Archive for the ‘Joy of Infertility’ Category
You’d think this would get easier
September 27, 2006but somehow my heart still sinks each time.
Pregnancy announcements. I just got an e-mail from “the friend” (who I am seeing on Friday with the other women in our circle) saying she’s pregnant with baby #2 due May 4.
I hate infertility.
*****
It’s 1 AM and I can’t sleep.
I’m sad, angry, jealous. All because of one damn e-mail. I’m not saying I’m not happy for them. I am. It is just the reminder of my inability to ever be pregnant and it hurts. A lot. In fact, I’m actually surprised at how intense these feelings are.
That “club”
July 5, 2006This is a reflection from reading a recent post on PH’s blog where he comments on “losing” an OB patient to an OB/GYN (He’s our family doctor). His favorite part of his practice is handling the OB patients for the office and being a part of the deliveries of the new babies.
If I could comment completely freely on his blog, this is what I would say:
“Infertility isn’t just the loss of being able to be pregnant or being able to have a biological child. It includes the loss of not getting to have that experience with you as my doctor. There are times when I feel a lot of grief over losing the ability to be a part of that “club” of families where you have been a significant player by being there throughout the pregnancy and birth. I know how much you love this aspect of your practice and, knowing you, your care during that time must really show this. You care for those babies from the minute they come into being. They are very real to you and when one is lost, I can only imagine the sadness you must also feel as their doctor. And losing the experience of helping care for the expectant mom and baby must also be very hard for you. Reading this post made my heart ache for you and the hurt you are probably feeling from this disappointment.”
Twinges of grief
June 19, 2006Pangs of longing
Dreams that will never come true
Wishful thinking that our next child would be a product of the two of us
Realizing that although pregnancy is full of aches, nausea, tiredness, swelling, excrutiating pain in the end, there is new life amidst the changes
Knowing what it means to see our child for the first time on an ultrasound
Feeling that first movement and subsequent kicks, stretches, hiccups
Being able to choose our doctor, make the health/hospital/birth decisions
Having a hospital experience that is ours and ours alone
No fears of changed minds
No guilt of taking someone else’s child away
No bittersweet reality of adoption and its intermixing of loss and joy
******
I don’t mean this in any sense of wishing Widget was anything but herself or that I view adoption as a second choice, a lesser choice. She is my joy, my world.
Every now and then, the sense of loss I feel regarding my infertility pokes its head out. Why now? Probably because of Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, our anniversary along with the fact this was the time of the year we did our IVF treatments.
Fortunately, it no longer overwhelms me.
Just twinges of grief
Anger
April 10, 2006I’ve discovered I’m still angry with God. Not for the failed adoption or even the failed IVF cycles. But for what “caused” me to have to go through these things in the first place. For the fact that childhood cancer exists. It just doesn’t make any sense- somehow, I can comprehend adult cancer but not children, especially babies born with cancer.
I am part of list serv, primarily for families of children who are currently going through the agony of Wilms’ Tumor. In a way, I feel a sense of obligation to let them know it can be okay, it will be okay in the long run. Here I am 23 years later and really, I am healthy. But I feel so many emotions, when I read the “daily digest”. Especially, when someone new posts or when someone posts that a child died (as two have recently). Maybe I shouldn’t read them, but I feel drawn and somehow and intense need to know what is happening to them-same thing with the web pages some of the families creat. I often find myself in tears reading about the day-to-day struggles of living with childhood cancer because it triggers these intensely, deeply hidden emotions.
The other day I found myself having a new emotion, jealousy (yeah, I know how odd does that sound?) along with my other emotions after reading the story of an adult Wilms’ survivor, who went through more intense treatment than I did and yet went on to have healthy pregnancies, not even fertility assisted. This was the third story recently where the doctors were wrong on the fertility angle. Not that I want a bio child in replacement of Widget- she is the light of my life, but still it feels like I am being taunted or tortured when I hear of women who were “lucky” in the fertility aspect after similar treatment.
I am not so bothered by women/girls who had treatment after me because protocols have changed and it is not surprising that their fertility has been better preserved. Actually I am happy that they won’t have to go through the extra grief of infertility as they deal with the late effects and psychological effects of being a childhood cancer survivor.
All of this from reading a posting yesterday and then looking at the website of a young girl who died this last week, quite suddenly from Wilms’. Something about her just reminded me of myself at that age.
The Way to Widget (part 2)
February 13, 2006Let’s see I left off with the referral to the reproductive endocrinologist…
T and I went to our appointment at the end of 1999 (either November or December) to meet with Dr. Young. He was nice, very positive about our option of IVF with donor eggs. The only thing I was never sure about was whether he ever really understood my childhood treatments. I know I filled the information out in their pre-paperwork, and I assumed that PH relayed the reason for the referral, but what I learned a few years later leads me to question it now.
