people I’m still in touch with. At the end of my time doing the work, the company who employs Steve expressed an interest in hiring me full time.

We had been discussing various positions for the past few months, but it quieted down in late August. A week and a half ago, I heard from the company again, and met with Charlie for an informal interview. He told me that part of my responsibility would include lifting some work off Steve who was overloaded.  Nothing seemed amiss.

The next day Charlie asked me via email if I was available immediately. I said if they could be flexible with my existing clients and time demands, I could start in the near term.

The day after that, X and I were at his mother’s house and when I went to check my phone and saw that both Charlie and Steve had called within a few minutes of each other. I called Steve back first. He said that they gave him “the talk” and that they were either demoting him or getting rid of him, but that they were giving me his job. I thought this was mega-uncool.  Then I called Charlie back and got essentially the same story - there had been “a talk” and they were unhappy with Steve and planned to have me replace him. They wanted to tell me since he was my friend who basically introduced us and to see if it would be uncomfortable for me.

In this conversation I really went to bat for Steve. I set forth two points: First, I worked with Steve at another company and knew him to be diligent and attentive. If he wasn’t able to do a satisfactory job, I wasn’t sure what I would be able to do differently. Second, it just didn’t feel right for me to be the catalyst for them letting someone go, much less someone who had brought me into the company and they needed to resolve this first before bringing me on. X was sitting there listening and he said he was so proud of how I handled them and myself, and that Steve really was lucky to have me be so loyal that I’d forego a job for him.

Charlie recommended I talk to Steve and get his side. I had already done this, but we did talk again the next day. He confirmed that he was told to “get his resume together” and because he was one of the few who I was honest with about the IVF process, he said that the condition the company was in was so bad, that if I wanted to get pregnant I should really reconsider taking the job regardless. I did tell him that we felt like time was running out for us, and while no one knew of the IVF, I didn’t want to get pregnant and then lose a baby because of a stressful working environment or something else like that. In all, he was appreciative of the things I had said about him to his boss.

A couple days went by and Charlie emailed me to ask me if I had made a decision. I told him that I would rather that they resolve the issue with Steve, that if I took the job and they let him go that I would feel like the catalyst for it. I ended by saying we could talk at some point down the road. I didn’t hear back from him. I didn’t hear back from Steve either, for 5 days.

Steve finally called me to tell me that “nothing had happened.” He wasn’t fired last Friday as he had been led to believe, he wasn’t sure what was going on, and said that Charlie had told him to convey to me that the situation was resolved with Steve. Steve then said to Charlie, “Well, with them trying to have a baby and going through IVF, I seriously doubt she would want to get involved in this company.”

Um. Okay…I had said several times that Steve was the only one who knew about this, and that I certainly did NOT tell the company where I’m interviewing that I’m trying to get pregnant. First of all, I’m not actually pregnant so what does it matter, and second, it’s none of a company’s business and was totally inappropriate to say and now probably removed me from all consideration for getting a job there.

I’m just so pissed off because from what the company had told me, they were really unhappy with Steve and even went through specific performance related shortcomings about him. The fact that I didn’t take the job enabled Steve to keep his, and he sold me out. For no reason.

People really suck.

I’ve been very remiss in posting. Sorry.

A friend of mine asked me the other night about how I went from daily writing to basically a once a month deal. It’s not that life is dull, it’s that. Wait. Shit. Life is dull. Damn it. We’re just plugging away over here trying to figure out how to have the life we want,  the life we always thought we would have and now aren’t sure it’s a reality. We’re mired in all sorts of various endeavors to determine if we can have this life or not, and truthfully, I watch it slip further away as the days pass. At least that’s how it feels. Which brings me to my next point.

The last IVF didn’t work. So that’s #3. I’m starting to realize this is more of an art than a science. I find myself resenting every swelled stomach I pass on the street and frankly it’s not a great place to be. But what can you do?

I guess you can find little ways to make yourself feel better, right? Which brings me to my next point. (Yeah, I know, I used that on the last transition, I told you I was getting dull.)

For some reason that no one can explain to me, Mr. X’s ex, the witch we can’t stand, is somehow receiving mail. At. My. House. Mr. X just moved in with me this past year, and she most definitely has never lived here. We can’t seem to find the source of the mailing list which has connected her name with MY ADDRESS. I swear, there is nothing like opening your mailbox to find that she has infiltrated yet another part of our lives. It really is a slap in the face.

