Cancelled

It turns out that there actually IS something worse than IVF injections…having your IVF cycle cancelled. That is worse. Much, much, much worse. I have been dreading returning to this space to write about what happened. I have gone through a full spectrum of emotions about it. Everything ranging from intense anger, helplessness, and despair to disbelief, foolishness, desperation, and guilt. I’ve cried until I could no longer cry anymore. I look at my carefully organized medications as they sit there under my sink in silent mockery. I wonder if I’ll ever get to use them. ‘Get’ to use them. Not a term I would have used before learning that I am in the 2-5% of women who ovulate through the birth control pills used to suppress my body and ready me for stimulation of my follicles. One more way my body has betrayed me.  One more loss to add to the pile of sadness that infertility dumps at our feet. Every time I’m certain my heart cannot break in any new and undefined way, infertility slaps me across the face and gives me a new crack in my foundation…a new sore for my heart to heal.

I noticed that with this cancellation, the immediate and raw pain has gone away as it does with each loss and failure. What’s different is a new hardness to my heart. I find myself experiencing thoughts about how I may never conceive another child. I may try as hard as I can and it may not happen. My doctor and nurses, my family, my friends, all of my various practitioners…they are all very hopeful. I find myself leaning into their hope more than ever because for the first time, I have doubts about whether or not this baby will make its way into our family in the way I so desperately have hoped for. I will continue to try my hardest. I always will. But I do not think of my effort as a guarantee in the way I once did. My attachment to the outcome feels lessened and that both frightens and heals me simultaneously.

For the sake of documenting this process, I’d like to recap the events and experiences of two weeks ago on Tuesday, April 11th:

I went to my baseline ultrasound and blood work appointment the morning of April 11th after dropping my daughter off at our friends’ home. As our daughters ran off and played together, my friend gave me a huge hug. We embraced and cried together because this appointment carried with it the weight of beginning IVF or not. Not until this moment had I truly considered that I might not ‘get’ to start. My body may not be ready and they needed to make sure. My husband met me at the appointment, we paid our very large bill and went back for our ultrasound. This is always an uncomfortable procedure because I’m usually bleeding…it always has to be done while I’m bleeding, it would seem. Everything appeared normal at first. I have a resting follicle count of 16. They see that every time. It’s normal for my age. ‘For my age’ used to feel like a diatribe against my femininity, but has since become a normalized way of discussing everything fertility. I still cringe a tiny bit when it’s said. Our technician points out one last thing on the ultrasound before she’s finished. A cyst. I’ve never had one come up on her screen before, so I’m immediately concerned. She reassures us that this doesn’t mean our cycle is cancelled, but the doctor will need to interpret and get back to us in 100 hours. I mean 7 hours. It took 7 hours. I have my blood drawn (laying down, of course because I still have to do that) and we meet our nurse. For the first time, I have a face to go with a voice and the multitude of emails. She is calm, confident, reassuring, and nice. I appreciate all of those things in a nurse. We go over how to do my stomach injections as well as our preference on how to handle the cyst. Do we want to pay a lot of money and have it drained in the morning by an RE we haven’t met before? Do we want to delay my cycle another 16 days as I use a Nuva Ring birth control method to minimize the cyst? Both options still lead to the the cycle continuing, but we chose the former because waiting longer seemed excruciating. We’d hear back from our nurse in 100 hours to let us know if the cyst needs to be drained. It is possible that it can be left alone and I can continue unaffected. And with that we left and continued on separately with our days…

My sweet friend could tell that I needed her, so when I went to pick my daughter up, she insisted on helping keep me distracted. We walked the mall with our girls. We hugged. Cried a little more. Laughed at the funny antics of our perfectly imperfect girls. And I appreciated her company more than I knew how to express.

Late afternoon, I received the call from my nurse letting me know that my cyst was not a simple cyst. I had actually ovulated through the birth control. Is that rare? Yes, it only happens in a small percentage of cases. I am one of those cases. I now need to stop everything. Stop taking the steroid pill, do not begin injections…do not pass go. ‘We need to cancel your cycle.’ I begin to cry and she validates my sadness. ‘It’s so hard and so disappointing.’ And then she tells me that I may not understand it now, but one day when I’m holding my baby in my arms it will all make sense how the timing worked out. I want to believe her. I am desperate to believe her, but in this moment I feel hopeless and helpless. She tells me that we will try again in 30 days with a different birth control and she cannot guarantee me that it will work, but she makes a strong case for the ‘cases’ such as myself who ovulate through a birth control pill and tells me that the Nuva Ring should do the trick. So, that becomes our plan. I need to have my own natural cycle whereby I ovulate on my own and get rid of the ‘non-simple’ cyst, have a period and then begin again. I get off the phone with her and I immediately become angry with my body and at the birth control pills. I suffered through those mother-f#ckers! I was nauseous, I broke my clean eating, I felt sick for weeks. And they still didn’t work. I wanted to scream. Calling my husband seemed like a better choice, so I sobbed out the words that our nurse had given me and he quickly made his way home to me. He spent the next few hours holding me and taking care of our daughter. He was my rock. I let my people know the news and I received an outpouring of support. They were devastated with me and I needed that. I needed to not be alone with the devastation.

So, that was it. My nightmare. And this didn’t happen in a bubble, of course. My husband’s mom was still suffering in a hospital after being hit by a car and needing surgery and rehabilitation. He was my rock, but he was also trying to be her rock too. And our daughter still needed to be taken care of. The first few days after the news of our cancellation proved challenging for me to continue on with normal activities. I still showed up, but I was not quite there. Slowly, I regained some strength. Time, it’s always time that is most healing. Time and love. Being loved on definitely helps. People sent flowers, cards, texts, food, offers to babysit our daughter. My people showed up for us.

I am now in the middle of my natural cycle and while I was floundering trying to figure out what day I was on (within the world of fertility, every woman knows exactly what day she is on in her cycle AT ALL TIMES…I haven’t NOT known what day I was on in over two years), I finally figured out that I am close to ovulation after deciding to buy another $40 kit (this was  something I thought I was done with, OPK’s, and I’m pretty sure we have made a substantial car payment, if not a small mortgage payment in Ovulation Predictor Kits). The money was worth the stillness it brought back to me though. I now know I’m not in the beginning, I’m not at the end. I’m in the middle. Which means that I will get a period in about 2 weeks. And then we will start again. I continue to grieve the time that we lost. I felt the pain of loss on the morning that was to be our egg retrieval. The morning we may have conceived our baby. That’s gone now. More standing still. We decided to busy ourselves and finished some projects around the house. Making space for some silence coupled with staying busy will be the only way that I can feel this disappointment and get back up again for the fight. My opponent continues to kick my ass all over town, but my people and my ridiculous stubbornness give me the strength I need to continue to show up for this battle, I am certain.

*Gratitude – I am grateful for my daughter. I know she is a miracle and I do not take her life for granted. I constantly joke with my husband (mostly when he’s throwing her high into the air) by saying, ‘Please, be careful with her, those are really hard to make!’ Now, more than ever I am aware of just how uniquely sacred her existence is. How she came to be, I will never fully understand.