In-Laws Visit

I don't where the time goes sometimes.  I feel like I got really behind on posting last week.  I started this post on Monday, right after my inlaws came for a visit and am just now getting around to finishing it.

My BIL and his wife live in the same city as us and my inlaws live about 2 and half hours away.  On Sunday we invited everyone over to our house for lunch since we haven't seen them in a while.  Unfortunately the weather was yucky and rainy which was disappointing because it's always relaxing to sit out on the deck and we were planning on grilling out.  J did manage to grill our lunch, but he basically just had to run in and out because it was too wet for everyone to be outside.  We had planned ahead of time to not tell anyone that we were pregnant yet, because we wanted to make sure things were looking okay with the baby and we wanted to tell everyone in person.  After my SIL's announcement a few weeks ago and more potential bad news on the fertility front for my BIL and his wife, it's going to make things really difficult.

We had emailed my inlaws about our struggle just before beginning treatment and aside from my MIL's initial response to us, she has been supportive.  We haven't shared a lot about what we are doing, but she did call J to make sure we were doing okay after my SIL's pregnancy announcement, which I thought was very nice and supportive.  We had no plans to discuss anything IF related during their visit.  However, that plan quickly went up in smoke.  My BIL had gone to see the doctor this week (I think a general doctor) who found a variocoele.  That doctor referred him for an ultrasound which he had had the day before the visit.  He did not yet have the results.  I was cooking in the kitchen, so I'm not exactly sure how everything played out, but she started talking about it with my MIL (which is fine - it's their business to share if they want to), but wow - she did not have all the information and was saying all kinds of stuff, that I thought was way out there.

My MIL is very over-dramatic, so she spent a lot of time freaking out that she had 'done' something that had caused this problem, blah, blah, blah.  J kept assuring her not to worry, which is right.  It's not her fault, sometimes these things happen and until my BIL has completed his testing they don't really know what the issue is.  He has not even had a semen analysis done yet, so they really don't know if there's a problem yet.  Everything we've been told is variocoele's are very common and they believe they correlate to infertility, but it's not a 100% link.  My BIL's wife and my MIL went into a different room to have the rest of their conversation which I really appreciated because my MIL kept trying to draw us into the conversation which I did not find appropriate.  Oh well, whatever, I guess.

My BIL and his wife ended up leaving a little bit before my inlaws did and as soon as they left, the conversation started right back up again.  I tried to clear up some of the major misunderstandings they had.  They should really visit some medical websites or something so they understand how common IF is and so they have a basic understanding of stuff.  I'm not sure what websites my BIL's wife was using, but she was saying (or my MIL was hearing) seriously scary stuff.  For example, she was saying that if you conceive with a man with a variocoele, there will probably be something wrong with the baby, WHAT??  J has a morphology problem and both the urologist and the RE said that is not in any way related to there being problems with the baby.  They said that usually a sperm with poor shape will not be able to fertilize the egg, and if it does there is no link to birth defects.

I also tried to explain that we had started seeing doctors about our situation in November (which I think completely shocked them) and that my BIL had only seen a doctor a few days before so he probably did not yet have all the information yet to fully understand their situation.  It's interesting how little people know if they don't have experience with IF.  J was explaining that we had been doing some treatment (I can't remember if he called it an IUI or not) and said that they take his sperm and put it inside me to help them get closer to where they need to be.  And my FIL said, oh that's good, they pick out just the good sperm and put them right in there.  No, that's not what they do.  I tried to explain how invasive and expensive that would be, but I'm not sure that they had any idea.  Hopefully they left feeling less freaked out about everything.

After they left, J did say that there's no way we could have had that type of conversation with them if we weren't pregnant.  It would have just been too upsetting.  Now we are thinking about how we are planning to share with our immediate families in the next few weeks that we are expecting and are deciding how to best tell my BIL and his wife since we know this will be a very difficult time for them.  More to come on that later....