I’m on meds this time around, as I mentioned, and the temperature chart actually did help me figure out When My Period Starts. So that’s an improvement. It helps that there turns out to be a woman at the fertility clinic who uses email. And she Answers Questions!! I also discovered a divine quirk in the universe’s tendency toward irritating chaos: the fertility clinic has someone on staff whose only job is to wrangle with insurance. I’m telling you now, it really might be worth going through fertility therapy just to have this woman call you out of nowhere and tell you she’s talking to your insurance people and will let your pharmacist know what to do when she’s done. I had tears in my eyes when she convinced my prescription insurance company to replace the $370 sticker price with my $40 copay on this extra special progesterone suppository no one actually stocked, and then told the pharmacist, and then made sure it was available for me to pick up that day. I was on her Call List, she said.

I know I don’t have to tell you, I’m not kidding: Tears in my eyes.

Okay, so I got set with my meds and joined the ranks of the Ovulation Obsessed, displaying three brands of predictor kits on my bathroom sink, taking multiple breaks from a conference to secretly pee on sticks, monitoring every glass of water I drank (not too much! can’t pee again for 2 hours!). Very intense and, frankly, weird. But we’re past that.

I even called the manufacturer of one of the ovulation kits to find out why it didn’t give me the same data as the other. Ended up spending half an hour on the phone telling him the difference between the test sensitivity levels, how to determine ovulation from looking at a cervix, and the pros and cons of letrozole vs clomid and endometrin vs the other one… If I weren’t certain this is all going into a suspended cache of short-term memory, I’d begin my new fertility counselling career right now. I could use a change.

It feels like months, but really it’s only been 3 and so only 2 definitive cycles and I’m so ready to get on with it and start inseminating! Of course my supply is dear and although I don’t have a deep or even manufactured fondness for Mr. Van Michigan, I still want to make the most of the massive group of decisions that got me to the point of reserving a carefully screened portion of his genetics.

So today I talked with a doctor at the local fertility clinic, because I found out at a Choice Mom event last weekend that I really ought to have had an ultrasound by now – along with a bunch of other things my gynecologist wasn’t even vaguely inclined to tell me (scratch her off the List of Helpful People). So there’s a bit of affirming news: if people aren’t giving you the amount of advice you think they should, something’s wrong. With them.

Okay, so now I’m finding out that I need to go in just before ovulating to have my (hopefully perched at the diving board of my fallopian tube) follicle looked at and my eggs counted. Neat-o! Almost exciting as the prospect of lugging a frozen tank up three flights of stairs and thawing a couple of tiny vials while attempting yet again to locate my cervix. That is, maybe it’ll distract me enough to make this a fun month of reporting on the Absurdity of my Fascinating Journey.

Meanwhile, in case you aren’t familiar, here are those ovulation predictor sticks that I was considering collecting in a huge damning art project. Then my mom said with rare conviction that I needed to throw them away because that’s really not in the category of Stuff Worth Keeping.

Moms know these things. So I’ll just show you a picture and you can see how conscientiously I was documenting for posterity…

It’s like reading glyphs from that crazy Laurie Anderson moon project. Not quite universal, but really trying. Anyway, I’ve still got my cervix, that Number One Communicator, and we’re getting friendlier all the time.