The Flicker of Hope is Gone

We had our 4th ob appointment today. I'm 10w2d. No heartbeat, and the baby measured at 8w4d - 0.3mm smaller than our last appointment two weeks ago.

There's no explanation as to why at this point. Everything looked perfectly normal - for an 8 1/2 week pregnancy with no heartbeat, anyway.

I'm waiting to hear when the D&C will be. It will be my first, even though this is our fifth miscarriage. The others never got far enough to need it. My ob is going to send the tissue for testing to see if it will give us any answers.

This cycle used the last of the embryos we had. We started with 17 during our fresh cycle in July/August 2006. 17. We worried at the time that we had created enough embroys for 5 or 6 families. And now there's none. Not one family, not one baby.

I feel dead inside. I've dealt with the pain of loss before, but this is on a whole new level. I don't know what to do, how to begin to process this. I don't want to eat dinner, I don't want to watch TV, I don't want to work, I don't want to do projects around the house. I guess what I really want is to not be inside my own skin anymore, to not be me. Because if I'm not me, then I don't have to deal with this.

I'm not sure where we're going to go from here. Before this pregnancy, I was getting to a place where I felt like I might just learn to live with being childless. It's not something I would choose as an option (though please know I'm not criticizing those who do). But since at this point that is the reality of our life, and despite trying our very best it still is the reality, I'm not sure we have another alternative but to accept it. After our devastating failed adoption attempts, I don't know that I have the strength to go back to that. And IVF hasn't given us any answers or any successes - it's simply added to the losses and compounded the pain. I don't see us going back to that route, particularly since R's counts are now normal and the RE doesn't have any answer to "why?" and just recommends trying the same thing again. Maybe we'll just try on our own and see what happens.