It has been some time…

I am a unicorn. And so is she.

Hello there friend.

It’s been some time since I’ve written – almost a year in fact.  And that’s not because I haven’t had a million and one Hawaiian adventures to share, but because sharing meant that what’s happening now is real – and this whole dreamy (yet somewhat miserable) story is hard to believe in.

Since my last post, which was about as honest as I could have been about our full fertility journey, so much has happened.  I went to Singapore and left my gall bladder there.  I got to see the Big Island, Kauai and Maui.  I got to hike across a lava lake, take a plane over the Grand Canyon of the Pacific, and experience the remarkable Cloud Forest.  I’ve been to Guam, where the snorkeling really is the best in the world, and moved into a new house much closer to town.

But the biggest news of all is something that I’m horrified to type:  In July of 2014, I got pregnant.

Pinterest Couple

You would think I’d be jumping for joy.  You would think I’d be yelling from the rooftops because we’d spent so many years of our relationship trying to make this happen.  You’d think I’d be happy…  But you’d be wrong.

Don’t read this cruelly, because I don’t mean to say that I wasn’t happy to be pregnant.  On the contrary, there was a piece of my heart healed by the news.  But after spending years going through infertility treatments, chemical pregnancies and miscarriages, it was (and still is) really hard to imagine.

It’s kind of like spending your life training to climb Mount Everest, and now, you’re finally there, you’re finally getting to take on your dream and it’s terrifying.

You see, people who suffer from infertility and undergo years of treatment can end up with PTSD.  Yeah, yeah, you can dismiss it outright, but I can personally tell you it’s absolutely true and the scientific evidence backs me up on that one.  There’s an article on Medscape that says it well…

“Subsequent to the trauma, victims experience feelings of intense fear, helplessness, or horror…  The inability to conceive can catapult some patients into a state of shock, disbelief, and helplessness.  Infertile couples must grieve 2 losses simultaneously:  the loss of their ability to procreate as well as the loss of the hope for children…  They [patients] may re-experience the trauma as nightmares, flashbacks, and intrusive thoughts about distressing procedures or pregnancy loss…  Giving birth to [a baby] seemed, at first, like heaven to her, but this quickly gave way to feelings of severe emotional distress…  She could not plan for the future or think beyond conception.  Her life was on hold, indefinitely…  She continually blamed herself for the ways in which she imagined she had caused the infertility…  On her visits to the gynecologist, she became tremulous, sweaty, short of breath, and highly irritable.”

When I took my first pregnancy test, I got two lines.  So I took two more the same night.  Then I took one or two every day for weeks.  I saw my family physician, who drew blood and tested my urine.  Positive!  Off to the OB.  But, I wasn’t very excited.  What was my beta?  Could I take another test the following day?  I needed to know if it was doubling or not.  But, they’re not an infertility clinic.  They don’t do that.  Instead, I had to wait a couple weeks to get in to see the OB, and I had about five panic attacks in the days subsequent to being told that I had to wait.  It was so bad that I actually considered taking a Xanax.

Every day.

In the meantime, I cried almost every day.  I dreaded going to the bathroom, and I went more often waiting for that tell-tale sign that I’m not pregnant.  Every single day I knew – I just knew – it wasn’t going to stick.  Every single day I waited, analyzing every single pain, every single symptom – double-guessing my own instincts and behavior.  Do you know what it’s like to constantly think, “Am I overly tired because it’s sticking?  Or because I slept two hours?”  “Am I really feeling nauseous, or am I making myself nauseous from the anxiety?”  Pregnancy after infertility is hard sucks.

The night before Keith arrived home from deployment, I was spotting and it wasn’t light.  I knew – I just knew – it was over.  I put on a brave face at our event, and at homecoming the next day as I sadly told my husband I was so sorry…  That my body yet again failed us.  But, together we decided to go see the OB anyway.

