Hopped up on Hormones

Before this whole IVF process, I probably couldn't tell you where on my body my ovary was. I mean, I knew, of course, that it was in the nether region, but that was pretty much it. It was enough knowing I had them. Who would have thought I would actually feel them, and boy do I.

I am completely hopped up on a large amount of hormones right now. I added two shots to the first shot and have been doing those since Saturday. The books and the doctors warned me about a plethura of side effects, but I think I am doing a pretty good job of holding on so far. my estrogen level went from 52 on Friday to 1757 as of this morning, the "normal" woman never gets above 200. The whole point of these hormones is to make me produce several eggs instead of the one we all normally produce every month. Well the ultrasound this morning said I had over 22 follicles (little sacs filled with fluid that hold the eggs). So despite feeling like a free range chicken with all these eggs, I am excited about that.

Doc says that everything looks great, but he is worried I might be overstimulated. Ya think?!?! If I truly am, it could make me very sick so he is backing down my meds. He had told Don that the most painful part of this process for him would be this time frame, because of my moods. I don't really feel all that different. I haven't gotten weepy or completely witchy yet...yet being the operative word :)

My Kindred Spirit in the Bible

I have always felt a kindred spirit with Sarah in the Bible. When I was little it was because we shared the same name and as I grew older I felt we had the same personality. Little did I know how very similar our lives would be. Sarah and I were both always getting ourselves into pickles that only God could sort out. Not many people know that in her first appearance in the Bible she had to pretend to be Abraham’s (her husband) sister so that the Pharoah would not kill Abraham and take her as his wife. Turns out, he took her anyway. God sent a plague to punish Pharoah and she got away. This happened not only with that guy, but also with Abimelech. God told him in a dream that she was really Abraham’s wife and he gave her back…with presents! First two pickles and God sorted it all out. Now to the story everyone knows as interpreted by me: There Sarah is 65 years old having lived a very eventful life being married to one of God’s good guys Abraham, or as I like to call him, Abe. She now has everything she ever dreamed of, beautiful house, great husband, but no kids. This presents a dilemma not because she wants them, but also because God had promised her husband that he himself would populate a whole nation. Well, after ten years, and being the control freak that she most certainly was, she decided to take matters into her own hands. She gave her husband her maid to sleep with so they could have a child. Wow….great thinking on her part. Well he did and the maid had a child. Sarah got really jealous and sent the maid with her son away. I can only imagine what ole Abe’s household was like during those days!

So years later, and I love how the Bible skips years so you can fill in the gaps in your head; I am thinking there were many a fight, many tears, many depressions in those years. I bet she even packed her stuff to leave a few times. I can’t wait to ask her when I meet her. Anyway, so by this time she is 90 and Abraham is polishing off a century, and I am sure she has completely given up on her dream. One day, three guys stopped by their house, and being the good hostess she was, she went in the kitchen to cook for them. Being a little nosy herself, she listened in on what the guys were discussing. I can picture her there with cornbread in the oven and her ear to the door. They actually told Abe that Sarah would conceive a child. She did exactly what I would have done in that situation: She burst into laughter, truly I Love Lucy style no doubt. They said in a year she would have a baby. Seriously! She was old and she had given up on all that. I mean honestly, was this just a ridiculous joke? But guess what…despite her doubt, and despite her mistrust in God’s promise, she had little Isaac a year later. Classic Sarah story, and by Sarah I mean me (hopefully).

Quiet before the storm...or storm before the quiet...

