Pain

The only thing that rivals the physical pain of losing my baby is the emotional pain of losing my baby. I am struggling to staunch the flow tears constantly. I don’t understand how this is such a common thing that women experience but that I have little to no comprehension of what I would go through, of what I am going through. I don’t know if society is to blame but it is inexcusable that we as women will likely face this experience and have little to no understanding of what would happen. You would assume that the doctors office upon finding out the pregnancy was not viable would educate and explain what I would be going through but I feel like I’m walking alone through the dark and just keep being told wait-and-see. What the hell am I waiting and seeing, the bits of baby floating in the toilet, the immense pain so much worse than a normal period. Or maybe I’m just waiting to see how long it will take because maybe they don’t know either. It doesn’t give you a lot of faith in your body being able to support a child or in the doctors office because they don’t care that you lost the one thing you’ve dreamed of your entire life. I am a mother but I have no child. I want to be a resource for the people around me if they go through this when they’re trying to conceive. Which means I have to be able to talk about it, and that may be the hardest part because talking about it is one of my strong side breaks. The tears flow when I try to explain that yes I was pregnant but right now I miscarryingand my whole world shattered. My day will come, whether a baby comes from inside me or we adopt or Kaylee has the baby I will be a mother with a baby in my arms but for right now I’m just a lady whose heart is broken.

Finally Real…

Today I finally started to bleed. It made the miscarriage all the more real. I knew people miscarried often, in fact I knew 1/5 of women will experience a miscarriage. But I didn’t know that it took a few weeks from the time you find out your baby will never be born to finally being through. I didn’t have a miscarriage, I am having a miscarriage. For the next week I will bleed and every clot I will wonder if that was the piece of me that was supposed to grow into all of you. The physical pain is encompassing, with my entire body feeling tired and weak and my back and uterus hurting worse than the worst period. Trying to stay busy doesn’t work because my physical stamina is so low I mostly just lay in bed. The emotional pain I push from my mind. I don’t feel strong enough to dwell on what should have been or what could have been. I try to maintain focus on the baby that I will someday not only hold in my womb but I will hold in my arms. Likely I am not coping but rather pushing the pain aside with hopes a new pregnancy will bring joy to dispel the clouds caused by this loss. If a new pregnancy doesn’t come soon I fear the pain and sadness will eat away at me.

Grief and Wisdom

So today the doctor confirmed my first pregnancy ended in miscarriage. The funny thing is I didn’t cry when they called to confirm it, but I cried twice when going to the doctor to get my orders, and again when we got to the office to draw my blood. As we were driving up to the hospital my doctor’s office is next too, I cried because my dreams were shattering. I cried because once again I failed at something, and regardless of my knowledge that it isn’t my fault, I will still struggle with blaming myself. I know there is always fear in making a life changing decision and for sure realizing I was bringing a child into this world made me question whether or not I was ready or could handle it but the truth is that I the fears were minimal. I found strength and resolve that Kaylee and I were and will make great parents. My fears were for the health and safety of our child and not thinking we could not handle becoming parents. This miscarriage has strengthened my resolve and faith in us as a couple and as parents.

The other thing is realizing how in-tune a woman can be with her body. I thought we were out and vomiting last Thursday was my body screaming to tell me I was pregnant. And throughout the rest of Thursday, Friday and Saturday I experienced strong pregnancy symptoms. I was nauseous pretty much constantly though I did not vomit again. By noon I was yawning and ready for a nap all three days. My breasts and nipples in particular were sore and I mean very tender and sore. By Sunday I was aware of the lack of nausea and the reducing in tenderness of my breasts. I knew something was wrong even before I started having the brown spotting. I felt it and while I tried to deny it, my body was telling me this wasn’t going to be. Going forward I am going to trust my body more. It will tell me what I need.

