Today was my niece’s first birthday party. I was looking forward to it happily, thinking mostly about BabyH and how big she is getting. Most of the time I see her as her own person, with somewhat of blinders on. It wasn’t until yesterday that I started thinking that there was probably going to be a lot of people there.

I intended to be there early. I thought it would be good to see BabyH before the people started arriving, since she gets withdrawn around strangers. I wanted to bring my camera, I wanted to get awesome pics of her today on this special day. But I got distracted in my garden, dirty and sweaty and happily content to lose track of time in the sunshine. So I was behind schedule getting dressed.

And then we got halfway there and I realized I forgot my camera. Normally not a big issue. But the pictures was something that I had been thinking about all week, and the thought of not having my camera to hide behind, to focus on, was an unpleasant one. I drove home to get it, which put me in an annoyed mood.

As I walked across the lawn I was taken aback to see kids and babies running everywhere. I shouldn’t have been, but for some reason it never crossed my mind that there would be other kids there.

The day went fine. We ate, I took pictures, I sat and talked with family, SIL opened gifts.

And again, just like the shower, it was the gifts that got to me. Gifts for the child, celebrating life. You don’t give gifts to the dead. I looked around at the celebration, the contentment, the comradarie and thought… this is how it’s supposed to be. Devin had a party, Deven had recognition, but it wasn’t the same. It never will be.

After the party, when everyone but family had gone home and we were sitting around the fire Den asked how I was doing, did I have a good day? “It was good, fine… but hard,” I said. And I just started crying softly…. crying for all of the things we missed out on with Devin.

Grief. It’s no longer such a heart-wrenching chasm. It’s a scar, it aches. It’s always present, but sometimes I forget it’s there. But once in a while something causes me to look down and remember that it is there and what was lost along the way.

To answer the question on everyone’s mind: no, I do not have any pregnancy symptoms. Nothing at all. Which is not at all surprizing. In fact I was thinking about how early I was feeling symptoms in April and then realized, duh, it was ectopic so of course I was feeling it more. Tubes are not nearly as adept at dealing with an embryo implanting. (But even in that cycle I didn’t have any cramping or anything until after I tested positive.)

Tomorrow will be monday and I have not had to fight off the slightest inclination to test early. Which may very well be the first time that has happened.

To be honest I do not feel positive at all about the outcome of this cycle… which is the same way I feel every cycle now. My heart is so guarded I don’t even let myself go “there,” I just don’t picture it. I try to just run on the assumption that I’m not pregnant and make plans from there.

Now excuse me while I ramble on about philosophy and fate. Feel free to skip.

::

This morning I found myself laying in bed thinking about Fatalism and Free Will. I quite obviously do not believe in a maker, a god – there is no question in my mind about that. I for some reason always thought the non-god version of the world was pretty straightforward. Then Saturday night I found myself reading the Wikipedia article about Fatalism, thinking, Well that sounds nonsensical. But the morning dawned with me puzzling over it, especially in the context of the crappy events in my life.

It boils down to one question: are our lives on a set path, or not. It’s a question that doesn’t bother with the why – it doesn’t matter if you think it’s because of a god making the decisions or if it’s just “fate” or “the way things are.” Either way there is a fundamental question of what is possible.

You hear it sometimes from people not really intending to suggest such a philosophical issue: “It was meant to be,” “Whatever will happen will happen.”

On one side is fate. Your decisions all lead to the same end game. I was destined to get married to this man, struggle with infertility, get pregnant that particular cycle, conceive a baby boy through IVF, who would then die in the womb. It wasn’t coincidence, it was the path my life laid out for me. In a way I can understand that viewpoint. Since I am standing in one place looking backwards I can see how every decision in my life inevitably brought me to the place where I now stand. It could be a comforting thought: my life will take me to where I need to go. There is certainly a kind of freedom in giving up control. But the downside is that in this imagined world you have no choice, no freedom – whatever you think you have is just an illusion. It doesn’t matter if you can see the bus coming, there’s nothing you can do to stop it.

The other side of the debate is free will. If you as an individual have the ability to make decisions that change something, it means there is no fate, no destiny. It means there is a tree of endless possibilities among which somewhere our life paths will travel, switching paths at every juncture. That’s where it’s easy to fall into the paranoia. If I make this small decision, that could lead to a circumstance that would necessitate this decision that could lead to some horrible event. Suddenly choosing a paint color feels like an overwhelming life decision. Maybe, if I had painted the room blue instead of green, I’d have a baby. Crazy thought? Maybe. (But you can’t tell me you don’t have them.)

