Infertiles Hate You, Too

The Best Friends I Never Met

Infertility killed my social life.

I'm Zero Weeks and Craving a Baby

Be warned.  There's a dangerous new "game" going around on Facebook. Just like the meme where you put the color of your bra in your status update, this is intended to somehow raise awareness about breast cancer among women and as an added bonus, drive men crazy wondering what the heck all the ladies are talking about.  Fun!

Except, not.

The $500 word

For the past few weeks I've felt like a high-school girl with an unrequited crush.  I've been constantly  checking my phone, wondering: has he called yet?  Why hasn't he called yet?  Will he EVER call?

In-Between Days

Photo by David Speiser.
See more of his bird photos here

Years of infertility has left me with a split personality.  There's "Jenny on the Nest" and "Jenny In-Between."

Cupcakes at Midnight

Photo by Gary Cruz.
Click here to see more of his work.

I've been wanting to write about this essay by Holly Finn since I read it last week. Much of it describes my own experiences and emotions so accurately that reading it was like looking in the mirror.

The author and I are the same age, both started fertility treatments in the fall of 2008, have suffered through the same number of hormone injections, spent roughly the same amount of time on our backs with strangers poking around in our lady parts, and even have similar hairstyles.

Don't Tell Me

In two hours, Mr Wren and I will go to the fertility clinic for yet another WTF meeting.  It will be the 8th time that we have dragged our defeated selves through those doors to sit in Dr S's back office and discuss why our expensive, invasive, complicated fertility treatment didn't work as anticipated.  Science has failed us and we've failed it.

This will be the first time, though, that we have to discuss a might-have-been.  After 8 different procedures, I only got pregnant this once.   This was my first miscarriage.  I had the d&c so baby could be tested for chromosomal abnormalities, because I want to understand why it happened.   If there was something wrong with baby, then there was nothing I could have done to save it.  But if that turns out not to be the case, and baby was normal, then, well, it's pretty much my fault, right?  For some reason my body rejected baby.  Or baby rejected me. 

Baby stopped growing the same day I stopped taking the additional hormones, the estrogen and progesterone I had been taking 3 times a day to help me stay pregnant.  Did the hormones sustain an ultimately unviable pregnancy longer than nature intended, or did my little one just need more time and help than we gave it before it started producing those hormones on its own?   Would staying on the meds for another two weeks have kept baby alive?  Some fertility patients take progesterone through the entire first trimester (or so people on the internet tell me.)  I stopped at nine weeks.

I'll find out the answers soon enough.  I'll probably even find out what gender baby was so I can start using the appropriate pronoun when I talk about it.

But here's the thing:  I don't want to know.   

Well, that's not entirely true.  I want to know.  I always want to know.  I've been hungry for information since I was a little kid - I was that annoying little kid who was always asking WHY?   I need the world to make sense.  I need to understand.  

But I don't know if I can handle it.  I'm beyond humiliated to return to that clinic, where just 3 weeks ago everyone was cheering and hugging me, all so excited that I was graduating to the OB and telling me to bring my baby back to visit them.  I know they'll all be giving me the sad eyes today and that makes me cringe.  But I can feign stoicism for long enough to get through the awkward encounters with the receptionist and lab techs.  The thought, however, of sitting in that back office and finding out what went wrong - or possibly finding out that WE DON'T KNOW for certain what went wrong which in its way is even worse - either way, having to discuss how my baby lived and died, the entire arc of its too-short existence, well that just makes me want to put my head in the sand and blow off the appointment entirely.

I Don't Want to Talk About It



 I watched exactly 5 minutes of the film Jennifer's Body and
what I saw was this scene, where she projectile vomits a river of tar.

I don't want to talk about it.

If you knew me, that statement would give you an idea of just how bad things are.  I've seen my share of  traumas over the years and through it all: tragic haircuts, crushing heartbreaks, financial devastation, personal loss... I've never not wanted to talk about it.  I've never not NEEDED to talk about it.  It's what I do. It's how I get through and make sense of things.  I love a good story.  I love an audience.  I have almost no boundaries and usually tell people way more than they want to know in my desperate need to understand and be understood.

This is different. 

This, I can't talk about.  It's just too much.  I can't let out the pain, frustration, misery and heartache that is welling up inside me. If I did, I picture it like a scene from a horror movie, gallons of toxic black goo exploding out of me:  oily and malevolent, taking on a life of its own and consuming everything in its path.  No-one wants to see that. 

But I can't keep it bottled up inside, either.  I'm not a good bottler.  Can't keep all this pent up sludge hidden away in the dark corners of my soul.   Like a bad batch of homebrew fermenting unattended in the basement, the pressure can only build up for so long before things start exploding.  And no-one wants to see that, either.

So here I am, finally making good on my threat to start a blog.  I don't know what to expect.   I don't know who, if anyone, will read this and that may be beside the point:  I have to let it out somewhere.  Hopefully I will, overall, keep the toxic spewing to a minimum.  But I make no promises.  At least not while I'm dealing with THIS.....

What is THIS?  Oh, I don't want to talk about it.
............................................................................................

But I have to.  It happened and I have to find a way to deal with it.  I was pregnant and then I wasn't.  Life goes on.  Just....not for my baby.

We made it to 9 weeks.  Almost 1/4 of the way there. We beat amazing odds to get that far - the fertility doctor had predicted imminent early miscarriage just a few days after declaring me pregnant. But our little one was a fighter and held on long enough to develop arms and legs, fingers and toes, eyelids and ear canals, and a strong, steady heartbeat.  A heartbeat that we saw on the ultrasound when baby was the size of a grain of rice, then a kidney bean, then a raspberry, then a grape.

As it developed from grain to legume to fruit, the doctor called it our "miracle baby" and marveled at its on-target growth and perfect heartbeat and increased our odds of success from minuscule to hopeful. 

Until last Tuesday.   It was our first visit to the OB after successfully and triumphantly "graduating" from the fertility clinic the week before.  I was nine and a half weeks along, and baby should have been the size of a stuffed green olive.  But I had a bad feeling.  I had woken up in the middle of the night, rolled over onto my stomach and realized that, for the first time in over a month, that maneuver hadn't sent lightning bolts of pain shooting through my chest.

Three hours of obsessive Googling and breast-poking later, I was only slightly mollified.  Lots of people on the internet say that pregnancy symptoms decline at around 9-10 weeks and it's nothing to worry about.  But still, my boobs felt completely different.  Like a switch had been flipped and all the electricity that had been pulsing through them was completely turned off.

So I was worried about my little cocktail garnish, and prepared for the worst.  At least, I thought I was.

As it turns out, nothing can prepare you for having your ultrasound projected on a giant screen overhead and seeing, larger than life, your perfectly formed almost-baby, which actually LOOKS like a baby and not an amorphous blob for the first time ever, lying there motionless.  A still, silent, solid space where only 6 days earlier you had seen a pulsing beam of light and life beating inside its tiny chest.  A lifeless olive sunk to the bottom of the martini glass.

I can't get that image out of my mind and I DON'T want to talk about it.