My doctor is not a unicorn, and this is not a fairy tale. If it were, I would be the fair lady banished to the Barren Wasteland and my doctor would be, not the magical unicorn on which she rides safely to the Fertile Valley, but the scheming goblin who promises to remove the curse in exchange for all her gold and future riches and demands a series of impossible tasks. But after she meets all his conditions and masters his challenges through her outstanding determination strength and will, after she has given everything she has, he twists and grins and finds a loophole to slither through. "Sorry, sweetheart, but you danced by the light of the full moon, not the new moon, so our contract is null and void. But if you want to try again I have another quest in mind.....bwahahahahah"
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?
It's such a cliche it hurts to type it, but that doesn't make it any less true: these past few months of IVF, pregnancy and miscarriage have been one hell of a roller coaster ride. There were dizzying ascents and devastating drops. I was thrown for a loop and spun around until I wasn't sure which end was up.
I'm only just beginning to get my equilibrium back.
Six weeks after the miscarriage, my hormones have leveled out and I'm feeling much more steady. It hit me today: I feel like myself again. I'll always grieve the loss of our little boy (did I mention that last week I found out, entirely by accident and in a manner as casual as this parenthetical digression, that the baby was a boy?) but now that the hormones have stopped turning all my emotions up to eleven, I can deal with it much more gracefully.
"Normal is not something to aspire to, it's something to get away from." - Jodie Foster
When I was in high school, I pinned little buttons printed with sassy sayings and the names of my favorite bands all over my denim jacket. (There I go, showing my age again - yes, I wore my button-encrusted jacket with neon-colored jelly shoes and Guess jeans while dancing to Duran Duran. I'm OLD, ok?) My favorite button asked the all-important question: "Why Be Normal?" Normal was boring. Normal was average. I was Unique! Creative! Fascinating! I had an asymmetrical haircut and wrote angsty poetry and knew I would never aspire to "normal."
And now here I am, over 20 years later, and normal is still a dirty word.
Normal people are happy when their doctor calls to say their test results are normal. But when you've fallen down the rabbit hole of infertility, sometimes normal test results are bad news. Like today: the RPL tests that were supposed to give us a clue as to what caused the miscarriage all came back -- you guessed it -- normal.
Normal means there aren't any obvious or easy answers. I don't have blood clotting issues or any of the other conditions that commonly cause miscarriage. So now what?
The baby was normal, and I'm so-called normal, and still the baby died and no-one can tell us why it happened or how to keep it from happening again. My body is having a critical malfunction on some deep and fundamental level. We don't know how or why it short-circuited and rejected my baby and I feel so frustrated and lost. I know I'm NOT NORMAL. I need answers. Where do we go from here?
As it turns out, we go to Memphis.
My RE referred me to a specialist in recurrent pregnancy loss, (I've only had one miscarriage, but apparently it was so spectacular and inexplicable I qualify for this advanced level of care) Dr. K in Memphis. As soon as I can get an appointment, Mr Wren and I will find a way to get there and find a way to pay for it. For my own peace of mind I have to see if Dr K can give me some answers.
There have to be answers. There ALWAYS are answers - you just have to ask the right questions and look in the right places. Right? I refuse to believe anything else. Yes, I know there's the possibility that modern science just isn't asking the right questions yet, and we won't find an answer no matter where we look but holy crap that is a terrifying thought and I'm just going to put it away for now.
For now I'm simply trying to take this one step at a time and focusing on planning our trip to Memphis and starting to look forward to it. I've never been. Regardless of what else happens while we're there and whether or not we find any answers, I'm going to Graceland.
Is it abnormal for me to be a little bit excited about that?
