love is blonde

How am I supposed to not want a baby so badly, when I came so close to having one, only to have him taken away from me?

How am I supposed to be truly happy with what I have, and accept my life as is, if something I want so badly is missing?

How am I supposed to find/create what is missing, while also having happiness and acceptance of life without it?

How can I take a step back, relax, and accept things as they are, when (for us) the process of making a baby requires what feels like endless persistence and perseverance?

How can I do everything possible to try to create a new life, when all I really want is the life my son was supposed to have?

Do I spend my limited mental and emotional energy on healing and acceptance, or on persistence and toughness?

—-

I will pay you one million dollars if you can answer these questions for me. They keep me up at night. In the meantime, a daffodil has bloomed on my street. I hope that means the real and the metaphorical Spring are near.

In redesigning the blog (thank you everyone for the swooning!) I found myself reading through a bunch of my archives. Aside from the normal embarrassment one feels upon reading one’s young and immature diary writings, I couldn’t help but think to myself…damn, I was really happy back then.

There was the time we did six word memoirs. Do any of you remember those? There are some gems in the comments.

There was the time I shaved my eyeball with a razor and ended up with an eye patch (and later with LASIK and 20/20 vision so we can consider it a happy accident).

There was the time my comments got a little crazy when I told you guys the s-e-x-u-a-l poem that Andrew wanted read at our wedding. Good veto, friends.

There was the ordinary Wednesday afternoon that we snuck out of work and got married at the courthouse.

And perhaps my favorite post of all time, writing about falling in love over the course of six Valentine’s days.

There’s more, too. Drunken girlfriend weekends, crafty endeavors, buying a house, beautiful vacations. In 2010 and 2011 the fog of infertility crept up on me. And then a little bit of hope and happiness for awhile, and then the loss. Now I feel like a black cloud follows me everywhere. It shadows all of my thoughts and words. It owns me and I hate it.

One day I’d really like to be a happy person again. If I had to write my six word memoir today, it would be: Things will never be the same.

I was browsing a friend’s work website the other day. She runs a marine biology lab so I was pretty out of my element, but I’m always impressed and interested in what my friends do at work, especially something so radically different from my DC life.

It was maybe 30 seconds before I came across the word hypoxia. The only place I’ve seen that word before is on the autopsy. The likely cause of death. Not enough oxygen. Hypoxia.

I couldn’t read another word.

•••••

I’m pretty sure I come across as “normal” to most people. I go out to eat, go to happy hour, I laugh and joke and wear mascara and make fun of the Kardashians. But sometimes I’m just plain faking it. This is how pretty much every conversation goes in my head, if not in actuality:

Someone: Hey, how are you?

Me: Oh, hi. I’m [depressed]. How are you?

Someone: I’m good, too! What’s new?

Me: I’ve been keeping pretty busy [crying my face off]. You?

Someone: Tell me about it, this time of year is so busy with all the holiday parties and things to do! What are you doing for Christmas?

Me: I have plans to [feel sorry for myself. I might not get out of bed.]

Someone: That sounds great – let’s try to meet up one night.

Me: Totally. I’d love to [sit around and cry and talk about sad and unfair shit] together.

Someone: Cool, I’ll call you.

•••••

Merry Christmas to me! I just bought $561 worth of fertility drugs.

FA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA.

•••••

So I went to two support groups.

The first one was an infertility group. About eight or so women, all very nice, all with their own stories. One had 4 failed IVFs. Another was about to embark on her first RE appointment. Another was using a surrogate. I was probably somewhere in the middle in terms of infertility timeline and interventions.

But I was the only one with a dead baby.

So I went to pregnancy and infant loss support group. Again, about eight women, all very warm, all with different sad stories. One woman lost one of her twins, another lost a son at full term in a car accident. Another lost her son at three weeks old. Another lost her twins at 22 weeks gestation.

But I was the only one without any living children.

I just don’t know if I should go back, to either or to both.

I summoned up some courage today and logged into Fertility Friend to delete my pregnancy ticker. You know, that cute little thing that tracks down the days to 40 weeks. I tried to do it with my eyes squinted so I wouldn’t see the numbers, but it was too hard to miss.

31 weeks and 5 days pregnant. 58 days to go.

Except not, because Miller will never get to count any ages, not even to zero, and especially not past 26 weeks and 5 days.

Some days are okay and some days are hard. Actually, most days are okay but nights are brutal. Mornings are a close second.

I find myself starting to feel anxious for the test/autopsy results. I have an appointment with my RE next week, and my OB the week after that. I’d like some answers before those meetings.