That Thursday, we sat in the office.  I was probably the most miserable-looking person there.  The nurse took my vitals and congratulated me, to which I replied, “Please don’t congratulate me.  It only makes it harder when you have to say you’re sorry.”  I was that rude, miserable woman.

The doctor came in the room and asked to do an ultrasound,  I didn’t look at the screen.  I didn’t want to see that big, empty void again.  I didn’t want to know that I’d wasted another couple of hours at a doctor’s office pleading for a miracle that would never come.  Yet, there she was.  This tiny little bean on the screen.  Keith squeezed my hand.  The doctor said everything looks good, but let’s hear her heartbeat.  That moment was the most frightening moment of my life.  I was so happy inside to hear that thump thump thumping, but at the same moment, my brain took over and said, “Don’t enjoy this too much.  It will only make you feel worse when you have to come back to an empty screen.”  I barely reacted.  Keith cried and held my hand.  I think he had a little bit of PTSD too.

Every week, we journeyed into the doctor’s office.  Every week, I was convinced that some spotting or some pain meant that the baby was gone.  Every week, we saw her wiggle wiggle wiggle on the screen and I just couldn’t open my heart to the possibility.  Talk about pessimism – except this was quiet acceptance that we would never make it to the finish line.  I couldn’t enjoy these moments.  I wouldn’t let myself, no matter how hard my heart tried.  I kept up with the bathroom anxiety.  I went probably once an hour, or every other, waiting – expecting – actually seeing that it had failed, even when it hadn’t.

Eventually, we didn’t have to go every week and she grew and grew and grew.  But pregnancy has been awful for me.  I was vomiting so often that I actually lost weight.  Poor Keith spent the night awake taking care of me while I cried and vomited and took baths to calm myself down.  I did nothing but sleep.  All.  The.  Time.  I slept day and night, because there was no other alternative to the nausea.  And my self-doubt only increased with every twinge and doctor’s appointment.

I was so sick that I could barely function.  We had a dinner event to attend and thirty minutes beforehand, I was bawling into my husband’s chest that I couldn’t even stand up straight.  But I couldn’t complain – not after we’d tried for so long.  I couldn’t complain.  I couldn’t say this is awful.  I couldn’t tell anyone how I was feeling, that there were moments when I wondered if I was still being punished…  If, for some reason, the universe had to make sure I really wanted a baby.

The nausea got better, but has never gone away 100%.  The discomforts continued to pile up.  Complete exhaustion for one, and restless leg, insomnia, heartburn – you name it, I have it.

What I also have is the inability to enjoy this pregnancy.  I still cannot imagine what it will be like to have a real little infant in my arms.  I’m still detached from the images on the screen and have trouble relating that what I’m seeing is what’s happening inside my own body.  Even her movements make me nervous.  If I haven’t felt her for a while, I’m convinced that something is wrong – to the point where I refuse to take Benadryl to sleep because it reduces how much she moves and causes me extreme anxiety.

The pregnancy has progressed as it should, with a few hiccups.  I’m still high-risk and there’s a potential for an early induction due to personal circumstances that I won’t discuss here (despite how open I am, there are some things that can’t go on the internet).  Every visit to the doctor’s office is stressful still.  The other day, I couldn’t find a parking space.  When I finally did, and I was five minutes late, I couldn’t stop crying.  I could not stop crying.  I was a lunatic and my blood pressure showed it.  I couldn’t answer questions, got angry when asked things that I thought were dumb, and became convinced that something was wrong.  Alas, all is okay and after spending the remainder of the day napping and in bed, I was able to function once again in the morning.

Keith and I have finished the nursery, which has been a welcome distraction to the other concerns.  Somehow, it’s easier for me to plan for a new room than it is to think about the person who will be sleeping in it.  It’s easier for me to find a safe carseat or pick out the perfect shade of pink than it is to imagine her wrapped in that perfectly pink blanket.  It’s easier for me to be concerned about who’s going to mow the lawn and how am I going to get my hair dyed than it is to be concerned about caring for her.

