First Steps

A month after we got married, Don had the surgery. It was a big decision and a big step for us. It really showed me how committed he was to our family. I will always remember sitting in the car in the CVS Pharmacy parking lot in an unfamiliar town in North Carolina after filling his prescriptions for the anesthesia. It was so many pills all at once, and he was scared. My heart broke when he looked at me and said, “How will I ever wake up after taking all this?”. This man, that I had never known to be scared of anything in his whole life; this man that had lost both of his parents and raised his little sister, was shaking as he took all those pills. It is strange that the moments you look back on and remember feeling a deep, deep love for someone aren’t the obvious ones. But he did it, and he did it for us and for our family. We anxiously waited six months for the result of the surgery, although we secretly hoped we would be like the stories that we heard of couples getting pregnant two weeks after the surgery even though you were really supposed to wait a month before you tried. A month after the surgery we went on our honeymoon to the Biltmore House. To this day, it was the best weekend of my life. We knew the time could be right and it was our first month of trying and we were both so excited about our new life together and the new possibilities. We tried for six months after that with no avail. My life became about testing for ovulation and testing for pregnancy. There was no telling how much money we spent on those kits. But we were so hopeful and so ready. When nothing happened in those six months, the doctor told us to do a test to see how the surgery went. The test results proved the surgery was a success, but the numbers were so low it may the possibility of conceiving almost impossible. They told us to wait another 3 months and test again that it could improve. It didn’t.