Some History - 2015, part 1, What to Say, Babies Everywhere, & Giving Up Control

Starting off 2015 was pretty rough.  New Years weekend and my birthday came and went.  My brain made sense of the fact that it wouldn't have worked out.  I always thought that would be enough for me, were I ever to be faced with this situation.  You know, you play it out in your head, and think, "Yeah, I'll make sense of that and that will be enough to help me deal with it."  It wasn't.  The hope, excitement, and projection of all the wonderful tings to come...the fact that this was all worth the wait to this point...the fact that I had let myself start to daydream about nurseries, names, etc.  All of that had just disintegrated.  I felt guilty...though I had heard the words...It wasn't my fault, but still I felt it.  Plus the hormones crashed.  Over the course of the next few weeks, I would just fill up with tears and cry, "I'm so sorry!"  I couldn't help it.  We were both sad and frustrated with having to start over again. 

Miscarriage is not unlike any other kind of serious illness or trauma that you might go through, I suppose, but with an extra dose of hormones on top.  It's physically happening to one of you; the one with all the hormones.  And that part is awful, and worse the farther along you are, to my doctor's point.  (NOTE: still NOT helpful to use the at-least-it's-not-worse approach as someone is going through something awful.  Thinking about how much worse it could be is just more depressing.). 

All of this is likely to put the partner in a position to feel a strong need to be the rock to lean on.  To be the strong and stable one, and to help the hormonal and traumatized one work through it.  It's such a helpless position.  Especially when in reality, BOTH of you have been gut checked.  Both of you have just had your excitement and hopes dashed.  We were both devastated by the loss, but in some ways, it can feel harder for the partner to allow themselves to give in to the grief, too.  And as the hormonal one, I admit, I didn't do a very good job of seeing this.  I saw disappointment and sadness on his face, and the crazy part of my brain just felt that I had let him down.  Not that he was needing to grieve, too. 

We got through it, all of the stages of grief, and after the next cycle we got started again, trying to be positive and.  This time I bought an ovulation predicting computer.  Because when in doubt, add technology!  Do more analysis!

Fertility monitor.

In all seriousness, I think I was just grasping for some form of control.  Maybe I'm not ovulating at a typical time  Maybe we can be more precise with more data.  Things had spun out of control and I needed to feel like I could make a difference somehow.  Now, before you say, "Well, you had luck when you relaxed...", I went back and did the math.  We ended up doing it right when we needed to, so our previous method was sound.

Also, if I hear one more story about couples who "give up" and then suddenly get pregnant by surprise, I think I may explode.  Everyone seems to have one of these stories.  It goes something like this:

"Yeah, so I knew this friend of my cousin who totally tried for years, then one day they just gave up, and BOOM! within a week and a half they were pregnant with quadruplets!"

The message received, even if this is not what is intended, is the following:

"Yeah, so you're obviously doing this to yourself by trying so hard.  Being stressed is probably why you aren't getting pregnant, so it's most definitely your fault.  Maybe that's why you miscarried, too!  You need to give up on your dreams and then maybe they will happen anyway, and the sooner the better.  Here is a single data point that says giving up is the way to go.  Totally scientific.  Why don't you try it?"

This message ate away at me for a while.  I knew what they meant was for us to have hope, and they could see I was stressed and wanted to help me let go of that.  I know that I'm a higher-stress person...I've been called intense before.  This whole situation, a year or so into it, was indeed stressful, and I was already taking steps to gain more control, if possible.  Could I be doing this to myself?? 

I did a lot of reading on the right kind of diet, exercise, and especially stress.  Stress, while it can be hard on you, is NOT a cause of infertility.  If it was, fertility offices would have fewer exam rooms with stirrups and more with couches and psychologists on staff.  Stress can make things harder, from a romance point of view, no doubt, but please, please, stop using this story with couples who might confide in you that they are having problems conceiving.  I don't care if your friend or friend of a friend ended up with a perfect little baby this way.  It doesn't help give hope to the person who is in the midst of it right now.  They just hear how it's their own fault, and how other couples have gotten so worn down that they made the decision to give up.

For my Game of Thrones friends...

Tell them instead that struggling with fertility sucks, but that many people do and they are not alone.  That they are brave to stick with it, and that it will all be worth it in the end.  Tell them it must be so frustrating to be in their shoes, but that they will take the obstacles as they come.  They just have a different road to travel.

It is particularly difficult to feel like you are not alone in the struggle with fertility when all you see is super-fertile friends and colleagues.  This was pretty hard for me.  At the time, I knew of a few others who had struggled, but the numbers were few.  Maybe it's just the coincidence of observing it far more due to the fact that fertility is all I could think about.  Maybe it's because our friends are mostly at the same stage of life, and it's just natural that pregnancies and babies just start popping up everywhere. 

