trying

Finally, a bit of excitement wends its way into this ordeal not a moment too soon. While managing, treating, and recovering from my cancer care so far, there has been little about which I have felt excited. I felt relieved that there was no cancer in the lymph nodes. I have felt pretty good, if sometimes frustrated, with the progression of my surgical recovery. But somewhere in my perhaps too-negative mind, these things fall short of being slotted into the category of events that I would normally call "exciting." They tend, instead, to sit in a new compartment that would be appropriately labeled, "thank fucking god because this could be so much worse," and while I have been swept over with relief and gratitude, it's been a far cry from excitement. But now, in advance of beginning chemotherapy, this is when the exciting stuff happens.
Unless in the midst of a pregnancy scare, a woman's period isn't something she is usually eagerly awaiting. I for one hate mine; it's a hassle and it's uncomfortable, rife with backaches and literal contractions (yep, just like childbirth contractions), and if it didn't ever happen I would think that was pretty cool. Though this month, I am attuned to every pull, bloat, cramp, ache, and new zit. This month, when the cycle begins, I will high-tail it to Ann Arbor to begin the in vitro fertilization process.
The procedure itself is a little unnerving. For ten days I will give myself shots (instruction video here if you're curious about the process) and make a few trips to the fertility clinic to have ultrasounds to monitor follicle development. When the follicles are mature, we will go again to the clinic where they will harvest the prepped eggs by pushing an enormous needle through the wall of my vagina and sucking the eggs up with said giant needle. Jason will have some time alone with a specimen cup and sperm and egg will meet in a petri dish. Romantic, huh? Don't mistake me - I'm no personhood or life-at-conception nut. I think those ideas are damaging and scary. But there's something thrilling about the conception process, even when it's going to happen in a little plastic dish under a microscope instead of inside my body. I mean, we're trying to make a baby! It's a pretty fantastic thing. From this hellish time in our lives will come a few embryos, relics of our current physical states to be stored and frozen until cancer is behind us. A child grown from this fertilization process will be the child of our younger selves. When other couples announce bashfully, excitedly, "we're trying," and head home for frantic quickies on lunch breaks, take temperatures, have lots of unprotected sex, and pee on the fibrous end of pregnancy test sticks, we will pull those internal functions out, place them in the care of doctors, cross our fingers that a few will take, and wait until my five years of Tamoxifen (hormone-suppressant pill therapy) are over. The delay is the strange part - we are now "trying" - these next few weeks our modified efforts at conception (less fun than the old fashioned method), but the pregnancy is off in the future somewhere.
I'd always envisioned deciding to try to get pregnant as an exciting choice, a time of eager waiting and redoubled sexual activity, buzzing anticipation as tests cure on the back of the toilet. It turns out that even with that happy procedural rug yanked from beneath my feet and supplanted by a sense of urgency to complete the harvesting, fertilizing and freezing before I start chemotherapy, I am still pretty stoked to be in the midst of baby-making, however it comes to us.
And five years from now, when a few of these embryos are thawed and implanted, we will huddle around pregnancy tests, hoping that Conception Effort Part II is also a success, that on the other end of this shit storm lies a healthy me, and a thawed cellular me+Jason concoction that will take up in my uterus for a while. 
Hey everyone, guess what? We're trying to make a baby!
Thank you forever and ever for your overwhelming support. We're pretty damn excited.