The Eternal Guest Room

This thing is cruel.

Calling it “infertility” seems almost hollow. There’s so much more involved.

I sometimes feel I’m walking a thin line between trying to help people understand, trying to express my feelings, and not getting more personal than I want to be. I don’t know how much of myself to put out there sometimes.

Some days I feel OK, I truly do. Some days I’m hopeful and excited and “just know” that it’s right around the corner, whether that corner might be 2 months or 6. (Never just one month though, because that’s just way to much to hope for.) I don’t want other people to tell me it will happen, because it hurts and doesn’t help, but I have to tell myself that it will.

And then other days…

Oh, the other days. Those are the days that feel like they’ll never end. It’s hard to think of anything else. And everything else seems more monumental than it should be.

On these days I feel like we’ll never emerge from this. Even if/when we do, it won’t be unscathed. This will always be with us. I envy those who have no idea what this is like. I realize more and more that it will always be there. If it had just been a year, or a year and half maybe, I think it would be easier to bounce back. But this has forever changed who I am and how I view the world. I will never be the same.

And maybe there’s some good in that. That’s what keeps me going. Because I know that at the end of this, when we have a child, we will appreciate them so much more than we ever could have without this struggle. Sometimes I see other people and know that they have no idea what blessings have been bestowed upon them. They have no idea how lucky they are. We will always know how much we wanted this child, and we will know how much it cost us.

It’s just that sometimes, it’s hard to get through the day.

We just wanted to take a minute to say thank you to all of you that take the time to read this blog. These past 3 years have been filled with grief and heartache and we’ve mostly gone through it all on our own. It means a lot that you care enough to keep up with our struggle. We know that to a lot of people, this doesn’t seem like all that big of a deal – there’s no visible loss, there’s nothing solid to hold on to, our life from the outside seems to just go on like normal – but your acknowledgment that it is a big deal is a tremendous relief.

We also can’t tell you how much it means to get comments here. Every time a comment shows up, we feel a little less alone. It gives us a little more strength to make it through another day. Even the shortest, simplest comments remind us that you care, and that you’re there for us, and this helps in such a huge way that I’m not even sure how I can describe it. It might seem like a small thing to you, but those comments remind us that we do have support and love, and that we’re not going through this completely alone, and it means more than we can put into words.

I know it sounds kind of cheesy, but it’s so, so true.

So, thank you.

It’s here – another year. I had a tough time ringing in the New Year. It brought up a lot of sad thoughts and emotions. 2009 is over, and 2010 begins. I have two lines of thoughts about this.

The first one is: Thank God. Good riddance, 2009. You totally sucked.

We started off 2009 hopeful and excited. Surely, this would be our year. In January we learned that Darek’s surgery had been successful, and his numbers had improved. In April we learned that they were even better – on the low end of normal, but way better than the original numbers.

In March, we passed the two-year mark. We had been “trying” for 2 years. It stung, but in the midst of the positive results we felt that it was just around the corner.

I went to my doctor to make sure everything was still OK on my end. I was still with my regular ob-gyn and she had me get a super fun procedure called an HSG. It revealed that my tubes were both open, but also showed a very small mass on my uterus. My doctor didn’t think it was anything to worry about, and specifically said she didn’t recommend having it removed. So we did 3 rounds of Clomid, thinking surely this will give us the extra boost we need, even though I didn’t technically need the drug for its intended purpose (I ovulate just fine on my own, thank you very much; at least I have that function covered).

That’s when everything came crashing down. On the day I found out the last round of Clomid hadn’t worked, I found out a friend was pregnant (thanks, Universe…really, thanks). Something inside of me just snapped. I admitted it was finally time to see the RE. It was the beginning of a very rough 5 months.

Unfortunately we kept having to push back our RE appointment since Darek got a new job around that time. When we finally went in September, he outlined a plan for us to do 3 IUIs  before the new year. We knew our insurance was about to change and really suck, so we were relieved that we’d have 3 opportunities before that happened. Three IUIs should have done the trick, statistically and optimistically speaking.

But of course they found a cyst, and that took away a month. I was upset, but did some math and figured we’d be able to squeeze in two IUIs before the end of the year, so we’d have a pretty good shot. On December 1, we finally had our IUI. Everything was perfect – I had the correct response to the drugs, Darek’s numbers were acceptable, and the doctor and nurses ushered us out of the office with smiles and choruses of “good luck!”

It failed, and I went in for a saline sonogram and got the news I expected but was still devastated to hear: a huge polyp was there. I’ll ring in 2010 with surgery to remove it. If we’d been able to do it in 2009, even just a week earlier, it would have cost about $500, but with the new insurance and ridiculous deductible it’ll be close to $1700.

2009 was not a fun year. It was not full of good things. It brought a lot of bad news.

Every step held a set-back. That expression about taking one step forward and two steps back definitely applies to how we felt this year. This was our third New Year when I thought for sure I wouldn’t be drinking at our party. It was our third holiday season to go through the grief of not having a child with us, born or expected. We watched more people get pregnant. We watched more babies be born. We watched other peoples’ children grow up and start walking, start eating with forks, start talking. We watched as other people moved on to kid #2 when I remember how upsetting it was to see kid #1 be born before we had one of our own to look forward to.

The emotional toll of our cumulative losses put a strain on our marriage as well as each of us individually. It was a year of ups and downs but the downs were definitely felt much deeper. Dealing with infertility is an extremely isolating experience. I felt disconnected from friends and family. Though some of my relationships grew stronger, others became more distant or even almost non-existent.

Another year gone is another year that we suffered disappointment and grieved for our losses. Twelve to thirteen losses per year. It’s hard to look at it like that.

But I have a second line of thought as well:

We are knocking out one more obstacle. Maybe this will be the answer. Maybe this will be our year. 2009 is over, and we have a fresh start in 2010.

It hurts to hope, but it hurts not to hope. So this year, we will hope. We won’t forget the past 3 years, but we’ll try to look at this year as a new start. We’ll try to think of this as a clean slate. The beginning.