Loss

For eleven days, we lived a dream. 

For eleven days, we were parents.

Fourteen days after our third IUI, there were two pink lines. Something I had waited years to see. 

There were kisses and tears and excitement flowed between us. We tempered our excitement with realism, knowing we needed to have a blood test for confirmation. The blood test came back positive. But my HCG levels were low. Only a 24. Low, but ripe with promise and potential. 36 hours later, they were at 60 and on track for a steady rise. We scheduled a 6 week ultrasound. 

We let close family and a few friends know. We held each other close. I prayed every day, saying "strong baby, healthy baby," over and over. I named our little angel "nugget" and hoped that he or she would hold on and be ours forever. 

I bought pants that would stretch with me for a few months. I started thinking about paint colors for the guest room. I read everything I could about having a healthy first trimester.

My body changed. I was exhausted. Sore. In desperate need to upgrade my bra size. Moody. Hungry, Bloated. Slightly crampy. Nauseated. 

Then, nine days after the test, five a half weeks into my pregnancy, the pain started. Tuesday and Wednesday nights were awful. I didn't sleep. I couldn't go to work. I clutched my tummy and just prayed it was progesterone side effects. The pain stopped. I went to work on Thursday morning. I started bleeding lightly. I threw up in the bathroom and left work immediately.

I went home, called the doctor frantically. I went in for a scan, and the ultrasound didn't show anything. No yolk sac. No heartbeat. It was still early, and possible that nothing would show up. I was sent to get blood work done. We held out hope that things were okay. 

Friday morning, there was a gush of red, and we knew. Our angel was gone. Tears and sobs and desperate aching. My blood levels showed a miscarriage. "Spontaneous abortion" was the official diagnosis.

So now I wait. Wait for the bleeding and pain to stop. Wait for the nightmare to end and dawn to break. Wait to be able to choke out a sentence without feeling like I am going to vomit. 

Three years. Three IUIs. Countless shots. Thousands of dollars. A million wishes and prayers and hopes. Gone in a moment and in a rush of blood.

I am exhausted and weak and broken. I do not understand. 

I awoke this morning with a horrible thought. The thought that I flushed my baby down the toilet yesterday morning. 

There are those that will try to placate me and say, "it was so early." Or, "it wasn't a baby yet."

They don't understand. In that magical moment when divinely appointed conception occurs, it is a baby. It is a life. It is full of hope and promise and that baby, small as a poppy seed, contains all of the promise of life. 

I know that early miscarriages happen because things aren't right. Genetically. Developmentally. They are Heavenly Father's way of mercifully taking care of things as gently and naturally as possible. 

Mercy hurts like hell. 

So we wait. And we pray. And I bleed. And I yell and cry and hit the wall. And I love my little angel that I miss desperately already.

We're not ready to talk about things in depth, but as we have opened our life and struggle to so many, we share the new of this tragedy and our deep sorrow as well. 

We'll try again. And again. And again. We will have a family.

And someday, we will meet our angel baby and my tears of sadness will turn to tears of joy and understanding. 

Living With An Open Wound

I remember getting hurt as a child. Scraping my knees. Slicing my thumb on a saw in the backyard while trying to cut enough branches to make a fort. Road rash on my side when I fell out of a wagon, towed behind a bike while flying down a hill. Skin breaks. Blood seeps out. Tears flow. Eventually, with the aid of pressure, a band-aid, or the simple miracle of human physiology, the blood would clot. A scab formed. Skin healed. Scars remained, but faded in time. Maybe someday, this will be my experience with the emotional and psychological scars of infertility. I'm not sure. Right now, I live each day with an open, hemorrhaging wound.

Everyone in my life is incredibly compassionate about this struggle. There are even a handful of people I know that have walked this same road. I wish I could articulate the deep, never-ceasing, excruciating pain that I feel each day. I desperately want someone to know exactly what I experience. All I can compare it to is suffering a wound so deep and so serious that it drains every ounce of your strength, all of your reserves, and saps you of any hope that you can move forward. I cannot compare this to the struggle of a mortally wounded soldier, but it is my emotional equivalent of warfare. And in the midst of this horrific, tragic, gut-wrenching pain, I am expected by everyone (even those who are compassionate and loving and caring and the most incredible people I know) to continue living life and moving forward and having hope. There are days where I lose the battle when I have to do something as simple as brush my teeth, never mind having to walk out the door, interact with other people, go to work, smile and nod that yes, I am doing well. Behind the facade I am face down in the dirt, drowning in a pool of my own blood. Those who have walked this road will know the complete sincerity of this statement. Those who have not, I appreciate your compassion and your acceptance that you simply cannot know how this feels until you have lived it for nearly one thousand sunrises and sunsets. 