Of course there are some – maybe many – who believe that it’s half and half… that there is a larger “plan”, but the details are left up to chance and free will. I think once you wade into that realm you’re left requiring a higher power making those judgement calls as to what fits into the plan and what is inconsequential. I don’t think the nature argument works well with this halfsies idea.

As for me, I think I fall within the free will camp, though I picture it less of “free will” and more of chance. Luck. Nature’s laws. I do see a tree of timelines, I do overanalyze my choices. That’s always been a problem for me. We as humans can make choices that affect our future, but I do feel like so much is beyond our control – but not because it is already set and decided, but because we are only human, we can only do so much.

Here’s another scenario: fortune-tellers. The only way that is even possible is if there is a fated plan. If there is no plan, then there is no way to know what will happen. I was thinking about this a while back, when some girls were talking about getting “readings” online regarding when they would concieve. I realized quickly that, while it once seemed attractive to have reassurance and know that pregnancy was going to happen, I no longer have any interest, even if it were possible. For one thing, I am a wimp and I can’t handle rejection. What if the answer sucked? What if I had known ahead of time that I would get pregnant after much heartache, only to lose him at 36 weeks? There’s no way I would have enjoyed my pregnancy the way I did. And I wouldn’t exchange that true, unfettered joy for anything.

The second issue with fortune telling is this: what if I had been told that I would get pregnant in March of 2009 from an IVF cycle (and knew that it was true). Well I can’t see me doing any IVF cycles prior to that, knowing that it wouldn’t work… I mean, who would do that. But in order to get pregnant in March I had to have a stims cycle in February that produced enough embryos to freeze some, and in order to do the stims cycle that gave us that many embryos we had to go through the December cycle that utterly failed, prompting us to change the protocol completely. It’s the age-old problem. Knowing the future means you change the future, which means you can’t know the future!

But who the hell knows. I feel like I’m too old to be concerned with such deep, philosophical questions. I had far more time and mental energy to fret about existence when I was 14. Now it just seems inconsequential. And it makes my head hurt.

My pregnant coworker, whom I have mentioned several times here before in passing, just received a not-compatable-with-life diagnosis today. She is 18 weeks pregnant.

Please, if you could, send up a thought or a prayer for her and her husband.

No one deserves to join this club. No one should suffer the loss of a child. Ever.

I feel sick to my stomach.

I’ve been feeling anxious ever since Thursday, when I learned that something might be wrong with my coworker’s baby. Which, now that I think about it, may have contributed to my mass meltdown this weekend. I just felt such dread in the pit of my stomach. Everyone else could say, “Oh it will probably be fine!” but I know too much. I really, really hoped I was wrong.

I desperately want to do something, but I don’t know her very well. People deal with grief differently, maybe she just wants to be left alone with her husband to deal. I gave her my number and told her to call me, but I know from experience that sometimes making a call is just too much to handle. I don’t want to intrude, but I want to make sure they know they are supported. I want them to know that even if the rest of the world doesn’t understand, I do. I have some baby loss books and other resources, and I think I’m going to deliver them to her… I’m just not sure when.

Being on the other side of grief is hard… harder than I thought. In some ways it would be easier if it was a close friend or family member.. then I’d have a better idea of how the person dealt with things, and what they would appreciate. Right now I feel like I’m just staggering in the dark and hoping I do something helpful along the way.

::

My plan was always to test on Tuesday morning. I’ve spent the evening wondering if I even should. It’s so strange to be the one whose life is moving forward when someone else’s stands still. What if it is positive? It feels so wrong to walk into work on Wednesday and announce happy news in the midst of this horror. Maybe to everyone else it wouldn’t seem weird. But it feels like a time of mourning, not joy.

And of course it could just as easily be negative. More bad news. I feel too drained right now to get too upset… remembering that there are worse things than not getting pregnant in the first place. I am in a different place tonight. I am scared – not of not getting pregnant, but of reliving loss. Of reliving the fear. In some ways the fear scares me more than the grief.

