I’m finally read to write this post. It’s been almost a month since… you know. And I’ve been hiding. I knew that as soon as I sat down to write these words, that the tears would start flowing and I might not be able to make them stop. Yep… here they come.
I’ve spent the last month keeping as busy as physically possible. The less down time I have, the less I think about it. At least that’s what I thought. But the truth is I think about it all the time. I get punched in the stomach with it every morning when I wake up, and I spend the whole day trying to stand up straight and keep walking even though I can’t breathe. There are still sharps containers all over my house, pill bottles and medicine in the fridge, my calendar on the kitchen counter. I can’t bring myself to throw any of it away, I just keep walking in front of it and trying not to look at it. It doesn’t help that school has been insanely busy the last three weeks. So basically I’ve exhausted myself and have started having panic attacks to where my chest starts to hurt and I can’t breathe. Sometimes I forget what I’m doing, sometimes I can’t think straight. I’m just so goddamn sad.
I started bleeding that Friday morning. I went to the bathroom when I woke up and there was blood. Not exactly bright red, but thick. I called Bobby and started shaking. He googled spotting while I was in the shower and read that it was common for women in their first trimester, so I went through the day trying to convince myself that maybe it was a good sign, even though I knew it was way too late to be implantation spotting. I think the hardest part was going back to school on Monday and being in the same space where I had waited for the final bell so I could rush home to hear the news. The place where I had paced back and forth, watching the front door, hoping that maybe Bobby would have ignored my instructions not to surprise me at school with flowers and he would be there. The bathroom where I went every 30 minutes to see if I was still bleeding, and I was.
When I got home, I knew Bobby would be inside with the news. I knew as soon as I pulled in the garage that it was negative. If it had been positive, he would have heard me open the garage door. He would have thrown open the door and smiled at me. There would have been flowers waiting on the kitchen table. He would have been standing there, smiling. But instead, the door was closed. The house was silent. I wondered if he was even home. I never realized how far away my bedroom was from the door, and he was lying on the bed, his eyes red. He came to me and at first it wasn’t real. I sank into him and we both cried into each other. It was painful and beautiful, how close we were. We both just sobbed, raw.
The weird thing is that I haven’t broken down since then. I’ve cried here and there, but for some reason I’ve been determined to not loose control of my emotions. So like I said before, I stayed busy to try and keep my mind away from it. I haven’t felt angry at God, just lost and alone. I feel like I’ve realized for the first time that maybe I’m not as important in God’s Great Plan as I thought I was. Maybe there’s no plan at all.
I had already made up in my mind, before we got the news, that I would not be doing IVF again after this cycle. This cycle was painful and stressful and awful, and I felt like vomiting at the thought of sticking myself with a needle one more time. But after, Bobby was crying, and he told me he was trying to come to grips with the fact that he would never be a father again. We talked forever about adoption and donor sperm, and he knows that being a father doesn’t have anything to do with genes but I don’t think he believes it. He’s truly mourning the loss of a biological connection, of offspring, not of fatherhood. And I realized that I can’t hold him back from that. If he’s willing to go through the surgery again, then I owe it to him to try again.
We’ve got enough money to try one more time. We had the post-op consult with the doctor last week and he said Bobby needed to wait 6-12 months so his testicles could heal. We’re going to wait until next summer, when school’s out, so at least I won’t have the unbelievable stress of doing a long distance cycle during the school year again. And there’s a chance we may be able to cycle here instead of going down south if Bobby’s doctor really does move his office further north. So there’s that.
Bobby and I have decided that adoption isn’t for us. We only have enough money for one more IVF cycle, not even enough for an adoption. We’ve decided that if it doesn’t work again, we’ll use donor sperm. But we’re going to try one more time. And now the hardest part is just the waiting. I’m back to being angry at every Facebook post about new babies, which are even more prevalent now than they were when we were first diagnosed three years ago. Back to crying in the baby aisle in Target. Back to trying not to look at the spare bedroom that’s supposed to be painted yellow.
I don’t know how to heal from this. I have Evan, and I love him so much, and he makes me so happy. His laugh feels so good. But he keeps catching me in the kitchen, crying. His little hugs are so precious, but they only make me want another baby even more. The next cycle is just staring me down like a black hole at the end of a tunnel, and I’m trudging toward it. I’m afraid that a fourth failure will completely destroy me. And now I have eight months to fear that reality.
Bobby told me today that maybe I need to see a counselor. Maybe he’s right. I’ve never felt so sad in my life. And I keep trying to tell myself, it’s not that bad. We haven’t lost anything but money and time, and that doesn’t matter. There are tons of people who never get to try at all, and at least we found sperm. At least we were in the game, and we played our hearts out and left everything on the field. There are people starving, people being bombed, people in labor camps. My problems are miniscule, I shouldn’t be this whiny. But we have lost something. There were two babies inside of me for a few days. I saw their picture and I fell in love with them. It was an accident, I didn’t mean to. But I prayed for them at church last weekend on All Saints Day. I wonder what they could have been like.
I can’t let myself go down into that rabbit hole. I may never come back out of it.
This weekend we have a getaway planned. Evan is going to his grandparents’ and we are going to stay for a night at a spa. We’ll go out to dinner, but no partying, We just need to rest and be together. To talk without a two year old crying and interrupting every freaking word we try to say. And rest. Rest. Rest. Maybe I’ll figure out how to let go of this pain and just let it be.
Step one was finally writing this post.
Just Keep Swimming 