It’s also taken me a long time to feel okay with sharing her photos or videos.  I blame myself for the infertility and I blame myself for how hard the pregnancy has been.  I blame myself for being a bad friend to the other infertiles by sharing anything joyous.  My heart breaks to think about the people who are still going through this journey and I feel isolated and alone in surviving it.

Yep.

I know that our little girl is a miracle.  I know that we beat the odds.  Don’t be an idiot and tell me it’s because we stopped trying.  That only throws me into a rage.  So, if we hadn’t been trying, would our babies have survived?  Would we not have had to endure the pain of a miscarriage just before Christmas if only we hadn’t been trying?  Or my other favorite – it’s because I lost weight.  Yes, ladies and gentlemen, I lost weight.  But that’s not why I got pregnant because I couldn’t get pregnant when I weighed the exact same amount in the past.  Surprise, surprise – I’ve been this weight before and we still were enduring chemical pregnancies and an inability to conceive.

I’m angry a little bit.  Angry at what we had to go through.  Angry that it took so long to work.  Angry that I’m 34 and pregnant and not 30 and pregnant.  Angry that it’s happened now, when Keith will be gone so much.  And I’m afraid.  Keith and I spent so much time just trying to make a new life that we never stopped to think about the impact that new life would have on us.  I’ve been so fixated on infertility that I never thought about what parenting looks like.

Infertility is a disease and it’s in some ways a lifelong one, even if you can overcome it.  It strips you of the ability to feel all that joy and excitement that every other pregnant woman seems to experience.  The glow that you have might be there physically, but it’s not inside.  You love your baby.  You probably even love your baby more than those who haven’t fought so hard for life’s little miracle.  But the fear is so overwhelming and paralyzing – the fate so already ingrained and accepted – that it is simply impossible to have a “normal” pregnancy.

Right now, we’re still awaiting some decisions about whether we’ll be inducing or holding out (we’re hoping for holding out, as is the doctor, but it’s not really in our power to make that decision).  And I’m still working hard to manage my prenatal depression (there’s another topic no one wants to talk about – even including me at this moment).  We’re in the home stretch, passed all the important dates for ensuring her survival, and can see the finish line coming up fast.  It’s still such a dream to me, like I’m going to wake up without this big belly in the morning and go back to what my life was meant to be.  I keep waiting for the other shoe to drop and, day-by-day, becoming a little more hopeful that there isn’t one.

Thanks for your patience and understanding.  To my infertile friends, I love you and I will never forget the pain of that process.  What it felt like to finally give up…  But I will also never know what it’s like to never succeed, and I won’t claim to.  There’s no magic formula that I can give you.  I don’t believe in those dumb things people say about relaxing and taking a break and getting okay in your own head.  That’s not why we’re pregnant.  We’re pregnant because of some fluke, and despite the negativity in my post today, I will be forever grateful for that fluke – for although I am struggling to see it, I know – I know with all my soul that this is about to be the greatest journey of my life.

Our baby is a rainbow baby because she’s conceived after a loss.  And she’s a unicorn baby because she’s the rare miracle after failed infertility treatments.  So, our baby is already being born with unicorns and rainbows, and if that’s not positive enough for you, I don’t know what is.

Our Infertility Story

Resolve.org

A few weeks ago it was National Infertility Awareness Week, and I thought it appropriate to be the week to finally post about our final journey with infertility.  But I never really got to it.  I kept rewriting this, and trying to figure out how to make it not sound angry or woe-is-me.  We want your empathy, not your sympathy, and I’m not sure I’ve achieved that.

But, it’s almost Mother’s Day – a day I have been dreading like no other, and I need you to know why.  I need you to know why, at least this Mother’s Day, I can’t celebrate.  I – we need you to not discount us as parents, because doing so would violate and hollow the miracle that is an angel baby.

Let me tell you what it actually feels like to go through this for three years and to end it all in the worst heartbreak I’ve ever felt.

