Work Hard Enough and You'll Forget You're Infertile

So I haven't posted in a week because DH and I took a vacation. The deal was this: I had a beta pregnancy test on July 4th. If it was negative, backpacking. If it was positive, car camping. About 27 miles later, I am definitely not pregnant.

It was hard, when we got those results from the last IUI, to recognize that it's actually time to be ready for IVF. There are these lingering feelings of fear ("Nothing else has worked, why should this?"), shame ("Why am I jealous of people who I love, who I'm so glad have babies and deserve them and are great parents?"), dread ("I hate needles. They're for sick people."). But a good way to get over all that is to go backpacking. That's because it is such an intensely punishing process that you forget all this other stuff, albeit temporarily. Here are the things that helped me live in the present moment, not the future, IVF moment:

• Mosquitoes. Buttloads of these blood-sucking bastards. DH and I have at least 50 bites each. Seriously, we'd get into our tent to eat dinner to escape, then spend the first 5 minutes killing the ten mosquitoes that followed us in. There's blood smeared inside and I can't get that "buzzzzzz" out of my ear. I kept slapping my own face all night long, as a precautionary measure, ever time I heard it.
• Not being able to cross a creek. I've always been sort of a wimp about this. But this trip I tried to buck up and go for a rather difficult crossing. In the middle, I had to step on the roots of a tree that was growing there, however improbably. And slipped. And basically landed in a plane position, feeling like an idiot, water running over me, bruised and scraped, trying to stand on said slippery tree roots with a 40 pound pack tipping me back and forth.
• 11,000 foot passes. It is super hard to breathe up there, especially with a pack on. Even if DH is carrying the tent. And the water filter. And the stove. And more than 1/2 the food. It is still frickin' high.
• Pulled muscles. I felt my quad give a little tug when I was anxiously barreling down the side of the mountain the last day of the hike, toward a hot shower and a really gnarly chili cheeseburger. Then the next day, while staying at a "resort" (a glorified campground, really), I slipped on a rock and felt it tear. No one can think about IVF when they're walking like an 80 year old who just broke her hip.
• Nip. This is my favorite. It's the one thing that makes backpacking trips with my uber-fit DH bearable. We fill a Nalgene with vodka. We make the dog carry it. We get to camp after hiking many miles. We mix some vodka with Crystal Light lemonade. It may sound gross, but it's heaven at 11,000 feet, and only available to the non-pregnant.

Don't get me wrong--I'd much rather have been car camping. I would have preferred not to call my "nurse coordinator" from a remote resort on the John Muir Trail, where each minutes costs $2 (I left a very fast message), to tell her to schedule me for a hysteroscopy (a camera's going into my uterus on Tuesday) as soon as I get back. But at least the pain of backpacking made me feel real, normal. Now it's back to the reality that seems surreal.