Welcome ICLW!

Welcome, ICLWers!

Ironically, I originally started this blog as a pregnancy blog when I became pregnant after our 2nd IUI. Stupidly optimistic, I thought the blog would be a great outlet for sharing our pregnancy with friends and family back in North America since we live abroad, officially catapulting myself head-first into the land of happy-go-lucky attention whoring Moms-to-be that we all love to despise. Long before we began to share news of our pregnancy or I went public with Journey to Baby G - The Puppies and Rainbows Version, we found out our baby had no heartbeat at our 7.5 week ultrasound.

After the loss, I felt a strong need to both write about my experiences for myself and to interact with others also grappling with infertility and pregnancy loss. This blog has obviously turned out much differently from what I originally intended, but I suppose our story also has ended up much differently than I had hoped just a few months ago. Already, I have benefited so much from being a part of this online community and I am daily humbled by the strength, grace, resilience and intelligence of the other women that populate it.

Currently, we are in the midst of our 3rd Clomid/IUI cycle. I was diagnosed with lean PCOS a few months ago, a diagnosis that was very surprising to me, since I definitely don't fit the classic PCOS picture. I am surprised by how different trying to conceive feels since the loss - perhaps because the loss is so recent.

On one hand, I am still shocked that we got pregnant at all to begin with. On the other hand, I am terrified that I will keep losing babies every time I get pregnant or that I won't get pregnant again. It seems like we keep falling on the wrong side of the statistics, so it is hard to have faith that one of these months it will finally be different. While I am excited to be back in the game, it is even harder to imagine myself pregnant with a healthy pregnancy and like everyone else, I hate not knowing how much pain it will take to get there or even if we will get there.

When we aren't obsessing over our future offspring, I bide my time in a research lab and Y operates on peoples' eyes with hands infinitely more coordinated and steady than my own.