Blog 3 of 6: The Big One: IVF
/Our motivations behind getting pregnant have not always been the same. For the first year or so, my husband and I were fighting separate battles. I was fighting for a baby, and my husband was fighting against endometriosis. This is back when we believed pregnancy cured endo. Since then, I’ve learned that is not the case for everyone.
So even though our goal of getting pregnant was the same, our reasoning was very different. My husband felt disappointment each month we didn’t conceive, but I felt genuine grief. Along the way, his thinking gradually shifted and he began grieving with me. It was the most obvious after someone he hadn’t seen in a long time stopped him in the grocery store. In their catching up, the guy asked my husband, “So how many kids do you have?”
We’d been married quite some time, and obviously the guy felt safe assuming we had children, but it was a right hook to the heart. My husband felt all the grief at that moment. I’d been fielding those questions for years, but I found out people rarely asked my husband about kids. I guess women talk about that kind of thing more often.
After that, we grieved every loss together. It made a huge difference fighting this battle with him.
At our clinic, counseling was mandatory before doing IVF. At the beginning of her career, our counselor said she used to wish no one had to go through the struggle of infertility. Now she thinks everyone should go through it because the struggle changes people, and there would be no unwanted babies. She said IVF babies are the luckiest babies alive because look how much they were loved even before they were made.
IVF is when they take my eggs and my husband’s sperm. They fertilize the eggs, and once they fertilize, they grow into embryos. Typically, the embryologists let them develop for five days before transferring them to the uterus. It takes a lot of medications and even more injections to produce lots of eggs.
IVF VIBES.
December 2017
I took the prescribed Xanax at 6:30 the morning of my egg retrieval. We went and checked in at the lab at 7:30. While my husband provided his specimen, a nurse led me straight to a room where she promptly gave me a shot in my bottom, told me to use the restroom, undress from the waist down, and lie on the table. The light in the room was dim, and I felt the injection she gave me kicking in. After a few minutes, my husband joined me. I made him take a selfie with me. I wanted to capture the moment.
A little while later, the doctor came in. He was not my regular doctor, though I had met him before and felt comfortable with him. He numbed my vaginal wall, and the procedure began where he extracted my follicles (eggs) from my ovaries using a needled syringe. It was uncomfortable hence the medication. When the doctor couldn’t find more than six follicles, I became very concerned. From everything I’d read, I was expecting 8-15, and I had six. Every ultrasound I had led me to believe I wouldn’t have over eight eggs, but I thought there might’ve been more that they just weren’t seeing. I always thought, well, I’m healthy, and they kept telling me how “young” I was, so I thought my eggs would be on the higher end. I thought the quality would probably be good. I didn’t think I would lose as many as those other women who had more severe cases. Deny, deny, deny.
Six eggs. I knew they wouldn’t all become embryos. I counted down in my head, wondering how many we would lose. The nurse delicately explained that the eggs that weren’t as mature would not become embryos. I knew this, but wanted an immediate number. Would that leave us with 5, 3, 1? And even if we had several embryos, that doesn’t mean they would make it to day-five or day-six embryos.
When it was time to leave, they didn’t rush me out. The medication left me groggy, and my legs were wobbly as we finally left.
The lab called at 8:53 the following morning. Four of the eggs had fertilized. I liked the number four. I was expecting at least two of the eggs weren’t mature enough. The embryologist informed me they would call with another update on Tuesday, but Tuesday was two days away. That’s 48 hours. It was 2,880 minutes away. I didn’t know what I was going to do for the next 2,880 minutes.
I never expected to feel so helpless during the process. It was so much harder than I thought it would be. It’s hard to leave something so fragile and important—something that should happen inside of my body—in the hands of a stranger. Before with treatments, I could at least fake the element of control, but this was entirely out of my hands. All I could do was find distractions until the next phone call.
On Tuesday, the embryologist rattled off some numbers to me. Embryologists grade embryo quality differently, so it’s hard to understand what all the numbers mean, but I knew it wasn’t good. I had expected we may lose one or maybe even two, but this news seemed much worse. By Thursday, we had two embryos still growing slowly. They were supposed to update me on Friday, but the call never came. I was furious.
I didn’t get the call until I was on my way to work Saturday morning. I was so frantic that I accidentally sent the call to voicemail. I wonder if maybe this was a blessing because the news was going to destroy me. The embryos were of very poor quality, meaning they were incomplete and missing parts of their structure. They had already discarded all of our little em-babies.
Pain. In my heart. In my soul. Pain I wish I didn’t feel.
This is a quote from PInk F*cking Moscato that I Modified from a journal entry after our IVF failed.
Sorry, guys, this one I write with a heavy heart because it hurts to look back and see myself so miserably sad. It reminds me of how much effort it took me just to make it through the days. I am immensely grateful for how far I’ve come to get to where I am today.
Today, I am happy. Without being a mother, I found joy. It doesn’t mean my longing to be a mother has disappeared, but it doesn’t make or break my happiness. I am a person with a purpose all on my own. The sting from that baby-shaped hole in my heart still hurts sometimes, especially with baby announcements and baby showers. I have moments of sadness, but I no longer hate the world for my infertility. I don’t hide from my family or avoid my friends like I did when things were at their worst.
