Decisions and Planning

Another month has come and gone, with little-to-no activity in the stork department. Ellie and Matt decided that they would like to skip November as a transfer month and set their sights on December instead. I had mixed feelings about it initially, knowing that December is a notoriously busy month at work, and not wanting to delay the process even further. However, the break from the medications has been wonderful, and as an added bonus, my December projects have been delayed to January. So it looks like a December transfer is going to be ideal, especially in light of the IVF clinic scheduling the transfer on a Friday. That will give me an extra two days to hang out in TransferCity and let the little bean snuggle into a cozy spot for the next several months. In hindsight, I'm really glad that Ellie and Matt decided to wait, and that I was able to step away from the shots and calendars and counting of days. Fertility processes can make a person crazy. I've officially had 5.5 weeks off and now the December transfer is looming on the horizon.

I called the pharmacy and the monitoring clinic this week to ensure that our medications and monitoring appointments are all in place. The shipment from the pharmacy will arrive today and I'll start Lupron injections in just over a week. I'll have two monitoring appointments leading up to a December 19 transfer of the one precious embryo that Matt and Ellie have on ice. If all goes well, this little storkie will have a due date of September 5, which will likely result in a delivery within a week of my birthday and Scott's birthday. A birthday week delivery would be all the more exciting and special.

So what have I been up to in all of my stork-downtime, you ask? That's a great question! A month of free time can be dangerous for an overachiever/perfectionist type like me, and it happens to have come at a time when I am not very pleased with my current employer. To give you a little more insight, I came to my profession by way of avoiding the professional course that my family wanted me to take.

In undergrad, I dutifully fulfilled the requirements of my BS as well as the pre-requisites of the professional school that I was expected to attend. The thought of being mentally beat down for another 4 years didn't seem appealing to me when I graduated, so I took a break, got married and had a baby. It seemed like a good time to fit those details in, but the naive 22 year old that I was had NO idea what kind of life chaos that baby would bring! I worked a good job, stressed constantly about juggling the baby and work, and tried to engage my emotionally MIA partner at the same time. Life was hard, my husband was growing more angry and violent by the week, and I knew that it was time to get back to school to finish my education to be able to adequately provide all of the things that I had dreamed of for my sweet little. I also knew that I still didn't want to go to the professional school that I was being pushed toward, so I applied to grad school halfway across the country. It was a top ranked program in a field that seemed like it would be a great fit. Two years into it, I had an MS, my husband seemed to have found his mind that he lost around the time the little was born, and it was an easy decision to keep going into the PhD program. Oh, and while the sailing was smooth, it seemed like a good time to add another little to the group.

I was about 3 months pregnant when husband again lost his mind. Family seemed like an overwhelming proposition, while friends and drinking and all-night activities seemed like great fun. Old habits reemerged, new habits formed, life was hard and I was gestating a fetus on top of it all. By the time another 3 years had passed, I was at the end of my program (ABD), had an unpleasant divorce under my belt, was single-parenting two littles, and had an ex-husband that was actively evading payment of any child support. I took a teaching position at a university that I really enjoyed, but alas, adjunct-style teaching doesn't go very far in paying the bills. The other side of doctoral work is research, which comes with a much greater salary. I was still pretty shell-shocked from grad school though, so I wasn't sure if I hated academia, or just needed some time away to love it again. In the meantime, I had a great offer from a research institute at my previous university that involved no academics, just research. I thought it would be a great opportunity to fall in love with research again, and allow my aspirations of greatness to blossom. I've now been at the research institute for about a year and a half.

The first year of research was truly amazing. I settled into a position where I was able to soar and achieve great feats. I worked closely with the director of the facility, and he quickly became a trusted mentor. He laid out a two year plan that would catapult my career, and I couldn't have been more ecstatic to be here and doing this work. Suddenly, at the end of my first year, he had to leave to follow his wife's career across the country. I couldn't blame him; when I looked at the aspirations of greatness that I had for myself, his wife is a total embodiment of that vision, 25 years into my future. The rest of the administration worked hard to alleviate everyone's concerns, a new director was appointed, and research was still being done. However, things have not gone well under the new director. He has run off all but one of our lead scientists and only shows up to the office for about 5 hours per week. He has no intention of hiring new scientists, so our institute is on the brink of major collapse. The rest of the administration is either turning a blind-eye because they don't want to deal with it, or pursuing a self-benefiting agenda which is an added insult to the demise of the unit. All of this has led me to a place of unhappiness which has resulted in a great amount of reflection in an effort to decide what I'm going to do next.

Logic would hold that I schedule my dissertation defense and find a different position in teaching or research. While wrapping up the degree is on the schedule for the coming months, I have yet to find an area of this career that I enjoy. Instead, I have found that my happiness in it is limited to positions where I have outstanding mentorship, and mentors like Former Director are few and VERY far between. I also have a close friend here that is a projection of me in 10 years (scientist with aspirations of greatness), and I can't say that I like what I see. She is brilliant, funny, and has found ways to somewhat cope with the stress of this career, but it's always lurking just under the surface. Former Director's wife took off for a different position for the same reason; trying to find a place of peace in this field of work. No doubt running from one stress vortex into the arms of another. That's when it hit me: The struggles that I have in my career today are not resolved 10 or 25 years down the road. The things I hate will not get better. So with that in mind, I've decided on a career change, and I've spent the past month pulling together everything that I need to get started on that track. As I said, a month of free time can be dangerous for an overachiever/perfectionist.