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| Who is Lady Ultrasound, owner of the Lupron belly? |
Age: 37
Location: A prison of my own making
Chronology:
- 1975-1997: Great childhood and fair college experience.
- 1997-2005, i.e. my 20's: Anxiety and depression; both in therapy and on medication on-and-off.
- Married to a wonderful man-- the best man I know, really; the most Christian; a man who would make/would have made a miraculous father-- in 2005.
- Miscarriage #1 in 2008 at 10 weeks. I had heard our little baby's heartbeat. I had posted our ultrasound picture on the wall. I had been scared and surprised (we had literally never before tried). It was during the 2008 election. I miscarried naturally, so we didn't do any genetic testing. I was destroyed.
- I lived as a destroyed person.
- Tried to conceive "naturally" (though now I resent that term and won't use it without quotation marks) for 3 years. Nothing eventful happened during that time beyond having occasional cysts on my ovaries.
- Met with my current fertility doctor in 2011. Had an HSG, which showed I had a blocked left fallopian tube as if from scar tissue. Since I had had no surgeries that would have explained the scarring, the doc sort of looked up at me and asked, "Have you had a lot of sexual partners?" Boy, buddy, were you barking up the wrong tree. In a word, no. So the cause of that scar tissue was unknown. I suspect it was a cyst that never healed properly.
- The week after we got the results back from that HSG, we found out I had conceived again. "Naturally." Very odd timing, although I had read apocryphal stories on the internet about how HSG tests "blow open" the tubes and often result in pregnancies within 3 months of the procedure. Yes, I had started yoga and yes I was sleeping a bit more, and so it's very possible that my improved mental state was the cause of our conceiving... But I really no longer have any faith whatsoever in any connection between my mental state and my fertility, so I basically attribute that conception to the HSG.
- That pregnancy turned out to be a blighted ovum (JESUS can they come up with any more traumatizing language?). I began to spot around 6 weeks. We did a D&C and we learned we had lost our baby from chromosomal abnormality, specifically Triploidy. She would have been a little girl. God rest your soul, my baby.
- IUI #1 (failed): December 2011. The day after they called to give me the negative results, my husband and I left town to spend Christmas with the Fertility Goddess, my sister-in-law. Picture a woman in a ball (writing "fetal position" hits a bit close to home, no?) on a bed in a hotel room, calling her doctor, asking for a new prescription for Lexapro.
- IUI #2 (failed): March 2011.
- IVF (cancelled) June 2012. The doc only got 4 eggs, which right there meant something, and although all 4 fertilized, none was genetically normal.
- A dormant year. I focused on my job while my husband moved mountains to raise another $25,000 for egg donation and combed through the egg donor profiles I find creepily similar to Facebook.
- Here we are. Now. Our egg donor cycle is here and schedule for mid-July. My beta test will be at the end of July.
- The future. The options:
- Frozen cycles until all our frozens are gone
- Adoption
- Child-free