After the 6th baby shower invitation I received that spring, I started a list.  I couldn't tell if I was crazy and just seeing it more, or if it really was more.  I had seen friends having babies and posting their pics on Facebook since our mid-twenties, but what was happening seems way beyond what I had seen up to that point.  By the end of the year, when I stopped counting, there were over 30 babies on the list.  At one point in the summer, 5 of them were born within 7 days.  I'm not proud of having kept a list.  It was and obsessive way of keeping track of what others had that I didn't, and maybe couldn't.  It added to the stress with envy. 

I love my friends.  They have all made adorable babies!  And I couldn't bring myself to be around them very much during this time.  Holding their beautiful babies, seeing their pictures on Facebook, going to another baby shower after shopping for baby gifts.  It was just an overload.  I had to take a break from Facebook, and I saw those friends less as they moved on into parenthood together.

Yep...logging off now...

In pulling back from those friends a little, we made new and wonderful friends, who have also gone through similar struggles with fertility.  In sharing a little about our experience and miscarriage, we began to see more and more that we aren't alone.  Friends from college, from work, from our neighborhood.  Miscarriages, hormone treatments, IUI and IVF.  It became less lonely.  Having people to talk to, vent frustrations to, to ask advice made 2015 bearable.

In April, Michael had another knee surgery to fully restore function to his leg.  Poor guy had been on crutches from Thanksgiving until early March.  It felt like he had just gotten off of them to now go back for another surgery.  Thankfully, this one was easier than the last one.  ACLs have become fairly standard and minimally invasive since even our high school days when they required a 12 inch incision.  He bounced back quickly, considering everything he had gone through up to that point, and while physical therapy would go on for several months to come, he was through the worst of it.  Michael is the toughest person I know.  He rarely complained from his pain or felt frustrated or sorry for himself in his limited mobility.  He was making jokes and keeping positive the majority of the time.  I admire him so much for that.  Watching him go through two surgeries and rehab after rehab gave me renewed strength and focus.

Michael's knee after 6 screws and 3 surgeries.

In June, I was due for my annual check up with my OB/GYN.  Michael came, too.  We asked about taking the next step.  What else could we do?  We had been using the ovulation computer, and I had the suspicion that I wasn't ovulating reliably.  Maybe only 1 of the past 3 months.  It felt like the definition of insanity at this point, every month hoping for a different result.  The doctor said he recommended trying a few months of a medicine called Clomid, and if not successful after 3 months, to go to the fertility specialist.

I was happy to have a new tool in the fertility tool box.  Clomid.  I had read about it already.  It would help me ovulate by stimulating certain hormones in my system to help ensure a mature follicle develops and releases an egg.  It sometimes results in multiple eggs...so the risk of twins goes up, but not by much, and at this point, we were very ready to take on as many babies as luck might throw at us.  Clomid is cheap to try (I think ours was $20/mo, a full IVF cycle can cost 1000x that, so definitely worth a try), and I would take it on day 5-9 of my cycle.  Doing this felt like the right step.  It gave us new hope, plus, the Clomid path was short (only 3 more months at the most!) before we could feel confident in taking the next step from there.

Clomid wasn't fun.  It wasn't awful either, and we have done harder things since, but it wasn't a cake walk.  I had awful headaches that pain killers just wouldn't help.  Light hurt, breathing hurt, noises hurt.  My desk at work was in an open area (noise) and faced a big window (light), and the shades were programmed to retract every 2 hours.  So every two hours, I would jump up and push the button to get them to go back down before my head split open.  I read some more about it and started drinking lots of water.  Water water water...as much as I could swallow.  It helped make the headaches manageable, and kept me from doing a full out Dracula hiss every time the shades started to rise.  Thankfully the headaches tapered off each month after the 5 days of pills were finished.

On Clomid, I could feel it more.  It was working.  The fertility monitor said so the first month, so I put that away after that.  At 5:30 every morning on days 6-20 of the last 4 cycles, I had peed in a cup, then dipped a test stick for exactly 15 seconds, which I then put into the computer for 5 mins of analysis.  I did this even on weekends and on an international business trip where I did it on a plane both coming and going.  I only spilled it once, and no, it wasn't one the times on the plane.  It was at home and it went all over my sink area.  Fun.  Cleaning it up, I thought about it being a preview of things to come with babies.  This time, for the first time in a while, this idea made me smile.  Technology and control were overrated at this point.  We focused on our "schedule" instead, and I put the computer away.

3 months of Clomid went by quickly and unsuccessfully, and then we were told to call in reinforcements.  Sigh...I made an appointment with the specialist, or RE (Reproductive Endocrinologist).  I had wanted to find out what was "wrong" for so long, but now I was feeling some fear.  We had hoped it wouldn't come to this...pulling out the "big guns".  Was this really our path?  Michael had been tested...it wasn't a new thought that what was wrong was likely with me.  It was September of 2015, and I was about to find out what was "broken" inside me, and ultimately give up control of the process to someone else.  There was a combination of fear and relief in the pit of my stomach when we walked into that office and met our new doctor.