The most irritating part of the journey: the beginning

How do I start this blog? I'm not good at feelings. I mean, I'm needy and emotional, but I'm terrible when it comes to genuinely expressing my feelings. And, well, this one is so tremendous, I felt the need to write about it.
Here goes: Jacob and I are struggling with infertility.
Ugh. That didn't feel any better.
Where do I go from there?
Maybe some expository information first? My intent for this blog is to keep friends and family aware of what we're going through, since we've extremely tight-lipped about the state of our family.  But if I can help other infertile couples, then that would certainly be a perk. Plus, I need therapy to get myself through this. Writing has, you know, been known to be therapeutic, and in addition to that, I need to stop keeping all of this mess to myself. Jacob is having a hard time shouldering all of my emotions as well, so it's high time I start talking about it. It's extremely uncomfortable, I know, but for once I need to start embracing the uncomfortable before it becomes unbearable.
Also, I've realized something about infertility: if you write a blog about being infertile, it seems you inevitably get pregnant. Maybe that's the long lost cure to infertility: blogging. Science should explore that option.
But I digress...where was I? Oh, yes: background. Wait...I'll get to that in a second.
I should explain something about my writing first: I'm not a very good writer. I also have been diagnosed with ADD for years. I tend to go off on tangents and never fully explain myself, which is confusing for you, but rather therapeutic for me, so in short, I don't really care. Also, be warned: I swear. I do. I know I shouldn't, but I linguistically, I just love popping in an expletive here and there. I've got a flair for drama, and nothing says dramatic like a well-placed f-bomb. I'll try to refrain, but don't say I didn't warn you. This is my therapy blog, not yours. Sorry, mom.
So, background: Jacob and I met in 2005 at Luther College in Decorah, IA, and basically have never been apart since. We got married five years later in 2010, after graduating (me in studio art and him in accounting) and moving to Austin, Minnesota, where he is (surprise) an accountant for Hormel Foods, and I...well....find things to do from time to time, mostly involving supervising small children. We have a lovely home, full of empty bedrooms, and a lovely Gordon Setter, who is phenomenal with children...but no babies...yet.
True, we've tried it all, test strips, temperature charting, all that crap, but to no avail. We thought we weren't trying hard enough, that our time would come, and that it wasn't worth it to bring it up to friends or family, since we didn't want to get anyone too invested in the state of my uterus. However, nothing happened. For over a year. Well, that's when I thought, "Hmm, Katie, maybe you should, I don't know, see a doctor?" So, I did. Well, let me backtrack---I'd been seeing a lot of doctors in the past few years. My intestines don't really function like they should and I've been privy to a lot of lower abdominal pain, which has been all-around miserable. But nothing was really established other than that catch-all diagnosis of IBS, so I figured the two issues were separate. That is, until November. In November, I finally decided to mention to my (new) doctor that my husband and I hadn't made any progress on the baby front for over a year. She actually seems concerned by this. After an uncomfortably thorough (and I mean back-of-a-Volkswagen-uncomfortable) exam, she diagnosed me with an ovarian cyst. NBD, I thought. I'd had cysts before, and they'd always gone away on their own. My doctor suggested my husband get his little swimmers tested, which turned out to be a very awkward experience---they expect you to put that stuff in about four different containers before you finally seal it up and mail it in! Fortunately, he has no reproductive issues. Also, just for a precaution, I went in for a pelvic ultrasound. What they found absolutely overwhelmed me: I had an ovarian cyst the size of navel orange! I was in complete shock; how did I not realize that I had something so large growing inside me? I hadn't been feeling well for months, but this was completely unexpected. So, the next step? Surgery. This thing wasn't going to come out on its own, so they scheduled surgery in order to not only remove the cyst, but see how extensively my reproductive system was affected by this.
So, I had the surgery. Actually, as I'm writing this, I'm still recovering, as it was only a few days ago. But since you've invested this much time in reading all of this, you probably want to know what they found. Ok, I'll bullet the list, so it's a bit easier to read (and coming from a girl with ADD, I really appreciated bulleted lists):

• The cyst on my left ovary was, indeed, the size of a navel orange. It was also two-chambered, meaning that most of it (the orange) was on the outside of my ovary, yet part of it was buried within my ovarian tissue, meaning that the surgeon had to excise some of it to remove the cyst. He said it went well and sewed up the remaining ovary, though.
• I had extensive endometriosis throughout my pelvic region, including some on my other ovary and some spots on my uterus. However, they were easily able to remove those legions and it doesn't appear to have damaged my fertility.
• My fallopian tubes are clear now. I haven't deciphered whether they were closed before, but they're clear now, so...yay!
• The endometriosis was not only throughout my pelvis, but it had reached up to my liver and my diaphragm as well. That couldn't be removed, due to the proximity of my heart, so it's still there. I'd been having a lot of shoulder pain during my episodes of extreme abdominal pain, and apparently, it's due to my body thinking that the diaphragm is housed in the shoulders? Weird, but I'm thankful for an explanation.
• My sigmoid colon apparently is adhered to my pelvic wall, which is why I've been having such "irritable" bowels. They couldn't remove that either, since they didn't want me to wake up from surgery with a colostomy bag (Congratulations, you've made it through surgery, and to commemorate you experience, here's a free colostomy bag!), so I'm  hoping that the lack of pressure from the now gone cyst will ease things up down there.
• The surgeon wants to medically stop my periods for a few months, in order to help me heal, and then immediately attempt to get me pregnant. I mean, by my husband. He isn't personally going to invest in that...ew.

So there's that. Ok, that's enough. I hate writing exposition anyway.