The appointment for the baseline was promised to be uneventful to make sure everything was “quiet” before we started. Quiet before the storm. Don needed to work that day so I told him I could go by myself. He had been there with me every appointment until then. Again, my doctor wasn’t there doctor that did our IUI (now known as the “bearer of bad news”) came in. She was chipper as a bird until she saw the cyst. Duh, Dum, Duh! There it was, a big fat 2 cm cyst of my right ovary, that I vaguely had remembered seeing when we did the IUI. Her face dropped, and it looked like she was about to cry. “What’s the big deal?” I thought. She apologized and whispered to the nurse about why my doc had not run a certain test. She turned around like she was about to tell me I had cancer and said we had to put off the cycle until we could figure out what it was. What do you mean what it was? It was nothing…right? They mumbled some more stuff about what it could be, I heard possible two week delay, more tests, possible drainage. They looked at me like I should burst into tears. I didn’t understand. They took some blood and said they would call me with instructions. When I got back to my car, I called Don and as soon as I heard his voice I did burst into tears. “I don’t understand what is wrong, why is this happening to us, why does this have to be so hard, why do we have to wait again….” , and down it went from there. Poor Don on the other line had no clue what hit him. I know he felt helpless, asking if he should come get me. After my pity party died down I told him I would be okay and that I was going to take the rest of the day off and shop to busy my mind. One foot in front of the other, Sarah, one foot in front of the other. Trust the doctors and trust God’s will.

So I went in that Wednesday with Don for yet another test, and for them to drain the cyst. The doctor and nurse tried to talk me out of it. Yes it would probably be best for the process, but it would be very painful. They would basically perform an egg retrieval without the anesthesia. I am tough, I thought, so if it was an option between the everloving waiting or pain, at this point, I would take the pain. They gave me a percoset to “take the edge off”, and proceeded to use an 18 gauge needle through my uterus into my ovary to suck out the juice. The needle was not nice, but I was okay until the fourth time he tried to draw back on the needle and I screamed. It felt like a knife severing my inside and sucking them out. It was probably the worst pain I have ever felt, even if it was for a minute. The worst of all is that he couldn’t get anything from it. Nuttin’ honey. He apologetically said it must be solid, like I knew what that meant. On the verge of tears I asked if this was bad or good. He said it was probably good……maybe…which, by now I realize, really means he has no idea.

After the whole cyst fiasco, they decided to start me on my “protocol” anyway. So I began the Lupron injections on a Sunday before church. Don got up with me and watched me do it. I know he really wanted to help. The injections are no big deal, and each day I mark off on the calendar of meds and count the days left until the action. That is where I am now. Waiting again… Tomorrow I am scheduled to have an ultrasound. I had a dream they did the ultra sound and the cyst took up the entire screen. I am hoping and praying it is gone altogether.

Needles, needles, and more needles

To start the IVF process, the doctor put me on birth control pills for a month. When the month was nearing an end, they called us in for our injection classes and to get our schedule. The first needle the nurse showed us was really no big deal. I had spent ten years of my life being poked and prodded with needles during my bout with rheumatoid arthritis and had grown accustomed to giving myself shots. The second and third needles were okay, but when she showed me the final needle I found it hard to swallow. I had never seen a needle so large, and when she informed me that I would have to have this shot for 10 weeks I face grew very pale. The needle was the size of a large paperclip, 22 gauge and Don would have to give it to me. That’s when I noticed Don was very pale too. The nurse brought in a ball for him to practice on, and once again I saw his hands shake. I thought then, that even though most of the IVF process would physically happen to me, it was affecting him too. After we left we would go back the next week to do a baseline ultrasound, one last check, before starting the injections.

The most painful part...

I am convinced that the worst and most painful part of IVF is the waiting. We waited to try after Don’s surgery, we waited six months to find out the results, we waited on our first appointment at the clinic, we waited to start the cycle of hormones for IUI, we waited for the result of the IUI, we waited for test results to see if we were IVF candidates, we waited for my cycle to be timed right to start the month of pills before we actually start IVF. I am now a confirmed believer that if you ask God for something, like a character building request, such as patience, you better get ready because he is going to give you something that will force you to learn it. I did pray for patience, and boy is He teaching it to me. I prayed for a deeper commitment and closeness to Don, and boy is he teaching it to me. I asked for a baby, and I am learning just how bad I want it. This process will tear you down or bring you closer to each other and to God. It is our decision and although we have struggled, I think it has deepened our love for each other, and it is helping me with the fact that I cannot control everything.

Adoption with IVF...Who knew?

