4/20/2017 0 Comments Ramblings from an infertileIt’s been ten days since my last blog post. I swear I thought it had been 2 months. Time has essentially stopped moving for me. The other day I started freaking out because I could’ve sworn I should’ve had my period by now. I was only cycle day 22. It hasn’t even been a month since our last IVF failed and it feels like it’s been years.
In the last few days/weeks I have really experienced a lot of emotions and numbness all at once. Some days I would feel like I was doing okay and then I would suddenly become overwhelmed with sadness and despair. It seemed like it would come from nowhere. I think so far the most important thing has been staying busy. Matt and I had some gift cards to the movies so we took advantage of those and spent this past Sunday cleaning our yard. It’s definitely very helpful for me to get out of the house as much as possible. While we were working on the yard, I had a moment where I felt genuinely happy. It caught me so off guard I had to stop what I was doing to think about it. I actually had a fleeting thought, “Is it okay for me to feel happy?” I started feeling guarded with myself. It’s a really scary thought to feel happy. I know what the crash of disappointment feels like and it’s a lot to bear. It’s likely going to be two more months before we even have our next transfer. I started questioning myself. Do I really want to move forward with the donor eggs? Well, we’ve already signed the contract and put down our deposit. So I’m guessing it’s too late to back out now. I’ve really had to sever the connection in my brain with the money. For the next two years, no matter what happens, we will be paying about $417 a month for a total of $10,000. I didn’t even pay $10,000 for the car I currently drive. It’s so much money; I just cannot think about it. I can’t let myself think about all the money we’ve already spent either. I’m still having bad days. More good than bad, so I feel like that’s a good place to be going. Right now I don’t know if I consider myself “happy” or not. Some days I feel like I could be happy. But the happiness feels pretty empty. I think maybe I’m just more “neutral” rather than truly happy. Not feeling sad seems to be the new happy. Part of me wants to just give up and start trying to figure out how to have a life without children. When I hear people complain about how tired they are because their kids are doing whatever I have found myself thinking, “I can sleep whenever I want. I can go to the store whenever I want. I can do whatever I want.” When people complain about how much their children are costing them, I’ve been thinking: “I can spend all of my money on me for the rest of my life. I can travel, buy nice things, and have nice clothing. After we pay off all this tremendous debt of course…” But then I’ll hear a child laugh or say something cute. I’ll see a family filming their baby dancing or bouncing a toddler on their lap. And I’ll think, “I’ll never know what that is like. I’ll never be a mom and have that relationship. I’ll never be proud of my child for making the right decision. I’ll never get to worry about where they are late at night.” And then I’ll start the cycling of, “All of my babies died before I even got to know their gender.” Every time that cycle starts, I feel like I have to start over. This is an endless, all-consuming process. There are not many minutes in the day when I am not thinking or knowing that I am infertile. Many moons ago we used to refer to people with disabilities as “suffering from” some ailment. A person might be “suffering from diabetes.” Then it became politically incorrect to use this language. It made these people feel victimized. So we changed our language to a person “is diabetic.” Then that too fell out of fashion because the person wasn’t a person. They were their condition. Now we say a “person has diabetes.” I am totally in favor of person first language. However, there are some days (let’s be honest…most days) I AM SUFFERING from infertility. There are most days where I AM INFERTILE. To say that I am a person with infertility really seems to diminish what feels like is happening. It makes it sound like I’m a perfectly fine person walking around who happens to be infertile. But the experience of infertility does not feel that way when you’re living it. In the throes of infertility, I am eating, sleeping, breathing, blinking, peeing, infertility. It literally feels like there is no escaping it. I really have no idea where I’m going with this post. After re-reading it, it seems rambling and has no real direction or point. But, that kind of feels exactly like my life right now. So, it is what it is. We will supposedly get updates once our donor starts her medications. I keep checking my patient portal multiple times per day hoping for some news. But, I know that her egg retrieval won’t be until sometime in May. Until then the days will be endless. “If you could hear the insane stuff going on in my head, it would scare the hell out of you. Probably. Or fascinate you. Depends on how easily you’re started, I guess.” – Jenny Lawson
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Heather Joyce
Trying to conceive. Archives
April 2018
Categories |