It’s National Infertility Awareness Week, 2020. My husband and I got married in 2011 and we immediately started trying to get pregnant. We had no idea the journey we were about to embark on. It took us over four years to get pregnant and we brought our daughter, Hope, home on our fifth wedding anniversary.
Almost nine years into this journey, I am still healing and processing all that we went through and answering difficult questions for myself and our family. Our family doesn’t look the way we originally planned and hoped it would, but it’s not lost on us that we are so blessed and fortunate to have our daughter.
Since our journey to fertility started in 2011, there have been so many twists and turns, highs and lows, joys and devastation, feelings of hope and hopelessness. It’s been a very complicated process. The first part of our journey before we got pregnant with our daughter, now almost four, was very different from the second part of our journey that came after our daughter was born and we tried to give her a sibling.
The first part of our journey was a huge learning process for us. We got married and tried getting pregnant and it wasn’t working. Since I was 35, after 6 months of trying, I went to my doctor for testing. My thyroid was “off” and I was sent to my primary care doctor for additional testing. That led me to being diagnosed with Celiac Disease (Read more about My Story here) and down a healing path I didn’t expect, but I am so thankful for now. Removing gluten from my diet wasn’t enough for me and my autoimmune symptoms persisted, so I began learning everything I could to heal my gut, reduce inflammation, and calm my body so I could get pregnant. During this time, I had two abnormal mammograms two years apart (biopsies were normal) and had to have surgery to remove polyps from my uterus. This went on for years, and eventually, I started to see huge strides in my overall health due to all of the diet and lifestyle changes I was making. As time went on, we were filled with fear of the unknown. Would we ever get pregnant? Would we have a biological child of our own? Were we crazy for continuing to try when we kept running into roadblock after roadblock? Why aren’t our prayers being answered?
After a couple of IUI cycles, we moved on to IVF. We got pregnant with our daughter on our third IVF cycle, more than four years later, and I had a challenging pregnancy. We were finally pregnant and I got into a car accident at 7 weeks, was on pelvic rest for a sub chorionic hematoma until 15 weeks, went into preterm labor at 26 weeks, and ended up on bedrest for almost three months until I was 37 weeks. After trying for months to keep her in my belly, our little miracle baby didn’t come out until about 30 minutes shy of 41 weeks. We were so blessed to have a full term, healthy baby girl.
After our daughter turned one years old we started talking about giving her a sibling and decided to move forward. We ended up having two miscarriages and it was devastating. Here we had spent over four years trying to get pregnant with our daughter and now I was getting pregnant, but not sustaining the pregnancies. Following the miscarriages, my body went into autoimmune flares that took several months to get under control. I was getting older and we questioned how much more my body could take. Were we letting our daughter down and preventing her from having a sibling if we stopped trying? Would we regret stopping? At what point is it too much?
It’s hard when people say to me “well at least you already have a baby”. Yes, it is true that we are so unbelievably blessed to have our daughter and it is not lost on us how fortunate we are. It is also perfectly normal and more than ok to want another baby or feel a sense of loss when your family doesn’t look as you had hoped. Whether you don’t have any children or have five, if you are experiencing infertility or secondary infertility when you want to get pregnant, it is devastating. This is not talked about as much as the pain felt when trying to conceive the first child. There is a lot of focus and support for people struggling to conceive their first child, understandably so. Longing for more children, grieving losses and what you hoped your family would look like, and making the decision to discontinue treatments or trying to conceive are also very difficult and complicated.
I fought like hell to make the necessary changes in order to heal my body and get pregnant. Once we were finally pregnant after over four years of trying to conceive, I fought like hell to stay pregnant and deliver a healthy baby. Now, I am fighting like hell to heal from the grief and trauma we have endured over the last 9 years so I can move forward with a greater sense of peace. Therapy has been helpful for me and I hope to continue to move forward. This journey will test everything about you as a person. I love my daughter and my husband and our family of three. I also deeply grieve the family I always thought we would have and the sibling or siblings our daughter would get to spend her life with.
So I am here supporting all of you fellow warriors, no matter where you are in your fertility journey. Whether you are hoping to get pregnant with your first child or are struggling with having another baby, you are not alone. If you are struggling with the decision as to when to discontinue treatments, either for your first child or another baby, you are not alone. If your family is complete and you are still healing from your journey, you are not alone. I see you and I am sending you so much love.
If you or someone you know is currently struggling with infertility or has in the past, head over to www.resolve.org or www.wearerobyn.co for support, real stories, resources, and advocacy opportunities.
