I'm feeling hopeful. Not so much for this cycle, but for cycles in general. The medications are working as they're supposed to - I didn't overrespond, I didn't underrespond - I feel like Goldilocks! The meds did their job JUST RIGHT! I have two follicles that will likely be perfect size for trigger tomorrow. My lining is thickening as it should.
I still have my suspicions that we've got a cervical problem, or that my husband's morphology are partially responsible for our lack of success. Either way, a timed intercourse cycle won't likely help us (though having two eggs instead of one, and perfect timing, makes me feel a LITTLE more hopeful for this cycle!). But with future cycles, when we do IUI in combination with medication, I have hope. Oh, so much hope!
It's been awhile since I felt hopeful. When we first started trying, I was full of hope. I designed a little logo that said "Mini-(Last Name)" with a teddy bear and balloons - appropriately gender neutral - and bought a package of newborn onesies with the idea that I would iron on the logo to a onesie to give to my husband when I got a positive pregnancy test. That was 17 months ago, and I have moved that package of onesies three times since then. No, not moved them from one drawer to another - we have moved houses three times since then (ah, the wonders of military family life). That's just depressing. I'm not going to dwell on that, because it just bums me out.
We went to see a reproductive endocrinologist long before we knew we were having trouble. I have a family history of Fragile X, so I wanted to confirm that it wasn't a concern. During our appointment, the doctor started talking about how we shouldn't worry yet, that we should try on our own for a few more months - I remember being really confused, and feeling like she was rushing things by even having that conversation. Of course it would happen for us, we had only been trying 4 months or so! Why would she even say such things?
That original hope started to dwindle after about 6 months of trying. I started having a hard time right before and immediately after my period came, but by the time ovulation occurred, I always spent the two week wait in blissful hope. I worried, for sure, but it would ebb and flow with the various stages of my cycle. Early disappointment and nervousness, followed by superstition that I had figured out the "secret" that would change my fortune that month - eating pineapple core after ovulation, evening primrose oil before ovulation, doing a handstand after sex, having sex two days before ovulation and one day after, followed by optimism and hope.
Around 7 DPO, I would start peeing on sticks (I never claimed to be a patient woman). I would hope for an early positive, and when I got negative after negative, that hope would dwindle. I would calculate exactly what chances I had of still getting a positive test. If 30% of pregnant women got a positive test on 8 DPO, and 70% didn't see a positive test until later dates, then I knew to be 30% disappointed and 70% hopeful. With those declining numbers, my hope would dwindle in the same proportions.
Originally, I would not "call it" until my period arrived. In months since, I've started becoming increasingly resigned after 10 DPO and completely resigned after 12 DPO.
There were months I tested 2-3 times per day, and months I tested only once before my period arrived.
At 8 months, I sobbed when I got a negative test around 12 DPO. I sat on the stairs of our home, fists clenching my husband's shirt where he stood in front of me, with my head pressed into his stomach while gasping for breath between choked sobs.
"What's wrong with me?" I implored of him, as if he held the answer.
The poor, sweet man held me and told me confidently it would happen. I think he really believed that.
After 10 cycles, I convinced my husband it was worth doing some testing, especially as I had been off birth control for 6 months before we started officially trying. During our 11th month, we had our initial appointment with a reproductive endocrinologist and did initial testing. My husband's numbers came back mediocre - his count was good at around 55 million, his volume was good, his motility wasn't good at 25% (the doctor said they wanted to see 50%), and his morphology was on the bottom end of what is considered an acceptable range at 4%.
After sobbing when I first heard the news, I felt oddly hopeful. If that was our only issue, we would try vitamins! We would just try longer. It would happen.
I read every study on the subject. I bought tons of vitamins (if you've read my early posts, you can see exactly what I gave my husband to take). We timed everything perfectly, and "tried to relax" (man, I hate that phrase). I had such hope!
Besides the fact that my husband's incredibly busy and rigid schedule would not have allowed for any treatment cycles, and we were moving twice in the coming months, I sincerely hoped it would happen. Of course it would! I gave us 6 months before we'd go back to a reproductive endocrinologist, which just happened to be the same amount of time it would be until we were finally settled in a place where we would stay for awhile.
