It figures...

...that the one day I take off, things do not go as planned. Rewind to Thursday night. We were supposed to go to bed early so we could be well rested for our doctor's appointment Friday morning. No such luck. The very short of the ensuing 12 hours goes like this...Jessica became angry after we talked to her about her recent behavior. She goes to her room. I check on her 20 minutes later and find the room empty, blinds open, and window unlocked. We all figured she was out walking around to cool off, but after thirty minutes we began to get worried. She has not had her cell phone for six weeks, so she did not have that with her and she did not take her coat. We called her friends, walked the neighborhood, drove around the surrounding neighborhoods, but there was no sign of her. It was 11:00 pm at this point, thirty minutes shy of being gone for two hours. Protocol is that we wait two hours when a child is AWOL, then call the local authorities and fill out a missing persons report, then call social services and the on-call foster care worker.

At exactly two hours, I called the sheriff's department gave them her stats, what she was last wearing, etc. Then I called social services and the foster care worker. In the meantime, a deputy called and informed me that I needed to come in to sign the papers and bring a current picture. It is 12:30 am at this point and the sheriff's office is 20 minutes away, so I knew I would be up for quite a while. Someone had to stay at the house in case Jessica returned, so I left Rich at home and hit the road. I got back home around 1:30 am and decided to drive around a bit more and walk through Walmart since it is the only place around here that is open 24 hours. At 2:15 am I decided to come home and call it a night. We left all the outside lights on and I tried to watch some television to calm down while Rich went to bed. I ended up hitting the sack around 3:15 am, only to wake up at 6:00 am to figure out what to do because our doctor's appointment was scheduled for 8:00 am.

I wasn't up for more than 5 minutes when my phone rang. It was Jessica's friend's mother, who I had talked to hours before when Jessica first went missing. Her doorbell rang minutes earlier and who was there, but Jessica? I was immediately thankful that she was alive and okay, but then the questions came. This is where the story gets even better. Jessica had walked for almost nine hours (9:30 pm-6:00 am) to get to her friend's house. All I could think to myself was are you fricken kidding me? She walked 15 miles over a freaking moutain in the middle of the night with no jacket, no cell phone, and wearing pajamas!! Then I was hit with all of the what if's. What if someone had picked her up? What if she was hit by a car? The horror of what she had done really started to set in. All at the same time, my mind was racing because I now had forty-five minutes to figure out what we were going to do with her and get showered and out of the house for our appointment.

After at least 10 phone calls, we had a plan and set out on the road. I'll spare you all of the crazy details, but eventually a social worker picked up Jessica and brought her home to change clothes and go to school. I think she wanted to go to school to avoid us when we returned home, which at this point was fine by me as well. It was all a little much to deal with.

So, after just about no sleep and more stress than imaginable, we went in for the IUI. Rich was super grumpy and pretty much scared the lady working in the lab into bypassing some of the required paperwork. Luckily, I could count on Jocelyn to make the hour wait after his appointment and before my appointment a little less stressful. I don't know of a another doctor's office where the person at the front desk will run out to see you and then plop down on the couch next to you just to catch up and get the latest news. She's a trip.

Anyhow, here are the stats. They aren't good, but this is pretty much par for the course. Rich's washed count was 4 million with only 2% morphology. The morphology is the shape of the sperm and means that only 2% of his sample had a perfect shape which is needed to break through the egg. Dr. W said that pregnancy is extremely unlikely with less than 3 million or 0-1% morpohology. So, we are right on the outside of these figures. I could tell that he was not very hopeful, but there was nothing else we could do at that point, but to go for it anyway. Now we have to wait two weeks to find out the results. I'm so mentally and physically exhausted that the wait isn't even bothering me right now. I am just praying that things calm down around here and that we can all get back to normal and get some rest.