I hold a kernel of hope deep in my heart that this pregnancy is going to end in a baby that we get to take home. It seems a bit bold and gutsy to confess to that, but it's true. I am not confident in my ability to carry to term, but I think the odds of me getting to something like 28 weeks are much better with a singleton and I think that each new week that passes by with no bleeding bodes well.
Still, it is hard not to be consumed by my fear. This is a different pregnancy, a new pregnancy, and yet it all feels so familiar. I have done this before, walked many miles in these shoes exactly a year before, and we all know how that turned out. Sometimes I even slip up, forget it's not Aminadav and Naava in my belly, and sometimes friends and family slip up, too, asking a question about 'the babies.' If only we really got a do-over, but Aminadav and Naava are still buried in the ground in Israel and in my belly I carry a brand new little one in Canada - the little sister or brother we haven't met yet.
I suppose it makes perfect sense that this winter feels like an extension of last winter and that my pregnancy with this baby feels like an extension of my pregnancy with the twins. After all, this winter and last winter, those babies and this baby are part of the same story and the same journey.
The memories of the terrifying moments are so visceral, so engrained in who I am, it is hard to not constantly relive the sheer terror of my water breaking (exploding really) way too soon and all of the sensory details of the experience.
I was really nervous during the first trimester about an early miscarriage and then I had a brief respite from anxiety, but now I feel my fear slowly creeping back up as I approach the gestation where I began having complications with Aminadav and Naava.
Every morning I wonder is this the day I will go to work, end up in the hospital, and not come home? Is today the day I'll start bleeding or the day my water will break? Is today the beginning of the end, or just the beginning of the beginning, like it should be?
I exist straddling a weird in-between of hope, excitement, and fear. Just like last time, I want to read reviews of fancy stroller models and daydream about baby-wearing and making my own baby food, but in my sleep, I give birth in tens of bizarre and disturbing ways to a baby that is not yet viable. Sometimes in these nightmares the baby is somewhere on the floor but so small I wonder if I will find him at all.
There are limitless demons that can haunt you once one truly awful thing happens - one of those sort of things that isn't supposed to happen. It opens so many new possibilities and avenues of horror. All of the sudden every freak complication seems equally possible because you are one of those people.
The belief that there are those people and then there's you is what keeps your imagination from plunging too deeply into the menagerie of horrors that could befall you. But once you become one of those people that wall comes down and you skate on thin ice because every manner of disaster could happen to you. Suddenly, the improbable odds and freak statistics feel very personal.
So I carry this kernel of hope deep in my heart; this belief that this time will be different but I have another foot grounded in a land of fear and disaster. Praying that in the right time I will land, two feet on the ground, with a screaming, cooing bundle in the 'normal' world - the land of the lucky.
**In mundane medical news, I had a MFM appointment on Thursday. Cervix is funneling a tiny bit at the top, but with fundal pressure, the cervix doesn't go below 2.8-2.9cm and my baseline measurement at 13 weeks was 3.0cm, so there is very little if any change there. The NT results combined with the first trimester screen gives us a 1:29000 odds of trisomy 21 and the appropriate PAPP-A levels combined with u/s suggest that my placenta is functioning well at this point. I think we will do the quad screen at my appointment this week.
I had a hematologist appointment on Friday. They asked me to enroll in a study following pregnancy and medical outcomes of women with bleeding disorders. There is so much known about the role of thrombophilias (clotting) disorders in pregnancy but much less known about the implications of bleeding disorders in pregnancy. The suggestion that my bleeding disorder may have played a role in my abysmal obstetric history is actually pretty unsettling to me.
Showing posts with label faith. Show all posts
Showing posts with label faith. Show all posts
Jan 21, 2013
May 30, 2012
Jul 21, 2011
mikveh night
I am sorry I haven't been so good at writing the past few weeks. My FET cycle has been really uneventful and I've been trying to heal emotionally from our failed IVF and somehow recenter myself. In truth, I've been pretty down and I am having a hard time feeling positive or hopeful, especially since our frosties are of pretty iffy quality. The good news is that assuming they survive thaw, I am on track for a Sunday embryo transfer - that's really soon!
Tonight was my mikveh night (it was actually a little late in my cycle to go to the mikveh, but I spotted a lot this month). The mikveh is a ritual bath that observant Jewish women go to a week after they stop bleeding and it demarcates the separation between menstruation and the time during which a woman is considered ritually pure. The largest practical implication of this practice is that observant Jewish women don't have sex from the time their period starts until their mikveh night.
Many infertile women notoriously find mikveh night difficult because each month serves as another reminder that they are in a new cycle and still not pregnant. Honestly, even as time wore on, I never had a big problem with it. I saw mikveh night as an opportunity for self-renewal and a symbol of new hope and another chance at creating a new life.
By the time mikveh night rolled around each month, the memory of the pain and disappointment of the previous cycle ending had dulled and I could always muster up new hope and some positive energy for a new chance. I would read tehillim (psalms), I would pray...mikveh night was actually a positive spiritual experience for me. I never felt a direct conflict or contradiction between my faith and my hopes and the reality of my situation.
This was the case for the first 21 cycles we tried to conceive, anyway. Not so much anymore. Last month, mikveh night fell a few days before egg retrieval. Luckily, there was no one in front of me and I was in and out in ten minutes, so I really had no opportunity to get all angry and emo about things.
Tonight, there were 7 women in front of me and then 6 who came after. I knew it was going to be a long wait, and then in classic Israeli fashion, two women sort of passively cut in front of me. I just couldn't bring myself to say anything which is absolutely the worst, it just makes me feel like such a sucker and so angry at myself when I can't stand up for myself. That was apparently the beginning of my derailment. And then I had to wait 25 more minutes to finally get called into a room.
