Monday, May 19, 2008

Barren Neighborhood?

Our house and neighborhood might be cursed. Not sure if I've posted this before, but now that we're packing our things after a 3-year stay, it seems appropriate to elaborate on our home/neighborhood and its history of infertility issues.

The people that lived in our home before us struggled with infertility, but we didn't learn this until we entered the land of the infertile last summer. When we moved in we found a few needles in the bathroom drawers and assumed they were required for diabetes, or heroine or something like that. At that point in time we had no idea what IVF was, and had no way to know that needles would be required to conceive. My, how things change in such a short time. During our introduction to IVF one of our neighbors told us about the former owners of our home and their dually unsuccessful attempts at IVF - that explained the needles. We're not sure what happened to them since, but we hope things worked out for them (they seemed like nice people at the closing)

Our neighbors on one side have a single child that they refer to as their "Miracle baby". They tried to conceive for a really long time and had given up hope long before they received their positive pregnancy test.

The couple two doors down have a teenage boy (Junior in high school) and two twin boys in 3rd grade. The gap between them never seemed odd to us (let me restate that - never seemed odd to ME ... my wife was always aware of this oddity) until we were diagnosed as infertile and were directed to pursue IVF - at that point we asked the husband of this household (referred to behind closed doors as "Putz") ... he told us that they did IVF and were successful in conceiving their twin boys. The twins are referred to as one person while Putz screams for them across the neighborhood in between swear words: MitchellShane!

The house two doors down the other way is occupied by swingers - pretty sure they're not all that concerned about being fertile ... in fact, they are likely concerned with NOT being fertile. Wonder if there are blogs in the swinger community about such topics ...
The "couple" four doors down adopted a little girl from Russia, and promptly got divorced afterwards. No word on why they adopted, or why they divorced, but we can only suspect infertility played a role.

So, there you have it - cursed neighborhood? Perhaps not, but there seems to be an unusually high concentration of infertility issues in our corner of the universe. Hoping to find better soil in Birmingham (where we'll be living for the next year)

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