This is tough to hold onto when you are in the middle of it all. There are so many ups and downs. You go through a test and you hold your breath to find out the result. You have to make so many life decisions. We spent an hour in the little back room of our fertility clinic trying to sign paperwork that says what we will do with the leftover embryos if both of us die. These are decisions, I am convinced, that no one is ever equipped to make. Believing that God is the creator of life, and believing that those little embryos, if given a chance to grow, would become human beings, there was no possible way I could sign anything that could give them to science or let them die in a lab. We discovered after talking with our doctor that this is what all of his patients have done. I suppose in one’s own mind you can make the case that they are not little humans, but to me, and I realize this is just me, they are. God holds the keys to life, and if blessed with the opportunity, who am I to say they should not be born. This is the major medical dilemma for Christians going through IVF. And while I will never condemn those that feel differently, I could not do it even if it meant donating them to another couple. This is a scary thought too. If we donated them it would be just like an adoption. We would have a biological child somewhere in the world that we did not know, that could even exist after we are both gone. These strange science fiction type thoughts are real to us now. Would the other parents love our children? Could they afford them? Would they have a good life? We could never know these things. I thought of how I would feel if I could not conceive my own child but was giving the opportunity to carry one. What a gift that could be to someone. I thought of how this would only be a small glimpse of what a birth mother would feel if they were put into position of loving their child so much to give them an opportunity. I can’t imagine the love that comes from adoption. When we told our doctor this is what we chose, to not destroy any of our left over embryo’s, that we would donate them to give them a chance at life even if we could not have them ourselves, he told us we were the only couple in his past 15 years of experience that chose this option. I was amazed and a little sad at that fact.

Turning Point

And then one day, on the way home from work, I talked to God like I used to. I poured my heart out to Him about how I was sorry for failing him in the past, and how I didn’t even know how to ask for what I wanted. So instead of asking him to give me child, I asked him to help me be okay with whatever His will for my life was. I haven’t always sought that, obviously, I have made a lot of mistakes on my own and taken a course He never laid out for me. But I have always believed that he forgave us and that he could bless the mess I have made if, and only if, I surrendered it to him. That was the only way we were going to make it. How then, was I going to reconcile everything I had to do for IVF with just surrendering everything to Him. The answer was clear. All I could do is put one foot in front of the other. Trust the doctors, trust God’s will.

In the medical fertility world all they ever can do is give you a chance. You can get completely overwhelmed with all the statistics if you let yourself. A normal couple has a 20% chance to conceive in any given month. We had less than 5%. For the IUI, we had less than 1%. With IVF you could have 60%. Of course this all depends on your age, your issue, your husband’s issue, and possibly your shoe size. There are tables and charts everywhere that tell you no more than this simple fact - you have a chance it will work, but you also have a chance it won’t. Does it really matter, because in the end, it either works or it doesn’t. So it donned on me that day in the car on my way home from work, that the reason why it would never be 100% is because of God’s will. Medicine and science can only take us so far in the ability to conceive. The creation of life is purely and solely up to God, whether you try to do it in a lab or not. When a life begins it is so beautifully and wonderfully made that only a God like my God can do it. I will go only as far as I can go, but God has to take me the rest of the way. So trying IVF is saying I gave it all I could and it just wasn’t in the cards for us, it isn’t the path God wants for us. I decided either way I was going to have to live my life and be happy for the blessings that I have.

Low Point

We decided to see a reproductive endocrinologist. They ran test after test on us, and decided the lack of sperm was our only issue. We decided to go with the last natural choice for us which was Intrauterine Insemination. I took hormones and tests to make sure I ovulated and waited for phone calls to come in. When we went in for the procedure we were so excited. I had pushed all my negative thinking to the back burner and was feeling pretty positive. The doctor came in to perform the procedure and it wasn’t our doctor. When I asked what she thought, she told us we were wasting our time that with that small of a sample it was near impossible. I thought we would both cry. We did the procedure, and it failed.