When yet another junk mail company couldn’t tell us where they got her name for our address, I hopped online. There is nothing google can’t tell you. After a few searches and clicks, I got to the junk mail website and found several ways that you can get someone to stop receiving mail at your house, but they all involve forwarding, going to post offices, filing complaints, waiting, etc. Until I scrolled to the FAQ and found out that you can actually report someone as “dead” and they get removed from all mailing lists. Just report them dead, give a date of death and bam - they get removed from all junk mail lists.

I guess I don’t have to tell you what I did next, do I?

Warning: This post is incredibly detailed with medical jargon you may find coma-inducing.You don’t have to read it all…I bolded the important parts. Mostly I want to solidify its place in the event I can help some poor woman in the future.

In most cases, I love it when something I didn’t understand finally makes itself clear to me. I also love it when I’m right. Not this time.

We just finished the IVF with Shady Grove. We don’t know much yet but I’ll report in when we do. I’m not hopeful since I’ve endured this before, only to have it fail.  Having gone through the whole process at Shady Grove and finding it 1000 times better, more professional and easier than the other stimulated IVF we did, I have learned a ton.

My Ob/Gyn, who I love, recommended two years ago we see Dr. Asmar at Washington Fertility.  We liked him and felt like he could help us, so we began the IVF process. From the 2nd or 3rd day of the shots I was sick. I could not understand how friends of mine did this 5 and 6 times. When I reached the point where I was homicidal and knew my body could take no more, Dr. Asmar said I needed to do one more day of shots. I was beside myself. I couldn’t believe it. I knew something was wrong with my body, we had already lost faith in them when they lost X’s sperm, when they overcharged us, when they routinely made us wait an hour even though the office was empty, when their two receptionists treated us like crap, but I just knew something was wrong. From what I know now, it appears that I was overstimulated.

When your follicles are overstimulated, you will get tons of eggs, but few of them are viable. There were 15 eggs retrieved from me on Friday, February 5, 2010 at 8:30 a.m. I went home to bed. X came in around mid-afternoon and said, “Good news, 13 of the 15 eggs fertilized!” We were so happy. What we know now from our experience with Shady Grove is that the eggs take about 24 hours to “fertilize.” So a phone call 6 hours later from Washington Fertility stating 13 fertilized eggs was clearly a lie.

That evening, as it started snowing the Great Snowstorm that gave the DC area 3 feet of snow, X and I discussed how wonderful it would be to have enough embryos frozen that we could have a few kids off this one IVF cycle. We lost power that evening, as did most of the metro area. X said to me at 11:00 Friday night, “I hope they didn’t lose power at the lab.” Suddenly our minds went to our 13 little embryos, the little Velvet/X combos and my heart sank. They had told us at Washington Fertility that they planned to stay at the lab all weekend in anticipation of the storm, but as the snow pounded the city, we didn’t hear anything all weekend long. What we know now from our experience with Shady Grove is that you should get a daily phone call after egg retrieval. The day after retrieval they call with a fertilization report. The second day they call to tell you when to expect the embryos will be transferred. For a variety of reasons they determine at this point whether you should transfer the embryos on day 3 or 5 post retrieval. We received no such call from Dr. Asmar’s office at Washington Fertility.

Monday morning, February 8, 2010, the medicine cocktail I was still taking had burned through my esophagus so badly I hadn’t been able to eat all weekend without throwing it back up. Dr. Asmar’s office called to say that “only 7 eggs survived the weekend and only 3 were dividing normally.” Because they weren’t even decent quality, they recommended an immediate transfer. We asked for a delay because of my vomiting issue (I seriously just wanted my fucking body to be normal again) and he said no, this was important to do today as the embryos typically do better inside the mother. What we know now from our experience with Shady Grove is that this transfer should be scheduled the day prior, and you shouldn’t receive a panicky phone call from your allegedly competent doctor telling you to come right away.

When we got to Washington Fertility they showed us a picture of 6 embryos and said that a 4th had “started to divide.” We never did find out why they said 7 embryos on the phone but only showed us 6. What we know now from our experience with Shady Grove is that an egg doesn’t just suddenly start dividing 3 days later. If they are going to arrest development it’s early in the process, and then they don’t keep going. Because we got no phone calls from Friday afternoon with our “fake” fertilization report, until Monday morning’s panicked “you have to come right away,” it’s obvious that these people lied. They were NOT in the lab at all, because if they were, we would have received calls, and not all of those eggs would have died. The lab needs to wash, change fluids, etc, and this probably wasn’t done. It appears they left the embryos to fend for themselves and went home to shovel their driveways.