After I heard they discarded our embryos, I had a total meltdown and then picked myself back up and got through the workday by compartmentalizing. Grief came in waves, and my emotions were all over the place. I was angry we spent so much money and devastated it didn’t work. One moment I was desperate to try again, and the next moment I would rather use our money on things that wouldn’t break our hearts.
I thought IVF was a slam-dunk. I was so confident that I ordered customized onesies to use in a pregnancy announcement. The packages arrived just days after our embryos had been discarded. It hurt. Everything hurt. Going out and seeing children with their families, talking to women about their kids, moms sharing their irritations about their children. It hurt every time someone asked, “How many children do you have?” or “Do you have children yet?” or “You don’t want to wait too long…” I wanted to scream, “I know bitch! I’ve been trying for over three years. I’ve spent over $40,000. I’ve done everything I can, but the wait isn’t up to me!”
I didn’t tell most people about my struggle because it seemed too personal and because people say stupid shit like, “Are you having enough sex?” “You just need to relax, and it will happen,” “Once you stop trying, it will happen.” “Just adopt, and I bet you’ll get pregnant.”
Just because one of these things happened to your friend’s sister’s uncle’s brother-in-law’s daughter doesn’t mean that happens to everyone. Couples who adopt after infertility have a less than 8% chance to get pregnant.
May I suggest we stop using the phrase “Just adopt” altogether?
First of all, there is no such thing as “just adopting.” Those two words are thrown around way too easily. It’s not something you just do, and it’s not a backup plan for infertility. Telling your infertile friends to “just adopt” belittles their struggle and can make them feel guilty and selfish for desiring genetic children. It also belittles adoption. Adoption is not the solution to infertility. Adoption is beautiful and so much more than a last choice option, so please stop suggesting to “Just adopt.”
Imagine going to a friend and saying, “Wow, my car is in the shop again, and I just don’t know if I have the money to fix it.”
Your friend nods and suggests, “Why don’t you just get a horse? I know it’s not a car, but they’re both modes of transportation.”
See how absurd that sounds? Cars and horses, while both wonderful and expensive, are completely different!
I know people say these things because they’re trying to help or attempting to give us hope, but it hurts. Instead of trying to offer simple solutions, listen and be honest. It’s okay to express you don’t know what to say or how to help, especially when you don’t know all that someone has been through. Most people who give me advice don’t know my entire situation, and unless I get really personal (like I am now), it’s hard for people to understand why their encouraging words aren’t actually helpful. In our case, we are trying, or we’re not trying. I’m on continuous birth control to manage my endometriosis when we aren’t trying, and I have no more faith that we will conceive naturally. No “free sex baby” for us, and that’s okay, but at the time, I was furious at the world.
For a while, I had a friend going through infertility simultaneously, which was helpful because we both understood the struggle. She got pregnant before I went through IVF, which was wonderful, but I lost my infertility buddy. It wasn’t until about six months after IVF that I joined my first support group. I wish I would’ve joined much sooner. For some reason, I thought the people in these groups couldn’t possibly understand what I was going through. I also didn’t want to tell my business to a bunch of strangers. I wish I had been more open-minded because Facebook support groups have been a wonderful thing for me! (Make sure you find the right group. I know there are some toxic ones out there.) There are groups for infertility, endometriosis, IVF support, adoption, foster care support—you name it, and it’s probably out there. And you can usually get a pretty good feel if the group is right for you.
The information I have learned from these groups has been very positive. It’s opened my eyes to not only my struggle, but the struggle others are going through. As alone as I felt surrounded by moms and their kids, I knew there were people out there having the same feelings and emotions I was having, and I needed that validation. Most of my friends have been very understanding, but there is only so much one can understand without going through it themselves.
Before I finally gave in and searched for support groups, I felt very alone and miserable. For a while after IVF, every quiet moment felt like death. We had been losing too much for too long. Now, we grieved every single one of our losses all over again. Like the loss of normalcy, the loss of control, the loss of financial stability, the loss of hope. We were grieving the loss of our family dream. Life was turning out so differently than what I had pictured when we talked about our future kid’s names on our honeymoon all those years before. I was so buried in my own despair that I didn’t know how to be happy for others. I hurt so deeply when people asked when we were going to have kids, and for a while, I answered, “We can’t have children.” It wasn’t exactly true, but I was so tired of pretending the question didn’t devastate me. I wanted people to feel a little uncomfortable for asking because I felt a lot uncomfortable answering.
“I used to be whole, but life had carved away a piece of me, like the cavity of a hollowed-out tree. And in that void, lived all of my lost hopes and broken dreams. Failed expectations nestled inside like temperamental hornets, stinging every so often to remind me of their existence. And on days like today, days when I kicked the hornet’s nest, adding to my losses. All those past failures buzzed around inside, spreading their venom with each sting.”
I had never failed so hard at something before. I put all my eggs in one basket, only for them to be deemed defective and discarded. I didn’t want to stay in my misery, so I tried to envision my new future and thought, “What next?”