Saturday, March 19, 2011

Perhaps I should clean more often

I bought my car back in 2004 - a Honda Pilot with 4-wheel drive. We bought it specifically because we were moving to Montreal and needed a snow-worthy vehicle and because we thought that we'd soon be filling it with bundles of joy (at the time, it was one of the safer SUVs on the market).

Fast forward to 2011 and I still have my car, but the only "kids" that grace it have four legs, and don't use car seats. Instead of having crushed cheerios scattered in crevices and sticky fingerprints on the doors, I have a lot of shedded yellow dog hair and noseprints on the windows.

Anyway, I only do a deep cleaning of my car about twice a year - once in the spring and once in the fall. And, as gross as it may sound, I have never cleaned out the contents of the console between the front seats. Today was the day.

In it, I found three decks of cards (from playing Rummy with my grandmother before she had a stroke last year), countless small bottles of hand lotion eternally encrusted with goop, hand sanitizer, a few water bottle caps and several old receipts (one dated 2006) and other miscellaneous notions - those things hold a lot more than you might think. And, at the very bottom laying among a permanent marker and a couple of corroding AAA batteries, were my old alcohol wipes and an unused and still packaged syringe from my IVF days.

What's strange is that I don't remember putting them there, and I'm wondering where the vial for the follistem or Ovidrel was (maybe it was in a cooler that's still wedged under my seat -- I didn't get that far in the cleaning process).

However, it was a reminder of how tethered I was to my meds and doctor's office - to the point of outfitting my car with the needed supplies. Perhaps I was afraid of veering off course and being lost for days without my meds or in a traffic jam and unable to be at home in time to do my carefully scheduled shot.

Again, for some reason, I have no recollection of putting that stuff in there. Maybe I blocked it from my memory for a reason.

Ever found your old fertility stuff somewhere strange - or even years later?

10 comments:

  1. I found my wallet in my car, after a lot of searching and eventually replacing all the cards inside it. The dog had knocked it to the ground and somehow it became invisible. *shakes fist*

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  2. I haven't gone through IVF - but I did leave an OPK on the kitchen counter once. My husband was so grossed out by it - he cleaned the counter five times before we were allowed to use it again. Oh, did I mention it was in the package?

    I'm impressed you clean your car twice a year - I haven't vacuumed mine in at least a year - possibly two.

    (Found you via ICLW)

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  3. Hi Lu - Nope I'm a newbie to fertility meds and syringes, needles, alcohol swabs and vials of meds. Ask me in a few years and I'll let you know where they turn up!

    I will say that I do love my Honda Pilot as we just purchased our third one in six years three months ago! Turns out, we like new cars, but we hate change! Hoping your Pilot smells like french fries and has crushed goldfish crackers and cheerios in the carpet soon. Keep that sense of humor. It's critical :)

    ICLW 149

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  4. I still have two semen collection cups (in their unopened packages) in my nightstand drawer and a Follistim cartridge in the back of my refrigerator, but the rest of my infertility supplies are in a box in my bedroom. Even though we no longer have any hope for a biological child, I'm still holding onto these items. Maybe because I spent so much money on them and I would hate to throw them away...

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  5. Haven't misplaced any meds in the car yet but what I really enjoy is packing a cooler for a night out on the town filled with hundreds of dollars of medicine and the multiple "bathroom breaks" my husband and I have to take together throughout the night. Fun times! :-). Does your dining room table look like a full blown pharmacy?

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  6. I'm so glad I'm not the only one who runs across ancient stuff when I'm cleaning.

    ICLW #36

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  7. I cleaned out my car console today as well, and I didn't find anything nearly as interesting as you. :)

    Took my first shot today - I'll let ya know in a couple of years where I start to find random IF stuff! LOL

    ICLW#151

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  8. Happy ICLW! - I still have a 'sharps box' of used - yes, used syringes in my bedside cabinet with no excuses as I KNOW they are there. Why?? xxx

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  9. I found my sharps container in the trunk of my husband's car. His car broke down a month or so later (died really) so we had it towed to the junk yard without cleaning out the trunk. We remembered the sharps container a few days later but by then it was too late. Oh well. Now the junkyard guy probably thinks we were heroin addicts :)

    ICLW #136

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  10. As a military wife, I have to move frequently, so everything gets cleaned out. No fertility meds or syringes that I've found...we've moved twice since we did IVF (successfully). Would be funny to find them, though. Somewhere in all the paper I bet I still have my scribbled journals of dosage and days/times I gave all those injections. I am a paper pack rat.

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