The plan... (For now at least)

Been doing a lot of thinking about our upcoming FET in March & I'm getting scared & nervous. Most of all im excited to jump back into trying again because I'm more scared of not doing anything. Although 3 months of not doing anything has been exactly what I needed both emotionally & physically. I didnt realize the toll all those meds were taking on my body until they were out of my system. For the past year I had been on some type of infertility drug. I'm praying so hard this cycle is a success but we have realistic expectations now with all the failures we have had & I feel like emotionally I'm more prepared this go round. If this cycle is a bust we have decided to finish out our 2 remaining IVF attempts this year before moving on with an adoption agency. After all, we did pay for a shared risk program & we may as well give it our all. I'm excited at what this year may bring... It will either bring me a healthy pregnancy & baby or I will have final closure on this chapter before we move on. Either way most of all I hope to keep peace knowing that whatever happens is meant to be & I will get through it.

Saturdays are hard

My egg retrieval was on Saturday May 24th, and our baby was concieved that day, so every Saturday is just hard because I'm reminded of where I would have been in my pregnancy. Today would have been 38 weeks. In 2 weeks is our due date, and it gets harder the closer we get to that date. Its hard not to think about what could have been. I've also been doing a lot of thinking about where we go from here and our plans for the future. We haven't actively done anything in regards to infertility since November and I know its only January but every day that ticks by without a baby in my life seems like a lifetime. My 30th birthday is also coming up and I honestly dread it. I hate the fact that I'm turning 30 childless. If you have the motherly desire there truly is a biological clock & mine ticks loudly. Sure I have 10 years but that's a very short amount of time when I look back at how fast the past ten years have passed. My desire to have a houseful of babies will never be and that's the raw truth that I live with. My dream of having 4 kids is gone, now I just pray for 1 healthy baby and I don't care how it happens, I don't even have to biologically have a child. I want the child the God has intended for me whatever way that happens.

It has been 5 months since my d&c & my body is still not regulated. We had planned to have done our last frozen embryo transfer by now, but we're still waiting. The last 3 years have been spent waiting. I'm back and forth about the plans for this year in regards to building our family. I will take things one day at a time when it comes to my decisions and I may change my mind. But I will do what I feel is best for my body and my peace of mind. Today I've done a lot of thinking about doing another fresh ivf cycle later in the year. I think I want to exhaust all of our ivf attempts before moving on with an adoption agency. If God places a child in our lives before that time comes we will persue adoption without a doubt. But I think I want to close the door to ivf before we open another in regards to getting involved with an adoption agency.

I pray for discernment & peace in the decisions on which path we decide to take. This whole process can take a toll on your mind if you allow it too, sometimes it's a difficult battle to stay positive. And in regards to that I'm not where I need to be, but Lord knows I'm not where I used to be & praise Him for that. Prayer is my defence against those horrible thoughts from the devil who is working hard to steal my joy.

The baby that only God & I held...

Today would have marked 37 weeks of pregnancy. I would have been holding our little miracle in my arms any day now. 

Some days the pain is just as real as it was the day I lay on the exam table & stared at our perfectly formed baby's little body the perfect little head, arms and legs and stared in silence waiting for a heartbeat then hearing the words "I'm so sorry the heart is not beating". I can still hear the piercing silence in that room that day. I was so angry so broken, more than broken I was and still am at times crushed into a million pieces. Sometimes I wonder if I will ever go a week without crying. I know I will, there was a time when I couldn't go a day & now I can. Healing takes time & the strength from God.

Sometimes I go back to the video of the last normal ultrasound, the flickering on the screen & the strong heartbeat. I will never forget that sound, I'm so thankful I can hear that heartbeat anytime I need to. My baby was real no one else got to hold her or love her as deeply as I did but she lived & always will be in my heart. There will never be a day that goes by as long as I'm living that I don't miss our baby. Some days are just worse than others.

Big decisions

I get so angry when I make a post about infertility and some one who has no clue what a walk in these shoes is like posts an ignorant comment like "there's always adoption". Did they think we had never thought of that? We've spent the last 3 years of our lives down this journey, scraped and saved for IVF and that idea just totally slipped out minds. (Really?). I realize that by making our struggle public that there is always going to be comments from people that just dont have a clue, so i usually try to just keep my mouth closed when it comes to comments like those. The journey to parenthood can have many different paths you can't take them all at the same time. This is a process. For us our journey began like most peoples do we started trying to conceive our baby after a little over a year of being unsuccessful we consulted my doctor who shortly after medical testing had to refer us to the reproductive endocrinologist. Believe it or not we didn't just jump right into ivf we took steps to get to this point. We've prayed, cried, spent every day of our lives thinking and making these decisions. So when someone says "why don't you just adopt" it takes all that I have to not just bite their head off. It was our choice to take the path we've taken to make an attempt to have a biological child. We first have to be 100% confident we are ready emotionally and financially to start down a different path before moving into adoption. Adoption has its own road, its own stressors that are a completely different ball game from infertility treatments. If it were just so easy to say I'll just adopt & this whole problem will be solved we would have made that choice a long, long time ago. We never wanted the heartache we've been dealt. But adoption is not that easy, you can spend years waiting for a child, not to mention $25,000-40,000 to even get to that point. We are finally at the point in this journey that we are beginning to seriously consider adoption. But these are our decisions, no one elses. I don't share our story for your opinions or advice. I share our story to connect with other women who have been where I am at & for prayers from anyone that believes in the power of prayer.

We've been doing a lot of discussing about where we go from here, after we've had 8 embryos die. We obviously have a problem with the viability of our embryos. We have a couple of options to weigh one is PGD testing (pre-implantation diagnosis) which would test our embryos for genetic disorders prior to having them frozen or transferred. This will add an additional $5000-8000 to our IVF costs. So we are seriously considering ending our treatment journey in the coming months to pursue adoption whole heartedly. If we do make the decision to persue adoption I don't consider any of this a waste. This whole process has shaped me into a better person. We have a child awaiting us in heaven because of this journey & that alone is worth all the debt, all the tears, all the heartache we've endured. This is a huge decision for us that neither of us are 100% sure which option we will take. Just continuing to pray for Gods direction during this time. His plan will prevail & will be far beyond anything we could have ever imagined.