Simply leaving the house hurts. I go to the store and am surrounded by reminders of pregnancy, babies, toddlers, teenagers, grandparents-the ceaseless ebb and flow of divinely ordained life that I may never play a part in. I experience all of the emotional depth of that statement when I stand in the store behind someone buying a package of diapers. I clutch my nieces and nephews to me and breathe in their sweet smells and my heart bursts and I wonder if there is any way I can be saved. I seek to escape the pain of the day through sleep and am haunted by dreams of caressing my pregnant belly, of giving birth, of holding my daughter who already has a name and is fiercely loved, and wake up feeling like I was hurled out of a moving vehicle into oncoming traffic. And it never, ever ends. 

I hurt everywhere. All the time. I understand how infertility leads to destructive behavior, ends marriages, wrecks families. I know why people choose to be numb.

People never know what to say. Those closest to me know that things like, "It will happen," or "Just be positive" or "your babies will come when it's time," will likely earn them a punch in the face and a sincere apology for breaking their nose. I think I have an advantage in that I am incredibly open (likely to a fault) about everything I am dealing with, so I do not hesitate to talk about feeling this way and people generally know when I am so low that not even a Harry Potter marathon can pull me out of the depths of despair. I think the best thing I have had someone say to me is simply, "I love you." That does more than anything when you are so emotionally obliterated that you can't seem to take another breath. 

Living with infertility is a hell through which few will pass, when you consider the population of the world through all time. Yet it touches most of us in tangential ways. Six months of trying to shrink ovarian cysts and get my cycles under control was absolutely terrible, but it only required me to feel disappointment. Now, as we gear up for a cycle of treatment, I have to feel the worst thing I can imagine-hope. I believe in a mind-body connection. I need to have hope and faith that this will work. But taking drugs, injecting drugs, doing an insemination, taking more drugs, and then having your heart ripped out by a negative test is more than a heart can handle. And if you do back to back cycles, you begin the whole process over three days after your negative result. It is the highest and most hellish form of torture I have experienced. Hope and promise shatter and you get to stand in the broken glass, bleeding all over while people look at you and tell you to be hopeful all over again. 

I am  hopeful right now. I am responding well to my Femara treatment, started my Gonal-F injections today for the next three days, will be re-scanned on Friday, and will finish up with a few more shots this weekend before I trigger ovulation. The tentative IUI date is Sunday. But hope is most definitely tempered by experience and disappointment. My hope feels like the last gasp for air while I am drowning before I sink away into oblivion. But it is there, and it is mine. 

I read two things last night that stuck with me. The first was a re-reading of  a series of short essays by F. Scott Fitzgerald, a man who I believe lived his entire life in emotional pain and agony. In "The Crack-Up," he penned, "and in a real dark night of the soul it is always three o’clock in the morning, day after day." And so it is three o'clock in the morning for me, day after day. 

The other was from the scriptures, more specifically, the Book of Mormon. If you do not believe this to be the revealed word of God, then perhaps accept this as a story that illustrates a larger point about resilience. The leader of a small group of people was named Jared, and as his people fled wickedness and crossed a great body of water in small ships, their small quarters were illuminated by stones that had been given light by the Lord. The wind blew furiously during their year-long journey, and though they were tossed about relentlessly and frightened and cried unto the Lord for stillness and peace, they were blown continually in the direction of their destination, and they had light. And the wind never stopped moving them in the right direction, and the people never stopped praising and thanking the Lord. And they had light continually, even in trial and tempest and through fear and anguish. And when they arrived on land again, they humbled themselves before the Lord, shed tears of joy, and recognized His tender mercies over them.

I am in a dark night of the soul. It is a night full of pain and fear. But I have a small light. And I have the love of my husband, and my family, and my friends, and my Father in Heaven. It doesn't change the fact that I hurt like hell and on good days, the best I can do is drag myself an inch closer to safety while I live with this open wound, but it does give the struggle a sense of meaning. This wound will never go away. It may change form and become an old wound, a scar, but it will mark my experiences forever. No pregnancy or adoption or perhaps a life without children will nullify what I have experienced. But I can own the pain and the experience and set myself up willingly for the punch in the gut that I might have to take in two and a half weeks, as long as I know that the pain and experience are mine to own and learn from. 

