Today is Pregnancy and Infant Loss Awareness Day. So I felt compelled to write. Yet, I’ve spent more time then I’d like to admit staring at a blank screen trying to put words to my thoughts and figure out what I actually want to say.
Part of me really wants to write about the five losses we endured. The heart wrenching pain of being told your child is not viable and waiting days to confirm that your child is dying and there was nothing you can do about it. The emotional toll that comes from waiting for your much loved baby to die, and to start hoping that they die quickly because you cannot live this way and you fear they could be suffering. Or the emotions that come along with the moment you are told there is no heartbeat. Or even the complex emotions that lived within me as my husband and I had to make an educated decision weighing the pros and cons of each type of miscarriage while preparing to actually have a miscarriage. Or the fear that consumes you as you lie on the operating table waiting to be put under so that surgery cab start to remove what was your child but now is referred to as the products of conception. Or the gut wrenching physical pain that goes along with each miscarriage. Or the daily fear that future pregnancies after loss are tainted by. Or the anguish I carry to this day (and expect I always will) when we ended the life of our little girl when we terminated for medical reasons at an abortion clinic.
Part of me truthfully wants to pretend that it was all a bad dream. I remember our losses, I will always carry them with me, almost as though I have their little lives etched into my soul. Yet, in someways I wish I didn’t have to. I wish I could just erase all of that from my memory as if it never happened. Maybe that could mean that my children actually lived to term, took their first breaths and are playing in the yard as I type – as if we just never went through any of our losses. Or maybe, and slightly more selfishly, that just means they never even existed and I am not left carrying their memories silently in my heart. Or maybe, what I just really wish is that it didn’t have to hurt to so much to say goodbye to your child far too soon.
Another part of me wants to write about how we learned to live with and in spite of our losses. How I’ve been working to reclaim my life after experiencing so many losses. We were fortunate to find a way to share our love with a child to call our own, in spite of all our losses. And, not a moment goes by that I’m not thankful we chose adoption and we were chosen to parent our amazing son.
I could even write about how frustrating and hurtful it is that people still do not acknowledge our lost children. Not a single word has been spoken by any of our friends or family about our miscarriages or our termination since we decided to pursue adoption. I wish I could tell people that pretending it didn’t happen doesn’t help us. I wish I could lift the cone of silence that surrounds pregnancy and infant loss.
But even as all of these feelings exist within me, what I really want to write about is how I desperately hope someone out there is able to read our experience and know they are not alone. I wish I could tell every mother out there who experiences the loss of their child that it’s okay to talk about your lost child and your lost dreams. It’s okay to cry. It’s okay to want to run away and hide. It’s okay to be sad. It’s okay to smile and laugh again. Life will never be the same, but you will survive and you will learn to live again and it will be okay again someday.
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Well, that’s a sentence I never thought I’d write!
But, I also never thought I’d go through recurrent pregnancy loss. So, I guess it just is what it is.
.
Mr. MPB and I had a rather brief conversation this last weekend about the actual way in which we could become pregnant with the donor embryo(s), if we choose to proceed. I say brief because we both 100% agree that my uterus is not an option. The facts are rather simple:
- My uterus is the reason we lost our 5 babies. My body, while not experiencing extensive immunological issues, has reverse blood flow to my uterus and suspected silent endometriosis. While We are still not convinced I have endometriosis, but we know without a doubt our babies died due to a lack of blood flow which is absolutely critical to the development of an embryo/fetus.
- The treatment for said medical issues is not available to us locally. In order to receive treatment I would have to fly to the USA to undergo surgery for the possible endometriosis. Then, fly bi-weekly for multiple months, possibly through the second trimester (if we made it that far) for medications to be administered. All of this would be uninsured, meaning we would pay directly out of our pockets. From a purely financial perspective this could easily be over 100K without any guarantee of a successful outcome.
- We have Baby MPB. I am simply not willing to travel and be away from him every two weeks potentially for months. I want to be present and part of his childhood. We both know we will not have a second child at the expense of Baby MPB.
To be blunt, the fact is, if my uterus worked, we would just try the old fashioned way and wait until we got pregnant. When it comes to our specific infertility journey, we were actually really good at the conception part. Honestly, we would go about a second child the old fashioned way simply because it’s the most affordable way to have a child. And, if my body worked the way it should, trying the old fashioned way is also the least complicated. But our reality simply isn’t that simple and there’s no point on pretending it is.
As for IVF to use my own eggs and Mr. MPB’s sperm. That is also completely off the table. Mr. MPB’s contribution is high quality (he tested completely fine through all our losses) and doesn’t involve major medical procedures to get. However, I am simply not willing to put my body through more and I don’t think Mr. MPB would encourage me to. I’ve been through enough physically already with all our losses and I simply have no desire to put my body through the process of IVF. I have no desire to experience all the side effects of the medications and I do not want to go back to the mental stuff associated with trying again – I’m really happy to be out of our multi-year pregnancy bubble. And I’ve been working hard to get back to where I was from a purely physical perspective. And probably more importantly, I’ve worked bloody hard to learn to mostly trust my body again and mostly not hate my body. I’m not willing to jeopardize that.
And its probably worth nothing that at we simply do not care about having a genetic link to our children. That’s just not an important factor for us. And so, we just don’t feel the need to go down the route of trying ourselves again.
All this means that we have decided that if we proceed with embryo adoption we will have to find a gestational carrier. And what we both know is that this single decision is what will make our desire to have a second child very challenging and possibly even impossible.
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