It has been over two years since we started this process. When I think about the time commitment, it is like taking on a new big life project or part time job. There is the element of managing the time needed for doctor appointments and ensuring injections can be given about the same time every day (For our last cycle, I endured at least 80 intramuscular injections to support the embryo transfer and pregnancy). There’s training on how to give the injections and following up with various pharmacies to fill prescriptions and to make sure they will be available on time and if they are covered by insurance. There’s up front financial planning, insurance inquiries and perhaps the decision to sell off investments and take out loans. It may mean saying no to vacations. Going through all the planning and commitments for one cycle is manageable as it becomes the top priority of your life for a couple of months. However, we have now done this five times, including the time commitment to go through the egg donor process as well as the unexpected periods of time to recover from failed cycles in addition to pregnancy losses. Over the past two years, the commitment and emotional strain of this process has impacted decisions about my career and how I want to live my life, which has lead to some positive changes. During my first pregnancy, I was in a very stressful job. I was miserable and exhausted. I wanted to be as healthy as possible during my pregnancy and I could not figure out how to reduce my stress level at work. I kept thinking to myself that I would just hang in there until I had maternity leave then I would look for another job. But that never happened. After losing our baby, Jaxon at 15 weeks and returning to work two weeks later, I made the decision to change my job. It was an absolute necessity for my mental health. I was very lucky that there was something I could move into but the process took a few months. While grieving and managing depression I was still under terrible stress at work but I knew there was a light at the end of the tunnel. This was a very different type of career decision for me. I had spent about 15 years pushing forward, taking on new challenges, taking risks and putting myself in situations outside of my comfort zone in order to get to the next big career move. But this time was different. I made a deliberate decision to return to a job that I had done before for many years. And that is exactly what I needed…Established expertise without stress of learning a new role, predictable challenges, and a feeling of stability. My plan was to create a situation at work that allowed me to focus on my health, emotional recovery and enough flexibility in my schedule to manage doctor appointments for our continued attempts to make a baby. While it ended up taking another nine months to achieve my goal of manageable stress and a stable, supportive work environment, it was worth the time and effort. I even managed to achieve a promotion along the way. I am incredibly thankful for the support I have at work from my management and close friends, which enables me to continue to pursue our dream of having our own baby. For this last embryo transfer cycle and nine weeks of pregnancy, the flexibility to manage my time at work allowed me to go to at least 12 doctor appointments and at least 10 trips to the lab for blood draws. Overall, my priorities have shifted from a focus on my career development to a focus on my mental and physical health, and taking on this journey with my husband to make a baby. And this priority means we have to say no to some other things and accept the risk of disappointment while not losing sight that our dream could come true.
Author: CJandMe
Mom makes it better
My mom was out of the country when I went through losing this pregnancy. While I was well taken care of at home, there is just nothing like having mom around to make it better. I was able to see her today. I was having a particularly bad day and was just completely exhausted. I was so tired, that just being tired was making me cry. I didn’t feel like I could break free from feeling depressed and run down today. We went for a walk and somehow the fresh air and her company helped lift the heaviness away from my heart. I love you Mom and today was the perfect day to be with you.
Two Girls
Two girls. Today we received the genetic test results and found out that the twins were normal (no genetic defects found) and were female. I thought the hardest part was over, but somehow hearing those words and realizing I had lost what could have been two baby girls made my heart break even more. I loved the names that we had picked out for girls and that stings a lot too. Finding out that they were “normal” made me even more confused as to why they had been taken. I guess it’s just random bad luck, totally out of our control. It’s so hard to live with that. It still feels impossible to let go, even though they are already gone…but the love that remains is worth holding on to.
Photo by CJE
Faith, Hope and Dreams
Yesterday was a really hard day for me. I was exhausted and in tears most of the evening. My husband and I had a long talk about hope and faith and not giving up. His words have stayed with me today and this is what I heard him say…
While you feel you have lost hope,
It is not gone.
I am holding it for you.
While you search for faith,
I will keep mine close.
I will wait for you.
While you see darkness
I can see a baby in your arms.
I will save this dream until yours is no longer broken.
