With this last weekend came the anniversary of the miscarriage, which means that we have officially been trying to get pregnant for a year now, and we don't seem to be all that much closer to knowing exactly what is wrong. Ironically enough, my period also started on the very same day. Ouch.

I actually think that I'm beginning to get to the point where I could say I'm "over" the miscarriage. Of course, wherever you draw that line is going to be pretty arbitrary, since I don't think you ever forget or ever stop feeling sad about it sometimes. It's also kind of hard to define because there have always been two types of sadness there: the sadness over the miscarriage, and the sadness over our fertility problems. At this point, though, I feel like the latter is definitely the more prominent.

I have to admit though, that I'm starting to feel a lot more hopeless about the whole thing. No longer do I think each month, "OK, this is going to be the month." I'm not wasting a couple of pregnancy tests each month. I've gone ahead and started my allergy shots and applied for graduate school and done all of the things I've been putting off because "I may get pregnant anytime now." In some ways that's probably good. It's not healthy for me to be focusing on this all the time. I just hope eventually I start feeling good about the other things I'm doing instead, rather than seeing them as second best.

As more time has gone by, I have started to feel I've invested more time in it, and the thought that I might get pregnant again only to have another miscarriage becomes even more depressing. Last time, at least, I only had three weeks invested in the pregnancy. How would I feel if it happens again? Maybe not getting very hopeful about it is just a way to protect my feelings.

I'm also feeling very out of control. I've come to realize that even with temperature charts and this and that, I don't even know what's going on with my body, let alone have any control over it. When we went in to see the doctor a couple of months ago, he looked at my temperature charts and said that I probably have some problems with my hormone balances. This is an extremely murky problem. It could be PCOS, it could not be.

What do we know? Well, we know my cycle varies from 5-6 weeks long. We know that my luteal phase, which is the time between ovulation and the start of the next period, has varied from 13 to18 days. It is supposed to be 12-16 days, and never vary more than a day. We also know that I consistently ovulate 4-11 days late. We know that the one month that my luteal phase was 13 days, I had normal progesterone levels, but who knows what my progesterone levels are when my luteal phase is 18 days? In conclusion, we don't know a whole lot.

The doctor said I could start taking drugs to regulate everything, but I don't want to do that until I have exhausted the more "natural" options. I want to actually find out what works so that we wouldn't have to go through all this again later and so that we can actually be addressing the problem rather than treating the symptoms. This last cycle after I had taken birth control pills was the first time my luteal phase has been in the normal range. Of course that could have been because of the birth control pills the month before, or it could be because of the weight I've lost. So this month I'm trying to lose more weight and exercising and eating to control my insulin levels, and we'll see how that works. Maybe we'll find something that makes things better. Of course each experiment takes over a month, so it's an agonizingly slow process and deciding which approach to take each month is not fun either. Either I could find something that works, or I could waste another month or two. Argh!