The New Normal

IVF is not the most glamorous or “normal” experience that one goes through in their lives, and I know this after having gone through the protocol for the past two weeks.

Does a normal person have to hide in a bathroom stall during their work holiday party and inject themselves to fatten up their “ovarian follicles”? And then have to scurry after a needle they dropped on the floor, hoping that no one had any concerns that the Deputy Director of Human Resources was hiding in the bathroom with needles?

Does the average woman have to go to the OBGYN’s office 6 times in 10 days to get blood drawn and put her feet up in stirrups to be examined for 20 minutes each visit?

How many people have had to make room in their fridge for their IVF medication----medicine that costs thousands of dollars?

Is it normal to have to give yourself over 25 injections in your stomach---so many, that you look like you’re turning into a Dalmatian and you have to keep an eye out for Cruella?  Or having to explain to your husband how he has to jab you in the hip with a 1 ½ inch needle in the middle of Sunday Night Football?

Surprisingly, more women than you know go through this in order to have a baby, and for them, this day to day intensity is “normal.”  According to RESOLVE (the National Infertility Association), 1 in 8 couples struggle with baby-making and 1.5% of all babies born in the United States were born via In Vitro in 2014.  As weird as all of this seems, I’m definitely not the only woman you know that has gone through this.

IVF without a doubt is not for the faint of heart, but thankfully, God has instilled a fierceness and strength in me I didn’t even realize I had until it came down to this.  As much as I would like to have gone down this road the “normal” way (believe me…the “normal” way is much more fun!), I am willing to do whatever it takes and trust in the road God has taken us down, all in order to hold a baby in my arms next year at Christmas. Then I will have a whole new normal to deal with!

What Could Have Been

9 months ago, I thought that someone would be handing me a baby this week.  I didn’t imagine I would have to go through the pains of IVF, I just planned that I would be going through the pains of labor by now.

In April, the Sergeant and I went through our 5^th (out of 6) Intrauterine Insemination (IUI) procedure.  A few weeks later, after feeling unwell for two weeks, we stood side by side in the master bathroom staring at a pregnancy test that showed that I was pregnant.  The shock and joy I felt was mirrored in the tearful eyes of my husband and in that moment I saw our world changing forever.

The rest of that Saturday is branded into my brain---walking into my parents' living room with baby shoes in my hands and hearing the joyful gasp from my mom as she realized what I was holding.  Choking up as I told my best friend over the phone she was going to be an auntie.  Watching the joy overtake my in-laws’ faces as we Face-timed with them that evening.  Talking to my dad and hearing him say, “I’m going to be a grandpa,” with such wonder and awe in his voice that I couldn't help but cry happy tears...again.  Falling asleep that night beside the Sergeant as we talked about who this “bumblebee” would turn out to be.  I have never experienced so much joy in one day.

That following Monday we went to the doctor’s office to get the requisite blood work to confirm that I was pregnant.  I celebrated with the front desk staff and apologized to the phlebotomist for being a difficult draw because I had been too excited and nervous to eat that morning. That whole day flew by in a blur of excitement and nursery planning.  I had bought a pair of tiny newborn pajamas the day before, as well as a book on pregnancy I kept pouring over and the first book for the baby’s room----I kept looking at it all in wonder on the counter, so excited that this moment was finally here. I couldn't help imagining and dreaming who this baby would turn out to be!

And then my dream world came to an abrupt halt.

I received a call from the doctor at 4pm that Monday.  She informed me that my HCG (a pregnancy hormone) was at a level that indicated that although I was pregnant, it showed that my body was in the beginning stages of a miscarriage and that I would be losing the pregnancy.  The next few hours are honestly a blur.  I remember seeing the panicked look on the Sergeant’s face as he realized what was happening and that his wife was falling apart in front of his eyes. I remember throwing the snail newborn jammies, the pregnancy book, and “Goodnight, Moon,” into the trash.  I remember the pain.

My grief was all consuming.  Although I had only known about this tiny life for 3 days, I had dreamed and prayed for this little one for a very long time.  The contradiction between the joy I had experienced just hours before and the immense pain I was feeling, were crushing to every piece of my soul.  And for the next week, as my body rejected the baby that my soul desperately longed for, I was raw. My heart was broken.

It is difficult to explain the earth shattering moment of a miscarriage.  People understandably don’t know what to say, how to react to your pain, how to help you.  As everyone else’s lives seemed to move on, my pain was stagnant, my grief still so fresh.  It’s hard to explain how much life was held in that 3 days and how much that meant to my heart that had been waiting for that news for so long. How difficult it was to transition my brain from that joy to all consuming pain.

And now 9 months have passed.  I don’t find it so hard to walk past the baby section at Target.  A newborn crying doesn’t send me to the bathroom to sob in a closed stall. I am able to look at the nursery boards on Pinterest and dream of where our future little one will sleep.  I am willing to hope again.