By this point, I was doing the whole silent sobbing thing. I knew that if I started talking, I would instantaneously burst into the whole not-so silently sobbing thing. The cleaning woman who was mopping the floor kept trying to make small talk. I just stared at her blankly and silently so she kept repeating herself. Apparently, she was really trying to put me to the test and my solemn face and red-rimmed eyes weren't sending a clear enough message of FOR THE LOVE OF G-D LEAVE ME ALONE WOMAN.
As soon as I got into my changing room I started sobbing. Those big fat ugly uncontrollable tears and of course lots of snot, too. Then I realized that there was no Kleenex or toilet paper in my room for me to clean my face up with. Finally, I gathered myself together the best I could and pressed the buzzer to enter into the mikveh. I immersed, got back into my changing room and proceeded to lose it again. And unlike "a good cry", I didn't feel any better letting it all out, I just felt more deflated.
In truth, I was more angry than sad, angry at the chicks who cut me in line and made me wait 25 more minutes, angry at myself for not speaking up, and more than anything else, I was angry because the mikveh is a reminder that I subscribe to a belief in something larger and in some force that you can reason with and reckon with and yet month after month nothing has changed for me.
It is much easier for me at this point to take a strictly medical, detached view of my infertility - that we are doing a series of medical interventions that cumulatively over a long period of time have some chance of eventually being successful. Emotionally, that's pretty easy to reconcile, but if you place your faith in something else, if you believe in something larger, and yet you fail again and again, how is it possible to keep a positive connection with that faith? Eventually, how do you not become consumed by anger or not take it personally? How do you keep finding solace or a measure of comfort in G-d or belief in any larger force when things just stay the same? After a certain point, isn't it just much more comforting to believe in Bad Luck?
Where do I go from here? Is it going to get easier, in the same way seeing friends and family members and acquaintances get pregnant and have children became easier with time? How will I have the strength to keep going if I reach mikveh trip #44 with no live baby?
Tonight was my mikveh night (it was actually a little late in my cycle to go to the mikveh, but I spotted a lot this month). The mikveh is a ritual bath that observant Jewish women go to a week after they stop bleeding and it demarcates the separation between menstruation and the time during which a woman is considered ritually pure. The largest practical implication of this practice is that observant Jewish women don't have sex from the time their period starts until their mikveh night.
Many infertile women notoriously find mikveh night difficult because each month serves as another reminder that they are in a new cycle and still not pregnant. Honestly, even as time wore on, I never had a big problem with it. I saw mikveh night as an opportunity for self-renewal and a symbol of new hope and another chance at creating a new life.
By the time mikveh night rolled around each month, the memory of the pain and disappointment of the previous cycle ending had dulled and I could always muster up new hope and some positive energy for a new chance. I would read tehillim (psalms), I would pray...mikveh night was actually a positive spiritual experience for me. I never felt a direct conflict or contradiction between my faith and my hopes and the reality of my situation.
This was the case for the first 21 cycles we tried to conceive, anyway. Not so much anymore. Last month, mikveh night fell a few days before egg retrieval. Luckily, there was no one in front of me and I was in and out in ten minutes, so I really had no opportunity to get all angry and emo about things.
Tonight, there were 7 women in front of me and then 6 who came after. I knew it was going to be a long wait, and then in classic Israeli fashion, two women sort of passively cut in front of me. I just couldn't bring myself to say anything which is absolutely the worst, it just makes me feel like such a sucker and so angry at myself when I can't stand up for myself. That was apparently the beginning of my derailment. And then I had to wait 25 more minutes to finally get called into a room.
By this point, I was doing the whole silent sobbing thing. I knew that if I started talking, I would instantaneously burst into the whole not-so silently sobbing thing. The cleaning woman who was mopping the floor kept trying to make small talk. I just stared at her blankly and silently so she kept repeating herself. Apparently, she was really trying to put me to the test and my solemn face and red-rimmed eyes weren't sending a clear enough message of FOR THE LOVE OF G-D LEAVE ME ALONE WOMAN.
As soon as I got into my changing room I started sobbing. Those big fat ugly uncontrollable tears and of course lots of snot, too. Then I realized that there was no Kleenex or toilet paper in my room for me to clean my face up with. Finally, I gathered myself together the best I could and pressed the buzzer to enter into the mikveh. I immersed, got back into my changing room and proceeded to lose it again. And unlike "a good cry", I didn't feel any better letting it all out, I just felt more deflated.
In truth, I was more angry than sad, angry at the chicks who cut me in line and made me wait 25 more minutes, angry at myself for not speaking up, and more than anything else, I was angry because the mikveh is a reminder that I subscribe to a belief in something larger and in some force that you can reason with and reckon with and yet month after month nothing has changed for me.
It is much easier for me at this point to take a strictly medical, detached view of my infertility - that we are doing a series of medical interventions that cumulatively over a long period of time have some chance of eventually being successful. Emotionally, that's pretty easy to reconcile, but if you place your faith in something else, if you believe in something larger, and yet you fail again and again, how is it possible to keep a positive connection with that faith? Eventually, how do you not become consumed by anger or not take it personally? How do you keep finding solace or a measure of comfort in G-d or belief in any larger force when things just stay the same? After a certain point, isn't it just much more comforting to believe in Bad Luck?
Where do I go from here? Is it going to get easier, in the same way seeing friends and family members and acquaintances get pregnant and have children became easier with time? How will I have the strength to keep going if I reach mikveh trip #44 with no live baby?
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