Thrilled and Terrified

So we found out Thursday that we were expecting. I threw up on my lunch break and was like I should probably check, four positive pregnancy tests later, and confirmation from the doctor via blood work and I was thrilled. We’ve been trying for a baby for so long and I couldn’t believe it was real and I was so scared for it not to be. Friday I was exhausted and had some nausea, Saturday was the same thing, on Sunday no nausea but I was still very tired. I woke up this morning about 630 and when I went pee there was blood (brown spotting). My boobs aren’t really that tender anymore and I’m pretty damn terrified that I lost the baby. I don’t want to be one of those pregnant women who calls the doctor as soon as something is even slightly amiss but at the same time that’s all I want to do right now. I’ll probably wait and see, their phones won’t even start till nine if I’m still bleeding I’ll give them a call and also the next time I can pee, I will pee on a stick and see if it’s lighter or darker. But in my heart I think my baby is gone and I blame myself I shouldn’t have helped Kaylee move the exercise machine last night. Because if we lost this baby I feel like I killed it.

Not Quite Ready To Hatch

So last week I finished my Femara fertility drugs and went back into the doctor for another follicular ultrasound. I guess the follicles were only about half the size that the doctor was hoping so she went ahead and put me onto Clomid for another 5 days and then I will go back in for another ultrasound this Thursday too see if my body is responding. I’m a little nervous today because for the last two days I can feel my body ramping up for ovulation and I need that to not happen until I see the doctor again. I’ve been using the OPK strips and so far I have not gotten a positive result, hopefully it will stay that way. I have the HCG trigger shot to force ovulation when the doctor decides my body is ready.

Months Later…. Still not Pregnant

I took a break from being over obsessive about having a baby, well at least not on a public platform. We found a new donor shortly after I complained about the difficulty in finding a donor. He literally asked me how I had been and in my emotional state I told him everything about our struggle to make a baby. He immediately offered to be our donor. We used him for about 8 months as our donor. At the end of the 8 months my OB-GYN was ready to refer me to a fertility doctor, in addition I was changing work schedules and would be less flexible in my schedule, meaning our donor living 2 hours away from us wasn’t go to work for multiple inseminations per cycle. So we went in search of yet a new donor. Honestly, at this point I was really debating about just buying from a sperm bank, but I was still determined not to make getting pregnant transactional.

During the 8 months working with the other donor, an old friend of mine had gone through a bad breakup and he was living with me and my wife. This lead to us deepening our friendship and eventually we asked him and after some research he agreed to be our donor. Around the same time I became reacquainted with a man I had known basically my entire life, and we asked and he too agreed, to be our donor. And that’s where we are now. I’m just getting started with the fertility doctor and  I have two donors to choose from.

Femara Sucks…..

This morning has been hell. 5am this morning, I woke up over-heated and nauseous. Like hot enough to check the temperature because I knew it was only supposed to be in the low 60’s. I also had a terrible headache and my lower back was so sore it felt like I had been bedridden for days. I got out of bed and got a cold water from the fridge, drank a bunch and then put the cold bottle on my inner elbows to try and cool myself internally. Nothing was helping. I went outside and it felt cooler so I stood there admiring the sunrise and pleading to the heavens to ease my discomfort. Once I felt cooled off I went and laid back down but the pain in my lower back was immense and so I got up and took some pain medication then Kaylee held me until i fell asleep.
I woke up in the same state about 3 hours later. Kaylee drew me and hot bath and then washed my body and hair for me. If I wasn’t so desperate to have a baby I would stop the medication. The Femara is making me feel worse than I have in ages.

First Dose

I started my first dose of fertility medication last night. I want to be really optimistic but at the same time I want to be rational. We’ve been trying for 13 months now to get pregnant and so far I’ve never even seen a positive.

Infertili…..what?

So after 14 months of trying and 12 cycles with multiple inseminations my OB-GYN was ready to send me over to a fertility specialist. She gave me the referral and I called before I even left the parking lot. I was scheduled for about three weeks out which feels like an eternity. Time was dragging on waiting for my appointment and so was my cycle. By the time I saw the fertility doctor I was on cycle day 54 and had only had a positive OPK cycle day 45. The first thing the doctor wanted to do was induce my cycle using a week of progesterone. The doctor also wanted a whole host of other tests and a copy of our donor agreement and STD testing. And on top of that a pile of additional medications, vitamins and baby aspirin.

