Pregnancy After Infertility (+ Resources)

Infertility and IVF were a long journey for us. After five transfer cycles, marked with gaps, attempted treatments, and surgeries, all I wanted was a baby. Every extra day I had to wait, every delay, cancellation, and failure felt like a knife. The day after our cycles would fail, I would lay in bed, unmoving, dreaming of that embryo that hadn’t stayed.

Finally getting pregnant brought me immeasurable joy. It also brought my anxiety, guilt, and fear. Having a baby had cured me of childlessness, but it had not cured me of infertility. I remember being a few months pregnant, and walking around the Target baby section. Mentally, I found myself separating myself from the other mothers – we were not the same, even though I knew nothing about them. And I was surprised at myself. In my mind, somehow their experience was different. In reality, I had no idea what they had gone through – it could easily have been the same as me. But in my head, I saw them as in a different world to me. Their pregnancies were joyful, and happy – mine were punctuated by daily injections, and “let’s see if this one lasts”.

My husband often talks about how he feels he missed out. There was never an innocence to us making a baby – everything was planned, deliberate, and scientific. We never had a moment where we both looked down at a pregnancy test, giddy and in awe. We never held on to that secret, waiting to tell family and friends our news and surprise them. Instead, we had medication regimens, injections, and text chains updating people on the latest numbers the doctors had given us. There was no surprise, no anxious and excited waiting. There was stress, and fear, and disappointment.

When I got pregnant, part of me had expected that all of that pain and trauma would disappear. Everything would be okay now. But it wasn’t. I still was fearful, constantly, that something would go wrong. I didn’t feel like other pregnant women. I felt different, halfway between infertility and parenthood. I was still jealous of other people’s pregnancies, even holding my own. I found myself still envying women with lots of kids, or who had ‘oops’ babies, staring longingly at the mom at Starbucks with her four kids under five. When friends told me of their pregnancies, I still had to swallow jealousy. And I didn’t understand – how could I still be or upset by their happy news? I had achieved what I wanted. I was ashamed of myself – how could I still feel that way?

I still often feel as if I exist in the ‘in between’. I feel as if I exist in the middle of two groups – an imposter among those who conceived effortlessly, but no longer entirely a part of the infertility community that hasn’t yet found success. On one hand, I decorate my baby’s nursery. I shop for baby clothes, I buy swaddles and pacifiers.  And yet, often, pregnancy announcements still knock the breath out of me. I feel guilt if I even utter something akin to a complaint about the experience of pregnancy. I am pregnant, but still, the pain of what it took to get here exists somewhere in the back of my mind, rushing forward at the most unexpected of times.

It is hard to acknowledge these feelings, because you feel as if you aren’t entitled to them. After all – you are pregnant. You have the thing so many other people are dreaming of. You achieved the goal. You feel as if you shouldn’t still feel scared, or sad, or envious. You feel as if you shouldn’t complain that pregnancy is hard, that growing a baby is difficult.

I have to remind myself to be patient, and to give myself room. I remind myself I am allowed to feel how these feelings. I am allowed to grieve the ‘regular’ conception and pregnancy experience. Infertility doesn’t just go away, and neither do the experiences it gave to me. The memories, the procedures, the medications, they are still with me, always, and they shape my reactions to the world.

Below are some resources I have found helpful in this adjustment period. Whether they bring advice or just solidarity, I encourage you to also read them.

Resources:

An Unexpected Family Outing – I’ll Always Be Jealous When I Hear Someone’s Pregnant

Resolve.org – Pregnancy After Infertility

Shady Grove Fertility – Dilemmas of the Deliberate Pregnancy

Six Things Never to Say to Someone Who’s Pregnant After Infertility

Parents.com – You Know You’re Pregnant After Infertility If …

Our Bodies, Ourselves – Pregnancy After Infertility or Previous Pregnancy Loss

Resolve.org – I’m Pregnant, Now What?

I’m a Mom Now, But My Fertility Struggles Still Make Me Jealous

I Have A Child and Am Pregnant Again, But I Still Struggle With Infertility

 

Our Successful Transfer Story

Our IVF journey was not straightforward. Our first and second transfer cycle both failed. Our third and fourth were both cancelled, days before the scheduled date. By our fifth, I was ready to give up. It was my husband who said we should give it this one final try. I agreed, although I wasn’t thrilled about it – my heart was tired and my soul was heavy.

