Letting it all hang out

I’ve been thinking of starting a blog for a couple of years.  However, doubts filled my mind:

Would it be helpful for me or anyone else?

Would it be interesting enough or be too negative? 

What if someone I know stumbled across my little corner of the internet, where I post my deepest fears and my uncensored ramblings about my life?

What do have to say that hasn’t already been said already?

I still have all of these doubts.  However, what changed is that I’m feeling like I could use a little (ok, a lot!) more sanity in my life. And I think writing will help me get closer to that.  I need this little space more than ever.

So, here I go.   I’m doing this for me, in spite of all my doubts. 

I’m not sure where to start? So much has happened in the past five years since we started trying to conceive.  For now, I think I’ll just start with yesterday.

Yesterday I finished putting together our medical records for our telephone consultation with CCRM.   I called the nurse at CCRM to see if they would like the information in any particular order?  She said no, that they would be organizing it themselves anyways.

Because we’ve been the patients of three other clinics now, not including the many specialists that my hubby has seen over the years, things have gotten really complicated.  Complicated as in adopting 8 donor embryos from two different couples, back to IVF with our own gametes, a couple of miscarriages and a clotting disorder.  I wanted to give the doctor and nurses the clearest snapshot of where we’ve been so they can give us the best advice on how to move forward.   Right now we’re all in.  I think this will be it for us.  CCRM represents our last ditch effort to become parents through fertility treatments.  They are the big guns, and we’re bringing them out.

After getting copies of all of our records, I consolidated them into a binder.  I made a summary page highlighting the information that I thought was especially important, and referenced the page number that it could be found on.   All in all, there were 236 pages of medical information about us.    It was an exhausting process to put it all together in some logical order. 

Seeing all of the information in black and white, in a 3” blue binder brought forward a lot of feelings.  It clarified a lot of things for me (more to come at another time on this).  It also created a lot of questions, and allowed me to see where things could have been done differently.   It gave me hope that maybe, just maybe, this new clinic might be able to see something different, or be able to help us get closer to our dream of becoming parents. 

Some of the pages made my eyes well up with tears.  Others made me feel full fledged burning anger.    All 236 pages left me in disbelief that this is our life, and that 5 years later, we are still searching for our way out of this IF hell hole.

Some of the pages that were the hardest to read:

·      The very first semen analysis (S/A) that DH did.  Not anticipating (as in, it never even crossed my mind that we could have bad news), I went to my OBGYN alone.  A few minutes later, I was sitting in my car with a piece of paper, a bunch of numbers I didn’t understand with the word “STERILE” written on it in.  Seeing that piece of paper reminds me of bawling hysterically in my car wondering how I was ever going to give D the news. 

·      The copy of the first ever FSH hormone test that I had.  It left me feeling confident in my reproductive abilities.  Ha!  One year later, I learned that my ovaries looked like they were 45 years old instead of the 28 years old that I was at the time.

·      The ultrasound pictures of the twins that we lost earlier this year at 8 weeks, and the blood test confirming another pregnancy loss at 5 weeks.

I want to find away out of this IF land.   That’s what this is all about.