Insult and Injury

I must say I've been pretty proud of myself for the last few weeks. It was so easy with the FET we just did to slip back into the infertile funk. How could it not be? Not only does it just suck a pair of huge ones that you can't get pregnant in the privacy of your own home with your husband, but you have to inject/patch on/take pills/shove stuff up your lady bits that are FULL of hormones, drain your bank account and deplete your emotional storage. And that happens whether you are successful or not, but to not have success? That was awful. I mean, really way worse than I could have imagined. Maybe I'm a wuss, but it sent me straight down into depression in just two months.

BUT . . . . I started coming around a lot quicker than I had thought and honestly can say I feel pretty good about things. I was giving myself just one more week to make it through before calling to get back on Lexapro when I had a lot of changes of heart and felt good again. A little hurt, yes, left wondering if I will ever really get over infertility, yes, but depressed and angry? No, it's gone now.

The last few weeks have been sprinkled with pregnancy announcements. When people tell me I know the tears are in there but I fight them off and by the time I am done I don't need to cry at all. I remind myself that of course I'm jealous and sad for myself, if my FET had worked I would be pregnant right now too. That being said, under no circumstance in any Universe would I wish that anyone would have to go through all this crap to have the family they want, so I can be glad for that person that it's not their reality even if it makes me jealous. I don't even wish it on the Teen Mom's from MTV who have new baby daddy's and get into YouTube fights. Nope, not even them.

Since the Universe enjoys testing my boundaries, it says "oh really, Ashley? You're going to put on your big girls panties are you? How about this!"

And then I get a bill from the RE for $643.00. Dammit! This makes me angry. On IVF #1 when this happened they sprung it on me on the way out after my first ultrasound where we saw two heart beats after 30 cycles of TTC, $22,000 and 12 assisted reproductive treatments. Of course I paid it without a second glance, if they had asked me for one of my kidney's on the way out I would have given it to them. But this time not so much. Now they want $643.00 on top of the other $3,000 that resulted in NOTHING. Not a thing but a broken heart. I had so many thoughts, not excluding sending them a mail bomb with their payment (again, just joking FBI, don't know how to do that). Instead, I pulled more money out of the savings and sent the check. Moving on again.

I mentioned in my last post that I am doing things that I enjoy again and making that a priority that is equal to other priorities and not a luxury. I have read a few books because I love reading. I really enjoy Jodi Picoult books although they tend to end in a depressing and shocking manner. I started reading "Sing You Home" because it's the only one I haven't read yet.

This has turned out to be another example of the Universe showing me who's boss. Something that I do for my enjoyment sucked me down the dark tunnel again!

The book is about all kinds of things, but long story short a divorced couple is battling over frozen embryos. The guy got really religious and they call the embryos "pre-born children."After reading into this book for a long while this weekend, that term just stuck with me. I am not a Christian and I don't think of each fertilized embryo as a child. I know scientifically our little embryo was just a ball of cells. I don't feel as though I had a miscarriage or lost a child or that I will see that embryo in Heaven or anything like that.

I would be lying if I said it didn't hit me similarly to those sentiments though. To us, the embryos that we saw are children because that is all we've ever known. We saw Ocean and Ever up on the screen and they became gorgeous little brown eyed, dark haired nuggets. It's only natural to think the same thing again. We were 2 for 2, there was no experience before of seeing an embryo and it not resulting in a baby. So when I saw the embryo on the screen, even though my logical brain told me that embryo looked like shit and would never result in a baby, I could only think of little brown eyed, dark haired babies for the next 8 days. I thought about how I could announce it in a fun way, what type of pictures I would take, what it would be like to be pregnant in the summer and going swimming with the fetus, I thought about what Ocean and Ever would do when the baby got here, I thought about what it would be like to have labor instead of a c-section, and the list goes on for eight days. It did not matter that it was just a ball of cells at the time or that the chance of success was pretty measly, all I thought was "baby, family of 5." I erased the picture of that ball of cells from my phone and camera, but it is still burned in my brain.

After reading the word "pre-born child" over and over again last night, I tossed and turned and then just let it go and started crying. Hubby asked what was wrong and I told him that I just can't believe this didn't work. He said he was sorry, he was wondering if that is what has been keeping me up at night, he thought with all his heart that this would work and never doubted it and he is shocked we are in this position too, this is all not fair, but he feels like things will be okay. And I agree. I feel that way too. Even though I had a good cry last night and it all came back and I was hurting last night, we do have a plan (that I"m not telling, ha ha) and that plan still feels good today.

So there Universe. Keep trying you little shit. I'm hanging in and I will NOT let this business bring me all the way down again. Its sucks hard that our FET failed, but we are going to keep trucking and I think things will turn out great!