7.24.20 Due Date [& More] Reflection
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7.24.2020
My sweet little angel in heaven, today would have been your due date. July 24, 2020 will forever live in my brain as a momentous day even though you will never be with us.
While I have not let myself dwell on the loss of you for too long these last 7 months, some days it creeps up on me unexpectedly, and I’m paralyzed by thoughts of what could have been. I do oftentimes find myself wondering, “will it ever be?”. Will we ever get pregnant again? Will we ever actually experience parenthood? Will I make it through another pregnancy without loss? Will I make it through a successful pregnancy in one piece or will I constantly struggle against the fear of another loss?
Other times I wonder, “do I even want to keep doing this?”, “do I even want to keep trying?”
My and my husband’s experience with conceiving has not been an easy one. Our journey started with a new year 2.5 years ago in January 2018. I knew almost from the start that something wasn’t right. With how regular my cycles were, I knew we should have been getting pregnant. But we weren’t. Each month would tick by and stay the same. Period on time. Fertile window. Two Week Wait (TWW). Aaaaaaaaaaaaand repeat. Forever.
The assault of emotions when you’re “trying” (TTC) can be sheer agony and most times is explainable and isolating, literally. At any one given time in the last 2.5 years, I have felt some version of emotions below… and more.
Confused / Frustration → what am I / are we doing wrong?
Controlling → towards my hubby and situations around me
Defensive → towards my friends checking in and towards the subject of pregnancy period
Despair / Doubt / Dread → what if we never get pregnant? what does that mean for me as a woman?
Disconnected → from the present / stuck in my head and research online
Discouraged / Reluctant / Tired → don’t want to try again
Distracted / Worried → unable to / extremely difficult to focus on anything else; put the stress and the wondering out of your mind
Failure / Shame → as a woman / not good enough
Fear → over the unknown, the future. will we go through this again?
Obsessive → researching symptoms online / every twinge, tuck, pull, cramp, feeling during cycle
And also Heartache, Hopelessness, Isolation, Less Than, Longing, Low Mood, Panic, Powerless, Sadness, Sorrow.
For our TTC journey, it turned out that I had Endometriosis. Albeit, minimal or what would be considered Stage 1. I don’t live in constant pain or have to have regular surgeries to function normally. No, I just had 1 really big chocolate cyst on my right ovary that was causing a whole heck of a lot of issues. We found out and had it verified in early 2019. 3 months after I called for the initial appointment (that’s how booked up my doctor’s office was for a mere fertility consult!) and then 3 more months after we had it verified.
There is so much WAITING in pregnancy and EVERYTHING that goes into getting pregnant.
But, by March/April 2019, we knew what was “wrong”. The solution? Laparoscopic surgery. Scheduled for 3 more months later. July 5, 2019. 1 year ago this month. The purpose? To remove the 6cm cyst (yup, that’s the size of a tangerine) and also perform exploratory surgery to confirm the severity of the Endometriosis. Thankfully, the exploratory proved minimal and the lab results showed all benign cells and tissue. All good things.
And I actually felt amazing after I healed from the surgery. For one. Mentally, I was feeling so hopeful and positive about our TTC journey. I was cautiously optimistic, but optimistic, nonetheless. For two, physically, I had no more pain on my right side. Unbeknownst to me before all this, the cyst was actually causing me cyclical pain all around the area of my right hip. I thought it was an old soccer/dance injury come to haunt me again in my (getting) old age, but sadly, it was my body trying to tell me something was not okay over here.
I still sometimes have phantom pain on that side. My doctor says the cyst was likely there for almost 2 years before I started noticing it (the pain that is).
Regardless, 3 months after surgery, my husband and I were pregnant for the first time. EVER. I will never forget it. We were visiting Disney World at the time, and I found it so fitting that the babe and I were already there together, riding rides in my (and our future) happy place. It was so perfect.
2 months after that was our first ultrasound. This begins the part of our journey that still brings complete and utter anxiety, stress, and sadness. I cannot explain the almost PTSD like experience I have thinking about it. It is a time and place that feels so dark in my memory. A bottomless pit with no light. No way out. And no hope.