Please, if you are inclined, say a prayer for us and those others that live each day with an open wound in the deepest dark of the night, that we might see the pinprick of light that will lead us on, and someday, lead us home.

Changes

I can't begin to grasp the amount of change that has occurred in my life over the past four years. The end of what I thought was a forever relationship. The beginning of what is my true forever marriage. Moving. Leaving my dream job. Experiencing my husband becoming my best friend. Financial hardship. Not being able to have a baby. A new job. And now, more changes are headed in our direction.

Last week, after waiting one month for a cyst on my ovary to clear up on its own, and spending another month taking a Progestin to shrink that stubborn cyst, I went in to see what was going on in the incubator. My cyst shrunk. A lot. Down by 60%, and the overall volume down even more. But I also found out it's probably not a cyst. It's probably an endometrioma. And for the first time, there is a fibroid camping out on my uterine wall. Which scares the living crap out of me. I have never had these before. I have had cysts that have come and gone. My uterus has been pretty normal. All of a sudden, my sloughed-off endometrial cells are making themselves at home in parts of my body where they shouldn't be. Scary. I didn't know much about Endometriosis until last week. I wish I had never even heard of this, because it adds another lovely wrench to this already hellish struggle. What I do know is that Endo is thought to be influenced greatly by stress, inflammation and weight gain. Well, I just hit the danged triple jackpot. 

I.am.so.tired.of.my.stupid.body.not.doing.what.it.is.designed.to.do. But this is likely of my own doing.

I looked back over 9 months of uterine scans and procedures. I have never had this happen before. The only thing that has changed in my life is, well, everything. I went back to work and I stopped eating well. I stopped sleeping well. I worked almost every weekend until 1 AM. I developed a persistent twitch in my left eye. I worked most weeknights nights until 9 or 10. I didn't exercise. I replaced water intake with Cherry Coke. I frequented more drive-thru lines than I could ever care to admit. Hell, I even ate more than one gas-station hot dog wrapped in a croissant drenched in nacho cheese. I ate roller food. From a gas station. The shame is more than I can bear. Those of you that know me and the extreme love for the gastronomic arts, this is a level to which I never imagined I could descend. For the past six months, ,my life became 100% about the 27 sweet, amazing, wonderful, squirrely, energetic and challenging kids that I teach. Doing what is best for them, every moment of each day. And I sacrificed doing anything for me. I wasn't the picture of health or fitness before going back to work full-time, but I certainly was not in the ultimate pits of having let everything that is important just fall to the side. 

I had to choose. The sweet, smiling faces. The moment that a kid truly grasps a concept. The sticky-finger hugs. The crazy ebb and flow of the day. I love it. But I love my future family more. 

The seed of change was planted in my mind about six weeks ago, but at 6:20 AM on Thursday, when my doctor looked at me and told me that next month, after another four weeks of Progestin, regardless of the size of the endometrioma, we would restart my fertility drugs and push through for an IUI, I knew what I had to do. His exact words were, "I need you to do whatever you can to get as healthy as possible in the next four weeks." It hit me like a ton of bricks. I felt like the wind was knocked out of me. I am doing ZERO healthy things in my life. I am dumping money and time and emotion into a pursuit of having a baby, and I am doing ZERO healthy things to support that effort. Reality is a bitter slap in the face. 

I won't be returning to full-time teaching in the fall. I may do some part-time specialized instruction that would be less stressful and demanding. I am not yet sure what the right choice is. I need to work in some capacity because it is good and healthy to have a focus and to be productive. I just can't do 75 hour weeks and extra classes for certification and little sleep and no room in my heart for anything but these wonderful 27 kids. My husband needs my heart. I need my heart. My future children need my heart. I thought about just scaling back. I am a person that puts excess into everything I do. My work process is frenetic. I can't give any less than everything. I need to give my everything to becoming a mom, in whatever way that comes to me.

I really don't know what the road ahead holds for me, but I do know that for the first time in months, I feel a measure of peace. Changes. Time to embrace the change that is coming, and commit to the changes that I need to make in my own life. Freaking gas station hot dogs... 

The Bitter Cup

I have drunk from my fair share of bitter cups in life. We all have. Plans are made. Expectations established. Hearts are set on hopes and dreams. And then the very dregs of bitterness must be swallowed as dreams shatter and hope explodes into a million tiny pieces. Broken friendships. Familial strife. Failed relationships. Financial stress. I have experienced all of these things before. But nothing compares to the bitterness I have swallowed in the past thirty six hours. We all have our cross to bear and our challis of sorrow to endure. Mine is yet another failed attempt at becoming a mother.

