ICLW - welcome!

Hi there! Thanks for visiting! I love the feeling of community that ICLW brings, and I'm looking forward to finding some new blogs this month (and hopefully some new readers too!)

If you're new to the world of semi-fertile, read on - a brief recap of my long and tumultuous ttc journey follows.


I met my Hubby in January 2003. We got engaged two weeks later, and married in June 2003. I went off of birth control pills in June 2005, got pregnant in December 2005, and promptly miscarried in January 2006. Pregnancy number 2 occured a few months later, which also ended quickly. Two more early miscarriages occurred over the next few years, during which I endured every RPL test known to man. I did test positive for antiphospholipid antibodies (a clotting disorder) and was prescribed aspirin, a mega dose of folic acid, and injectable Lovenox (an anticoagulant) upon confirmation of pregnancy. My fifth pregnancy, in December 2008, was devastating, as it seemed to be normal until the ultrasound - and then, an ectopic was diagnosed. I had surgery to remove cletus the fetus from my tube - poor cletus, who was actually growing on schedule and looked good aside from his location. My seventh pregnancy, in the fall of 2009, ended in early miscarriage as well. Further testing revealed a high level of prolactin, which has been corrected with medication. And despite 6 cycles with femara, we have not conceived since (although I am currently in the 2ww from the last femara cycle, but not exactly hopeful).

Since the demise of cletus, I have been deeply depressed. I am working on getting myself well and healthy while we take a break to save for IVF. We may do a couple of IUIs in the meantime.

So there you have it - my utesaurus eats babies, and it makes me sad. I still try to laugh, though, and I am determined to kick depression's ass before I move on to beating the shit out of RPL.

warped

In so many ways, I have been defined by infertility and loss. My primal drive to become a mother, and my failures along the way, have warped me, like wood that has gotten wet repeatedly, and has swollen and morphed into a new shape. It is still essentially wood - all of the things that make it wood are still there - and yet it's different. There are ridges and valleys where there weren't, although the grain is still visible. There might even be a little mold. And no matter how dry that wood gets, it will never look like the wood it used to be. Those ridges and valleys are permanent, until the mold eats it away into dust.

I am still essentially me, and yet I'm not. Infertility has seeped into my soul, rotting me from the inside out. I am warped. My life was once even, defined by the expectation of  "when." Now, I am all ridges and valleys, riding the rollercoaster of "if:" If I get pregnant again. If I don't miscarry again. If we save the money for treatment. If my marriage isn't wrecked in the meantime. If I can pull myself together enough to become a fully functioning, happy human being, regardless of how this all turns out.

All I can do is to hang out, dry out my soul enough so that the rot stops in its tracks. Those ridges and valleys are here to stay.

I am forever changed.

the crawl

Slowly, surely I am putting one foot in front of the other on the path towards wellness. Okay, maybe that’s a bit of wishful thinking –most times I am army crawling inch by painful inch, through the sand traps of grief and the water traps of sadness and despair, under and over obstacles lobbed at me by infertility. I see a normal life ahead, just out of reach, and I want it, so badly, even if children aren’t in it. I want to live, and smile, and lessen the stranglehold of depression.

Therapy is so helpful, as are the anti-anxiety meds. I am really thankful that Hubby is open to the process, that he acknowledges that he needs to change too, if I am to get well, and that maybe he needs help to reach his own happiness. Our therapist gets me, I think. She sees right into the heart of our relationship and zeroes in on what is good, and what is bad. She has, in her own roundabout way, convinced me that I really truly am suffering from clinical depression. I don’t think I realized just how ill I have been until recently. I can’t believe I let it get so bad. I also can’t believe that I was more willing to accept a vision of myself as a total fuckup – a wife who can’t keep the house clean and the bills paid, whose inertia almost brought us to the brink of financial ruin, who barely has the energy for work and surely can’t fit time for friends in – than as someone with a mental illness. And so now I am double stigmatized – I am a mentally ill infertile who happens to take breast cancer meds and Parkinson’s meds and anxiety meds and aspirin and folic acid in the foolhardy hope that something will make it all magically work as it should. Yay me.

