A Day of Hope? Or a Day of Hopelessness?

Carly Marie is a pioneer in breaking the silence around pregnancy, infancy, and child loss. She is woman who lives in Australia and known to woman around the world for her healing projects. She started a project called August 19th-Day of Hope. This project is for grieving parents around the world, giving them an opportunity to speak out about their children who have died and an opportunity to raise awareness about such a sensitive topic in society. The loss of a baby or child is becoming less "taboo" to speak about and the more we as grieving parents speak about our children the more we are able to heal. But no matter the time that has passed...we are always grieving for our children. We will always be grieving parents.

I did not get to participate in the Day of Hope. My day yesterday was compacted with a staff meeting in the morning, a doctors appointment in the afternoon, and work in the evening. To be honest though-I don't know that I would have wanted to participate after my horrible doctors appointment. It felt like a Day of Hopelessness for me, not a Day of Hope at all.

I first thought, how ironic. My sister's bloodwork to be screened to be our egg donor was falling on August 19th-A Day of Hope. It seemed fitting. After our conversation with my sister on Saturday she has been much more open with us and with this process...it made me hopeful that our baby would come from her donated eggs.

Our trip to Cincinnati was fun. We picked on my niece on the way down because she was being so quiet. And my niece is RARELY quit. Then we stopped at a McDonalds that I had read online had a playland hoping to give my niece something to do for a little bit because I knew this was going to be a long day for a four year old. The McDonald's "play land" ended up being two computerized touch screens with games with little kids to play. Oh well. She had fun matching shapes on the bears belly. After we left McDonalds my niece was a hoot. She had us cracking up. She was so good during the doctors appointment too and just as funny on our way back to Dayton where I dropped my sister off to her car so she could take my niece school clothes shopping and I could go to work.

During the appointment my doctor did an internal ultrasound on my sister to check her follicles. She had 17. My heart kinda sank when the doctor told me this. He said "I expected to see more for someone her age but if we get 17 good eggs from your sister then that's a good thing." Well I know from experience not every follicle is going to stimulate (grow) and not every follicle that begins growing is going to be mature enough to retrieve an egg from it. Even when follicles are completely mature, the eggs retrieved from the follicle can still be immature and unable to be fertilized. Going in with such a low number does not give me hope that we will get a lot of eggs that will turn into a lot of good quality embryos to choose from. We won't know until early next week if my sister's blood work is good enough for her to be cleared as our egg donor. This is all very unsettling to me.

On top of this not so great news, comes some extremely terrible news. My fertility doctor is REFUSING to speak to Dr. Braverman, the reproductive immunologist from New York that did $4000 worth of testing on me and my husband. REFUSING. He does not agree with immunological testing or treatment. He does not agree with the few recommendations that I had told the nurse about, such as a laparoscopy to check for endometriosis, and does not care what his recommendations are as far as immunological issues and treatment. My doctor feels a laparoscopy has more risks for me then benefits. He said I probably do have a "small" amount of endometriosis as most women do but it has not prevented me from getting pregnant and has not caused me any issues if it is there. He said he would prescribe me Metformin if I absolutely want it but does not believe it will do any good for me either. He also said he would not start me on Lovenox injections before I had a positive pregnancy test with an increasing Beta result. So basically I would have to be 5-6 weeks pregnant before he would start me on Lovenox. Oh, and, by the way, IF my sister gets approved to be our egg donor and we want to get this done by the end of October so this does not fall around Thanksgiving or Christmas, my doctor will be in Hawaii with his wife on vacation so either the brand new doctor who just joined the practice and looks very young will have to do it or a doctor that my doctor didn't seem to have much respect for will have to do it. FAN-FUCKING-TASTIC!

