Choosing Joy

Wow I’ve been absent.  I wish I could just say I had writers block or was so busy preparing for baby…but alas, it’s really just that I was lacking motivation to write. To be honest my motivation has been pretty non-existent all around lately…losing motivation to stay positive,  losing any semblance of having something helpful to say on the situation, losing the ability to choose joy over sadness. You always hear about how infertility takes away your joy, brings people to a dark place, makes it hard to be happy. I was determined not to let that be me. But here I sit wallowing in my baby-less sorrows and forgetting that I have quite a bit to be grateful for in my life.

So today, Thanksgiving, I’m choosing to reflect on all of the great things that I have to be thankful for.  I’m choosing joy. In my grand plan of how I thought life was going to work out,  a year ago today Josh and I would’ve been telling our families we were expecting. I even had a few idea of the cute ways we could tell them…..ya, we all see how that one went…

I’ve spent a good deal of last year obsessing over the one thing I want most and don’t have, rather than being grateful for the things that I do have. So today I’m refusing to dwell on the have-nots, and instead being grateful for the many pluses we have had through this journey.

I’m thankful for a husband who has been by my side and supported me through the hardest year of my/our lives. It’s impossible to explain the constant grief to an outsider, but it’s real.  I think we’ve done a relatively good job of making the mess we’re in bring us closer rather than driving us apart.

I’m thankful for friends and family who have been open and willing to listen to me bitch and complain, and who have been supporting us through every step of the way even though I’m relatively certain it’s uncomfortable for them. Just being here for us and continuing to be our friends, even though we are in a different spot than most of you is a godsend.

*And I’m even extra thankful for friends who are willing to go to the ends of the earth to help us reach or dream of being parents. You know who you are* 😘

I’m thankful for a job and a career that allows me to even consider assisted reproductive therapies. There are plenty of people out there for whom a diagnosis of infertility means the end, because they don’t have the financial means to do anything about it. I’m doing everything I can to change that and advocate for better access to care, but until then I’ll continue to be grateful that I am not in their shoes.

I’m thankful for a couple wonderful colleagues who have been extremely supportive and willing to switch me shifts at the last-minute, because there’s not really much planning ahead for these types of things.

I’m thankful for all the fun we’ve had, trips we’ve taken, last-minute plans that we can say yes to in the last 2 years. I always said I wanted to enjoy just being married for a little bit before kids and the vast majority of the beginning of our marriage was spent with me in school and Josh working 2 jobs, so you can imagine how much fun that was haha.

I’m grateful for 2 amazingly adorable, fun, loving and a little bit crazy pups to come home to that snuggle me when I’m sad and make even the worst days tolerable.

I’m thankful for a new doctor who keeps calling me “young”  This may sound silly but when you’re tiptoe-ing on the edge of the all dreaded Advanced Maternal Age” hearing from your REI that you’re young is reassuring that maybe things will work out.

So today I choose joy. And I will try to choose joy again tomorrow, and the next day.  And I’m sure there will be more days that I’m not positive, but when I realize it’s happening I plan to consciously choose happiness instead.  And I wish joy every day, even if it’s the smallest dose, to all of you.

HAPPY THANKSGIVING!!

Good Greif

Infertility is an emotional roller coaster to say the least, and can be quite overwhelming at times.  Month-to-month excitement turns to month-to-month anxiety, which inevitably becomes to month-to-month dread….

A few months in the grand scheme of life seems so trivial to people not dealing with this hell. Ohhhhh how I wish they could just understand how the days seem like weeks, and two weeks drags on like an eternity. They don’t realize that the journey can be all-consuming. It’s an unrelenting grieving process. Daily, monthly, with each CD1, with each failed treatment, each less than stellar SA, each pregnancy announcement, and baby shower, and birthday party, and……  All the while there’s no end in sight to our battle. And the ongoing and endless grief is EXHAUSTING at times.

I’ve spent the better part of the last few months busying myself enough not to think *too much* about my baby-less life or the mess that lies ahead.  But every so often a burst of immense sadness just breaks through and I start to feel totally hopeless.  Sometimes it’s the big things like pregnancy announcements and new babies, some days it’s just the small things like seeing how proud a mom is of her child, the emotion, the tears, and knowing those tears may never be your own. And some days it’s probably a combination of too many things to name…

To be totally honest there are few days that go by that I don’t in some way think about being a mom, that I’m not reminded somehow about my predicament. I’m not saying I’m laying on my couch with a pint of Ben and Jerry’s and a box of Kleenex sobbing into my dog’s neck every day (you can picture that this has happened before right?!?!). But in some small way the infertility bug finds a way to make an appearance just about daily. To “just not think about it” at all is impossible.