A little over two weeks ago, we had our first IUI procedure. It was quick, easy, and filled us with hope and a renewed sense of promise. After the IUI came daily hormone supplements which gave me every pregnancy-like side effect known to womankind. Nausea. Hot flashes. Wretched dizziness. Cramping. Sore breasts. Veins appearing in new and interesting places. Horrid constipation. Gas. Sore and bleeding gums. A cold. Absolutely everything. And then, early Sunday morning, after I was absolutely convinced I was pregnant, I peed on what must have been my 30th pregnancy test over two years, and it was negative. I sat on the bathroom floor crying, hating to wake my husband up to tell him the bad news. But when I crawled back into bed crying and shaking like a leaf, the cat was out of the bag. We cried together until we fell asleep and slept fitfully for several hours.

Sunday was a blur. We watched mind-numbing amounts of shows on DVD. BJ held my hand all day. I went through an entire roll of toilet paper as I cried and blew my nose. We stayed home from church, the thought of facing anyone we knew just too difficult to even bear. We even went to the movies just to escape from the house and the crushing sense of disappointment that sat on our chests all day. I accepted yesterday that I feel like absolute crap about the whole thing. I'd love to be all "there is a bigger plan," and "I'll just be patient." But I can't. Right now, I want to hurl my bitter cup off a cliff and scream every four-letter word in the book into the abyss. 

It is a special kind of hell to have your body and mind chemically convinced you are pregnant by hormone supplements, and then have it not be true. Biologically, everything for a pregnancy was in my system for at least twelve days after my procedure. Everything in me felt pregnant. But I'm not. And I can't do anything to change that. Every pill I swallowed, every time I was in pain, every moment I was hot-flashing, every minor twinge in my body, I became tied emotionally and physically more and more tightly to the idea of a pregnancy and a baby. And in the space of three minutes, all of that hope and promise was ripped away from me. Right now, I am furious about my cup being full of this bitter and horrifyingly painful trial.

We face an uphill battle. We can do more IUI rounds with fertility drugs. We plan to. Each one will cost at least $500. We can do up to four of these before the options become infinitely more expensive. We already have over $500 sunk into our first failed round. For two people on a single income, it's terrifying. I start work tomorrow as a long-term sub for at least 12 weeks, and that will help, but it won't solve every problem.

I have been thinking about Christ and his acceptance of the bitter cup. We know that He took it willingly, but not without difficulty, pain and pleading that it pass from Him if it be at all possible. I know that there will be something on the other side of this for us, and that our cup must be consumed if we are to move forward. I am pleading that there is another way. I know that there likely is not. But I am tired of being tested. I am tired of being disappointed. I don't know how many months of this I can possibly withstand. I am frustrated with my Father in Heaven because I lack the knowledge and capacity to comprehend this on a grander scale. I know that it's ok to feel that way, because we are meant to experience the full spectrum of emotion, and because eventually I will and He will help me. But right now, I am angry. I have thought often of Jacob of the Old Testament, and of the significance of his new name, Israel, meaning "one who wrestles with God." There is some solace in knowing that on the path to truth and understanding, there is turmoil, heartbreak and trouble, and that we are meant to experience it. We all wrestle at some point. We all learn the bitter cup cannot pass.

But how I wish it could.

I still believe in the idea of bread being disguised as stones, but I think it's going to take me a while to digest and accept this particular stone/piece of ridiculously hard bread that might as well be a stone.

We are starting all over again, bitter cup in hand, and we drink on, choking it down, banking on the moment when the sweet overwhelms the bitter and the cup has passed from before us. So I drink it down freely as I begin another month of mourning the loss of a baby that I never had.

I don't think I'll raise my glass to that one.

Two Week Wait

Fifteen minutes at an early morning doctor's appointment was all it took to change my world.

Early on Friday morning, we bundled up and walked in the dark to our internal ultrasound appointment, breath puffing out like smoke against the cold morning air. The ten days before the appointment were ones spent in relative panic, fueled by irrational Google searches about 29-year old women declared barren and free of eggs and whose uterine cavities had been consumed by endometriosis. Stupid internet. Stupid baby-hungry brain.

