December 14, 2011 – Clomid Crying: Getting by with a little help from my friends

The 5 days I was on Clomid were some of our busier days.  Doc had holiday parties and recruiting dinners and he really needed me to be at my best.  He was working overnight, coming home to sleep for a couple of hours, and then we would be off to the next event.  There was very little sleep had by all.  To make matters worse, we both have a cold or flu bug.  Under normal conditions, this schedule and situation would have made me a little tense.  On Clomid… I had many episodes of what I call “inappropriate crying”.  It wasn’t that I was sad; if I had been sad it would have been easier to explain.  Instead it was just that any emotion and I mean any emotion, resulted in a session of bawling that lasted approximately 10 minutes.  I watched Our Idiot Brother… cried.  I looked at one of my dogs and thought, “He is a really good dog.”… cried.  Watched Doc shave and he made me laugh… cried.  Watched a video of a baby scaring itself with a fart… laughed so hard I ended up bawling.  Inappropriate crying!

By the time we were leaving for the party, Doc and I had managed to make light of the inappropriate crying and he was even excited to tell people about it.  I am not a public crier, but I quickly realized that feeling embarrassed by the crying only made it worse.  So, I pulled on my big-girl panties and accepted that I was going to cry, I would have no control over how/when it occurred or how long it lasted.  All I could do was accept that it was a part of my current situation and that I could only control how I reacted to it, not how others thought/felt about it.  Everyone at the party was a physician or hospital employee that already knows us and most of them knew we were having fertility issues, so we opted to just be honest about our situation.   

The party went well and I only had 2 episodes of inappropriate crying, that thankfully were very brief and little more than tearing up.  One of the doctors that had also been on Clomid before shared that she had the same side effect.  She said she would walk into a patient’s room to give good news and end up crying.  She refers to Clomid as “an evil little drug”. 

Overall, it wasn’t a terrible side effect and it was over by the next day.  I am thankful that although we were busy, I didn’t have to try and work while I was feeling so off balance.  I am thankful that I had the time to think about the situation, fully process it, and gain some perspective with Doc before I had to face the world crying.  Being open and honest about it was definitely the way to go!  I felt like our friends were supporting us and when I started crying we all just started making jokes about how our table had the most interesting people (the crier, the wino… you know the cool kids).  J

And I found that once again, I can get by with a little help from my friends J