A step backwards just a second, when T and I began discussing doing the IVF procedure, my older sister, surprisingly volunteered to donate eggs. We did a lot of talking about whether this was a good thing or a bad thing. My sister had her first child the year before and, I think, wanted us to have our first child soon too. Eventually, we decided that this would be the closest we could get to having a child with our genes and felt confident that our relationship would be able to withstand the dynamics of having my/our child biologically related to my sister. Part of the process was that all of us had to have interviews with a psychologist/social worker, separately and together, after which the social worker said she never had a group of people she felt sure would be able to handle the complexities of the situation.
So, my sister, T and I began the testing phase in January 2000. The egg retrieval and first transfer were at the beginning of March 2000. After the required two weeks of waiting, I had the blood test. Negative. It was extremely hard to hear and to have a period after it. Even though I never established a pregnancy, there had been living embryos in my uterus- it felt like a miscarriage.
About a week after the negative test, my paternal grandfather died from liver cancer. He had so much life up to his 6 months of illness prior to his death. He was a huge part of my growing up years and his passing was extremely upsetting. The only time in my life that I got absolutely passed out drunk complete with vomiting was about a week later.
May 2000 was our second try using some of the embryos we had frozen after retrieval. Again it failed. Again, I felt intense sadness when I had my “cycle” afterwards.
We gave ourselves six months to get away from the ups and downs of emotions from the two failed transfers. We did not want to leave any frozen embryos in limbo/storage and there were enough to do a transfer so we had our last attempt at the end of November 2000. I remember thinking that if the first transfer had worked, I would have been close to giving birth, but instead I was still trying to get pregnant. But it was not to be.
We both cried and then closed the door to pregnancy. In a way, I almost think it was harder for T to deal with than it was for me. I had been through the grief of infertility already and this was just a confirmation of what I knew. For T, he had to come to the acceptance that his children would not be biologically his either. Granted, he knew marrying me that adoption was likely the method we were going to build our family but once we started talking about the possibility of me getting pregnant through the IVF, I think he latched on to that idea quickly and was excited about being a dad to his biological children.
In the eighteen months from closing the pregnancy door to starting the adoption process, I said to him several times that he didn’t have to stay with me because of my inability to even be pregnant. Fortunately, he didn’t listen to me…
The Way to Widget (part I)
February 9, 2006I have never really written about adopting Widget and being an adoptive mother. Bits and pieces while we were in the process, mostly on the adoption forums I visit, but never from beginning to present in a cohesive whole.
I think first, though, I need to write about what led us to adoption…
So here goes nothing 
I’ve known most of my life that biological children were not going to be in my future. The radiation treatment I received at the age of 5 1/2 for Wilms’ tumor caused permanent damage to my ovaries and uterus. I started on hormone replacement therapy at the age of 12. Yup, I went right to menopause. Initially, I was not bothered by the infertility aspect of my life. I felt weird having to take hormones to make myself “normal”, but it was a part of my life.
Then I grew up and began dating my future husband, T (well, I thought I was grown up, I was 17). After dating for just over a year, we got engaged. Suddenly, the infertility meant so much more. Here was this guy I had fallen in love with and I realized down the road I wanted children. The loss of being able to have children with him, a combination of us, began to hurt.
Two years later, we were married. Two years after that, we began talking about becoming parents. T already knew about the cancer, the treatment, the resulting infertility because I was open with him from the beginning of our relationship. We talked about adoption and we talked about infertility treatments. My very last visit with my pediatric endocrinologist right before I turned 18, she mentioned that in vitro fertilization with donor eggs might work but it would depend on my uterus and its flexibility. We had an appointment with PH, who is both my doctor and T’s doctor. He referred us to a reproductive endocrinologist.
So that was the next step and all I feel like writing tonight…
A little bit of background
January 24, 2006Since I’m not sure who will read this, I thought I’d share a brief synopsis of who I am.
I am an adoptive mother of one. My nickname for my 14-month-old daughter is Widget, so Widget she will be on here. She came to our family through a domestic open adoption. We see her birthmom (L) and L’s dad (CJ), stepmom (R) and stepsister (S), about 4-6 times per year.
I have been married for 8 1/2 years to T, who turns 30 this year. I’ll be 29 so I still have a year until the dreaded loss of my twenties!
I am a survivor of childhood cancer. I had Wilms’ Tumor at the age of 5 1/2 (a kidney tumor found mostly in children under the age of 5) and the treatment from it left me infertile, thus leading us to the adoption of our daughter.
I struggle with depression and anxiety- some of it stemming from being a cancer survivor, some of it simply biological in nature becasue my mother is in a constant battle with both as well.
I just renewed (or perhaps really finally defined and accepted) a faith and belief in God and Christ. It is amazing already the changes I am finding in myself as I begin to discover what a life with God/Christ at the center of it can become.