Photo by CJE – Peru
Faking it: I Need a Rock to Crawl Under
I tried to avoid everyone today. I wanted to hide in a hole or crawl under a rock. It was my first day back at work after such a sad week and the Thanksgiving holiday. I knew it would make my stomach turn every time someone casually asked me how my holiday was. I had so much anxiety over trying to figure out how to answer that question. So, I figured it was easier to avoid people as much as possible in hopes I wouldn’t have to fake my way through a generic and emotionally stable response. My strategy was pretty solid and I got through the day without breaking down or having to talk to many people. I only sent one pathetic text to my husband telling him how depressed I was and that I wanted to go home. I think I only had to answer, “how was your holiday” twice today. Totally faked it with a semi-smile on my face. Unfortunately, one of these people stopped by to tell me her dog died. I decided it was best to keep my sadness to myself and offer whatever empathy I could muster because she deserved to have that too. It is a mixed blessing to have had several previous difficult life experiences allowing me to perfect my “return to work survival strategy”. The first day is always the hardest and most risky for unpredictable emotional collapse. And you don’t want to risk this in front of just anyone. I know where to park so I can get directly between my office and car with minimal risk of running into someone. I know what bathroom to hide in if I can’t fight off tears. I’m skilled at the use of email to alert people I’m back and working on stuff, delaying actual direct face-to-face contact. I have Kleenex in my office. I know what type of work I can do that helps distract me from my emotions but has a little wiggle room for error in case my brain tricks me into thinking it is actually working properly. I’ve returned to work after much worse…losing my Dad to cancer, a death of a loved one two months later, and then losing my Grandma within the same year. I’ve worked through divorce and walking away from my home and completely starting over. I fumbled and cried my way through work after a traumatic miscarriage at 15 weeks. Through all these experiences, I’ve continued to learn how to return to work while still grieving. I know how much space I need and will try to protect that space as much as possible. I know whom I can trust and who will support me. I know who to share details with and who to keep at a distance. Then starting with the second day back at work, I continue to endure and wait for enough time to pass to feel normal again. And I wait long enough through the stability of the daily grind so that when someone asks me how I’m doing I don’t have to fake it.
Photo by CJE – Peru
Sympathy
Sometimes we try to trick our mind and our heart into feeling better by thinking these words…”it could be so much worse.” Sometimes other people may think they are helping us feel better by saying those same words. Somehow trying to put our pain and our sorrow into perspective. I find myself jumping between my own memories of loss in my life and thinking about the life-altering challenges other people I care about have had to face. And yes, it can be worse. But then I stop and remind myself that the loss of my pregnancies and the sorrow I am experiencing right now is my tragedy and it is my sadness all on it’s own without having to make a comparison to anything else. I know from experience that making these comparisons will sting deep in my soul. It gets in the way of healing and can make us question our own process of getting through it. It can question the validity of feelings that are supposed to be raw and clutching and that must be experienced as they happen without the pressure or distraction of diminishing them. If we can feel it all and not hide from it, or lessen it, we will be able to replace the invasive thorns of grief with a soft, peaceful, protective aura; bringing the calm of acceptance and the ability to live with hope and happiness again. But we don’t have to get there on our own. Sympathy and comfort from our loved ones is a blessing. Pure compassionate sympathy showing simply, that I am here with you in your grief and that I am here with you as your heart breaks and I am here with you until you see light again is the most healing gift. Expressing no time limit on someone’s pain, no comparison to another’s suffering and no limit on the love that is shared in these difficult moments helps to pave the path to recovery. I am very fortunate to have people in my life who can give this to me and I was reminded of that fortune by the card pictured here that I received a couple of days ago. Thank you for your love. You are giving me the gift of healing.
Photo by CJE
Thankful: Making Jaxon
It’s a different Thanksgiving today. No plans, no travel, no getting together with family. I think I may watch the Thanksgiving Day Parade and bake something made out of pumpkin and enjoy the sounds and smells of my husband cooking turkey, stuffing and mashed potatoes. It will just be a day for us. With the events of this week, I didn’t have it in me to put on a brave face and a smile to visit with anyone. It feels better to stay home without any pressure or schedule, plus the dog is happily snoozing next to me. While I sit here watching the pre-show of the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, I’m reminded of Thanksgiving from two years ago. It was just the beginning of making Jaxon. The 2012 holiday season was our first round of IVF. We launched into the process as soon as we had returned from our honeymoon and not long after celebrating the new year of 2013, we found out it worked on our first try. I was pregnant! Could we really be this lucky? Our first try and it worked? It was incredibly exciting but then so quickly coupled with a random health event that clouded the enjoyment through the first six weeks of the pregnancy. Two days after the embryo transfer I had unusual breast changes that first appeared to be an infection. I went to an urgent care clinic and was treated with antibiotics. Nothing changed. For the next six weeks I went back and forth between my OB/GYN, a breast surgeon and an infectious disease specialist. Since I could not have a mammogram, it was harder to determine a diagnosis or quickly rule out various concerns. We kept trying different antibiotics for a while, with my doctors still leaning toward treating an infection. No change. Then there were scarier possibilities that would not only risk my pregnancy, but my life. The next step was a biopsy where we hoped to eliminate the worst of the possibilities. But now the worst of the possibilities was all I could think about. After six weeks terrified of what this could be, we finally had an answer. It was simply benign, and random, and unexplainable. All those weeks of doctor appointments, and worry, and stress, and the distraction from bonding with my pregnancy was finally over. And I was fine. The relief I felt when my doctor called me on a Friday night to tell me I was ok was a wonderful moment and such a huge relief. I could feel my whole body rejecting the claws of tension that had held on so tightly for those long weeks. And I was so thankful. I could finally just enjoy this pregnancy and focus on this new little life. Now, it was just normal pregnancy doctor appointments and ultrasounds. My favorite, at approximately 11 weeks where we got to see so much detail of our growing baby and his cute little movements. At about 13 weeks we announced our pregnancy to everyone. EVERYONE. We enclosed the photo attached to this post in our wedding thank you cards. A photo to quickly spread happiness to everyone nearest and dearest to us. However, the joy of sharing the news and the relief of transitioning to my second trimester of pregnancy was so cruelly short-lived. I started having problems right after 13 weeks and by 15 weeks he was gone. At the end of it all, with only a few ounces of perfection resting on my chest, I have never felt anything heavier sinking so deeply into my heart. The most precious, beautiful face I had ever seen. A cute little button nose and the littlest fingers and toes. And while my mind was still in shock in that horrific moment, I knew I had been given the biggest love I had ever known. Today I am thankful that I can still see his face and still feel that love from our baby named Jaxon. I know that for all that was so painfully stripped away from us that day, the love still remains. And when my husband speaks his name in heartfelt memory, I am thankful.