During those 6 months (September through January), my hope took an odd path. At first, my hope was relatively low as I had just seen my husband's sperm analysis, and knew our chances were not great with those numbers. But I felt positive and patient - we were doing the right things, it would happen. After 3 months, I started getting very hopeful as any vitamin regimin for my husband would take approximately that long to start having an effect.
As each month started passing, I got more and more discouraged. I felt hope for fewer and fewer days, and felt despondent and hopeless for more and more of each cycle. As you can see by my post from my birthday in December, I hit rock bottom around then. My following cycle, the last one before starting medical intervention, I felt such a split between desperate hope that it would happen before we needed medical help (because isn't it always that way in the stories?) and absolute lack of hope that this would ever, ever happen.
When we finally went to see the doctor, I felt hopeful that it would happen with their help. When we re-did some of our tests and my husband's numbers came up surprisingly good (70-something million count, great volume, and over 80% motility - no idea what the morphology was, but my guess is that it still isn't great simply because morphology usually is the hardest to improve), I oddly felt less hope. If my husband's numbers were so much better, why would an IUI work? If they can't find anything wrong, how can they fix it?
Hope hasn't been steady since then. It wasn't like early on, where I felt hopeful all the time. And it wasn't like later in the process, where I felt hopeful and despondent based on which part of my cycle I was dealing with at the moment. Now it it feels ephemeral - hope shows up like a flash of lightening in the night sky, lighting up the room and disappearing as soon as you notice it. Or it's like a bonfire - it's warming and soothing and you can hang around its glow for a little while, but eventually it burns out and you're left in the cold dark again, desperately trying to reignite the embers so you can feel its comforting warmth again.
Today I'm standing by that bonfire. It feels good, and I'm trying to just enjoy the ride while it lasts. I'm trying to stoke the fire - finding ways to add logs to the fire to build the hope and sustain it just a little longer.
I'm also trying to plan ahead to maintain that hope - if I put too much stock into this cycle, it will knock me down when my next cycle starts and it will be harder to start the fire up again. Like building up the fire with lots of logs and then pouring ice water all over it, with no logs left to rebuild. I'm trying to stoke the fire slowly, making the logs last long enough, with the plan to try to keep it burning low-and-slow until this long night of infertility is over and dawn arrives. Because if I build that pyre of hope too high, I run the risk of being left in the cold dark without any hope and without a baby.
I'm trying to space out that hope so that I have enough for three cycles - I'm not putting all my logs on the fire for this cycle, I'm saving some for my first and second medicated IUI as well. If I get to that point and we still aren't pregnant, I might need some serious help in rebuilding my bonfire of hope. But for now, I feel hopeful. Not overly hopeful for this cycle, but a little hopeful. I am feeling hopeful that this plan will work, and that within the next few months, we'll be pregnant.
That hope burns warm inside me. It feels so good! I did something yesterday that I haven't done since over a year ago - I went through the baby aisle of Walmart while shopping and imagined what it would feel like to buy little items. How it would feel like to walk through those aisles in a few weeks or a few months and actually be pregnant and looking at those items for my future child.
I also used this hope to think more about the next stage - I realize that I have been so focused for over a year now on getting pregnant, that I have learned so much about how the conception process should work and how the infertility treatment process works, but I know very little about what to expect after this is over. And I have spent my bad hopeless days researching what happens if we reach the end of this fertility treatment journey without a baby - we know that we want to be parents, and will move onto adoption if necessary - but I haven't spent any time since those early months researching pregnancy, labor & delivery.
I actually started looking online today to start thinking about what kind of maternity care I want, what to expect from pregnancy, what kind of labor and delivery I want, what pain management options I might consider during labor, which facility I want to give birth at.
Early on in my hopeful days, I created a secret Amazon registry of baby items I thought we might need. I've added to that and changed things around several times in my hopeful days. It's been a very long time since I looked at that registry, but it might be something I revisit during my newly found hope.
I also might start doing some research on early childhood development, what to expect as a new mother, vaccine research, and so forth. Because at some point, all this research that I've done on infertility and how to become pregnant will become moot. At some point, I will have to move forward. At some point, I will need to research something else and think about other things.
At the moment, it feels good to hope. It feels good to think about what could be awaiting me, what I would need to know after all of this research pays off and we finally get what we have worked so hard for. It feels really good to think about researching something new for a change, something hopeful.
I'm going to burn this fire of hope for as long as it burns, and hope that the dawn arrives before I run out of wood to stoke this fire.
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