Let my ovaries decide

Last week I was approached by two different recruiters. One position is in the ideal company I should be working for, given my training. Still, the commute would be horrible because it's 30 miles away from where I live. It's also a terrible company to work for. There is a lot of job insecurity, and employees are always disgruntled and complain about long hours.

The other position is also related to my background, though not so much. It would be closer to home, about 6.5 miles away. I don't know much about how happy their employees are, but I do know that there were horrible layoffs recently.

Finally, there is the company I am working for under contract, and which might hire me permanently after three months. It's seven miles away. It's a Fortune 500 company, they're doing pretty well and everybody I know would love to work for them. The thing is, what I am doing is only partly related to my training and experience. Let's say that 50% of my work requires my knowledge and experience, but the other 50% of the time I do lab monkey work. As in, "¡Monkey, press the button! ¡Blow the whistle!". So I cannot say I get a warm feeling of professional accomplishment everyday. There is a huge part of my expertise that has no application whatsoever in this place.

I do get to knit at work, between pressing buttons and blowing whistles. I am about to finish my third pair of socks. In contrast, in my last job I was busy all the time and could hardly afford bathroom breaks. Maybe that's why I ended up with kidney stones. So this is an improvement, professional accomplishments be damned.

The thing is, if I were them, I would split my position in half. I would keep the biochemist part-time, and hire another part-time assistant to do the monkey work. I've been here for a month, and nobody has mentioned anything on whether they will keep me or not.

So of course I sent my resume to the two recruiters, and am already planning to come up with excuses at work if someone decides to interview me. I want to keep all my options open.

But I do not know what it is that I really want. There is no good wind if you don't know where you want to sail to.

Precisely at the end of my contract I will get another ultrasound scan to confirm that the ovarian cysts have been reabsorbed. If so, I will have to decide whether or not I want to do another IUI with FSH or go directly to IVF. The amount of money involved is mind-boggling.

Money aside, how do I keep working, or start a new job, knowing how stressful and inconvenient any of those treatments will be? Knowing that I will have to miss work to go to unpredictable doctor's appointments, and that I will have to interrupt work to go shoot myself hormones in the toilet?

The idea of not working at all seems tempting. The spouse and I are thrifty, he makes good money, I am on his insurance... But if we do IVF, we will need all the money we can make. If it works, we will probably want to buy a house. And the area where we live is still horribly expensive. Of course, if I were to work 30 miles away...

I keep jumping from one possibility to the next without coming any closer to knowing what it is that I really want.

But, who cares? Maybe the birth control pills are not working, and by the end of my contract my ovaries will still be full of cysts. So I try to convince myself that I don't have to determine what I really want, until I know for sure how my ovaries are doing.