I'm done with the birth control pill, yeah! I really didn't like taking that one, for some reason. I think it's the idea that they have to block my brain's natural function to control part of my body (and a very important part at that) that I don't like. I am generally pretty independent, so having to relinquish control so fully might be what didn't sit well with me. But ok, that's done. I'll have to get used to that control thing, at least for the moment. Now I just don't think about it and I stick myself with three different needles to get all the drugs I seem to need to take over my egg production machinery. But it's not too bad. I made it into a kind of experiment, seeing which needle and drug gives me the smallest bruise, and actually trying to not get bruised at all. Hey, as long as I'm entertained!
This is the easy part, I actually like being able to feel like I'm doing something instead of just waiting for something to happen, so I'm trying to find books and entertainment for phase 2, post procedures. I'll need to find something to read, possibly light and funny but not so stupid I'll get bored. I have a couple of titles I'm thinking about, and the library is at walking distance.
This is the one thing that I dislike about being gay: the pain and suffering we have to go through to do what so many do easily. And I'm not even saying that it is easy to have a baby, I'm just saying that we don't even get to try the pleasant way, it's catheters and syringes and soon enough needles and doctors while if we had, say, a sperm tap, we could at least try as many times as everyone else. Sigh. But then I stop and think that it's all so relative: I'm here, I play in a gay soccer team, the city has a gayborhood and I cannot be arrested, detained or harassed because of who I love. I have the best life partner I couldn't even ever dream of (meaning, were I granted the wish to draw a life partner for myself, picking all I thought I wanted, I'd have done a much worse job!), and in the end, if this doesn't work we still have options and we could adopt. Steve Job was adopted and he turned out just fine. I heard a piece of an interview that struck me on NPR the other day: a writer, his name escapes me, was diagnosed cancer and told he needed to have a shoulder amputation, neck to armpit. This obviously sucked, and he didn't hide the fact that he spent a while thinking "why me?". But then he realized that besides the cancer, he was healthy, free and alive. We fight many battles, and we win many battles, but we tend to forget the ones we win and only focus on the ones we seem to lose until they become us. I'm not going to let this one become me. It's just one part that belongs to this moment in time.
David Rakoff, this is who the writer was, ended up embracing his future as an amputee, and started living like a man with one arm. He learned to buy moccasins, move chairs, button his pants, live life. He even learned to cut avocados and take the pit out. In the end, the diagnosis changed and he got to keep his arm. Whatever our diagnosis will be, we'll always make guacamole.
