Stuff I'm Finally Saying Out Loud

I'm not infertile anymore. Seriously, I don't fit the definition: "not capable of initiating, sustaining, or supporting reproduction." I didn't initiate reproduction (at least, I didn't do it alone) but I did sustain and support it. I need a new label.

The reason I flipped out when I was diagnosed was not because I was infertile. It was because something was wrong with my body. That's not the same.

Giving birth to a healthy baby didn't change how I feel about my body. I still live in fear of it malfunctioning.

During my pregnancy, I didn't identify with other post-IVF patients. I identified with women who got pregnant unexpectedly, and who were struggling with the idea of becoming a mother. I felt awful when I remembered how grateful I was supposed to be.

I feel tremendous, crushing guilt about requiring IVF to conceive. First my body screwed up, and then my over-the-top reaction to it hurt my husband, family, friends, and might even have hurt my son. I should have handled it better.

My fertility issues may still be hurting the people I love.

As I was getting into the wheelchair to leave the hospital after my initial surgery to remove the endometriomas, right after I learned I would need IVF at the earliest possible opportunity, I had a single clear and frantic thought: I am not ready to go home. I can't take care of myself right now. I am destroyed. I got in the wheelchair anyway.

I wish somebody had stopped me from going through with my IVF cycle. Both my Ob-Gyn and my RE should have had the sense to say "wait up, you are clearly not okay, you need to fix yourself before you get pregnant."

Despite the above, I am EXCEEDINGLY, world-endingly grateful for my son. I want to be clear about that. I love him beyond words. His smile is the most beautiful thing I have ever seen in my entire life.

The saddest part of this for me is that my "regular" self always looked forward to pregnancy and envisioned having my first child as a happy time. When I stop to think about what I imagined vs. what we experienced, it breaks my heart. Especially since I ruined that joy for my husband, too.

As a result of this experience, I no longer believe that doctors and nurses have my best interests at heart. I don't trust them anymore.

Let's just finally throw this out there: I work in medicine. I deal with this stuff every day in my professional life. Separating the two has become a challenge.

When I say that therapy was "suggested" to me during my time of great unhappiness, I really mean that my loved ones tried repeatedly for months to get me to go. So did my doctors. I refused every single time, because:

I do not trust therapists. I think therapy is awful. I have tried it, and I do not like it. It makes me feel humiliated and dirty and much worse about myself. I rank my few, long-ago attempts at therapy as some of the most upsetting experiences of my life. Top ten, anyway.

This was far and away the worst experience of my entire life.

And I don't know how to move past it.

My Body's Doing Great; My Mind, Not So Much

First, the really good news: a followup scan of my ovaries revealed that they look healthy and normal! Well, mostly - there were two small endometriomas as of December, and although it does appear that they're still there, they're actually smaller than they were the last time we saw them. I guess that mini-pill really is doing something.

I don't mean to minimize the above. This is a really, really big deal. When my doctor confirmed that I was stable for the time being, I felt a tremendous weight lift off my shoulders. I've just bought myself six months of the status quo (knock on wood), and that's a pretty good quo if I do say so myself.

But. But but but but but. For a variety of reasons, the last three weeks have been pretty awful. I've been re-confronting a lot of my negative feelings about infertility, pregnancy, medical care, my body, and my own mental health. It's been over a year and a half since I found out that I was infertile. A very eventful year and a half, but still - this is not exactly breaking news. I am extraordinarily lucky and I feel so grateful that I have a healthy child after my first cycle of IVF. Yet I spent most of the past three weeks on the verge of tears while I waited to hear the all-clear from this scan. Why?

First of all, my infertility journey isn't over. Not by a long shot. I have three embryos on ice from the cycle that gave us our darling O, and I feel a responsibility to give each one of them a shot to grow into a baby. This means that there will come a day when I have to walk back into the fertility clinic that I associate with so many bad memories, sit down across a desk from my doctor, and go over my future plans with him. Then I'll have to go through at least one Frozen Embryo Transfer (FET) cycle with them - the same doctors, the same nurses, the same waiting room, the same exam rooms. I cannot tell you how much I am dreading this. And if my recent scan had come back with any indication that the cysts were growing, it was possible that I would have set up that next fertility appointment as soon as the clinic had an opening in their schedule. So while I'm thrilled and relieved that I bought myself at least another six months, I still know that this is going to happen at some point, and I do feel a bit like all I got was a stay of execution and not a full pardon.

Also, there was a bad moment during the scan when the ultrasound tech saw something odd in my uterus (no, not a baby, I promise) and asked if I had had an endometrial biopsy. Let me assure you now that I have no indications that would suggest I needed an endometrial biopsy, and when I spent a few minutes with good old Dr. Google looking at related ultrasound images after the appointment, I think that all the tech was asking was if I'd had one in the past since it might have explained a particular finding. I haven't, and the finding was benign, so there's nothing to worry about. Except that in between when she said it and when I got back to my computer and did my research, I took two minutes to look it up on my phone, and learned that it's usually an in-office procedure that is performed without sedation even though some women find it painful. This was enough to send me into a total tailspin. It's hard for me to articulate how upset I was even reading about women's experiences with endometrial biopsy; as I write this today, just getting the link for the sentence above I lost about twenty minutes reading comments and holding back tears. And this is for a procedure with which I have absolutely no connection! The problem is that I know someday, someone will recommend that I do have an endometrial biopsy - or a hysterosalpingogram, or a dilation and curettage, or any number of other gyn procedures that are invasive and painful up to and including another fresh IVF cycle - and I will just want to die.

Wanting to die when you hear that other people - who, let's recall, are not you - have had or are going to have painful gyn procedures is a bit extreme. I don't have any actual thought of suicide (shudder), I just have this idea in my head that experiencing more trauma between my legs would be so terrible that it seems incompatible with life as I know it. And that's not right, I know it isn't. Most of the time I feel fine - really, overall things are going well, and it's springtime and I'm wearing the sundresses I couldn't fit into last year and my baby has incredibly kissable cheeks - but I'm concerned that something so relatively minor could send me off the rails. Concerned, and angry, and ashamed, and all of the feelings that I struggled with last year. Clearly they're not just in the past.