Fertility – Spoonful of Jun

I came home from my egg retrieval, and when I was finally well enough to scroll through Instagram, I came across a post by an old friend. He and his wife had just had their second embryo transfer. His wife had poured her heart out about their fertility journey, describing how they had never imagined they’d find themselves going through this journey, how they had lost their pregnancy last year, and how she had taken half a year off of work to relax and “get [herself] back.” I couldn’t stop crying for hours. I couldn’t imagine the pain of losing your baby, and I had also felt many of the emotions she described when I first went through fertility treatment three years ago. I later messaged both of them to offer support and to share that I myself was going through this journey again.

Three years ago, I did four or five rounds of IUI, and one round of IVF. We only ended up with one genetically viable embryo, so we began a second IVF cycle. At that point, it wasn’t uncommon for me to break down at work in front of my boss, who said all the wrong things at first but became one of my closest and trusted supporters throughout the process. I was also exhausted from the number of appointments and blood draws, especially considering the drive between my clinic in downtown Chicago and work in the suburbs could take anywhere from forty minutes to two hours. One day, likely from all of the stress, I lost hearing in one ear. I was desperate to get my hearing back, and gladly took the prescribed steroids. I must have mentioned this to one of my fertility nurses, because one Saturday morning, my fertility doctor called me, a little bit furious, and told me that I needed to stop the steroids and IVF cycle right away. I was heartbroken. I had invested so much, emotionally, and physically, and now I had to throw it all away. We agreed to take a break, and then restart with my next period.

So I took a break. We went on a little trip to a Michigan football game which of course came with multiple tailgates. I went to a couple of wine-tastings with ex-colleagues and took advantage of free company booze. I went to a birthday party for a Mexican friend with delicious palomas and home-made soup. That month, my period never came. Ten months later, my beautiful daughter was born.

After trying and failing for a second child, we started fertility treatment again. I told the doctor I was in a different place than I was three years ago. “If IVF goes well, great, and if not, we already have a perfect daughter.” What we didn’t know was that it would be hard this time around too; that our first IVF cycle would again only yield one good embryo, and that our first frozen embryo transfer wouldn’t be successful. We had believed for the past three years that this embryo would become our second child. But we lost our little boy in what seemed like an instant.

The fertility journey can be full of grief. You may have a miscarriage; you may have to terminate an ectopic pregnancy, your embryo may not implant, your eggs may not fertilize, your eggs may not mature, you may not have any eggs left… Grief during fertility treatment is over what could have been. Our little boy can only be buried in the grave in our hearts.

There’s also guilt – the guilt of not being able to give my daughter a sibling, of having walked my dog and taken my daughter to the beach and vacuumed the house instead of sitting still after my embryo transfer, of not having stopped breastfeeding earlier and started IVF earlier this time around, of not having been mature and stable enough to have had kids when we were younger.

We have our next appointment tomorrow to discuss next steps. Our future family might look like many different things. But for now, we’re going to hang onto hope and try again.

My birthday fell on a Friday this year, so I decided to do something nice for myself and gathered a group of friends to go hiking on Saturday. I had a blast and was reminded of the wonderful friends I was surrounded by. I woke up the next morning to see if anybody had liked my Instagram photos, but instead, I got distracted by post after post about Mother’s Day. Many of my friends were celebrating their first Mother’s Day as moms, and I was reminded of the harsh reality that I was not a mother, nor was I certain that I could be by this time next year, or ever. I’m usually prepared to see baby bump posts and baby announcements on social media and can feel genuinely happy for everybody, but these Mother’s Day posts caught me completely off guard.

My husband and I called his mother to wish her a Happy Mother’s Day. We chatted for a bit about the dogs and the new restaurant we had checked out and what my father in law was going to cook for dinner. After we hung up, I felt a cloud of guilt form over my head. I hadn’t spoken to my mother in a few months. I hadn’t responded to her happy birthday text, and I had no intention of acknowledging Mother’s Day to her. My mother and I have always had a complicated relationship. A few months ago when I first started fertility treatment, I found it extremely difficult to go through and called her, hoping that she’d be supportive, as one would expect her own mother to be. But instead, her words were, “You don’t know how to handle challenges in life because you were given all the education and everything you ever wanted.” Not exactly what I wanted to hear when I just wanted someone to listen to me as I poured my heart out about how hard fertility treatment was. I go through periods in life when I stop talking to my mother – usually times when I want to focus on something and don’t want to be distracted by my mother’s irrational nonsense. I decided that now was also a time when I didn’t have space for any negativity in my life, so I cut her out.

But I responded to her “Happy birthday” with “Happy Mother’s Day.” And then I felt guilty that I had done this through guilt rather than from the bottom of my heart, so I called her. The majority of the time when I call her, she talks about herself and doesn’t ask a single question about how I am doing, and that’s exactly what happened. She went on about her dilemma on whether to move back to my hometown with my father or to persevere the emotional and financial challenges of long distance until she finished college which she had started at the age of sixty. At the end of what felt like forever, I said, “I’m going to hang up now,” and perhaps she got the hint, because she then asked me how I was. I told her that things were hard, and that I felt like dying on some days. That I had had complications – bleeding and pain – during my last IUI on Thursday. That after this round, I was going onto IVF. Instead of criticizing me, she simply asked me more questions and listened and told me that I was still young and things could work out. I usually hate it when people tell me that things will work out, but it felt different coming from my mother.

Fortunately, my husband has assured me that even if we eventually couldn’t get pregnant, we would still have a happy life with just the two of us. And I have more than a few special people who are there for me. I remembered that last summer, in one of our business school email chains, a friend had mentioned that she was expecting a baby boy and was also “on a one-woman campaign to destigmatize fertility” and open to discussing anytime. I reached out to her, and she has been more than helpful walking me through her experiences and listening to me as I went through my own. One friend who went through egg-freezing last year offered to teach me how to use needles. We used an empty syringe and practiced on bananas until I felt comfortable. A gay friend and his husband just got pregnant with a surrogate, and he has kindly reminded me that not everybody was going to understand what I was going through and gave me some advice on keeping my fertility updates to a small group of understanding friends.

I go through ups and downs. Some days I’m cheery and goofy, and other days I feel like I don’t want to converse with anybody. It’s hard to understand what it’s like to be going through infertility unless you’ve been through it. I definitely didn’t understand until I started going through it myself. I don’t know if I’m going to be able to celebrate next Mother’s Day as a mom or not. But I’m going to celebrate this day to appreciate not only all of the moms and the soon-to-be-moms out there, but also the wonderful women trying to become moms.

Spoonful of Jun

Tag: Fertility

IVF Part 2

Mother’s Day Going Through Infertility