That my body could hoodwink me into thinking our pregnancy was on track, that everything was just fine, is almost unfathomable and explainable to me. I could not accept the fact that I kept getting positive after positive pregnancy tests with soaring HCG marks and a perfectly formed gestational sac, and then oops, somehow all that to actually mean nothing. Absolutely, utterly nothing.
There was no baby. No fetal pole. No semblance of what we know to be a baby in the womb. There was just nothing. The pregnancy had stopped so early in the process that my body likely reabsorbed what had started developing because something solely due to biology wasn’t developing on track. And yet my body hadn’t quite figured that part out yet. So, in the process of also realizing our first pregnancy was not viable, I was also going through what is known as a Missed Miscarriage.
Yet another thing about pregnancy I’d never heard about, never learned about, didn’t even know was actually a thing and can actually be high risk.
Because I had just been (or what felt like “had just been”) to the hospital for my Endometriosis treatment, neither me or my husband were excited about the fact that we’d potentially be going back there again. For the DNE, Dilate and Evacuate, procedure.
And may I also just point out that this was 2 weeks before Christmas, my 32nd birthday, and New Years. This was the absolute last thing I wanted to think about. I was avoiding this next step in the I-had-a-miscarriage-and-oh-make-that-a-missed-miscarriage process like the plague. We had been planning to share the news with our parents and family as a Christmas present and surprise. Sadly, God had other plans.
And so we opted for what the doctor’s call Medical Management to handle an nonviable pregnancy and to also treat a missed miscarriage. I felt like I was giving myself an abortion, honestly. I was so terrified of electively having to induce the miscarriage that I felt like I was actually aborting it. And I was, in all honesty, terrified unfathomably so that I was doing that. That there was actually a baby and somehow we’d missed it.
I spent New Years Eve prepping for the medically induced miscarriage that I was to execute all by myself. Hindsight: I would not elect this option a second time. 3 rounds of medicine (suppository, mind you) did not clear all of the pregnancy tissue. It got all but 2cm at the very top of my uterus. That part was handled through the DNE procedure at the hospital.
In between all that were about 8 more ultrasounds and so much stress I could hardly function.
Finally, 12 weeks after our first ultrasound, I was finally, fully not pregnant. And it was the saddest day of my life. Between October and November, I was blissfully pregnant, unaware that anything was amiss. In December we found out otherwise. And between December and January, I was miscarrying.
In February, I was emotionally and physically still recovering. I spent a lot of time by myself coming to grips with all that had happened to me, to us, to our future family. I started reading again. Like a fiend. Anything to escape my reality. My first period didn’t come for another 6 weeks after the DNE at the end of January, and then 2 more cycles were spent in what I’m calling recovery - I could tell that my body was not cycling normally. Then COVID-19 happened. And by April, we opted to halt our TTC efforts for a month or two.
And now it’s July. I’m still not pregnant, but I think that’s okay.
I’ve been working from home since March (but have since left my 9-5 to pursue other ventures of my own). And SO MUCH is going on in our society at large.
How could I have even IMAGINED being pregnant during all of this? In hindsight, I don’t think it would have been possible. My stress level would have been through the roof to outer space, back and around again before my second trimester was over.
All that to say, I still have hope. Not only in my and my husband’s TTC journey, but in humanity and the world, and our community at large. Things will never be perfect or exactly how you or I planned them or want them to be. But hope is always there. Course correction and revaluation of ourselves and our situation is always there.
Be kind. Look within. Support your community. Allow grace. Stand up for what’s right. Breathe. Rest. Recuperate. Repeat.
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I’m Leah. Wife, believer, and fur mama of 2 [now also a mama to 1 angel baby]. I have a minor obsession with coffee, yoga pants, and thriving at home. Books, wine, and essential oils are also my jam. I'm truly just a homebody at heart with a knack for photography & content creation. This is my creative space.