First of all, this has happened twice now. Both IVF cycles. The doctor we've worked with the whole time ends up being the doctor that can't do our retrieval and we end up getting someone who does not do as good of a job and has lower success rates. Second of all, I am so sick and tired of getting back into a corner by doctors. I feel like I'm beating my head against a brick wall and there is blood spewing everywhere but no one gives a damn. No one is hearing me screaming at the top of my lungs that the chromosome issues is only ONE issue and I am very confident that it is not the ONLY issue here. I'm so sick of hearing that "if we get you a healthy embryo I'm confident you will have a baby." Well I'M NOT CONFIDENT THAT I WILL. AND I CAN'T LOOSE ANOTHER BABY BECAUSE I WAS A HORRIBLE MOTHER AND DID NOT TRUST MYSELF ENOUGH TO STAND UP FOR MYSELF AND DEMAND THE MEDICAL TREATMENT I FEEL I NEED. I could not live with myself if I put my sister through a month work of injections and an egg retrieval and I don't end up carrying the baby she is helping us to create to full term. I could not live with myself if I lost another baby. What do they not understand about that? Reproductive Immunology is a new specialized field and might be the very answer to recurrent miscarriages/stillbirths and recurrent failed fertility cycles that end up leading people to be childless or adopt. Yes, there is limited research right now...but the research is being done and proving there are other issues that are causing these horrible things to happen to women.

I don't know for certain that I need the immunological treatment. But at the same time, what Dr. Braverman explained to us made so much sense. And I need to know that we put 100% into this egg donor cycle. Especially starting out with a low number of follicles which could result in having no embryos available for freezing. If there are no embryos available for freezing...this is our one and ONLY shot at this egg donor business.

I finally broke down crying on my way home from work last night. Life felt so hopeless to me. Between my sister possibly not being medically cleared and my doctor refusing to do the immunological treatments, I felt like I am NEVER going to carry a baby in me again. I'm tearing up just typing those thoughts out. I was so angry that I have to keep backing down and keep getting no where because I back down to doctors. I felt like if we do the egg donor cycle without immunological treatment we would suffer another miscarriage. I felt like if we did not do the egg donor cycle because our doctor would not do the immunological treatment we could be missing out on the possibility of 9 months of pregnancy and my husband having a biological child. I felt angry at myself because once again I started thinking our only option is to comply with what this doctor in Ohio wants us to do when its not the only option. I started thinking horrible thoughts that I'm ashamed to admit because of what I do for a living. I shouldn't have thoughts of wanting to die or wishing God would give me a heart attack or a stoke or terminal cancer so I go to Heaven and be with my children and stop worrying about having other children. I felt like a failure for my husband and then thought how selfish of me to want to die and leave him a widow. He's the only other one who knows how exhausting this is for us. He does not deserve to lose me too. He's already lost his father and three grandparents and his godmother and his only children.

Has anyone ever told you how much infertility sucks? It steals the life out of you. And for me, this is a literal statement. It has stolen four precious lives out of me.

This morning I told my husband I'm over this. I'm over it all. I'm over the heartache. I'm over the uncertainty. I'm over the money we've spent and planned to spend to try to have a child. I'm over the hormone medications. I'm over my newly irregular cycles because of the hormone medications. I'm over no one listening to us. I'm over the doctors who think they know everything there is to know about me. I'm over it. I'm over it. I'm over it.

He told me to "don't worry about anything right now" and once we know if my sister is approved to be our egg donor we will re-evaluate where things stand with all this. So I guess that's what we are doing. And if she is approved, and because our doctor won't be doing the retrieval or transfer anyways, I'm going to ask to meet with the other doctor in the practice who HAS sent a few of her patients to a reproductive immunologist in Chicago and see what she thinks. If she will work with Dr. Braverman, great. If she wants to send our lab results from Dr. Braverman's testing to the doctor she has worked with in Chicago, fine. I'm willing to get another opinion from someone who is a professor at a university and does research in reproductive immunology. Fine. But I need to know we have tried whatever we need to to make this work.

I want to thank everyone who has donated to our Give Forward online fundraiser. All of your support is amazing and getting us closer to our goal! You are not only helping me and my husband, but you are helping another deserving couple also. You are all so wonderful:)