MY JOURNEY WITH INFERTILITY

I was always the little girl who loved baby dolls and babies. When my younger cousins were born I would act like a little mommy and try an care for them. I’ve always seen children in my life and never imagined having them would be anything but easy. 

When I was diagnosed with an autoimmune disease in my late teens, I learned that infertility was a common issue that went with the disease. A couple of years later I was diagnosed with Polycystic Ovarian Syndrome, I was told that infertility and difficulty conceiving were issues I could face but were not impossibilities. I stayed optimistic through the diagnosis’ and would deal with any challenges I could face when my husband and I decided to start a family. 

Four years ago my husband and I made the decision that it was the right time to try for a family. I have an autoimmune disease and PCOS (polycystic ovarian syndrome) so this decision involved loads of doctor appointments and further testing to make sure that my body was ready to carry a child. I passed all my tests and we began to try. 

Nothing happened for months. This was incredibly disheartening to think that I wasn’t able to get pregnant. I didn’t let it get me too down because I knew that there are medications and procedures that could be done to help people in our situation. 

Over the next couple of months I had more testing and examinations done, my husband also had a sperm analysis. After a few weeks we received our results, my husband had no issues with his tests. I however was told that I wasn’t ovulating properly. I was given a medication to help me ovulate and we tried again. After my first round of medication I became pregnant. We were ecstatic. 

I felt pregnant very early on, I had an immediate aversion to some foods and some foods tasted different. It was incredible. My husband was extremely attentive and always checking on me. I was also really tired all the time. We downloaded an app to follow the growth of our child and see how big they were each week. I remember feeling so incredibly amazed by what my body was doing. I would rub and hold my stomach at night because I wanted to instill as much love as I could into my growing child. 

Then a couple of days after our positive pregnancy test I had the worst cramping. I felt cold, ill and had the worst bleeding. I suffered a miscarriage and I felt completely distraught. My husband and I mourned the loss of our child, but to be honest I still carry the pain inside of me to this day. 

I went through a range of emotions. During this time people in my family were conceiving so easily in less stable relationships. I blamed myself for miscarrying, thinking it was something I had done wrong or did to cause us to lose our child. 

On top of miscarrying, the medication I was given to help me ovulate reacted badly with my autoimmune disease. I suffered a really bad relapse with my autoimmune disease that was causing a lot of damage to my liver, it would take me a few months to recover. 

My miscarriage is something I’ve never gotten over and to this day I still carry it with me. I think the reason I have never moved on from our loss is because of all the what ifs surrounding that pregnancy. My husband and I had been discussing children for over 10 years before we had tried to conceive. During the weeks leading up to taking a pregnancy test we talked so much about the baby and how happy we were that this was happening. We wondered who the baby would look like more, what their personality would be like, and we talked about how we would reveal our pregnancy. It was and still is difficult to let go of all of those dreams. 

After my miscarriage it took me a couple of months before I was comfortable having sex again. It brought back the memories of the loss we had suffered. When I was finally ready to have sex again I became incredibly depressed when I would get my period each month. I still held out some hope that we would somehow magically be able to conceive on our own, but that would never happen. 

For the last 3 years we put having a child on hold because I just never felt ready. This past summer we were finally ready to go back down that road and had an understanding of how far we were willing to go to have a child. I saw a new gynecologist and was told that my only choice would be to do IVF. My husband and I long ago had decided that with all of 

the medical procedures I have to go through on a regular basis, it wasn’t worth us exploring. So this was the end of our journey of trying to have a biological child. For me, it was a difficult thing to accept. 

We had joked and talked about these “imaginary” children we would have one day that they became real. They had names and middle names and personalities we had already created for them. To me it felt like a death. By ending our attempts to get pregnant these amazing children would never exist. I told my therapist about how I had felt and she reassured me that it was completely normal to feel that way. Even though I’ve gotten to a place of acceptance with not being able to conceive I still have days where I cry and feel angry about it. 

During this entire process my husband and I had always discussed adoption. I was never against adoption, I had just never really thought much about it because I was so focused on carrying my own children. 

One day my husband explained the importance of adoption and being able to give a child a life it may not have otherwise. It completely opened my mind to the process of adopting a child. I still had fears about adoption. I was afraid the children we adopted would leave us in the future for their biological parents. My therapist reassured me that it wouldn’t happen. She said the children would be curious about their parents which is natural, but they would know why they weren’t with them anymore and wouldn’t leave a healthy stable situation for one that isn’t. 

I was also uneasy about how you go about selecting children to adopt. Thankfully a few of my husband’s friends at work have expanded their families through adoption and hearing about their experiences has eased any fears I had about the process. I still worry about how people will judge me for adopting and not being able to have biological children, which I know is silly. I think a common worry is if your family will accept and love adopted children the same they would biological. But honestly who cares what anyone else thinks? It’s YOUR life. There is no wrong way to have a family and there are so many children who need loving families at adoption agencies.