This week, however, is a reminder of what the Sergeant and I lost.  A reminder that there was a life inside me, if only for a brief period of time, and that life was precious, that life was wanted, and that life is so deeply missed. I will carry that little one with me for the rest of my life.  If even for a few days, I was someone’s Mom.

Not Like the Movies

Why did no one tell me that IVF would suck balls?  That’s not how I have ever seen it in the movies… she always has a couple of injections in the butt, lots of doctor visits, and then a baby (that was always fat and pink and not covered in birth gunk) would be handed to the happy, but tired, looking couple 9 months later in a hospital room. Isn’t that how this is all supposed to work?

The Sergeant and I officially began step 1 of the IVF process last week and, of course, because I never do anything the easy way, there have been a few complications that have already lengthened and intensified the process.  My cervix, apparently, has decided to shut down for business, and I have had to have extra appointments to try and get it to cooperate.  Next week, I have to go in for a Trial Embryo Transfer, just to make sure everything will work when we do the actual transfer sometime in December or January.  All of this has added to the emotional and physical difficulty, and honestly, it’s even more overwhelming than I was mentally prepared for.  And we’re not even to the injection phase yet!

It’s hard to explain, even to the Sergeant, how difficult every aspect of this ride can be.  Every time I’m on the table with my feet up in stirrups, I feel like my body is broken and find fault in myself that we have had to go through this process.  Every time I have to stay home, because my body is uncomfortable and in pain, I question whether all of this is worth it.  Every time I cry over the anxiety of this process, this journey, this aching need to be a mother, I feel guilty that the Sergeant has to deal with all of this and crazy ol’ me on top of it.  To say the least, I have been feeling overwhelmed.

But as Thanksgiving draws nearer, I am trying my best (and believe me, it hasn’t been easy!) to focus on what I am grateful for…and I have a lot to be grateful for.  The Sergeant, who has reworked his schedule and been at all of these IVF appointments to hold my hand and wipe away my tears.  My family and friends, who listen to my complaints about how the meds are making me hormonal and how the procedures are awkward and painful.  My great doctors, who listen when I have a panic attack on the table and are willing to stay in the room and answer the million questions I have after each appointment.  And Huck, of course, is great at distracting me by throwing his toy around and acting like a wild animal when I need to be distracted from my discomfort. I have food on my table, a roof over my head when it is snowing, and God continually meets all of my needs and I believe he will continue to do so as he guides me through the chaos of IVF.

I can get through this.  I will get through this.  And, as always, I pray a someone hands me a baby at the end.

The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

Infertility is not a two dimensional part of my life. It’s not black and white, but has shades of gray. It's not just disappointment, but there are pockets of joy in the midst of the sorrow. And it's not just a thing that affects me and the Sergeant, but our families and friends that have been waiting just as long as we have for this little nugget. I have come to find that in my life, infertility can be good, bad and ugly. 

The Good
• The Sergeant let me get a dog…and if this goes on much longer, I get another one! And Huckleberry is a pretty great infertility bonus. 
• Young couple adventures! Random cravings for ice cream at 9pm? A new restaurant in downtown that I want to go to? An unplanned excursion into the mountains? The Sergeant and I have done all of those things and more in the past two years, all without having to find a baby-sitter or lug a stroller through the streets of Denver. 
• The goodness and support of the amazing people in our lives...my heart is constantly blessed by the notes, phone calls, and kind words that our friends and family have given to us over the past 2 years.  I wouldn't still be going through all of this if it wasn't for the people around us that continue to support us through the process.
• Sleep. I get lots of it. 

The Bad 
• Monthly disappointment. Every month has hope…some months more than others…so when the bad news is repeated every single month, it is emotionally exhausting. 

The Ugly 
• Pretty much every medical test that I have had to do to try to get this baby. Recently, I had to take medicine to make my body cooperate for a pre-IVF test, and the medicine basically made my un-pregnant body go into the beginning stages of labor. (Note: After getting an IV of morphine, Dilaudid and an oral dose of Percocet and STILL having pain, I will 100% be getting an epidural 5 minutes into giving birth. Please remind me of this.) This is just one of the uncomfortable tests that I have had to do, and I still have many more to come through this in vitro process.
• The multitude of emotions that can set your day ablaze if not under control---hurt, disappointment, shame, anger, self-loathing, regret, etc. This is not easy. 
• The cost.  Baby making is free...unless you need to go through IVF.  The total cost is $20,000-$22,000, depending upon the cost of medications. This baby will have to pay for their own college!

Hopefully by next year, I can add another section to this…the good, the bad, the ugly, and the reason I went through all of it and why it was all worthwhile. Fingers crossed someone will hand me a baby by then!