When you reach the end of your hormone shots, the clinic calls you and tells you to take a “trigger” shot that tells your follicles to release the eggs. Exactly 36 hours later, they have you go in for an egg retrieval. I had 12 follicles this time but some were sluggish. Based on the sizes, I had thought they would have me go another day on shots, and X and I were prepared for a last minute trip to the pharmacy to pick up more. When Shady Grove called with my directive to take the trigger shot I was sort of stunned. Last IVF I was begging for that shot, but this time, I could have easily gone another day. I asked the nurse why. What we know now from our experience with Shady Grove can be summed up by her response: “Well, we watch for the estrogen jump, and as long as it jumps as much the following day, we keep going. When it levels off, your body is going to stop maturing the eggs and you could risk losing the bigger follicles as they will be too old now.”  I went back to look at my records from good old Dr. Asmar.

Before I compare estrogen levels, here’s a tidbit of useful information on Estrogen and proper numbers during IVF:

Exact figures are not possible. As a rough guide, however, a level in the range of 150 to 500 pg/ml is generally considered reasonable for the eighth day of a stimulated cycle. An approximate doubling of this level every 48 hours is considered promising, as a sign of continued good follicle development.

Let’s compare Estrogen Levels for both cycles.

Washington Fertility
Day 5    149
Day 7    489
Day 10  1323
Day 11  3312
Day 12  3458

I didn’t have an appointment on Day 8, but let’s assume I was around 500 just for fun since I was at 489 on Day 7.  Following with the guide above, day 10 I should have been 1000; I was 1323. Day 12, had I been 1000, I should have been 2000; I was 3458. That’s 73% higher than I should have been. Those eggs weren’t over-easy, they were scorched.  While they don’t provide targets of estrogen because every woman is different, it appears from that example above that if you stimulate for 12 days with shots, the max your estrogen should reach is 2000.

Shady Grove
Day 6     189
Day 7     302
Day 9     481
Day 11   1106
Day 12   1380
Day 13   1599

My day 8 estrogen was clearly in the range of 150 - 500 since days 7 and 9 are in that range. It’s safe to assume though that they did it right. I was responding to the meds more slowly, but when the jump from day 9 to 11 was 625 points, then from 11 to 13 it went 493 points, it was time to trigger.

See what happened at Washington Fertility with Dr. Asmar? I was right. I was totally overstimulated, could go no further physically and they should have given me the trigger shot when I asked for it. The jump in estrogen from 1323 to 3312 was the big one, but then the fact it went only another 140 points? Dr. Asmar totally missed the entire window of opportunity and all that pain, torture and money was for nothing because my eggs weren’t viable. Couple that with the fact they weren’t at that lab that weekend, and those embryos didn’t stand a chance. I love being right, but this time it’s heartbreaking.

After my experience at Washington Fertility, I left some reviews on various doctor review sites. Like clockwork, their stupid nurses would come in right after me and leave positive reviews. Except they are soooo stupid because you can tell it’s them writing the reviews based on what they say. On one of the sites they even wrote “Velvet we know who you are and we’ll call your job and tell them you’re crazy.”  Um….nice. Except that their English isn’t that proper.  Washington Fertility has been on a massive PR parade. They also since redesigned their website and put up testimonials that are clearly fake…just as fake as their fertility reports.

Uggh. I can’t believe I’ve neglected the poor Velvet blog for this long. Actually, I’ve neglected all my writing endeavors, save a few cryptic notes on my feelings about a long standing family drama that’s come to a head.

X and I have had a very busy summer. There have been work and vacations. We wrote an offer (that wasn’t accepted) on a house in the Keys. We’re still planning on buying our next home there though. Sammy and Thora had a summertime brush with fame when they endeared themselves to one of my favorite actors - Sean Hayes. Actually, it was less a “brush” and more of an intended bump-into. Let’s see…my ex, Sammy and Thora’s original daddy, had texted this spring that he’d like to try to see the dogs. They are almost 12 now, and he said he would rather see them now than when there’s an eleventh hour phone call. Shudder. I don’t like to think about that day. Anyway, he is in the movie business, and we went to see him on our way home from Florida. By “we” I mean, Mr. X and I.

I know what you are thinking, but it wasn’t awkward at all. In fact, to me, it was like just getting two of my closest friends in one place. See, when you have long term relationships with people who aren’t psychos, they can manage to function in the presence of each other without wanting to kick each other’s asses. And so there I sat at some high school cafeteria in Cartersville, Georgia, eating lunch with my husband and the man who was almost my husband, with Sammy and Thora and with Sean Hayes behind us. It was mega-cool. My ex brought us to meet Sean and he got down and started playing with Sammy and Thora. Sammy gave him his resume, but Sean wasn’t interested in employing a bacon-eating, bark-a-tron corgi from Washington, DC.