I try really hard to stay positive n this journey, but some days I just don’t have it in me to believe and have faith and be upbeat and look for the silver lining. Some days I just want to scream and cry and ask what the hell we did to deserve this, when there are millions of people out there that want nothing to do with kids getting knocked up daily, and parents treating their kids like crap, and not realizing the true blessing that they are.

I’m trying to remind myself that it’s okay to not always be positive, and that it’s okay to have all these big emotions.  Because this thing called infertility just. plain. sucks.  And it IS a grieving process. And I would never tell someone who lost a loved one, or who was diagnosed with cancer, or any other major event that comes with grief to “just not think about it,” or that they are “thinking about it too much,” or that “there are plenty of people going through worse things so count your blessings.”

Give yourself permission to grieve.  As often as you need to. And try to find support to help you through the grief. It’s out there if you are willing to open up and look for it.

“The idea we can go it alone defies the natural world. We are like animals; we need ties to others to survive. We live in the shelter of each other.” ~ Dr. Susan Love

 

 

 

You are not alone

Lets face it, this journey can seem quite dark an isolating at times. I’s easy to get into a rut when month after month you keep getting BFNs, or in my case aunt flo keeps coming a knocking, no matter how much I try to tell her she’s not welcome.  It can feel like no one could possibly understand the constant letdown. And it’s true, anyone who hasn’t been through it truly cannot understand the pain of wanting so badly to create a life and be a mom and not being able to do so.  And it can be especially hard when everyone around you is having babies on top of babies on top of babies….

While it can be a very lonely road, I’m here to tell you it doesn’t have to be.  It’s quite eye-opening and freeing if you start opening up about your struggles, at least that’s the experience I’ve had.  Not only have close friends been very supportive, I’ve been amazed at the number of people I find are battling or have struggled with infertility themselves.   Take this past weekend for example:

A good friend of ours was getting married, and my husband was a groomsman. Well, we also recently got the green light that we could try IUI because Clomid has dramatically improved hubby’s sperm count, motility and morphology back into totally normal ranges.  Woo hoo!! I had been convinced IUI was off the table and IVF was our only hope. We also found out that our doc does not make us do in-cycle monitoring so the cost of each IUI is quite a bit less than we had planned on. Double woo hoo!! We were riding high, back on the upswing…this was gonna be it, this is all it was going to take, THIS was going to be our month!  Well of course nature had other plans and I got my beautiful positive OPK on, you guessed it, Friday morning!!  Which would put IUI on Saturday….which was a non-option because my hubby was in a wedding that was 2.5 hours away from our clinic, and there’s just no way we were going to bail on our friends like that.  So we resolved to just have lots of good hotel sex and try naturally again this month.  I can’t lie I was pretty disappointed. Of all the days in my 10-day window of possible ovulation it just had to be the ONE DAY we couldn’t make it work….

Well, life has had a funny way of keeping things in perspective for me these days. Some call it luck, some call it fate, I like to think of it as divine intervention.  So I was at the wedding and I was sitting with one of the other groomsman’s wives (who I met just the night before at the rehearsal).  We were just chatting and she asked me, “So do you guys have any kids?”  I thought Oh man here it goes…..the baby questions….I politely responded “No, not yet, how ’bout you guys?”  To which she replied, “No, no luck for us yet.”  It was then that I got the sense they must have been trying too.  She then opened up to me and told me that they had been trying for close to 5 years and IVF is their only option. They have already done 4 IVF cycles and had to cancel a frozen transfer the day before because of the wedding. Holy shit was I surprised! Like, what are the odds I’d end up spending the day with someone who 1000% gets where we are?!?! And I also got to thinking, as much as it sucked to cancel the IUI it could have been worse.  She’s been doing daily injections to prepare for a transfer and had to cancel…

I have also been lucky enough to have some great close friends who are extremely supportive and are doing their very best to take our feelings and struggles into consideration.  If you feel like you’re fighting in the dark I highly suggest finding a way to break the silence. Tell a close friend or two, find a Resolve support group, ask your REI for resources. They are out there if you are willing to open up. I know it’s not for everyone.  But I will tell you I am living this baby-free life with less stress, less tears and more laughter these days, and I wish that for each and every one of you as well!

