This is Chapter 4 in the Infertility Memoir. Read previous chapters here.
With the weight lifted from sharing our infertility struggles with family, I started to feel a shift. After seeing a post about Pregnancy & Infant Loss Remembrance Day, I finally felt like I wasn’t the only person struggling with infertility or who had experienced the gutwrenching pain that came from experiencing miscarriages. It felt like the clouds were lifting and I could see others who experienced what I was experiencing. So on October 15, 2019, at 7:00 pm CT, we lit the tiny heart-shaped candle the hospital had given us and participated in our first Wave of Light honoring our babies who were lost for Pregnancy & Infant Loss Remembrance Day. I decided to share it on social media because I wanted others to see they were not alone… that having conversations about hard things is not only important but necessary, and normal.
That day was a turning point. I accepted our struggles, I gave a voice to them, I openly shared our story to break the stigma around the topics of infertility and pregnancy loss, and the responses I got forever changed me. People from high school, college, and every duty station we’ve lived commented or DMed me with “me too” or bravely shared their own stories. Before that day I think I had maybe seen one or two posts in the previous five years of people talking about miscarriage. I had never seen a post about infertility. I had over 30 comments or messages. My mind was blown away by how common these struggles were among my friends and family. Conversations that would have never happened if I hadn’t opened up and started talking.
Many of those conversations continued as we navigated the next steps of our journey. Several days later we were off on a multi-state trip to visit with family in Texas and Pennsylvania. While we had planned for a lot more fun before the D&C we shifted as best we could. The trip to South Padre Island was not as enjoyable as I wanted, simply because I couldn’t swim after the procedure due to the risk of infection. I desperately wanted to swim in the ocean and at the pool; the beach is my happy place. Instead, I had cramps and this constant reminder of what could have been. But, we were still able to make a lot of memories with my husband’s grandparents that we cherish to this day now that they are both gone. Then we were off to Pennsylvania for my cousin’s wedding.
We’ve spent a long time living on the west coast and in the middle of the country so we didn’t visit my family as often as we would have liked. Between expensive plane tickets, and then knowing we were going to be pursuing fertility treatments things like vacations and trips to visit family were “luxuries” we couldn’t afford. But we also wanted to be present for big things like weddings. So it was good to spend time with my family, but there were moments with unwelcomed advice and comments. I brushed most of them off, but there was one moment where I almost lost it completely.
The day of my cousin’s wedding was the first chance we had to see a lot of my extended family, I’m talking years, not months. There were lots of hugs and light-hearted conversation. After the ceremony, we all moved inside for the reception. Everything was great, aside from the dress I was wearing being a little loose in the chest area, another reminder that I was no longer pregnant. The dress fit perfectly when I bought it at seven weeks pregnant, with my larger-than-normal chest thanks to pregnancy, but not so much weeks later after those extra hormones had left. Thankfully, I always carry a safety pin in my purse and was able to fix my dress so I felt more comfortable in the restroom.
Shortly after returning from fixing my dress, the toasts started. First up was my cousin toasting his sister (my other cousin) and her husband when the last thing I ever expected to happen, happened. He announced in a cheeky way that my cousin was expecting. Everyone erupted in laughter and a few surprised gasps, followed by whispers. The wind was knocked right out of me, tears started to fill in my eyes, and all the pain that had temporarily left my mind was back front, and center. And I was trapped at our table, there was no way to leave without causing a commotion. It took every single ounce of strength I didn’t know I had to stop those tears and put on a brave face to get through the rest of the speeches. My cousin was going to be having her baby around the same time I was supposed to be having mine. Boy, life felt cruel at that moment and I cried myself to sleep that night. It’s not that I wasn’t happy for them – I was. I was just mourning our loss at the same time.
Overall we had a great trip visiting family, but once we returned home we were ready to determine our next steps. We hoped we could get answers for why we experienced another loss. Long story short we were advised to have the fetal tissue tested, but learned that TRICARE only covered the testing after three consecutive losses which meant we couldn’t have it tested. Our only option was to have genetic carrier testing done, which we were able to do in early December while waiting for my menstrual cycle to resume. Once again, all of our tests came back normal. While it was a huge relief that everything looked good, it was incredibly frustrating to still not have a reason for all of this.
In January 2020 we nervously prepared to have our third IUI. I remember having conflicting feelings as we started our injections and the slew of monitoring appointments. Hopeful that our doctor couldn’t find any underlying cause, but scared because we didn’t have any answers. I really couldn’t understand why we weren’t able to test the tissue when I had the D&C. I kept thinking what if that was the key to the answers we needed? Why force families to experience a third loss when clinically recurrent pregnancy loss is defined as two? But our desire to have a family overshadowed those fears and frustrations as we got closer to our IUI procedure.
We thought the third time was a charm when we found out that the IUI was successful. We were so hopeful, but at the same time very aware of how easily things can change. Our family and friends knew we were trying again, but we kept the results mostly to ourselves. We went about all of our usual post-pregnancy confirmation appointments and we entered the Yearly Training Brief (YTB) season for my husband, which meant lots of travel, after-hours conference calls and that he was busy. Let’s be clear, I refer to the YTB as his dirty mistress, that’s how busy he gets and how often he is away during this time of year. And off he went on a TDY with “her” while I was at home fighting the morning sickness.
My husband had been gone for two or three days when the cramping started. This couldn’t be happening again. I went to the bathroom and sure enough, there was blood. The tears just flowed as I sat there sitting on the toilet unable to find the strength in my legs to get up. I called my clinic, and they told me to come in the next morning for a blood test, and some other instructions to go to the hospital if things got worse.
Eventually, I got off the toilet and crashed onto the couch in a daze. I sent my husband a text asking him to call as soon as he could and I waited. I cried. I screamed. This wasn’t fair. This wasn’t how it was supposed to be. I was crushed, but I was so angry that so many other people could just wake up and decide they wanted to get pregnant, and actually get pregnant.
Once my husband was able to call, I shared the news with him and we cried together on the phone. It was the longest week of my life, waiting for my best friend, my rock, and my safe place to come home. Driving to the airport to pick him up was in a way torturous because I was again in a car experiencing the bleeding that comes with a miscarriage, but also relieved that my husband would be home to comfort me. We grieved, we were frustrated together and knew that the next leg of this journey would likely include IVF.
We scheduled our IVF consult with our doctor for late April and decided to try one final IUI in March while we waited since we had some unused medications from our previous cycle that would expire before we could start IVF. My sweet husband is very frugal, and we sacrificed a lot to pay for those medications so one more IUI seemed like a good plan. Days before we were scheduled for our last IUI the COVID pandemic shut down the world, including our clinic.