Baby on the Way

IVF is the hardest journey we have ever embarked on. It has changed us, and even now, we remain different people from who we were when we started. I think we will always be different people, really. There is no way not to be. And for a while, I saw no light at the end of the tunnel.

I was ready to give up. I was tired and exhausted, sick of daily injections, just sick of hoping. We had been trying and failing for so long, and with each turn of the corner, we discovered some new hurdle, something else not working quite right in my body, another thing to overcome. After our 2nd cancellation and 4th failed transfer round, I told Chris I wanted to give up. My soul was tired, and my body was bruised and sore.

And he said no. “One more try.” I agreed, somewhat begrudgingly. And it took. That one more try is arriving – June 2020. They called us in the car, on the way to Washington DC. Deep in the Virginia mountains, hearing the word “congratulations” through the phone and not much else. I did not cry, I laughed. It was as if someone lifted a weight off of me – it was truly, really real.

So many people have helped us get here. Countless people have prayed for us, hoped with us. They have cried when we cried, and rejoiced when we did. They have pulled us from the trenches on days it all seemed too much, and sat with us at the bottom of them when we couldn’t bear to surface. We are eternally grateful to all of them, and to have a baby that is already so loved, so cared for, and so wanted.

Total Counts:

70ish Office Visits (60 miles each day – 4200 miles total, or the equivalent of a one-way trip from North Carolina to Alaska)

200+ Self-Administered Injections + Blood Draws

3 Abdominal Surgeries

1 Egg Retrieval, and 5 Transfer Rounds

 

We will see you in June, Baby MacKay! And truly, we will never forget the journey it took to make you.

The End of Frozen Embryo Transfer #3

Written June 20th, 2019, the Day of Cancellation

Our embryo transfer was cancelled today. Cancelled, like we never even got to try. This cycle had been perfect. PERFECT. I had an actual lining, my estrogen wasn’t low. And, cautiously, I was so full of hope. But something changed, and, today, instead of picking up medicine to take on transfer day, I picked up the drugs to flush my body of all the artificial hormones. And, for the first time ever, I cried on the phone with the nurse. Two failed transfers, two babies that never showed up, and I’ve never cried on the phone calls. Because I am strong and brave, and I saved all those tears for post conversation. But today, I am tired. I am so tired.

Maybe Babies

On my fridge, there are six pictures. A wedding portrait. Some travel mementos. My husband with some family friends. Four pictures, surrounded by fridge magnets, papers, bills, periodically buried under chaos. They are reminders of good days, of old adventures, and of family and friends.

The final two pictures sit in their own area of the fridge – a whole space to themselves, reserved, untouched by the mess. Two violet-tinged pictures, one little embryo in each, dated for months ago.

Facing Infertility When you Work in Childcare

The other day, I went to a meeting for work. Usually, I end up working remotely – taking calls from excited expectant mothers and fathers who need help with caring for their newborn after they arrive. We often chat on the phone for close to an hour for that first phone call, discussing their excitement and their nerves, their family structure, sometimes their journey to the baby.

But the other day, I went to a meeting, and discussed many of these things in person. We talked about the mental health of new mothers and babies, and the things that can affect it going wrong and right. I talked to a coworker about her pregnancy scare. I talked to others about their children at home, about the babies they nanny, about their own prenatal and postpartum experiences. During the meeting, I got an email from Enfamil, welcoming me to the second trimester of pregnancy (which, I figured out, was where I would be had only transfer one worked.) I am not sure how I got on that list, or why I was still on it at all.

PIO Shots, and Other IVF Adventures

When I first found out I would for sure have to do the progesterone in oil (PIO) shots, I cried. To be fair, I was full of about every hormone known to mankind, in levels not found naturally in nature. But, I cried. I cried to my husband, to my therapist, to my mother. Because when you google IVF (as you naturally do, when someone tells you that’s the way you’re going to have babies), you’ll inevitably stumble along the forum posts that state matter-of-factly and only mildly hysterically that they are the most painful, most awful, most terrible thing to ever happen. Ever.

IVF.

I have debated so long and so hard about writing this. Because, how do you even begin to talk about this topic, when it’s something that you’re supposed to keep so quiet? I have always been told it takes a village to raise a family. And here we are, needing a village to make one.