This is a long post.  I realize that you might just want me to “get to the point,” but without the story, you can’t understand the heartbreak.

Infertility is a disease.  It’s a horrible, painful, heart-breaking disease.  It doesn’t start out that way.  You try for a few months and nothing, so you go to the doctor.  The doctor does a whole bunch of testing, and most of it’s all right (just bloodwork), but some of it hurts like hell.

Some of what hurts like hell is also embarrassing.  Take getting a hysterosalpingogram, or HSG for short.  They put you on a table with an x-ray machine above your pelvis, then inject dye into your uterus to check your tubes and the shape of your uterus.  It’s somewhat painful, and somewhat uncomfortable, but mostly embarrassing as twelve medical students stare at your private parts and you have to sit there, listening to the doctor explain how the fluid’s going through your tubes, forcing more in to get it “all the way up there” and then, as seems to be the case with every single test we’ve ever taken, there’s no answer.  Everything looks fine.

So, we moved on to actually trying treatments.  Months passed as we waited to get in to see the doctor, and when we did, we had to wait until my cycle’s in the perfect timing to start.  We began with Clomid, the devil drug.  Clomid is so much fun that you spend your days and nights going between sweating profusely and needing to live in your freezer to being so cold that you need an electric blanket in the summertime.  Keith hated the constant hot flashes too, as I made the room freezing cold, and then proceed to cover him and uncover him with the blanket all night long.  Oh, and I was friggin’ crazy too.  I went to the doctor every other day, and ultimately every day, as they watched my follicles grow.

Sometimes I had a lot of follicles, too many to do the IUI.  So, we waited, and started all over next month.  But, when we had few enough and they developed okay, we moved forward with the IUI, aka the turkey-baster method.  Keith, who’d already undergone his own embarrassing tests, did his duty and then they inserted a long, painful needle into my uterus in the hopes that the eggs and the sperm have some fun.

Resolve.org

Then, it didn’t work.  We did it again and again.  And it didn’t work.  So, we moved on to using gonadotropins, i.e. needles.  We had to pay thousands of dollars for this medication, and then inject it every night after visiting the doctor nearly every single day to have my body bled dry.  The medicine stung, and I had to mix it and inject it at the exact same time everyday to be safe.  Oh – and then my body was moving too fast, so I had to inject other painful medicine to prevent me from ovulating before injecting more medication to make me ovulate.

Then, it didn’t work.  We did it again and again and again and again.  And it didn’t work.  But I have loads of stories about injecting myself in public restrooms, on the bleachers at luaus, among other places, and carrying around refrigerated bags to keep my meds cool.   Don’t forget the side effects!  I gained weight, went crazy, and wasn’t able to control my emotions, so Keith prepared for the hell of crying and screaming one moment, being blissfully happy the next, and being hated the next…  On and on it goes, and I was hot, all the friggin’ time.  So hot that I needed the a/c in winter.

Then, I got cysts.  Yeah, you’ve never had cysts before?  Prepare to get cysts.  And if you have cysts, hope that you don’t have TRICARE Prime because those doctors at the clinic have no idea that fertility medications cause cysts, or what to do when you show up with a gigantic one.

So, now that we’ve spent thousands of dollars, our doctor thought its time to either stop, or move on to in vitro fertilization, or IVF for short.  Let me tell you how FUN this is!  First, you dig out your bank account and hand over the entirety of it to your doctor.  Yeah, that’s like $14,000 up-front.  Then, you got through all of the same fun needles that you did for your IUI, except at ten times the rate of medication.  Take those horrible side effects and triple them – no, wait, it’s like ten times worse.  And you’ll go to the doctor’s office even more because they’ll be all afraid of cysts.

