Dreams of a child

 

I have always thought of myself as a person who can get things done - and done in short order. So when it came to trying to conceive, I was surprised that getting pregnant was not something I could simply set out to do and accomplish. Instead, we failed again and again and again.

We started working with a local fertility clinic that focused on helping couples conceive without IVF in 2022. This involved a series of tests, taking a number of vitamins and supplements, learning how to track cycles and cervical mucus, and so on. I also tried acupuncture and a gluten free-diet. None of these changes seemed to produce any different result, so we got a referral to the Duke Fertility Clinic. We went through multiple rounds of IUIs in 2023 and rode the roller coaster of waiting for the blood test, driving back to the clinic to get blood drawn, and seeing the negative result pop up on MyChart. 

Only once in all that time did I ever see a positive result on an at-home pregnancy test. It was in May of 2023, the morning before we left for our vacation to the Dominican Republic, and I had not been expecting anything other than a single pink line and mostly did it on the offhand chance that I needed to refrain from drinking alcohol. But there it was - two pink lines in the panel. I showed Andrew, we hugged and jumped up and down, and I ran downstairs to my office to dig out a little onesie I had ordered from Etsy a year ago that said “Lil Vader in Training” - which I had planned to use to announce if I was pregnant if I were a little more prepared. 

We flew to Punta Cana and relaxed at the resort. The next day was my birthday, and the resort had already set up cake and champagne in our room. Full from dinner, we ate part of the cake and left the champagne alone. We went to bed as everyone else partied at the pool.

That night, I had the worst cramps I had ever experienced. In the middle of the night, I went to the bathroom and saw that I was bleeding heavily. So that was it - less than a day of thinking I was going to be a mother and it had come to a painful end.

It was easier to numb my grief at this point. There were more IUIs, more months without IUIs, and more periods. I just didn’t let myself expect that anything would work. I didn’t let myself think about the onesie or dream of what any child of ours would look like. 

But it was only a couple of months before we started the process of beginning IVF. In August of 2023, I had a hysteroscopy where they removed some follicles from my uterine lining. It was the first time I had ever been under anesthesia for a procedure, and I underestimated how painful the subsequent cramps would be and how long it would take to feel normal again. In late September, I started taking a series of injections - some in the morning and some at night -  all in my abdomen. Andrew helped me with some but if I didn’t wake up early enough, I learned how to do them myself, playing “Stick Season” by Noah Kahan as my background song. My ovaries soon bloated with follicles and eggs, and it felt like I had rocks in my abdomen - pinching everything inside of me.  In October, I underwent the egg retrieval procedure. When I woke up, we learned the good news - they had retrieved 29 eggs.

Over the course of the next couple of weeks, we received reports about the progress of the embryos’ growth. Not all 29 eggs were successfully fertilized. Over time, the numbers dwindled more quickly than I thought they would. 29 became 22, then 15, then 9. Only 6 embryos made it to the blastocyst phase. We opted to do some genetic testing on these 6 embryos, so the lab took samples and then froze all 6. After the PGT-A (which checks for an incorrect number of chromosomes) and PGT-M testing (which tests for common, single-gene disorders) was complete, we learned that only 3 embryos were chromosomally normal.

Part of me was shocked, is still shocked, that anyone can get pregnant on their own with this kind of attrition. Part me of me knows that I was and am very lucky. After all, I had 3 embryos after this long and somewhat painful process. We were privileged enough to make it to the embryo transfer stage. Andrew was there with me in the dim procedure room of the Duke Fertility Center as we watched the needle on the ultrasound monitor drop the little embryo in my uterus, a flicker and a bubble on the screen. All of me knows that I was and am very lucky that a couple of weeks later, after going in for my blood test, I saw the test result pop up on my Duke MyChart that my HCG levels were above the threshold amount for pregnancy.

I called Andrew anyway. “What does it mean?” I asked excitedly on the phone, even though cognitively, I understood what the numbers meant.

“You’re pregnant!” he said and we gushed over the good news which finally felt like good news.

It took awhile before “good news” summoned the reality of an actual child - that there was a baby growing inside of me. It wasn’t until January 2024, when I went for my ultrasound in my tenth week of pregnancy that I really thought about who I was about to meet in seven months. I didn’t expect to see much of any being that looked like a baby at that stage. But when I lay down and they put the ultrasound probe on my belly, there she was - a literal bean shaped creature with short arms and legs wiggling on the screen. It was the first time our dream felt like it was finally coming true.