#growingthroughinfertility

Tonight I am coming to you with a very heavy heart. I am sad and I feel defeated tonight, but I am allowing myself to feel this way and give myself time. So, with that being said, prepare yourself for a very crybaby post. I am in my feelings tonight and I want to share that with others.

My friend recently sent me a picture of a paragraph from the book she is reading. It was wrote by a woman who has been dealing with infertility. In the book she writes about how everyone around her is pregnant and getting to come home pregnant, or with a baby. Yet, you’re coming home with empty arms. I don’t know about you, but it really hit home with me. If you’ve read any of my later posts, you’ll know that 4 close people around me are pregnant. With that being said, I’ve never felt more connected to a paragraph before. I know the pain that we deal with when seeing others become pregnant, being able to tell their partners, their parents, sharing things on facebook, being able to track the babies progress. It is heartbreaking and it is unfair, but it is life.

Today’s post is going to be a little more on the emotional side. I want to talk more about the pain of infertility, one of the many struggles we have to go through while trying to get pregnant.

To start this off, I would like to go into detail about my current situation and how I have dealt with the pain of everyone around me becoming pregnant. When I say everyone, I mean at least 4 people that I am in relation with are pregnant or have had a child within the last year. My father, who has given me a beautiful sister, my younger sister, and two of my cousins. As I stated in my last post, C and I have been trying for a few years now. It seems like now that we are seeking actual help, everyone is becoming pregnant. So, yes, I know how it feels to be so hurt and heartbroken over not becoming pregnant when everyone else is.

When I first learned my dad was going to have a child, I was heartbroken, I was jealous, and I was angry. I thought I had done something and I was being punished, like it was a joke. I thought God was saying to me, “I know this is something YOU want, but watch me give it to someone else.” I was wrong to feel this way, but we can’t control our emotions. As time went on I learned to forgive, I learned to accept, and I learned to love. Now, I love this child more than anything. I still get my feelings heart, but I am working on it. I truly believe the one that has hurt me the most, was my sister. My younger sister who is giving our parents their first grandbaby, the one who is getting to go through something I’ve wanted for years, the one who wasn’t even trying but is now pregnant. This is the one that shattered my heart and my hope. This is also the one who has made me grow the most throughout this process, the one who has taught me strength, patience, and understanding. Now, in a few months I will become an aunt to a sweet baby girl. I am completely supportive of my sister, and I help her as much as I can. It gets better.

So, with that being said, it is ok to be hurt, it is ok to feel sad, angry, and broken. What is not ok is when we don’t pick ourselves back up again. When we continue to let ourselves hurt and stay angry. I took my anger out on my sister, I took my hurt, my pain, and my heartbreak out on her. This was not her responsibility, this was not her fault. I should of been there from her, shown her that I was by her side and I would continue to be. I let my anger get the best of me though. So, yes, I know that it hurts, I know the struggle. I have been there, I am still there some days.

How to fix it. I gave myself time, you are allowed time. No matter the situation, YOU ARE ALLOWED TIME. Give yourself as much as you need to heal, you are a better you when you have let yourself heal on your own. Do not try and rush through the healing process, it will be ok. You are only as good as you let yourself be. Talk to someone, I was lucky that my mom knew my feelings and was understanding to them, she let me cry to her and talk to her when I felt most upset. I also had my wonderful fiance as well. I don’t think I could of gotten through it without him, there were many nights where he just held me and I cried. I cried because I wasn’t pregnant, I cried because she was, I cried because I hurt and I cried because I was angry. And he held me. C made me feel better, he made me feel validated, and he made me know I wasn’t alone. Your support system is something that cannot be taken for granted and cannot be any less than great. You deserve to be surrounded by people who are uplifting, caring, and love you. It will make this experience so much easier on you.

To start out, I would like to go into a little more detail about my life and this process. I am engaged to my wonderful Fiance, we have been together since I was 17. We have been engaged for almost 3 years now. We became serious pretty quickly in our relationship, however, marriage has never been one of those things we were super concerned with, until now. I’m sure there will be people who question why we want a child and not a marriage and to answer that, I’m honestly not too sure. We have now decided to start planning our wedding, as well as trying to get pregnant. We have began our doctor visits are are fairly far along in our infertility journey. I will catch you all up and talk to you about some of the procedures. Keep in mind I am not 100% sure of the proper names of everything and the exact procedures. I wish I knew more so I could share more but unfortunately I can’t, so please just bare with me. Now that I have given you this information, we will start in on the actual process.

I don’t want to give out too much of my identity right off the bat, I’m still very new to this and how exactly it all works, so until I get it figured out slightly more, I’m going to be rather discret on my personal identity. With that being said, I will refer to my fiance as C. So, like I have said before, C and I have been together for 4 years now. We have been trying for a baby for about 2-3 years, I am not exactly sure on the actual date we started trying. This last year we have officially began to seek help. I was the concern for the first couple appointments, I talked about my cycle and how irregular I have always been, I talked about being on birth control and how that has been the only time I have ever been regular, and we just talked. After our consultation the next appointment was blood work. All of my blood work came back fine, this is one of the things I was referring to about not knowing the exact thing. I’m not sure what was tested, I just know it all came back ok. While we were moving along with my issues, my Dr. said we need to start working on C. According to him, there’s only one main test they can do for the man, a semen analysis. Which is exactly what it is. Your man will have to ejaculate into a cup and then they will test it at the lab. They will check his motility rate, the will check on the general amount, and they will check on how many are alive or not.

Once they get those results back they will go over the process with you of what to do next. If nothing is wrong you will move along, if something is wrong, he will redo the test once more. C had to redo his test because the first results were pretty bad, his count was low, half of them were dead, and then some weren’t moving. They decided to have another test done and somehow, his count had gone up, and they just looked a lot better. So we continued on. I was scheduled to do a vaginal ultrasound. This wasn’t too bad, everything looked ok. Just in case you’re unsure of this process, they get this big wand shaped device and they insert it inside of the vagina, then they will just exam you. After that process and everything was fine, so we continued. The next step was the hysterosalpingography test, also know as the HSG test. Incase you’re unsure of this procedure, I will explain it in common terms (as well as use the information I got off google, haha). You will go in to get an x-ray and they will shoot a dye through your vagina and then the cervix to outline the shape of your uterus and it also shows if your fallopian tubes are blocked. The procedure took about 15 minutes start to finish, but I will not sugar coat it. It was very painful for me, you might be better at tolerating pain than I am. To explain the pain, it it a very very strong period cramp that doesn’t go away until the tube is taken out. It made me tense up incredibly bad and didn’t get better until they took it out. The x-ray came back fine and there were no issues.

Our next step is now IUI (insemination), I am about to start the process leading up to it. I will take 1o days worth of medication (medroxyprogesterone). This medication will is to bring on my period, once I start and finish my period they will then began tracking my ovulation. The way I understand it is I will be given a shot that makes me ovulate and we will start doing ultrasounds to test if I am ovulating. If and when I do start, we will begin the process for IUI. C will give another sample and they will go in and get all of the best sperms. Once they have done that they will insert them into me. Like I said before, this is just the way I understood it. I will explain more once I have more information on the subject, but until then, this is the best I’ve got.