Everyone who has followed the Sir and my story knows the
journey we have been on to become parents over the past 2 plus years.
We went through 2 years of struggle with infertility which
included 6 rounds of IUIs, almost $30,000 in medical costs, and a
miscarriage. I learned how to give
myself injections and how to smile when someone else told me they were pregnant
“on accident.” We went through the heartache of not ever knowing if any of it
would be worth it in the end.
But we kept on praying and kept on going. And then through
IVF we got pregnant.
Unfortunately, in the theme of this journey, pregnancy wasn’t
a piece of cake for me either. I spent
the first 20 weeks barfing multiple times a day and lost almost as much weight
as I ended up gaining by the end of my pregnancy. Once the sickness phase finally passed, I was
just plain uncomfortable and dealt with the usual issues of swollen feet, the
inability to get comfortable enough to sleep, and the overall anxiety of
impending childbirth.
But once again, we kept on praying and kept on going. And then the doctor said it was time to
schedule a c-section to get the baby out of me.
And so the Sir and I headed to the hospital and waited in
the pre-op room for 4 hours until it was time to go back to the operating
room. In keeping with the curve of
difficulty theme, the anesthesiologist had to try 4 times to get the spinal
block in my back and had to call another doctor in to assist before the numbing
began. They brought the wide eyed Sir in
shortly thereafter, who was dressed in a snazzy pair of scrubs with a paper hat
and all (although he couldn’t understand why he needed a scrub cap to cover his
shaved head).
And after all of the hard stuff, after the years of tears
and anger and hopelessness, after all the prayers, that one second where they
told me they could see her head and then I heard her cry for the first
time---that emotion is something I will never have again in my life. It was like joy was exploding out of my heart
and running down my face as I heard that tiny but powerful cry. And when they brought her over and placed her
on my chest for the first time and I looked at the Sir’s face and saw all my
emotion mirrored there as we looked at our daughter, that’s when I knew it had
all been worth it.
All of it was for her.
On November 15th at 2:31PM, someone handed me a 6
pound, 13 ounce baby girl and my life will never be the same again.