And then I think about taking a test and staring at it as my hand shakes, watching as no line shows up after 1 minute, 2 minutes, 4… and I feel sick to my stomach all over again.

I do not know what the morning will bring. I’m not even sure I’m ready to face it yet.

Den: “So how are you feeling hon?”
Me: “Fine, I guess. I’m fine.”
Den: “I saw it earlier today…”
Me: “Yeah. Wait, saw what?” (thinking he’s talking about the blog post about my coworker or something?)
Den: “Yeah, I saw it in the trash. I didn’t mean to, but I went to throw something away…”
Me: “The trash???” (Now utterly confused. A piece of paper or something? WTF is he babbling about?)
Den: “So, not good news huh?”
Me: (LIGHTBULB: He’s talking about the negative HPT I threw in the trash this morning and didn’t bother telling him about!!) “Ooohhhhhh. No. Not good.”

We have a standing agreement, that if it’s good news I wake him up to tell him, but if it’s bad news I don’t bother mentioning it. He’s never really sure when I’m going to test, either. But with so much other shit going on I actually forgot that I hadn’t already talked to him about it.

I have this whole rant hiding in my head about businesses and employees and what qualifies for bereavement leave (hint: it does not include stillbirth). I spent all day stewing over it, but right now I just don’t think I have the time or focus to do it justice. I’ll get back to that thought later.

Tomorrow morning brings my second (and last, for this cycle) HPT, and then I go get my blood drawn for the beta. I am feeling extremely negative about it. I had a lot of hopes going into this cycle, though with a lot of hesitation about the hopes. I thought maybe FETs were my lucky break, maybe we’d be on the good side of the odds for once. But getting pregnant twice in a row? I just didn’t know about that. It’s just not what my body does.

And also, this may sound silly, but I have no signs of being pregnant. With Devin’s cycle I had bleeding before I ever tested; with the ectopic I had that day of feeing utterly and completely exhausted and my allergies going crazy. This time I have nothing, absoutely nothing to mark down. No cramping, no fatigue, no stomach upset. The only “thing” I could possibly point to are ovary twinges. Which, by the way, are NOT reassuring AT ALL after an ectopic. Why can’t I have uterus twinges? Is that so difficult?

And then the negative. Yesterday, when I tested, I was 13dpo. I was 13dpo when I got the positive with Devin. I was 14dpo when I got the positive with the ectopic (which had lower numbers because it was ectopic). It took whatever air I had in my sails right on out of there. So I’m just preparing myself to see a negative test in the morning and then get on with planning the next cycle. Fuck.

What I did was cut my hair and dye it darker (because I just feel darker), and what I will do is drive into Boston to visit an IVF friend so we can get totally drunk and weepy together, and then I’m going to go visit Kel. I just need to get the hell out of here for a little while.

Test is negative, as I expected. No surprizes this week. Guess I’ll be doing another stims cycle. Lovely.

I was fine with the news. It sucked, but honestly it’s kind of expected. Did I REALLY think I could get pregnant two cycles in a row? Did I REALLY think my luck was that good? So the beta confirmed that I am indeed NOT pregnant, as I expected.

What I did NOT expect, however, was for them to tell me that the lab is closing down next month, so I’ll have to sit out a cycle. The lab re-opens on August 15… so that’s when I can start my stims cycle. Two months of doing NOTHING! Two months of sitting around just waiting. Another two months of being not pregnant. And that is when I started feeling hazy and angry and wanting to throw my cell phone out my car window. (Which I would never do because it is pink and I love it – but, you know, I just wanted some kind of handy projectile to shatter on the highway.)

The negatives, I can handle. The doing it all over again, I can handle. The mockery that is my “luck,” I can handle. But I cannot handle waiting. The entire summer, wasting my time. Another three months from this point in time that I may (or may not) be pregnant. Hasn’t this gone on long enough? Haven’t I waited long enough?

But like I said to Kel, there’s nothing to do. It would be different if we had done 4 fresh + 2 frozen cycles and gotten absolutely nothing, then I’d be ready to move on to donor eggs. But this? We know it works!! I had a beautiful baby boy. I got pregnant again, just in the wrong spot. It’s so fucking close! It’s possible, it’s achievable. It’s just a question of how long do we have to wait for it.

