More than two months have passed since the ivf 1 chemical pregnancy debacle. I was pregnant, then I wasn't pregnant anymore - all within the space of 48 hours.
It's been a tough couple of months since the ivf but it's also been over a year and a half since we starting trying to get pregnant. Like a lot of women in my situation I've questioned so much about myself, my standing as a woman and as a wife. I've felt guilt, responsiblity and shame, and I've lost a lot of confidence, to the point where I've even found it hard to spend time with my closest friends.
I haven't been speaking much about how I feel and I haven't been able to get my thoughts in any sort of order to write about them (until now). I've also had night panics which, apart from being frightening, have affected my sleep and my mood. I can be fine one minute and then lose it completely because I left my phone upstairs or we ran out of milk.
I've put myself under a lot of pressure since the failed cycle, thinking my head had to be straight and clear before we started trying again. That I'd have come to terms with that cycle before I could move on and be properly ready to go again, or I wouldn't be giving myself the best possible chance.
But I think it's been slowly dawning on me recently that that's not the case, that maybe I don't need to 'come to terms' with that cycle - because I probably never will. We went through a process that was tough physically, mentally and emotionally. We chose to do it so we could give ourselves a better chance to get pregnant. But it failed, and no one could give us a cast-iron biological or medical reason why. Just like no one has been able to tell us why we haven't been able to conceive naturally over the last 19 months.
I have always wanted to have children and I still do. I know it sounds weird considering they were only inside me for two weeks but I miss our two little embryos. They were a part of us, we created them – irrespective of the help we got from medical science. I even loved them, right from the moment I got the call to say they’d made it. They were a bunch of cells in a petri dish in a lab across London but I loved them. I keep the scan picture given to us at the transfer in my bedside table drawer and I look at my lost little embryos every morning and every night and I wish they were still here, growing inside me.
I want so much to know how it feels to carry your own child, to bring them into the world, to look after and love them unconditionally. And I want,possibly more than anything else,to make my husband a dad. He has so much compassion inside him, he would do anything for anyone and he’s wiser than anyone I know. I just know he will make an amazing father. I hope I never again have to see the pain in his eyes that I saw when we realised the last ivf was over.
I know a lot of women in this situation think 'it's not fair' and 'why me?'. It's not really in my make up to think that way (I'm more likely to think I deserve it than anything else) but I get why they think it. There is a lot of shit in life and it comes in all different shapes and sizes (no pun intended). This is just my shit. And I think I finally realise that I don't need to understand it, accept it or be happy with it.
But I do have to deal with it, and that's what I'm doing. I now know there's no right or wrong way to deal with it, I just have to do what feels right for me. It hasn't always been pretty but somehow I've made it through these past couple of months and finally I can see a spark of light again. So I feel like maybe I've done something right. And that spark of light has helped me to think about the future, to think about doing another ivf. So I've booked an appointment with our consultant in a few weeks' time to discuss it. It's a start.
So no, I haven't come to terms with this shit and maybe I never will but yes, in my own way, I'm dealing with it.
