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.