I feel quite overwhelmed at the list of things I need to do, take, complete, however I am more than ready to be a mom and I keep reminding myself this is just the necessary things I will need to complete to increase my chances of becoming a mommy sooner rather than later. My list of things to do is great but all I can do right now really is wait for the Progesterone to kick in and get my period going and then it is going to be a crazy wild ride for the next few weeks.

The Search For A Donor

And so the search for a donor begins. We had it easy the first time. Our first donor offered his services after making jokes about him having a harem of women and children and he actually really like the idea of being our donor. I was overwhelmed and over the moon when he offered. My wife loved the idea too and since she is our biggest critic I was ecstatic. His ethnic background was varied which appealed to both of our and he wasn’t too shabby in the looks department either. His sense or humor was similar to mine and he was a very smart man. The fact that he has been dating one of our best friends long term and plans to someday have babies with her was icing on the cake and we started dreaming of trips to Disneyland with our donor and his wife (our best friend) and the herd of children all descended from him. It was both hilarious and heart warming. So when he didn’t want to do it anymore it was heart breaking. Too many eggs were put into that basket and our dreams went up in smoke. We have our ideas as to what might have went wrong and maybe someday I will expand on those in another post, but not today.

Without a donor we had a biological time clock that was beating loud enough to drown out the rest of the world, and a hopeful future mommy with a clean bill of health and fertility but no donor to provide the other half of the equation.

So the wife and I sat down and discussed criteria for a donor. I preferred a known donor and I want my child to at least have the opportunity to meet the person who provided half their genetics. I also think it will be easier to get updates to significant changes in the donors medical history if we know them. I also did not want the donor relationship to be transactional, in that I didn’t want to “dirty” the process with paying for it. I wanted our donor to care about us and want to help us become parents. My wife wanted someone who was either Hispanic or racially diverse. Basically not someone who is basically white. I’m pretty diverse ethnically but am primarily white and Native American. Not a bit a hispanic in me at all and my wife is 100% Mexican. And in the pursuit of honesty, I preferred our donor not be black. Primarily because I was worried we would have a little girl and I would be completely lost trying to do her hair. After our criteria had been set we began discussing potential people in our lives to ask, taking into account things like distance and any weird quirks etc.

We finally narrowed it down to 3 guys and basically approached them and told them we would like them to think about it but we ask that they not share it with anyone else. All of these guys were single, had lived with us at some point and were very close with us.  The first guy, we’ll call him Potential Donor #1 or PD#1, literally just never brought it up again. We told the Potential Donors to come to us when they were ready to talk further. So we just waited and waited and waited and NOTHING. For the love of God if someone asks you something like this please just tell them NO if you’re not willing to do it. Understand the painstaking discussions and considerations and the balls it takes to put yourself on the line to ask someone to do this for you and give them an answer even if the answer is no. On to Potential Donor #2, like I said our only stipulation was not to talk to anyone. Literally the first words out of his mouth when I talked to him were, “I need to talk to my mom.” Seriously.  Our only request was to keep it to yourself, and also what nearly 30 year old man needs to talk to his mom before he makes a decision but I digress. I immediately told him never mind. I didn’t want him anymore. My wife agreed so onto Potential Donor #3. PD#3 had us worried because he is absolutely an alcoholic and he smokes cannabis every single day. We have nothing against the ways he chooses to live his life and I have even been known to smoke a bowl once in awhile but we worried about the addictive personality and the detrimental effects to fertility. This coupled with the fact he hasn’t seen a doctor in years and tends to be promiscuous made us change our mind shortly after asking him. I knew he would need to make some changes before we would even be able to try and wasn’t very willing to wait for him to maybe make those changes. So here we were out of luck again.