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!