Hubby and I have a reasonable plan ahead (I know, I know, our plans change almost as frequently as our underwear). We’re going to try with our last cycle of femara. Then, we may take a couple of months off so I can detox a bit and get physically and mentally as healthy as possible. Exercise. Sweat. Do acupuncture and yoga. Eat well. Spend time with friends (or maybe actually make some of my own, since all of our friends here are couple friends and I let all of my female friendships die). All the while we’ll be building our savings account towards that lofty goal, IVF. And since it will take a while – since, in my depression, things like “paying the bills” and “not getting sent to collections” were not high on my priority list – we’ll try a couple of iui cycles. If all that fails – as it likely will – we’ll move on to IVF (which scares the shit out of me, because if that fails as well, I’ll be cliff diving off the precipice of depression to the depths of complete batshit crazy!).
We’ll get there, inch by inch. We might be the oldest parents of a kindergardener EVER, but we'll get there. I hope.

lemonade

So, I'm still here.

Remember how I said I can change my mind regarding the whole adoption vs. IVF conundrum?

Well, Hubby and I have started couples counseling and individual therapy, mostly to prepare us for our adoption journey.

Only Dr. A, our therapist, thinks that we should forget adoption right now and move towards IVF. She thinks I won't be able to move on with my life if I don't at least try it. I think she's right, but I'm still trying to wrap my head around all that that means. I've also started taking anti anxiety medication, because she's helped me realize that I am really really clinically depressed and that I need to address it, and that most of my depression stems from anxiety.

I'm sorry that I haven't been commenting. You all mean so much to me and I feel terrible about it but I've been spending a lot of time working on myself these days. I've been starting to read blogs again, though, which is good.

I'm making lemonade, I am.

unlucky seven

Seven years ago today, I married the love of my life, with visions of a future that wasn’t to be dancing in my head.
We’ve spent more than half of our marriage trying to bring a baby into our lives, and experiencing heartbreak after heartbreak.
He’s still the love of my life. I couldn’t imagine walking this road with anyone else by my side. Dead babies have a way of either pulling a couple together, or pushing them apart, and I guess we’re lucky that we’ve been cemented together like we have. We have an intimacy that people who have been married three times as long as us lack.
I’d trade all the closeness, though, for one of my babies to have lived; I’d trade it for sleepless nights and stress and dirty diapers and spit up and stretch marks. I’d trade that intimacy to not have to see the look of pain on my husband’s face when idiot family members make stupid comments, and tell him that babies don’t like him because he’s not a daddy.

He IS a daddy, in his heart.

In fact, his seventh baby would have been due today, on our seventh anniversary, a day after Father’s Day, if my utesaurus hadn’t killed it.
And so we struggle on, and whisper “Happy Anniversary” to each other yet again, while neither of us is truly happy or in the mood to celebrate, not while the thoughts of our seven dead babies – one for each year we’ve been married – haunt us. Oh, the irony! We have the big family we always wanted, only they’re all dead, all of them.
My heart hurts today.

poor neglected blog

I've been a bad, bad blogger, and am prepared for my whipping. Got yer stitch?

I apologize for my absence in comment land. I have not been reading or writing much of anything lately. My brain has been sort of like a shaken up snowglobe lately, and things are just settling back to normal.

I do have some updates though and will hopefully have a longer post this week.

no, I'm not pregnant. sigh.

let the darkness in...

I have noticed over the past several months that my dark days arrive with a pattern. Usually they are tied to the imminent arrival of the crimson tide. I can be positively sunny and upbeat one day, and feeling the depths of despair the next. I lose perspective, and the ability to evaluate a situation with any intelligence.

Right now, things just seem insurmountable. The housework is piling up. The yardwork is out of control. The bills that need to be paid before we can start saving for adoption scare the shit out of me. I mourn the relationships that I have let fail. The fact that am probably not pregnant this month, and I probably will never be again, makes me wish desperately that my husband would leave me and find a happy life with someone else. The first baby who would have been approaching four - FOUR! - years old (you know, if my body didn't kill him) haunts me.

Right now, today, I feel as if everything is falling apart and I will never be enough, not in any way.

I didn't feel this way yesterday, and I know that soon, things will look up (I hope).

But right now, I don't want this life.