Our 1 year anniversary was July 23rd - yay! We came home from our vacation of bliss and started IVF again. Happy Anniversary to us!  Actually, it isn’t that bad at all. We’re with Shady Grove - where we probably should have stayed from the beginning. I’m in the middle of the shots and other than being sleepy all the time, I feel pretty good. We have a couple days to go, then egg retrieval and the rest of the fun stuff.  The only other time we did the fully stimulated IVF was the mega-disaster with the worst of the worst - Washington Fertility. That was 18 months ago. That round was during the big February snowstorms. When the area lost power, and all my eggs died, we had to wonder if the lab lost power as well. It was somewhat calculated that this time we would do this in the summer so there were no weather complications. Except I miscalculated for the time that X had to go get his vials of frozen sperm and have to run them from storage in Virginia to the lab in Maryland when it was 110 degrees. It’s actually comical.

I’m not going to get into boring scientific specifics, but comparing that cycle to this one where my ovaries are responding a bit slower, I will say that time means everything after 35. And this is coming from a woman with zero reproductive issues. Zero. So if you are on the fence and you’re mid-thirties, get cracking. Don’t wait because now instead of just facing Mr. X’s snippy snippy issue, we have my apparent Indy-500 race into menopause.

It was just yesterday I was doing keg stands. Now I’m looking for retirement homes in Florida and counting my eggs and hoping they hatch. But it’s been a great summer thus far. Hopefully it will get better.

Nothing makes me cackle like a good prank call. Well, unless it’s someone falling.

Okay, so prank calls rank a close second. In college we had a shared phone between 2 dorm rooms and we would all sit on the extensions and prank various places. Sometimes we would go through the classifieds and just call people which never proved very fruitful. In Miami, 110% of the people selling crap in the Penny Saver don’t speak English. We decided to bring it a little closer to home and prank the Fraternity Houses on campus.

There was one such house with a rather large population of frat boys from Long Island and New Jersey who really hit the jackpot in the “body hair” department. Normally I would order 10 pizzas for them with pepperoni but asked that they “not slice the pepperoni” but to “just lay the stick across the pizza.” Then I would call to the frat house and let them know in my signature psycho voice. Every time I would call with the voice you could hear them all saying, “oh no…this again?”

Pepperoni aside, my best call, according to my roommates, was this one:

Poor Schlub: ZBT House!
Me: Hi, it’s Jill.
Poor Schlub: Yeah???
Me: Someone called me from there.
Poor Schlub, to room: Did anyone call a “Jill?”
Room: No JILL NO ONE CALLED YOU!!!
Me: Are you sure? This number came up on my caller id.
Poor Schlub: We said NO ONE called you from here, okay?
Me, cueing psycho voice: Are you sure? No one called Jill? The big Gillette Razor? I’m coming over to shave your back!!!

The advent of caller id and popularity of cell phones really put a damper on my prank calling career. It’s all well and good anyway since I’ve managed to do a massive amount of growing up since 1992. However, there is occasionally an opportunity that makes me giddy with glee.

It’s no secret that X’s ex, the Beast, is usually unleashing some sort of drama on all our lives. Her most recent stunt involved moving away, taking the kids, not telling anyone, and then threatening to take X to court when he didn’t fork over her money so she could sign up for Yoga 10 states away. She wasn’t bothered by that minor detail of kidnapping, but such is life.  When she couldn’t squeeze money out of X (he was waiting for her comments on the aforementioned kidnapping and certainly was not going to pay her to continue to commit a crime against him and their children,) she called X’s mother. (The Beast has a British accent.)

Poor X’s mother, she’s 83 years old and she really hates The Beast.  X’s mother called X in a fury and said that The Beast called her and said, “Is this a werkin numbah? I need it ta file papuhs ageenst X.” X said his mom was so upset. So I decided to have a little fun.

I called X’s mom. When she picked up, I put on my fanciest British accent and chirped, “oh helllllowh! D’ya want ta have tea and biskits with me??”

Click.

She hung up on me.

X and I were laughing so hard. Never mind that The Beast has a working class accent and the only British accent I can pull off be the fancy kind, X’s mom missed that detail. But I thought she would have known there is NO WAY The Beast would call and offer to break bread with her. I tried to call right back but she didn’t answer. I had to beg and plead into the answering machine that it was me. When she picked up she said, “You’re never going to believe who just called me!”

Oh, I’ll believe it all right. It actually took a while to convince her that it was me. I had to do the voice again to prove it. X’s mom has a great sense of humor, and anything at the expense of The Beast is hilarious to her. And me, apparently.