The strain of all of this was taking a toll on us. We talked ad nauseum about our options: Would we adopt? Would we try IVF? Don started to question if it was meant to be for us. Maybe this was God’s way of saying we weren’t supposed to have children. I could see the burden he carried on his face. If we adopted could we both love that child as our own? We definitely could. Could I live without knowing that we didn’t try everything to have one of our own? Maybe. Could we afford either? Probably but not without sacrifices. We looked at finances and options until we couldn’t talk about it anymore. Meanwhile the ticking of both our clocks got louder and louder. We stopped having fun. We stopped making love because we wanted to and started doing it when the test strip said to. I stopped praying and started trying to control what I could not. I was broken without a plan.

We made a plan to save for IVF, and that week, my truck engine blew up. In addition to the $12,000 it would cost us to go through IVF, it was going to take $6500 to fix my vehicle. This on top of everything. I was reaching my limit with what I could stand. Why was this happening to us? Was I being punished? Was God telling me, like he did Moses, that I would not enter the promise land because of my past sins? Would he give me everything I ever wanted EXCEPT this? And by the way, why did I feel like I even deserved it? I sank lower and lower.

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.

Here and Now

Soon after we got married, my Papa Dude passed away. My grandparents had been married for 62 years, and I was there the night he died with my grandma laying beside him telling him it was okay for him to go. It was the most beautiful and the saddest thing I had ever experienced. He was her best friend, her life. They had the perfect love and marriage. They had been through everything together, even the death of their last child. After he died, I became very upset not just with his death, but because it really showed the reality of my own marriage. Yes my motto was to live for today, but by forcing myself to believe that I never thought of how my own life would be without Don. I became overwhelmed with the thought of losing him. The thought that if we both lived very full and long lives, I would live about 20 years of my life without him haunted me. This thought was unbearable when I would see my grandma, who still to this day begs for her time on earth to be over because she misses him so much. I remember reading a book called “The Time Traveler’s Wife”. It was a beautiful book about a time traveler that falls in love with one woman throughout his life. Because he is a time traveler he ends up falling in love with her at all different ages. He couldn’t control when he time traveled, so he never could control when he left her or when he would see her again. When I read this book I felt the desperation that they felt not knowing how long they had together. I remember when I finished the book I was in the back yard of our new house on a blanket with Don and I cried while he held me. And the more he held me, the more I cried. How could I live without him? In the book, the woman’s sole comfort was the child that they had together. When she looked at her, she saw him and could feel his prescence. The child was a piece of him, the culmination of their love for each other, even after he was gone. The more and more I thought of this, the more and more I longed for child of our own. After a while, I realized it was definitely not healthy or beneficial to focus on the negative aspects of our situation, besides, we knew all this going into it. There was a quote in the book that really struck a cord with me, and I often think about it.

"What is it? My dear?"

"Ah, how can we bear it?"

"Bear what?" "This. For so short a time. How can we sleep this time away?"

"We can be quiet together, and pretend – since it is only the beginning - that we have all the time in the world."

"And every day we shall have less. And then none."

"Would you rather, therefore, have had nothing at all?"

"No. This is where I have always been coming to. Since my time began. And when I go away from here, this will be the mid-point, to which everything ran, before, and from which everything will run. But now, my love, we are here, we are now, and those other times are running elsewhere."– A.S. Byatt, Possession

This now has become my theme for us, and I have tried to focus on the here and now. I have failed miserable at this at times. There are times when I think we will never have a family, something will happen to him and I will be left here alone. I am sure everyone thinks of that at some point.