Idiopathic Oligoasthenoteratozoospermia…

Oligospermia….or is it oligozoospermia….or wait maybe oligoasthenazoospermia…….or coud it be oligoasthenoteratozoospermia?  Okay now you’re just adding letters for the fun of aren’t you?!?!

But seriously, idiopathic oligoasthenoteratozoospermia…say that one 3 times fast!!

Besides a ridiculously long word that no one can pronounce, what the heck is oligoasthenoteratozoospermia (more easily referred to as OAT)?  It’s a form of male factor infertility.  Basically it means all semen parameters (count, motility and morphology) are low and there’s no specific known cause, all hormone levels (testosterone, LH, FSH) are within normal limits. From all of my research and blog reading and infertility support groups everything always seems to be focused on the ladies and very little information out there outlines the male side of infertility.  But here we are after a couple of awkward semen collection tactics facing just that. Hubs has been diagnosed with idiopathic oligoasthenoteratozoospermia, just one type of male factor infertility.  So I though I’d put together a little cheat sheet on all those confusing prefixes when it comes to male factor infertility terms.

• Oligozoospermia/oligospermia=Low sperm concentration (<15 x10^6million/mL)
• Azoospermia (no sperm in the ejaculate)
• Asthenozoospermia (total motility <40%)
• Teratozoospermia (<4% normal forms)
• Idiopathic: no specific cause determined
• There are also other parameters on a SA including volume, pH, debris, agglutination, leukocytes, immature germ cells

Male factor infertility is actually thought to be a contributing factor 50% of cases, but sadly it is severely under researched and under-talked about.  I highly suggest seeing a urologist who specializes in male factor infertility if you are dealing with this. There are some treatments out there, although most of them don’t have great research backing them.  I’ve even read that some physicians recommend couples with moderate to severe male factor infertility skip all other treatments and go straight to IVF with ICSI. Yikes! That escalated quickly….luckily Josh’s urologist is hopeful that medical therapy will help and we won’t have to go that route, at least not just yet. He is currently taking Clomid–yep, CLOMID! Who knew men could take that?!?!  The way it works is that it selectively blocks estrogen receptors, removing the negative feedback cycle to the brain. This makes the brain produce more LH and FSH, which in turn boosts testosterone production and spermatogenesis.  From what urologist tells us this is effective in improving SA parameters in about 50% of men.  Luckily it is pretty well tolerated by guys, and Josh hasn’t had any crazy side effects yet (although he does tell me he’s been craving chocolate….weird….)

I often feel for my Josh because I can’t imagine what it must be like to be in his shoes. After his very first semen analysis I got the results through a phone call with my REI.  Josh was at work. My heart just sank.  I was left with the task of telling him that his counts were low and that he needed to do a repeat analysis.  At the time I thought we had something to blame it on, because, after all, he had collected the sample at home and no one told him to keep it at body temperature while driving to the lab.  In addition, he had been on methotrexate (a chemotherapeutic drug) for terrible atopic dermatitis.  To add to the fun, spermatogenesis takes an average of 74 days so he had to stop the medication and wait 2 1/2 months to do a repeat analysis.  2 1/2 more months before we have answers?!?! My God that seems like an eternity.  Silly me, thinking I’d get answers…so here we were a few months later at the urologist’s office after his second SA.  This time there was no medication effecting it and the sample was collected at the lab site.  Unfortunately all of his parameters were still low.

I asked him if he would consider writing a guest post for the blog but he’s not much of a writer, nor a feeling share-er.  I think he sometimes now feels like our infertility is his fault. Like he is broken. You know, the things we often feel ourselves as women who can’t get pregnant. And I’m not going to lie I have maybe contributed to this notion unknowingly a time or 2.  “Less than 4 alcoholic beverages a week hunny…” “Are you going to start running again soon?” “Dessert AGAIN tonight?”  Here I am constantly reminding him of all the lifestyle changes he can make to try to improve his SA, and every single time all he hears is, “This is your fault.”  How unfair and outright mean of me.  I know we are in this together. And I tell him out of one side of my mouth that exact thing, that there is no one to blame and that it is just something we are facing together.  But I guess out of the other side of my mouth I’m backhandedly saying “Just work harder and we’ll get pregnant.” I should really stop that.