Wow. I have to say I was
surprised to see how long it’s been since I last posted. So much has happened
and I have tried on several occasions to write about it with no luck. In some
ways it feels like too much to write about now. How could I possibly sum up a
year in a single post or even multiple posts at this point? But in the last
couple of weeks I've realized how much I get from writing this blog and then
being able to check back in and read about those things. So I'm going to just
jump back in with a summary of last year. (Warning: this is a really long post)
Today I am 30 weeks
pregnant. Tomorrow is the one year anniversary of finding out that our first
baby no longer had a heartbeat. We only knew of her for two weeks and yet it
was enough. (I felt in my heart that she was a girl so that's how I refer to
her). Up until that point, our year had been fairly normal. We were going to
start fertility treatments until we found out I was pregnant. I heard her
heartbeat and looked that up on the internet - everything said once you hear a
heartbeat you're usually good. Usually.
After that day in
February, the husband and I continued on as usual with work but that was about
it. For the next two or so months we did pretty much nothing. The grief was
hard and lonely, isolating. I will forever be grateful that I worked at a grief
center during that time. The executive director and now my dear friend was a
crucial support for me.
We met with our doctor
about two weeks after the miscarriage and we knew it was too soon. In a lot of
ways though I wanted to push forward with treatments. A part of me felt like if
we were not going to be able to have children, I wanted to get the pain out of
the way all in one year. And so at the end of April we started our first round
of IVF. I was determined to get through that process and so I gave myself shots
for 11 days like a champ. When it was over I remember thinking that it hadn't
been that bad. As a result of our fertility issues and the miscarriage, we
opted to freeze any embryos and have them genetically tested for viability.
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| IVF round 1 - daily shots organized in boxes with all the necessary materials - each day required mixing of lots of meds |
On our four year
anniversary we found out that of the three embryos frozen, all three had
significant genetic issues that would have resulted in unsuccessful
implantations or miscarriages. We spent the evening sitting on our back porch
absorbing the news.
About two weeks later,
on the first Friday of June, the husband had an interview in Raleigh and about
a week later he got the job offer. He had his eye on NC jobs and we were both
thrilled to find out we would be moving back later in the year: thrilled and overwhelmed
by the amount of stuff we needed to get done before his start day of August 1.
From that point forward,
our summer was a whirlwind. Between the day he accepted the offer (June 13) and
the day we left Houston for NC (August 15) we:
- Worked on some areas of the house that needed to be updated before we put the house on the market
- Put the house on the market and accepted a full offer on the third day
- Traveled to NC to house hunt for four days
- Did another round of IVF
- Spent time with friends in Houston to say our good-byes
- Did a frozen embryo transfer which included three days of bed rest for me
I knew it would be
hectic to try to do another IVF cycle and possibly an embryo transfer but at
the same time I knew that if this round didn’t work, I likely would not do another
fertility treatment. The second IVF round was awful compared to the first. I
hated every minute of it and instead of pushing through without thinking about
it, I spent 30 minutes to an hour every night trying to convince myself to take
the three, sometimes four shots. In this case convincing looked a lot like
sitting on the floor in my closet, crying. My first round of IVF involved two
shots nightly until 2/3 of the way through when I added a third shot. My second
round of IVF involved one morning shot and three nightly shots to start with and
about half way through I moved to two morning shots and four nightly shots.
We found out that four embryos
were successfully frozen on the Friday we were in NC looking for houses. The following
week we received the news that three of the four were genetically viable. The
last week of July I started the process involved in a frozen embryo transfer
cycle which is essentially more shots and more hormones.
We had two embryos
transferred on August 11. I was on bed rest through the 13th and we
left Houston for NC on the 15th. We closed on our house in Cary on
August 20 and found out that day that my hormone levels were high enough to
indicate the likelihood of a pregnancy.
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| Bed rest supplies from Betsy! |
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| Shadow and Gracie during bed rest |
Of course, things didn’t
get easy from there. The house had some major plumbing issues so we didn’t
actually move in until August 29th and once we were in the house we had to wait
for drywall work to be completed before we could do much.
We got the early
confirmation of the pregnancy the week after we moved into the house, on
September 2 at our first ultrasound. That’s also when we found out that both of
the embryos were successfully implanted and when I started to feel very sick.
There is a lot that I want to write about the experience of this pregnancy but
I will save that for a later post.
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| 5 weeks |
Most of the fall was a
blur with the first trimester essentially kicking my butt and the second
trimester starting off about the same. We went from a whirlwind couple of months
in the summer to a complete stop in the fall. I literally did the very bare
minimum I could to make it through the days.
We ended this crazy year
right where we needed to be – celebrating the holidays with our families and
spending time with friends. It was difficult to figure out what to share here
and how so I often deferred to writing nothing at all. And yet, the experiences
of this past year deserve some space here. While I have more I can write about
everything, and I likely will at some point, it’s important to start somewhere.