Everyone says, you need to take some time off. To relax. I say, bullshit. What I need is to get pregnant, and sitting around doing nothing is NOT going to get me pregnant. I have obstinate eggs and only one tube – and I gave up hope of ever getting pregnant naturally long before I lost that tube. Sane people don’t bank on winning the lottery – especially people who tend to lose every lottery they have ever entered… and some they didn’t. Time off only serves to make me pissed off and frustrated. Trust me, I am pissed off and frustrated enough as it is.

But there is nothing to do but waste my entire summer doing NOTHING. It even looks like it’s going to be a crappy fucking summer, weather-wise… mid-June and we’ve had a week of rain and are looking at another one. I feel like I’m back in Vancouver (which does not in any way inspire a happy nostalgic feeling). Predictions do not show a happy sunny warm summer.

I guess there are two very minor positives that come out of this delay (the kind that I really don’t care about, but it’s something I guess): I don’t have to worry about taking more days off work mid-summer when everyone’s on vacation; and my next cycle’s due date won’t be in April. Oh, and I’m going to visit Kel… just have to figure out when.

Last night I finally broke down. After the ectopic, the surgery, multiple negative tests and beta… last night I finally broke down and sobbed for all of it… all the loss, the frustration, the missing pieces.

I don’t feel that sad for the failure of one cycle by itself. That I knew, I knew. I knew it was a possibility, and by the end I knew it was more than a possibility. As usual I just keep pushing forward, one foot in front of the other.

But what killed me was hearing that I’d have to wait out an entire cycle. It devastated me. How can a miscarriage and IVF cycle loss not upset me as much as a wasted cycle? But suddenly I’m motionless, suddenly I’m freefalling. My next step is gone and I don’t know where to put my feet.

I’m finally feeling the effects of the miscarriage. I shouldn’t be dealing with this shit right now, I should be fucking PREGNANT. My body gives me one chance out of every 3 or so transfers – one implantation. And that was it. That was IT. And it fucking implanted in the wrong place!!!! I lost my chance. That was my one fucking pregnancy of the past year, and I lost it.

I was a little concerned that this “next cycle” (before I knew about the time off) was going to give us a due date of April. I was nervous about that, but at the same time thrilled…. a chance for a living April baby, just the way I wanted it. Now that’s gone too. My next cycle will have a due date of May… late May. BabyH (neice) was due late May, born early June. Den reassured me that our baby, no matter when it was due, will have its own birthday, its own celebration, but I still cried. There will be at least 2 years between our baby and BabyH! Our babies were supposed to grow up 2 months apart, NOT 2 years!! And it will be after Devin’s SECOND BIRTHDAY that we will have another child. 2 fucking LONG YEARS. And that is with IVF, with full insurance coverage!!!

I just want to curl into a ball and weep. This is so not how our lives were supposed to go. How can we be so much futher down the road, with so much lost time and so much heartache?

The only way I have gotten through these past 6 months is two weeks at a time. That’s all I can handle. I always have my eyes on the next cycle, the next meds, the next test. It’s how I have managed to hold it all together. Then suddenly, out of the blue, I was dumped into a 2-month holding pattern. And I fell apart, because I can’t handle that. I can’t even look that far ahead. The last time I had to hold it together for months with nothing was when I was waiting for my insurance coverage to kick in, and I cannot say I held it together very gracefully. I was a mental wreck. So 2 months? How the HELL am I going to fill 2 months?

::

I talked to the nurse today. I’ve had this plan brewing in the back of my mind for after the next child, when presumably we won’t have IVF coverage. I keep thinking how my eggs, when treated “normally” with Follistim and such, are absolute crap. But the last stims protocol they added a large amount of LH to my body (in the form of Menopur, which is half FSH, half LH), and not only did I create a lot of eggs, but there were a number of GOOD ones in there. So my thought was: what if we added just LH? The FSH makes lots of follicles… the LH is there theoretically just to help mature the eggs. So what if we took a normal cycle and added a ton of LH? Maybe a little FSH to make a couple more follicles. Couldn’t that theoretically give me a decent egg or two? A decent shot at pregnancy WITHOUT IVF?

