Impatiently Waiting for our Miracle(s)

I kinda left you all hanging on the 3 rd loss. But I promise it wasn’t on purpose. Until this past Thursday, we didn’t have all the answers. We heard from the nurse last week that the baby had trisomy 11, and was a boy. I was actually relieved it was a trisomy. How terrible is that? But that meant that it was a more common miscarriage, not one of these 2% chance events. But we didn’t really know what that meant until we met with the doctor on Thursday. He explained that with Trisomy 11, the baby wouldn’t have survived outside of the womb, and it’s unlikely we would have even made it past 8 weeks. He went on to explain that all 3 of our losses have been totally random. There really is no explanation as to why one person would have an ectopic, a triploidy, and a trisomy. Which may sound frustrating, but it was actually a relief to us. That means there probably isn’t an underlying issue with one of us (other than my low AMH). He suggested we do a miscarriage panel on me (which requi...

As a kid, I would cringe every time my dad would say “now, what lesson did we learn from this?” I felt like I heard it all. the. time. But as an adult, I realize I ask myself that often. Thanks, Dad. Going through this battle with infertility and pregnancy loss, I’ve learned a lot. I’ve also grown a lot. Early in our struggles, I hated when people would tell me “this is all part of God’s plan.” I finally see that. Even though some days I still struggle with it. So what have I learned? We have very very little control over when and how we have a baby. I am a control freak, there – I admitted it, but I’ve learned to let go. That’s been a hard lesson to learn. I’ve learned that people don’t mean to hurt your feelings by the things they say. I have had so many people say hurtful things, not meaning to, over the course of this process. I could make a couple posts just about that, but I won’t. The truth is, if they really understood how badly their words hurt, they would never s...

Today is one of those days. If I’m really going to be very real about this stage of life we're in, I feel compelled to share the hard days too. I don’t want sympathy, I don’t need anyone to do anything for me, I just want to bring light to the fact that you don’t just “get over” a pregnancy loss (or 3). It never truly goes away. It’s grief. And grief comes in waves. Some days it will hit you like a ton of bricks and you think “where did that come from?” Some days there are triggers everywhere that set it off. Today is one of those days for me. I’ve been doing pretty well. I haven’t cried much since the last loss, I haven’t felt like a crazy person, I actually have been feeling pretty great. The support that I’ve gotten from this blog, and the fact that I’m putting those feelings on paper, really helps. But there will always be set-backs. This morning I woke up sad. I wasn’t really sure why, I was just sad. I started browsing Instagram and not only saw all of the babies in ...

December 1 st , 2016 we were finally cleared to stop “avoiding conception”. So here we go again. I have now realized that I have absolutely no control over this process, and that I can’t revolve my life around trying to get pregnant. That sounds like a no-brainer, but I had a really hard time getting to that place, as shown in my last several posts. I had to come to that realization on my own, not from other people trying to convince me of it. So we determined we weren’t going to “try”, but we also weren’t going to “not try.” Meaning, I’m done with ovulation tests and thermometers. We’re just going to enjoy our lives and hope things work out how they should. I had spent that last 2 ½ years planning my life around hoping to become pregnant, or being pregnant. Not gonna do it anymore. One thing that I did do that helped me feel like I was doing something to “help” the process and my stress-level was see an acupuncturist. Before we were supposed to start IVF, the fertility doctor rec...

As you can imagine, the recovery was difficult. With our first loss, I was starting a huge 400-person move (that’s my job, move coordination) the next day. Naturally, I had to hand that one over. The day that my grandma suddenly passed away, I was starting a project and had to hand that one over. So I had a pattern that I was determined to break. As I mentioned at the end of my last post, I had a move starting the day after my D&C. It was for a company that I used to work for, Greater Houston Partnership, so not only did I not want to miss it personally, emotionally I just needed to accomplish something. And do something where I felt I was in control of the outcome. My boss and co-workers are so wonderful. They knew that I wouldn’t be 100% for the moves, but also wouldn’t keep me from doing them as they knew that’s where I felt I needed to be. So they filled in all the gaps. I was able to be a part of it where I could, but was still in some pain from the procedure so I couldn’t be...

July 21 st of 2016 I woke up and felt a little flu-like. I decided I’d take a test, but didn’t expect anything from it. I jumped in the shower, started getting dressed, and then remembered I’d left the test in the bathroom and hadn’t checked it. To my surprise, there was a line again. I couldn’t believe it. It had been 15 months since our last positive, and I fully expected that I wouldn’t be able to get pregnant without IVF. I mean, we had planned to start IVF the very next day. This had to be a total God thing, right? I made a doctor’s appointment, still in shock. They confirmed that I was in fact pregnant again, but my progesterone and estrogen were low. So they prescribed hormones for me to take. This isn’t totally strange, as some women have to take hormones throughout their entire pregnancy. Over the next several weeks, we had at least one to two ultrasounds and blood tests a week. We saw the heartbeat, and watched the baby grow and the heartbeat get stronger. We had som...

In January of 2016, I went in for my annual woman’s visit. That was the first time I visited their office after our check-up from the ectopic. That visit was so much harder than I thought it would be. I sat in the waiting room, looking around at the other women with their pregnant bellies, and became so anxious. They called me back to the room, and before the nurse even started talking I burst into tears. My doctor came in, and I mentioned that we’d really like to start seeing a fertility doctor. I felt like that’s where we’d end up, but he said we needed to wait until we’d been trying a year after the ectopic. So I mentally marked my calendar for June. I spent the next couple of months trying not to obsess over the fact that I now had a deadline. Either we would get pregnant or we’d start seeing a fertility doctor. I had mixed feelings about that. I felt a little hopeful that we’d have more options with a fertility doctor, but I also felt that we’d then be admitting we needed hel...

So I touched on the struggles we had after the ectopic pregnancy. But I feel the need to dedicate a post just to this. Those were tough times. At that point I seriously thought my life would never be the same. I had people tell me “well, at least you know you can get pregnant”… and yes, they were right. But it certainly wasn’t the outcome we had hoped for. I had heard that once you have a pregnancy loss, chances are you go on to have a healthy pregnancy. Yeah, not really the case with ectopic pregnancies. At least not for us. We had to give it a couple months to let my body heal, and then we were back to “trying” (that really is just as sexy as it sounds). I decided this time I was getting serious. I was going to do what I could to get pregnant again. As scary as that seemed at the time. So I charted my basal body temperature, I tracked my ovulation, I did fertility yoga, I ate the things that I read boost fertility, I tried everything. And month after month we had one negative te...