Stories seldom told....

I meant to write about this quite a while ago but never got around to it. Since today I'm feeling quite lazy regarding this blog I figured I may as well say something in an attempt to jump start things a bit.

Emotionally I'm in that lame limbo...or purgatory is probably a better word...state where we are going to start all the meds here in a little bit for the next cycle. We have one frozen embryo left and are hoping to hell it works. Anyway...I don't want to write about how shitty I feel about everything infertility and how infertility feelings infect nearly everything else and start eating away at my ability to feel confident in other life areas and take pride and feel happy about my job and blah blah blah it goes on and on.

So...I thought I would give a Cliff's Notes version of a story. This kind of story is very seldom told because it's just too fucking terrible to repeat more than once or twice.

We have an infertile friend who is in somewhat the same situation as us. (By friend I suppose acquaintance is better but IF brings people together on a different level.) Her situation is easier than ours (in that they have not been at this as long as us) and harder than ours (her family situation is much more pressured and frustrating). Anyway, she and her husband decided to do a donor cycle. Of course, as documented on this blog, this decision is agonizing and long and hard in itself but they did it and chose a donor they were happy with. The did a cycle and everything worked splendidly. She got pregnant with twins! Of course, twins is not what you want because there is a higher chance of complications but...whatever...people have healthy twins all the time. Well, as shitty luck would have it they lost one of the twins quite early on....but late enough that they were able to hear two heartbeats...so this I'm sure was a devastating loss. Then...as luck again would have it...she lost the other. This time, however, was much further along. IM knows how far along (I can't remember) but it was far enough that she had to go under the knife, as it were, to take out the fetus. I suppose in a warped sense it could've been worse and she could've been asked to deliver a dead baby. I literally cannot imagine how they are dealing with this loss. So many compromises of dreams and compromises of entitlements--simple things 90% of people get automatically--are made before a person even gets to donors. Then a whole new set of compromises and grieving the loss of a whole other set of dreams kicks in. Then, if the cycle works, a sort of miracle occurs (honestly, the more I think about a successful donor cycle the more astonished I am with the....miracle of it all). To have that brutally taken away is something I wouldn't wish on Satan himself. There are no words to comfort them and there is nothing I or IM can possibly say. Not to mention the very real fear that something like that could happen to us.

Women that get pregnant through IVF or donor cycle IVF do not have normal pregnancies. Not that they are full of complications necessarily but the naive joy that 90% of women experience during a pregnancy is always rudely taken away from infertiles by fate and life. That's one of those hard things to learn personally and harder to explain to somebody else. It is also at the root of how a successful IVF cycle DOES NOT CURE INFERTILITY. It does make you a parent though and that's ultimately what we are all hoping for!