My Comfortable Spot

This week I am going to have the final test in the series we have been having since we miscarried in July. They are checking to see if there underlying reasons why my miscarriages have happened. The procedure has been planned so that my consultant can take a good look at my uterus with a camera and make sure nothing sinister is lurking. It seems strange in my writing this. It’s the first time since I have been writing that I actually have a moving part to focus on. Until now it’s just been a lot of talk, no action.

I follow a lot of girls on social media that are at various stages of their own journeys. There are so many of us and I admire them all so much for talking about their pain, their strength and determination. Not being able to have a baby isn’t anything new. Lots of families over the years have remained incomplete. Now we have better access than ever before to potential solutions to our problems, relatively speaking, we have more reason than ever for us to be talking about it and sharing in terms of personal experience. And that’s what’s happening. The online support network that is out there is huge. If you need it search for something like #ivf #ivfjourney or #ivfsisters. You will soon see how many there are of us out there.

As much as I am in awe of this community, you also have to find a balance for yourself as to how much you should be involved. Being so intent on every small detail of the journey, having access to so much information, much of it conflicting, being able to get so involved with the details of a journey that is a personal and tailored account of treatment for another, and not us, actually may not help us at all with our own end cause. We all are told at one time or another, “Just relax and it will happen.” Or hear stories of ladies who have fallen pregnant after years of trying hard, just because they have given up on ever having a baby. And as annoying as it is to hear sometimes, I really believe and have experience of this being so. Stress has a negative impact on our conception. When we first started, because of my age, I knew that we were up against it. The first months of trying I drove myself, and my husband, to distraction counting days, peeing on ovulation sticks, and falling into painful depression every time my monthly scheduled pregnancy test, said, “Not this time.” And then, I took a leap of faith. Against every urge in my body to want to keep fighting, try my hardest, my best, do everything I could to control the situation and make it happen, I stopped. I completely stopped all of it. I didn’t pee, count or measure anything any longer. It was so hard to let go but wouldn’t you know within two months we were pregnant. Stood on the top of the stairs together outside the bathroom in total shock.

For that reason, I have worked hard to get myself to a place where, and this is by no means as simple as I am sure I am going to make this sound, in the main I am okay with what is happening to us. I am 43, and I have been pregnant twice in the last 18 months. Once naturally and once with our first round of IVF. This is pretty good going for someone my age. I have started to believe in myself, in our journey. It has taken me about 18 months to get to this place, two miscarriages, working through the grief that goes along with that, and finding a way through life. I find that my monthly cycle, my hormones and because of them my anxiety are sometimes uncontrollable as my period approaches. I still have the nightmares, and sleepless, fretful nights around this time. I figure that this is something I may always struggle with given that its hormonally-driven, and isn’t something I feel comes from my own laidback personality. But, on the positive side, the other weeks of the month are becoming more and more stable and I am able to separate myself, my life, from my fertility.

As we approach us being able to try IVF again, I have been wondering how much I would actually write about the probing and drugs once things get started. I, very selfishly, write for me. Writing helps me express myself and I find that I write more when I am in the hormonal stages of my monthly pattern. The other functional stuff I have down. We are not searching for answers. We had one successful round of IVF, we got pregnant. We just need to do that again and have me retain the pregnancy. Even through these rounds of tests, it hasn’t felt like we were waiting for that eureka moment. We are just waiting for the go ahead to try again. I guess time will tell. I suppose what I am saying is that if I don’t write about what medication I am taking or how scans are going, or whether my next down reg is on track, it doesn’t mean it’s not happening. It doesn’t mean I don’t understand, I have just found my comfortable spot, and I am happy with it.