We walked into an empty clinic office and took a seat in the waiting area. Within three minutes, we had been called back and Dr. Peterson was waiting for us with a wide smile. He had me get settled into the ultrasound room, stepped out to let me get all arranged from the waist down in a sheet, and then we did the ultrasound.

To my shock, he said, "your uterus looks great, no endometriosis, and while we're in here, since it's day 11 of your cycle, we can go ahead and check your egg follicles." He shifted the ultrasound wand and a round black spot showed up on the screen. An 18 millimeter egg follicle on the right side. Dr. Peterson noted the size and said, "that looks great. Almost ready to release. Let's check the other side, but it's rare to have them on both ovaries. Well, except for you, apparently." I had another mature, dominant follicle on the left side, at 21 mm. He noted all of the sizes, and told me that we would do an Intrauterine Insemination on Sunday morning. He prescribed an HCG trigger shot  for me to give myself on Friday night to stimulate the release of the eggs on Sunday morning, and twelve days of progesterone to be taken after the IUI to prepare the lining of my uterus for implantation.

The next 36 hours were a blur. I gave myself the trigger shot in my lower abdomen on Friday. I felt a little nauseated, and since then have felt this weird seasick feeling in my lower body-my uterine area down through my legs. Saturday night and Sunday I had some twinging around both of my ovaries, which I assume were the follicles rupturing. Sunday morning I had a major temperature drop, which can be indicative of ovulation if followed by a sustained rise over the next few days, and so far the pattern is holding steady. We began a fast on Saturday night (along with many dear friends and family members) and prayed especially for this procedure to work if it was God's will. I slept well, and felt peaceful.

On Sunday morning, I woke up at 6:15, showered, got ready, and tried to quell the anxiety in the pit of my stomach. My HSG in August was so traumatic that the thought of a date with another speculum and catheter scared the daylights out of me. All day, I felt the comfort of Heavenly Father with me as we went through every moment of the procedure.

I spent most of the day amazed not only by how simple this procedure was, but also by how many couples IUI has blessed. After the andrology and IVF lab had all of the necessary materials for the procedure, BJ and I went to relax for an hour while they centrifuged and prepared the "sample" for the insemination. They basically spin all of the really good quality stuff to the top, eliminate the toxins and other materials that can inhibit conception, and then pump it up on a sugar substance like Red Bull to give it some extra pep in it's step. Pretty cool. Pretty amazing.

When we returned to the fertility center, we waited for about ten minutes with a few other couples. We all had the same look on our faces: hopeful anticipation, radiant joy, and an underlying quiver of fear and doubt. When you plunk down between $400 and $500 to do what nature intended for you to do on your own, it messes with your head. This was our first time, and I felt like there was a roller coaster in my stomach. Some of those couples may have been on their second, third, or fourth try. There was a strange sense of silent solidarity in that room. For a moment, I thought my heart would burst from the outpouring of love I felt for those other couples. When the nurse came to bring us back to the room, I had tears in my eyes.

The insemination was very fast. From speculum in to speculum out, it was a matter of about three minutes. I explained my HSG-related trauma to the procedure nurse, and she was very gentle and had no problems reaching my cervix or threading the catheter through. She had us check the labels on the insemination vial about 20 times (wouldn't that be a nightmare if it were the wrong vial!), and then connected it to the catheter, and boom, we were done. She wished us luck, and then I got to lay there for fifteen minutes with my legs up to give the little guys their best chance of saying hello to my egg. All I experienced from the actual procedure was some very mild cramping.

In two weeks, I can do a home pregnancy test, and if it is positive, I will do a blood test. If it is negative, then we move on to another cycle with some fertility drugs, and we do it all again.

I am nervous, hopeful and excited all at once. I am also crazy emotional and hopped up on hormones that make my cry at the drop of a hat. In the middle of the grocery store. About not being able to find the right kind of oranges that are on sale. Sigh.

We don't know what is going to happen, but we will soldier through whatever the result is. If our test is positive, we will tell family and close friends, and wait a few weeks until the ultrasound to establish a heartbeat before telling everyone else. If it is negative, we will need some time to process, regroup and reassess before talking about it. The whole purpose of this blog is to share and connect with others experiencing the same struggles, and I want to be open and vulnerable about everything that I am experiencing. Sometimes it just takes a little time to be able to be open.

Fifteen minutes changed the course of our lives. In two weeks, we will have a similar experience as we find out whether or not we were successful. Just a few moments in the grand expanse of time.

So we wait out those two weeks, and we pray, and we hope and we dream, for ourselves and for everyone else who is trying to have their own little angel.