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A cou­ple weeks I stum­bled onto a pic­ture that I had tucked away inside my dresser. At the time I tucked it away, it was the intent that I would some­day look back at it and think, “Wow. I can’t believe how far I’ve come since then.” As it hap­pened, that day I was busy look­ing for some­thing else and I pulled the pic­ture out and put it on top of my dresser (actu­ally, on my mir­ror) and then went about my busi​ness​.It wasn’t until yes­ter­day when I was talk­ing to a newly acquired friend, about my recent find that it hit me as to what the pic­ture actu­ally was. The pic­ture I found hap­pened to be the pic­ture of my “would-​​be babies,” the embryos that were implanted into my womb dur­ing my one attempt at in vitro fer­til­iza­tion (IVF). As I was telling my friend about the snap­shot, I felt myself begin to cry yet once again.

I relived that period of my life yes­ter­day after­noon as I told her my story and my strug­gle. She’s heard bits and pieces about it before, but never to the extent as I did yes­ter­day. She had pre­vi­ously heard about the treat­ment I went through, all lead­ing up to the IVF cycle. And she cer­tainly heard about all the won­der­ful med­ica­tions I had to inject into myself each month and espe­cially dur­ing the IVF cycle month. But what she never heard (nor any­one else for that mat­ter) was how emo­tion­ally spent I was after each monthly dis­ap­point­ment… espe­cially after the failed IVF cycle.

What I had told my friend is that when I looked at that pic­ture, it reminded me of how dif­fer­ent a per­son I was since that period of time. And even how much more dif­fer­ent a per­son I was since start­ing my infer­til­ity jour­ney ten years prior.

Ten years ago, I saw myself as a pretty opti­mistic per­son. A “glass is half-​​full” type of per­son. If preg­nancy didn’t hap­pen, then it just wasn’t meant to be just yet. Almost a year later, I began to become cau­tiously opti­mistic. And by the time I had my first hys­tero­scope, my mind­set was of “let’s just get the task done.” At my low­est “pre-​​IVF” point, I was def­i­nitely very pes­simistic about any chance of ever get­ting preg­nant. By that time I had already had done enough ovu­la­tion chart­ing, had more than enough Clo­mid cycles fol­lowed by even stronger injectable med­ica­tion cycles, and had enough surg­eries to last me a life­time. It was at that time I became a“glass is half-​​empty” person.

So when Hubby and I finally decided to try the IVF route, I knew I had to change my atti­tude. And although I knew that IVF was never a guar­an­tee that I’d be able to get preg­nant, I had to think pos­i­tive. In fact, I couldn’t just think pos­i­tive, I had to put every effort into mak­ing sure that I was going to be suc­cess­ful at becom­ing preg­nant. It was actu­ally not as hard as I thought, espe­cially with all the hor­mones I was pump­ing into me. I knew then that if I had even a shred of doubt, I would fall deep into the abyss of pessimism.

So imag­ine how far I fell once I found out my IVF cycle was unsuc­cess­ful. I cer­tainly did plunge deep into that deep pit of despair. There was the ini­tial shock and dis­ap­point­ment, fol­lowed closely by hys­ter­ics for the next cou­ple weeks. Any­thing at that time set me off into waves of sad­ness and tears. A year after the failed IVF attempt, when we made the deci­sion to let our one frozen blas­to­cyte “go,” it was like reliv­ing all the emo­tions of the year prior.* And in that moment, I knew I would never be able to go through another IVF attempt. It was just too emo­tion­ally and phys­i­cally painful for me to ever have to go through again.

After a period of time, I just became “numb.” Cry­ing seemed to be use­less, and to tell you the truth, very humil­i­at­ing. After all, in my cul­ture, cry­ing is only appro­pri­ate for a set amount of time. After that, cry­ing is just con­sid­ered a sign of weak­ness as we are taught to quickly “get over” our loss and “move on” right away. So after awhile, I learned to sti­fle my pain and pre­tend as if noth­ing was wrong. I pre­tended to be “over” the failed IVF attempt and let peo­ple believe that I was just con­tent with my cur­rent sit­u­a­tion. I also let oth­ers believe that even­tu­ally my Hubby & I would be work­ing towards adop­tion. And truth­fully, I tried to con­vince myself of that for the next three years.

How­ever, as the past three years went by, I uncon­sciously knew that some­thing was miss­ing. By all stan­dards, I looked like I was okay, but inside I felt mis­er­able. I prob­a­bly would have con­tin­ued to go on feel­ing like this if it wasn’t for the news that we received a year ago next month. That news was of my sister-in-law’s preg­nancy. And well, if you’ve read my pre­vi­ous posts (not to men­tion the most recent posts of Liam’s life), you’d know that I didn’t han­dle the news very well. As of recently, I’d like to think I man­aged the most recent events rather decently, but it’s only after I spent this last year talk­ing (and sub­se­quently blog­ging) about the gamut of emo­tions I’ve been through.

So where am I at now? Well, obvi­ously I’ve been cry­ing a lot lately (cul­tural behav­ior be damned!). In fact, I think I’ve cried more this past year than I did over the last ten years, since I started this crazy infer­til­ity jour­ney. I know for a fact that all the events that have tran­spired over the past year is respon­si­ble for the river of tears (not to men­tion the trails of tis­sue paper) that fol­low behind me. And while it’s been a ter­ri­bly dif­fi­cult year, I do have to admit I feel I’ve grown a lit­tle more emo­tion­ally stronger from it. I would think that just by being able to post my “baby pic­ture” shows that I am. (At least I hope so).

Wow. I can’t believe how far I’ve come since then.

* For a quick overview of our IVF his­tory, we had 13 eggs retrieved, 8 of which were fer­til­ized using ICSI, 3 of which “matured” enough, 2 of which were implanted in me. The lonely one that was left was frozen for the pos­si­bil­ity of later doing a “frozen cycle.” What we didn’t expect was that we’d only have one blas­to­cyte mature out of the 13 eggs that were orig­i­nally retrieved. As there isn’t much suc­cess rate in doing a “frozen cycle,” let alone with only one blas­to­cyte, Hubby & I elected not to pro­ceed with that next step.