This past Thursday, after much encouragement (and, okay, nagging), I finally called my OB-GYN to schedule a preconception visit or, as I call it, a why-can't-I-get-pregnant appointment.To my surprise, they had an opening available just a week later, this coming Thursday. I wasn't prepared to be coming in so soon.
I also wasn't prepared for the forms the scheduling nurse told me to fill out ahead of time, and couldn't understand why she told me I might want to go ahead and get started. What? I couldn't just fill out their little questionnaire in the waiting room?
No, not so much. I had to log on to the clinic website and fill out roughly seven pages of highly detailed medical (and some not-medical information). They asked everything. They wanted to know my sexual orientation, and my partner's sexual orientation. (Maybe they get a lot of confused lesbian couples who don't know where babies come from?) They wanted to know whether I owned or worked with cats, or had ever had chickenpox. They wanted to know every surgery I had ever had, and every surgery my husband has ever had. (I have no idea how the metal rods he had put in to rebuild a broken arm are affecting our fertility.)
They wanted to know everything I had eaten the prior day, and I had to resist the temptation to lie. (I had worked through lunch, and therefore my meal plan consisted of yogurt, black coffee, and Monster energy drinks.)
In between the questions of whether I worked with hazardous chemicals, had ever been exposed to rubella, or am of Eastern European Jewish ancestry, I was really looking for a little comment or suggestion box, something that asked, "Are they any other factors that may be affecting your fertility?" Because then I could get to what I, at least, in my uneducated opinion, believe is the real issue: I only have one fallopian tube and half an ovary, and they're pretty much held together with my uterus via scar tissue. But, sure, ask me some more about whether I've ever lived in Africa.