Ode to the Sergeant

I never thought I would be here in my life…I don’t think infertility is ever something anyone plans for when they’re dreaming of their futures.  One thing that was better than my dreams however, was when I met the Sergeant and I can’t imagine going through this journey without him.

When you’re struggling with infertility, you have about a billion doctor’s appointments that you have to go to throughout the month.  I have been poked and prodded, undergone x-rays, MRI’s, and more ultrasounds than I can even count.  I’ve had my blood drawn, peed in a dozen cups, and taken medication that makes me have all the glorious pregnancy symptoms without he baby at the end of it. I have cried on the doctor’s table, cried on the car ride home, cried on the couch whenever a baby is on the screen, cried myself to sleep.  This hasn’t been easy.

But I haven’t been alone through any of it, because I am married to an amazing man who has held my hand every step of the way.  He has been to a majority of those doctor’s appointments, sat in the waiting room while I have undergone all the testing.  He’s made me dinner when I’m too sick or sad to cook and picked out great bottles of wine for those months when we were once again faced with the truth that we were still not pregnant.  He’s held me in his big Army arms when I have cried and doesn’t care that I get his shirt wet and covered in snot every time. 

This morning, I had to undergo a painful and uncomfortable test before starting with the first IVF steps, and the Sergeant held my hand through all of it and comforted me when I cried in the car and snuggled me on the couch with the dog when we got back home.

I go through these types of things because I want a baby…a baby that looks just like the Sergeant.  I do this because I cannot wait to hand that man a baby and say, “This one is ours.” I do this because I cannot wait to watch my husband teach our little one to play baseball, watch him wrestle around with our kid and Huck while I cook dinner and roll my eyes,  or watch as he shows him every Star Wars movie for the first time. 

Yes, I am doing this for me…but I do it for him, too.  And I can’t wait to watch him be as good of a Daddy as he is a husband.

In the Beginning...

Infertility is an ugly word in our society.  When it is mentioned, it’s associated with 43 year old famous women in Orange County who have decided it is time for them to have a baby. It carries a sense of a shame with it, a sense that the woman who it refers to is broken, damaged.  The word “infertility” does not carry any hope, but in fact, seems to be a shadow that many women silently bear.

Two years ago I was blissfully unaware of any connotation that the word held, because I never thought that it would apply to me.  I was floating on air being the wife of a handsome Army man and giddy with the thought that the rest of the pieces of our family were about to be put into place.  We were both under 30, healthy adult, we weren’t doing drugs, we ate healthier than most people I knew, and we seemed to have a pretty put together life---we were even planning on getting a dog! (***Don't worry, you'll hear plenty about that furry guy later!)

During our first month of trying, I already had my life planned 9 months down the road---the nursery, the baby’s name, how it would be hard to have to deal with so little sleep, but that baby would make it worth it.  I read pregnancy blogs, new baby tips, and looked up how much paternity leave my husband would be able to take with the Army.  I was ready.  My body, however, hadn’t gotten the memo, and the pregnancy test window was pure white after the first two week wait.  But I didn’t give up, and I was ready to go month 2…and month 3….and month 4.  Month after month I would agonize over every symptom, every sign, sure that this was going to be our lucky month.  The fact that up to 85% of couples get pregnant in their first year of trying (a statistic I read a zillion times to help calm my anxiety) continued to give me hope as the months counted down.  But by month 10, a month that just 9 months before I had assumed I would have a baby in my arms, we still had nothing to show for it.  And having just been relocated back to our hometown of Denver, we decided to use our fancy Army insurance and go see our first “reproductive specialist” aka a doc who knew more about why we weren’t having a baby than we did. And that fantastic doc ran all the usual tests: bloodwork, ultrasounds, semen samples (the Sergeant was excited about that one), an HSG test (x-raying my fallopian tubes to make sure they were open)…we did the whole gamut of tests.  And in bittersweet news, we were told that there really was no reason why we weren’t pregnant…we just weren’t.  And so our journey through infertility treatments began. 

Over the next year, as we had our first of six intrauterine insemination procedures (IUI).  Only one of those six was successful, and that brief period where I was pregnant was full of the most joy that I had ever imagined.  Unfortunately, just days later, I lost that pregnancy and that great joy transformed into the most soul aching grief I had yet to experience in my life. 

We were then faced with the decision of what to do next.  The doctor recommended taking the next step and we also looked over and researched the possibility of adopting a little one.

And here we are now, finally having made the decision for now. After much prayer and after having tried every other option over the past 21 months, the Sergeant and I decided to try a round of in vitro fertilization (IVF).  We got the loan, talked to the doc, and go in for the baseline bloodwork and testing this week. 

And so it begins.  Chapter 21 of our infertility brings us here. I am praying this story has a happy ending...hopefully you'll stick around to find out!