When Things Don’t Work Out: A Journey in Infertility

 I went around and around in my head as to whether I was going to publish this post. I wasn’t sure if everyone was tired of hearing about this. But then I remembered all of the people that contacted me about this topic. There were so many people that didn’t understand why this is such a taboo topic. In the end I decided to post it becaues I wanted to share my exprience and show that this isn’t something to be ashamed of. I also wanted to share this for the people who just don’t understand personally but have a friend that they want to help. So here goes nothing.

I am  going to say it: My husband and I have had fertility problems. 

There I said it. We all know of at least one couple that have been in this boat before or currently are. And I will put the disclaimer here, we are in no way the worst off couple in the world. There are people who have been trying for decades with no luck, so we have so much to be thankful for. We had been trying for over a year. After lots of testing and finding some things that could be working against us we found out we were pregnant. 

Relief.

Relief was one of the first emotions we felt and obviously excitement. Finally it had happened, we were pregnant. I called my doctor immediately and got an appointment set up for the next week. They sent me to go get blood drawn to check my hormone levels to make sure everything was looking good. 

The results were not great. Our doctor was up front and told us my Progesterone levels were low and there was a very good chance I would miscarry or that it was an ectopic pregnancy. All we could do was hope and pray. 

You always hope you will be the one in a million it works out for. That makes it so much harder when you are just one of the millions.

On Sunday evening, 9 days after we found out, I started to miscarry the baby. 

Obviously a miscarriage is hard for any woman. Most of us are completely devastated. Several of my girlfriends had them between getting pregnant with their 1st and 2nd children. But what made it harder for me is that they knew they could get pregnant since they had one child. For all I knew, this could be a good as it gets. Every time I get pregnant we might only get a week of that joy before we felt that terrible, horrible loss. 

I cried for an entire day and then decided I was just going to be okay. We would try again and hope and pray it would work out. It apparently wasn’t meant to be and we just had to hope it would be the next time. 

I made the conscious decision to look at the positives. We had made progress and in infertility progress is great. What no one tells you about are the extreme emotional highs and lows I would experience. 

At 6 weeks after the miscarriage (which was before I wrote my last post) I just did not understand why I was so upset. There are people who have lost babies at 12 weeks, have carried a baby for 6 months and lost it or even had their children tragically die after they have been in their arms for days, weeks, months or years. Even though I was thankful for not having to go through an experience like that, I still felt as though I was mourning a child I lost. Some days I would be okay because I know God has a plan. The next day I would cry the majority of it in my house because I felt this deep sense of loss. Loss over something we want so badly and had. Something that I felt was so unfair.

I was also berating myself for mourning something that I knew shouldn’t be a big deal.  I felt like my loss was nothing like so many others yet I couldn’t quit. 

As a science based mind I totally understand these things happen and it was probably just a genetic defect in the baby that caused the miscarriage. It could just as easily be a one time thing as anything else. At the same time I cannot help but emotionally blame myself and think that maybe it was all my fault. This then leads to an entire train of thought about how I need to not do anything to risk a pregnancy in the future. I am stressed thinking abut all of the things I do on the farm that I should quit. I get even more frustrated when I think about all of the women who just truck through their pregnancies and do almost everything normal. I wish I could be like that because I don’t want to walk around thinking I am a piece of glass but I just cannot get past the fact of what if it was something I did. 

I know my friends and family love me when they say that it will happen when it’s supposed to happen. I know they mean well when they tell me to relax and it will happen. But that’s so much easier said than done. We were relaxed for the first year and it just didn’t happen. 

Sometimes I just want to be told it is okay to feel these things. I don’t want to see myself as a bad or selfish person for the way I feel. 

I just want to be told that you support me. I know you do but sometimes I just need a friend to hold my hand and cry or laugh with me. I just need someone to tell me that whatever I am feeling is okay.