Unfortunately that game plan is totally out for this cycle. I figured as much, but the nurse definitely confirmed it. The problem is that any type of injects requires monitoring. And also my clinic apparently only does injects in conjunction with IUI (as opposed to timed intercourse). And the problem with injectable IUIs – or even just injects with monitoring – is that it gets to be quite expensive. And insurance won’t cover it. In order to be approved for IVF you have to show the insurance company that this patient NEEDS IVF to get pregnant. So they are not going to spend money trying something your doctor already proved to them doesn’t work. Sucks, but it makes sense.

I am still keeping that game plan on my mind for after the next child – given some time and research I could probably convince the doctor and perhaps even the insurance companies that IUI with a totally off-the-wall protocol could work for me. But for this cycle? Absolutely not an option.

The other thing I am looking into is acupuncture. I mentioned that to the nurse as well and she was very happy about that. She said research has been kind of split – some says it helps IVF, some says it doesn’t – but that patients who have done acupuncture during their cycles have said that at the very least they FEEL better. And, hell, right now I’m willing to try ANYTHING that could help me get pregnant. So the nurse gave me some names and numbers of acupuncturists that other patients have used and recommended, so next week I’m going to make some calls and set something up. At the very least starting acupuncture treatments could help me feel like I’m actively doing something to prepare for my cycle, and maybe that’s just what I need.

I already feel far better than I did a few days ago. I hate having my plans thrown aside, I hate the feeling of losing what little control I think I have.

But more than that, I think I needed to finally break down and sob for a little while, to grieve my miscarriage. I never really did. I pushed it aside and waited and hoped I wouldn’t need to fully grieve, that I could get pregnant again quickly and start over again. I know that’s probably not the healthiest thing to do, but I guess I got to the point of too much grief… being numb was just easier, more manageable. I didn’t want to have to stop and deal with it unless I had to.

Of course it didn’t help that it has rained all weekend, preventing me from working outside in my garden like I normally do.

Den and I are coming to some sort of resignation and peace about waiting yet again. We had talked about doing some injects during this “trying naturally” cycle (I have a plan in mind for much further down the road, for child #3 when we presumably won’t have IVF coverage), but there are logistical issues (money/insurance) that the nurse pointed out. So that was another frustration. I had assumed it wouldn’t work out… but I asked anyways, just in case. So Den and I sighed and basically said to each other, what’s one more month, really.

One interesting topic that came up was the possibility of overstimming… which is now my great fear with stims cycles. In a way we regret moving forward with IVF#3 (the December cycle) despite massively overstimming. I know I was desperate and couldn’t bear the thought of cancelling, but the result was no pregnancy, nothing frozen, and one less stims cycle that insurance will cover. Den said that if it happens again, that we see by ultrasound that I am way, way overstimming, we should cancel and start over. Let’s hope it never comes to that, now that we’re using menopur for stims.

::

This blog is not the only place I am outspoken and open about our IVF and loss journey. Recently we have some temporary fill-ins at work, which at first felt a little weird because it was in the middle of all this shit going on with me and my coworker, and I feel bad for them walking into that. It’s obvious that people have clued them in, but you can see they’re not sure what to say or do. At first I remained kind of cryptic, but then I just didn’t care quite so much and just started talking to my coworker about the delay, my next cycle, our plans…. just like I usually would. After a small outburst of frustration to a coworker I turned to the temporary girl and said with a small laugh, “Yes, we’re doing IVF. As you can see, I don’t have problems talking about it.”

The coolest thing is watching someone open up to me. Most people haven’t dealt with infertility or child loss, and what exposure they have is minimal – they know someone who went through something, but they don’t know details. Most people are roiling with questions underneath the surface… they feel terrible for what their friends or family have gone through, but they have no idea what it all means. So for me to laugh and say, “I’ve had some fertility issues and I don’t mind talking about it,” it opens up the door. I get questions. Not the kind of idiotic comments that we all run into, but honest questions, “How does that work?” and “What does that mean?” I love explaining, passing on some info.

I love knowing that one day infertility will be just another disease, not something to hide. I appreciate it when I mention something my infertility and someone says, “Oh yeah, my [friend/aunt/neighbor] went through that! It was really heartwrenching.” There’s some common ground. There’s a bridge of understanding already being built, and now I don’t need to explain what IVF is. It just makes it a little bit easier. The only way to fight misinformation and ignorance is to educate.

::

Right now all I want to work on is preparing materials to give to the newly bereaved. I’m thinking I need to become more involved with my pregnancy loss support group somehow… it would be a good way to focus my energies and help others.