I'm feeling a bit better about things this morning... I think last night I was just completely overwhelmed and was desperately missing the time I needed to process everything. Note to self: crowded shopping centres are NOT the best place to be after medical appointments!

Intellectually, I'm quite aware that I've over-reacted and misinterpreted a lot of things... I'm not quite worked through things enough to figure out exactly how I have, and what the correct interpretation should be.

When it comes to why he said the varicocele repair would be a waste of time - he handed us a paper from the Cochrane collaboration which went through and summarised the findings of a heap of studies on varicocele repairs and pregnancy rates. The summary there is that in couples with otherwise unexplained infertility that varicocele repairs do not improve pregnancy rates. There's a lot of stuff in the paper that I just don't have the medical background to understand, but I am left thinking that we don't have otherwise unexplained infertility, and aything that improves things on either side should be worth a shot! I'll chat to my acupuncturist this evening, and we'll certainly be asking more questions next appointment, and more questions of DH's specialist when we go see him (16th of Jan)

I am going to give him another go... I know I was feeling really quite stressed on the day, and couldn't really cope with him questioning me directly - I really wanted to hide behind DH! But I also recall not really liking my rheumy on the first appointment and feeling like a right clod when I couldn't answer his questions (decribe the pain I'm feeling? It hurts, dammit! I block it out so I can get stuff done, and now you want me to think about it?! It moves, it changes, it's never the same! I can't describe it!), and now I love him to bits and wouldn't ever dream of switching to another rheumy.

From the way he questioned me at the end of the appointment, I'm pretty sure he picked up that I'm a bit of a control freak... and that this stuff being so far out of my control is damned scary. But I don't think he realised that if I can't control I need to understand, and that helps to reduce the stress of me not being able to control things.

I've been sitting here staring at this post for the last few minutes - and I just can't get my current thoughts and feelings into words. I guess that where I am right now is better than last night, but still a lot of thinking, processing and just general pondering to happen on top of what has already taken place.

BW