Some days I want the answer to be “cord accident.” This would mean that it was a horrible accident, but probably one that wouldn’t be repeated in another pregnancy. It would mean that there was nothing I could have done differently to prevent the outcome.

But it would also mean that Miller wasn’t supposed to die. That he was a healthy baby — our lottery winning baby — and that a stupid, random accident took away his life.

Some days I’d rather hear that Miller had something wrong with him that simply made him not ready or healthy for the world. Maybe a genetic issue (even with seemingly normal chromosomes…) or some other underlying condition that we didn’t know about before. After all, he did have two left thumbs (did I tell you all that already? It was weirdly cute), the intestinal obstruction, an a two-vessel (instead of three) umbilical cord. All of these can point to bigger issues. But we did so many tests and scans and procedures and didn’t find anything else wrong, which doesn’t make sense.

I don’t want something to have been wrong with him. In my eyes he was perfect. He grew right on target and he was a beautiful baby. It’s hard to imagine what could have been so wrong.

I definitely don’t want to hear that something was wrong with me or my body. It’s not that I wouldn’t take the blame a million times over if it brought Miller back to life, but because I’d worry that any future pregnancy would be at risk. And I’m already going to be a huge anxious mess if/when we get pregnant again. I don’t need any more high-risk issues added to my chart.

The other possibility is simply “inconclusive.” I don’t really wish for this either. It gives us nothing. Nothing to watch for next time, nothing to answer our questions, nothing to explain what happened. And no peace.

So I can’t decide what I want the answer to be. But maybe I need to stop thinking that answers will make anything better.

I can’t decide if I should tell the story from the beginning or from the end, but in case you read nothing else in this post, or you’re not really a fan of medical details, all you need to know is that I am going to have a baby. In November. And it’s a boy.

The whole thing seems both completely normal and completely implausible all at once. Let’s go back to February or so. At this point in our babymaking journey, we had learned that: 1.) We were not good at making or keeping babies on our own, 2.) My otherwise perfect husband has some kinda messed up genetic material that make things extremely difficult, and 3.) I had my own issues that were complicating things, namely that our fertility specialist thought that my fallopian tubes would not work.

(Basically we were operating with ONE perfectly functioning thing – ovaries. But did you know babymaking takes more than just ovaries? Yes indeed.)

All of these things combined, our doctor gave us a nearly zero chance of success without IVF, or IVF with genetic testing, and maybe even IVF with a donor. But my insurance doesn’t cover IVF so we decided to try a medicated IUI cycle. On Day 3 of the cycle our doctor actually called and recommended that we cancel, because it really was not going to work. But I had already bought the drugs, and the rest of it was free. We chose to go forward instead.

Meanwhile, during that cycle, we set up consultation visits with a slew of experts. We met with the doc about IVF. We met with the genetics guy about embryo testing. We met with the financial counselor. We met with the social worker about using a donor. We were prepared to move on to the big guns for the next cycle, even if thinking about the financial, physical, and emotional toll it would take was keeping us up at night.

So, [skipping some details here, you can google IUI if you want to know the deets] a few weeks pass and I find myself staring in disbelief at a very faint positive pregnancy test. But I’ve seen these before, and they normally don’t last. I went in for blood work, and the result was a “low positive.” I kept peeing on sticks and kept going back for bloodwork, usually with a good-but-not-great result. After my fifth blood test, I met only the minimum requirements for a viable pregnancy when my levels didn’t double.

But we somehow kept moving forward. The first ultrasound showed almost nothing—but not nothing! There was a small sac. The second one showed what looked to me like a piece of lint. (A very cute piece of lint though.) The third one showed a tiny, flickering heartbeat, so small it couldn’t be measured. The fourth one showed a great heartbeat but a fetus that was measuring behind. The fifth one showed a still-small baby and a small sac. (You don’t even want to know what Dr. Google says about small gestational sacs. It’s really not good.) At every appointment, I got 80% good news and 20% worrying news. You can probably guess which part I was more focused on.

Eventually we made it all the way to 12 weeks, and by this point some of the anxiety had gone away. We opted to do genetic testing just to make sure that we hadn’t passed down anything that would show up later on and make it so this baby was not going to be able to survive.

We waited a week for the test results. It felt like a loooooooong week. Just last week we got the news that our baby – our baby boy – has 46 completely normal chromosomes. He is already a one in a million little guy, when you consider the odds we were facing right before he was created.

So, I’ve been keeping a secret from you for months. And I am so excited to be sharing it now. Be glad you missed the last few months, when I was a hot mess of barfy anxiety exhaustion, all rolled up together. But now I am feeling good, very mellow, and really damn happy.