Once my eggs have gotten large enough, and there are enough of them, I had surgery!  Oh, it’s so much fun.  We went into the office, waited, then I got completely sedated in the most uncomfortable position ever, and the doctor harvested my eggs with a gigantic needle.  It only takes about a half hour, but I was woosey for a while, and cramped like crazy.  Ibuprofen won’t touch the devil in your uterus!  (And Keith got called back to work to take a stupid test – the SINGLE DAY he asked off for his wife’s surgery.  Ugh.)

Then, we waited.  They try to make embryos with your eggs and your hubby’s sperm.  We paid up the ying-yang for ICSI because, well, we were going all the way.  A few days later, they told us that we had six embryos that looked good.  We froze four and scheduled the embryo transfer for two.  I had the embryo transfer alone – apparently one of the very few to show up alone for that procedure.

Then, we waited.  But – during the waiting period – I got gigantic needles stuck in my butt at exactly the same time every single night.  Keith’s out to sea?  Call a neighbor or a friend.  Have a nurse friend show everyone how to do it.  Thank goodness for good friends.

Forget about sitting for the waiting period.  The shots hurt, and I got these balls of pain in my behind that made sitting and sleeping difficult.  I did everything right, but it just happens that way.  I had bruises and eventually lost the embarrassment of everyone staring at my butt, and got over the fact that I had to be home at 6:00pm every single day without fail.

Then, it didn’t work.  I actually got my period before I even went in to see if it worked.  And no one seemed to care at the infertility office that it didn’t work, except the amazingly kind woman who takes my blood.  So, we’d spent $14,000 in addition to the thousands previously, all hormoned-up and in pain, with nothing to show.  I cried.  Probably every day for a while.  And I was alone.  Keith was out to sea when he got the news.  It sucked.  It sucked so bad.  Then, we gathered up the courage to try again.

Luckily, this time we don’t have to get the eggs.  They’re already done.  So, we forked over another $4,000 or so and then started other oral hormones that drove me nuts – hot flashes, emotional breakdowns, sleepless nights.  It was miserable.  And then, I had another embryo transfer with two little snowflakes and was hopeful again.  The shots start back up and they’re just as painful as before.

Miraculously, I got pregnant.  Of course, I was technically pregnant when they did the transfer, but this time there’s HCG in my blood.  It wasn’t much – just 12, but I hoped.  And when it’s 87 shortly after, I hoped even more.  When it keeps going up, I hoped and hoped and hoped and hoped throughout the days and weeks, and Keith and I eventually went and bought some baby shoes to put on the Christmas Tree.  No one even noticed at the holiday party.  The shots turned into the most painful experiences of my life and poor Keith could barely give them to me as I screamed as soon as the needle went in.

Sayinggoodbye.org

Then, I started bleeding in the middle of the night.  I woke up Keith, we cried, and we went to the ultrasound, and there he or she was – just fine – hanging out.  The little peanut.  And we hoped again.

Two days before Christmas, the baby was gone.  And I cried.  I cried so much sometimes, and then others couldn’t cry or function or move.  Do you know how we were told?  “Yep, looks like a miscarriage…  Do you have any questions?”

Christmas was pretty awful.  We kept our secret.  We went on with our lives like nothing had happened.  We cried, more than I’d like to admit.  It was Christmas and we didn’t want to ruin it for anyone.  Then it was New Year’s and we didn’t want to ruin that.  Then Keith was gone and I didn’t want to tell anyone without him, and then reality set in.

Our baby died.  Our sweet, sweet Christmastime hope.  I carried that baby every second of his or her life, and we will love that baby for the rest of ours.  We loved that baby with all the love possible from two people.  We grieved a tremendous loss.  And no one knew.  We were alone in our grief, alone in our remembrance, and it was too much to bear.  What’s worse is this was not the first baby I mourned.

I read an article about a woman who had a miscarriage and had trouble talking about it:

“Years later, I still think about that miserable afternoon at work and how much easier it would have been if I’d just exhaled the truth.  If I could have let people say, ‘I’m so sorry.’  If I hadn’t had to pretend that it was a normal day even as I was in the grips of soul-swallowing grief…  Because the only thing worse than losing something that meant the world to you is pretending that you lost nothing.”

http://www.labelledame.com/

And then I told a few friends.  And it was the best decision I could have made.  We never should have kept it a secret.  We needed to grieve – and we still grieve.  We needed to break the silence.

