It's my party and I'll cry if I want to!

Cycle 12, CD 10

So what do you do when it's not your pity party and you're tired of the crying and ready for action? DH is in the midst of his second major pity party in just a few short months. It's understandable but I'm ready for some action. On Friday 10/2 DH got called into a meeting with his clinical instructor and asked me to go with him because we both had an inkling that it wasn't good. He was already on probation because the mentor he was with the week before had made 2 med errors (ridiculous). So when he was finishing his homework to turn in the following week and realized he was missing two lab values for his patient, he panicked. He had missed a lab value before and when he asked his instructor what to do, his clinical grade for that day was changed from pass to fail. He called a friend to vent and his friend told him that she knew another student had the same patient from another clinical group because she had overheard this other student talking about her patient in the library. So DH calls this other girl, we'll call her G, explains the situation and asks if she has the labs. G laughs and says "No, I couldn't find them either so I made them up. I do it all the time." ?!!? DH didn't want to do that so G offers to get the real numbers when she goes to clinicals the next night. Long story short, clinical instructor caught wind of it and DH was confronted when he showed up for clinicals. Since G hadn't gotten him the real numbers, he used her made up numbers so at least they would match. Now, I know this was wrong but in all fairness, it wasn't work that was going to be part of the patient's chart or affect him in any way shape or form. So DH spills the whole story when he's confronted. And then the call came that night to meet with his instructor the next morning. Shit.

His instructor said that him using false lab values constituted falsifying the document which was cause for immediate failure which means immediate failure from the program. She repeatedly told him that this has happened in the past and this was how it was handled and how it would always be handled and he was not the only one being affected that day. She encouraged him to go up the chain of command and meet with the course instructor. DH called her and she asked if he'd like to meet with the nursing chair at the same time. Two birds with one stone, sure, why not. It was a complete brick wall and they told him basically he just needed to take his LPN and move on. Great. On to a very drunken, bitter weekend for DH while I got to go work back to back 12 hour shifts and start AF. Fanfuckingtastic.

Monday the phone rings and it's a friend from class. G was there taking the exam that morning! Would someone PLEASE explain to me how he falsified a document but she didn't if he used her numbers?! DH was so angry he was shaking. So we called the dean and asked for a meeting. They emailed him the form to make a formal appeal (interesting, no one mentioned that was an option before) and set up a meeting for Wednesday. Tuesday night he gets a stuttering phone call from the nursing chair asking to meet with him because she heard he was meeting with the dean. Interesting. Anyway, the dean is investigating and we should hear from him later this week. DH pretty much had to raise the issue of sexism so he's also investigating the percentages of males failing from the program vs females which I think will be interesting.

But where does that leave us? Because it's the second time DH has failed, he can't reapply to their program for 5 years. The first time he failed was in June. My dad had a heart attack Memorial Day weekend and we were trying to get over to see him. DH hadn't seen his nurse at all that day on the floor so when it was time to go, he told his clinical instructor he hadn't seen her and needed to leave. She told him to go ahead and leave but then failed him for leaving without giving report to his nurse. WTF?!?! At that point he was told he couldn't make any appeals because it was completely at the clinical instructor's discretion and was just readmitted in the program for this fall. So we're getting his paperwork together to apply to take his LPN exam. We've picked 3 schools within a half hour from here as options to transfer to and finish his RN but he needs to go meet with each advisor and figure out which one is going to be the best pick.

In the meantime, he's wallowing in his failure. It upsets me because I feel like he spent the whole summer doing the same thing. There's nothing we can do but pick up and move forward right now. I'm frustrated because when he went back to school I knew I was taking on the financial responsibilities until he was done. Originally, he would have been done in just 8 weeks from now. After his first failure, he would have been done in the beginning of May. Now....who knows. Life has not been easy since DH entered nursing school and in some ways it's a relief to be out of the death grip school has had on our lives. I think I'd be perfectly content if DH stayed an LPN. He still thinks he'd be a failure.

I'm doing my best to be supportive. I took him to the Lions/Steelers game in Detroit yesterday because he's been a Steelers fan all his life. It was good to see him smile and enjoy himself. I really need him to pick himself up and move on with life. But how?

The results are in...

DH's s/a results came in the mail last weekend. I was at work and got a text message from him saying we needed to talk. I kind of started to panic and called him immediately. He answered the phone and I asked what was going on. He started to stutter a little bit and I cut him off and told him to spit it out already because my heard was pounding out of my chest. So he blurts out "Baby, I'm infertile. I can't get you pregnant." I broke out into a sweat and yelled "Just tell me, are there sperm? Are there ANY sperm?!?" It's probably a good thing I was back in the dark room with the processor running because that would have been a really awkward thing to have to explain to my coworkers.

I got him to run down his numbers with me and while the results were not stellar, I would say they were sub-par at worst, he certainly is not infertile. And I thought I was a drama queen! The two main concerns are that he had 14 WBCs when the normal parameters were 0-5 and that his morphology showed that 40% were tapered. His count was a little low but from what I've read that could just be from the WBCs. So my doc's office called back yesterday to talk about it with me and basically didn't tell me anything that I didn't already know - that he has some sperm that are abnormally shaped and she wants him to see a urologist. Oh yes, and that lovely golden ticket I got last week? Just hold on to that for now dear. Great.

Honestly, I wasn't about to waste 2 rounds of Clomid without getting DH's boys squared away first. There's just no point in making me ovulate better if there's nobody there to meet it! And who's to say that this won't take care of things without needing to move on to Clomid? That wasn't any great surprise but I'm glad to know that we were on the same page.

All that aside....for any of you TTC out there, do you ever have thoughts you know you shouldn't have towards other pregnant women? I have a confession. There is someone I met very briefly from my time on the TTC boards. Her stay was very brief which both relieved and aggravated me at the same time but even in that short period there was something about her that really rubbed me the wrong way. Now I know that it doesn't take any special education to be a parent or to be a good parent for that matter. But she didn't strike me as particularly bright (actually rather ignorant) and while I don't like to judge it didn't sound like they were really in any financial position to be having children. I know, I know...I've heard people say that you can't ever really afford children. Anyway, I'm ashamed to say that I have occasionally over the months secretly followed her on her EDD monthly board. I hadn't checked in on her in awhile but I did today because she's toward the end of her last trimester. I found a post where she referred to her unborn daughter by name and about spit my drink across the room. Honestly? Just sign the girl up for stripper classes now. Oh yes, and prepare for the hatred that will come because honey, as original as it may be, she will hate you for it. Especially if she ever decides to over come the short comings of her family roots and apply for med or law school some day.

Okay, I know I'm getting snarky now. I can't help it. This is my outlet and I'm airing it out. But here's my point: why her? Why does she get to spend the upcoming holidays holding her little girl in her arms after only trying for a few months (mind you without really the resources to care for the child once it's born) and here we are. Almost a whole fucking year later with a big lot of nothing to show for it. It's not fair. I don't know why this woman and her pregnancy bother me more than any other but they just do. I can't explain it.