Photo by CJE
The Middle
I’m stuck in the middle of this empty place
Where dreams were stripped away
And I can’t figure out how to say goodbye
To reach the end of a beginning that had so recently started
It simply slipped away before my heart could comprehend it was gone
Stuck in this middle place where it’s too soon to see the next beginning
And my mind doesn’t yet believe in starting over
So I will just stay here for awhile in between places
Until the emptiness is replaced by hope
Photo by CJE – Peru
The Little Things
We decided to have a D&C (Dilation and Curettage) procedure in hopes of avoiding a spontaneous miscarriage. It was not an easy wait. Six days between finding out the heartbeats had stopped to having the procedure. We were on pins and needles those 6 days worrying I would miscarry. It made me afraid to leave the house…and so I didn’t. I did not want to go through that again. It’s also emotionally draining knowing I was carrying these babies of my dreams that were no longer living. In those six days I somewhat reached acceptance for the end of this pregnancy but also terribly saddened knowing the two little things would be physically taken away from me today. But we hoped the events of today would help us move on. We would start to put this behind us and look forward. My husband told me so many times today that he loved me, telling me I was brave and strong and said this isn’t the end of our journey. I was brought to tears several times at the hospital knowing how incredibly hard it was for us to get this far. Just for this one cycle thinking about all the doctor appointments, cycle planning, ultrasounds prepping for embryo transfer, daily injections, blood draws, coordinating medications with different pharmacies, and arranging time off work for every little step along the way. The first milestone of waiting the 9 days between the embryo transfer and first pregnancy test is torture. And now I’ve done that 5 times. I didn’t want to have to do that again. And then there are those other little things…I was so looking forward to pulling out my maternity clothes. It was so devastating having to pack them up the first time and hide them away. I’ve been waiting, and waiting, and waiting to wear them again. I had just ordered morning sickness hard candies that showed up yesterday in the mail. I was getting adjusted to my picky eating habits (and my husband putting up with them) and am now missing the morning sickness feelings that had reassured me for the first 8 weeks that I had life growing inside me. And the constant sneezing that had become a new companion while pregnant now seems to be gone. And I was certainly enjoying the fact that other family members had to take over kitty litter box cleaning duty. This Friday would have been the end of the daily intramuscular hormone injections required to support the pregnancy and that my poor booty had endured over the past couple of months. We were both really looking forward to that. It’s those little things that sting that I know will more easily fade away over time in comparison to the emotional impact of the two little dreams that disappeared. But the lingering reminders are still staring at me.
Photo by CJE
Strength
The photo posted with this entry was written to me by my husband. He quickly replaced what had been written before we got the sad news about losing our second pregnancy. Before he wrote this, we had started a list of names for the twins and had some favorites listed. It’s just too easy to start dreaming about the day we would hold them in our arms and give them these cute names. Both my husband and my best friend recently told me these words…”you are the strongest woman I have ever known.” It’s quite amazing to hear those words when strength feels like it’s gone into hiding and crouched in a hole covered by confusion, loss and heartbreak. Thinking about my own strength, hiding in there somewhere, I am reminded of a story I read in another blog a few months ago. It was around the time I was going to start another embryo transfer cycle that I ran across this touching story about a woman who lost her sweet baby girl. To me, it was the most beautiful story of a mother’s love and quiet courage. In reading her story, I could feel every word so deeply and relate to her experience so strongly. While she experienced a much more difficult journey than I had faced with my first loss, the feelings in those very raw moments are so intensely the same. Her words brought amazing beauty to her daughter’s brief life and touched so many of us who needed a way to understand our own pain. And I could make more sense of my own loss through her words. She gave us all a gift by writing her story. Her name is Danielle Walker and I have never met her. She is the author of several recipe books that I really enjoy and I follow her on Facebook. What I found so incredible about her is her amazing spirit that shines through in her writing and how she endures through this loss by truly living. I see her posting updates on Facebook about her book tours with a smile on her face and interacting with so many people. But also at times, admitting to her followers that she misses her baby. And she just amazes me. To me, she is STRENGTH. And she just might be able to help me find mine. I’ve attached a link to her story about her baby, Aila. http://againstallgrain.com/2014/07/24/life-after-aila/
Photo by CJE
31chances 