How we got here

Today is the first day I can write about what we are going through. I think it is because I feel a peace and presence about it now. Going through IVF is probably the toughest thing I have ever done, and I can see how most people lose their minds in the process. I have almost lost mine a few times so far. Our journey to this place started before Don and I even began to date. I had always wanted to be a mother, and I felt like if there was ever a purpose for me on this planet, it was to do just that. I never even questioned whether or not it would happen. I guess that is why, even when I started to have feelings for Don knowing he could no longer physically conceive a child without surgery, it didn’t scare me. Before we started to date we had long conversations about what I wanted in my life, and that I could not even begin to think about starting a life with someone who didn’t think they wanted the same thing. Of course, in the beginning, it is easy to make that decision. When you fall in love, everything is rosy, everything is easy, and at that point in my life, I was ready for something to be easy. So, at the time, it was easy for Don to say he envisioned himself as a father again, considering the situation was just right. And I accepted that because if the situation wasn’t right, we wouldn’t be together. Things became a lot more clear and upfront when it came time to decide to get married. I was so completely in love with him, but no children was a deal breaker. At the same time, I wanted him to want them and to not just want them because I did. We had lots and lots of discussions. When reality set it, we both had concerns. Don was worried, and it was compounded by issues with his boys. When his boys were small he worked away from home and because of that he missed a lot of things. He carries that guilt with him to this day. How could he be at such a better place in his life, and give another child such devotion when he feels like he failed his own? I could feel his hurt for this. He also worried about his age. At the time he was 47 and did the math on every major event of a child’s life. He would be 67 when the child was 20. Would the child be embarrassed about this? Feel completely jipted for having an older father? And although I could not answer these things for him, I could remind him of how we made the decision to be together despite our age difference. We loved each other, and we both knew from experience that we are never promised tomorrow. Could we walk away from a love deeper than we had ever experienced on this earth because of our age? Could we say that same thing in the case of a child? We never know what life is going to throw at us and all we can go on is what we know. Don could be a better father now than he ever was at 30. I think a child would be blessed to have a Dad that has learned those lessons. We have a beautiful home and love all around us to share with a family. These things are the things that we know. How long we have on this earth is something no one knows. We have this moment. We have now.

To be a mother....

Ever since I can remember, I felt my purpose on this earth was to be a mother. I first became a mom at the ripe age of six. Baby Heather was my daughter’s name. She moved, talked, and cried. She had to be rocked to sleep and fed with a bottle, it was even necessary to burp her. Amazing what a little robot baby required. I loved doing it all, and I took her everywhere. And I am willing to bet, if you asked Baby Heather I was a good mom (until I outgrew her). I never really thought I would have a problem becoming a mother, it always seemed pretty easy to me. So much energy and dollars are spent to prevent it from happening at an inopportune moment, I just assumed if I ever stopped trying to prevent it, it would magically and wonderfully happen. Life had such a different journey for me. I have always been the type of woman that had to find her own way. You know, make my own mistakes; learn my own lessons. It seems I must enjoy taking the hard and winding road rather than the easy yellow brick one, but never the less, I have… In life, I have always wondered about those that say that they have no regrets. I find myself at odds with that. In the words of the Avett Brothers: "I made decisions some right and some wrong, And I let some love go I wish wasn't gone These things and more I wish I had not done But I can't go back, And I don't want to 'Cause all my mistakes. They brought me to you. I have made some mistakes, broken some promises, hurt people I did not want to hurt. And I do regret those things. But in the end, all those things brought me here to the person I am today. They have taught me lessons I would have never learned, and they brought me back to my two truest loves – God and my husband. So in a way, I would not change them. I love what Maya Angelou says “When we know better, we do better,” and that is how I have decided to move forward in my life.

New Directions

Wow...it has been so long since my last post, and my life has changed directions yet again. Its funny when I go back and read how obsessed I was with the weight, while it was a very good thing that I lost all that weight, it really wasn't healthy for me to be so focused on one thing like that. But that is the way I am, must have something to focus on until I beat it entirely in the ground... Well, the weight loss seems rather insignificant to the new focus in my life. For those of you that read my blog for that purpose: yes the diet worked, I felt great, I gained some back, and will do it again in the future, I just won't let it consume me like it did back then. I finished one of my last blogs talking about my new adventure...having a baby. And while it hasn't been the fun filled adventure I thought it would be, it has been just that so far. I fought with myself on whether or not to blog about what I am going through, specifically if it ends badly, but all in all its therapeutic for me if nothing else, and if it helps one person going through the same thing, why wouldn't I share it? SO...here's to me losing it again....through IVF.