Were we parents?  The infertile community says yes.

“Am I still a mother, as I have no child with me?’  My reply is this, “If you have held a child in your womb, you are a mother, and I can think of no one who deserves that accolade more than those who have had to give their child back.

If you’ve never experienced a miscarriage, if you’ve never known the heartbreak of losing a dream so close to your heart, then you can never, ever understand what it feels like.  And, even though I’m sharing this post with you, and trying to give you some sense of it, please don’t assume you can relate.

The truth is that was a turning point for us and my biggest fear was hearing someone say, “At least you can get pregnant.”  Do you tell someone whose father died, “At least your mother isn’t dead?”

It hurt for a long time, and it still hurts, but there was this wash of relief that we both felt.  Three of the four years of our relationship were spent trying to get pregnant.  Do you know what it’s like to give up your body, your mind, your life to fertility treatments?  To put your entire life on hold, to spend every waking moment engulfed in this journey?

What was worse was the misinformation.  The “it will happen for you” people, who we know said what they said in love, but don’t understand that making that statement only helps us feel like failures, because it didn’t happen for us.  “What’s meant to be will be,” is another good one, and “Everything happens for a reason.”  Really?  Do I even need to address these?

The hardest were those that thought the process was easy, and couldn’t understand why we were hurting.  “Just do IVF.”  Okay, so just write us a check.  Just fly to Hawaii to help me deal with the side effects.  Or, better yet – blame it on my mental health.  Tell me how much harder it must be because I experience anxiety and depression.  Yes, we dealt with that kind of cruelty and ignorance.

We never thought it would be harder to deal with some of our friends and family than with infertility itself, and if you’re reading this, please check yourself.

After the miscarriage, we let go.

Letting go felt freeing.  We didn’t let go of that baby that we had, that we loved.  That baby will forever be in our hearts, but we let go of the pain and the exhaustion and the dream about being a family, and accepted that we can have a wondrous life with a family of two.

Since then, recovery has begun.  I’m back on the medicine that I had to give up, my weight’s way down, and I’m no longer experiencing all of the horrendous symptoms of being pumped full of hormones.  The grief is still fresh, however, and it’s going to take a long time to get back to being the couple that we want to be.  Recovery simply takes time.  Grief isn’t a wound that heals quickly.

Resolve.org

Today, life has changed.  It’s an entirely new world, one in which Keith and I start over, leaving these painful three-plus years behind us.

My heart has changed.  Don’t get me wrong – I have always wanted to be a mother, but now, I have found so much peace in the acceptance that I am the mom of some very special angel babies, and that’s enough for a lifetime.

I no longer find myself wishing away on Pinterest nursery boards, and instead think about our future together.  I have come to the finish line, and even if you were to place a check at my feet, I would not take it.  I no longer wish for miracles.  Although I am still walking this road, I no longer dream of children.  In fact, my heart has experienced such freedom from this prison of infertility that I sometimes fall asleep in the comfort that – gasp, can my mind go there? – I no longer want children.

It is still a long road ahead.

Thank you for making it to the end of this post.  I don’t expect that many will, but I hope that they do.  I hope that our story, no matter the outcome, helps others understand what it is to go through infertility.  I hope that this effort helps bring the “awareness” to infertility that this week calls for.  And, I hope that for those who have gone through this, I hope that you know you have a friend, someone who’s been there and who gets it without saying a word.  That, my friends and family, is really the most important thing that every infertile needs – your quiet love.

Remember our little one in your thoughts when you can, we’ll never forget our baby in heaven.

Please visit Resolve’s website for more information on National Infertility Awareness Week and other great information about supporting couples experiencing fertility challenges.