Will the 4th Time be the Charm?

Obviously, I haven’t been blogging during these past few months. To be honest, it simply became too painful. Our friends in normal life have kids, many of them two or three at this point. We’ve been long since left behind. Friends we made through Resolve, who started out in the same place as us, also now have at least one or two children. We’ve been left behind by the infertile community.

And then the veteran bloggers who were around when I started blogging all moved on to success, along with many bloggers who started after me. And once again, I’ve felt left behind. Everyone else is moving on to the new phase of their blogs – life with pregnancy, life with kids – and here I am basically retyping the same old variation on a theme: I’m pregnant, oops now I’m not; we’re adopting, oops now we’re not.

I needed my life to focus on something else for a while. And that plan was working, until our fertility clinic decided to brighten up the week leading up to Mother’s Day for us. It’s a long story, but for the sake of brevity, let’s just say the clinic’s financial coordinator was telling us we had to do an FET, the RE was insisting that our next cycle had to be a fresh cycle, and we got stuck in a very awkward tug of war between the both of them, who apparently are either unwilling or unable to communicate with each other.

It was handled, in my opinion anyway, very badly. But regardless, the upshot was that we wound up having to do an FET in June. It was a total no confidence cycle – the RE made it very clear that he didn’t see the point of it, and it was obvious that the feeling rubbed off on everyone, R and myself included.

I forgot to go get blood drawn, the clinic forgot to put me on the schedule and so didn’t realize that they should have been seeing lab results for me, I had to self-dose a couple of times, the clinic forgot to schedule a procedure I needed, they added a medication to my calendar that I wasn’t supposed to be taking, I left $350 worth of meds in a hotel room when I was traveling out of town, a bottle of suppositories I brought when I was traveling out of state to the clinic melted and congealed into one big glob of goo, etc. And then, to top it all off, the morning after bed rest ended, I backed R’s truck into a pole. It was pretty much the perfect cap to an absolutely laughable cycle.

And then, of course, the betas came back positive. I’ve had four so far, and they’ve all risen appropriately. I have the next one tomorrow morning.

My enthusiasm for this pregnancy is totally and completely underwhelming, to the degree that it’s causing concern among those who know me well. But it’s the best I can do at this point – it’s all I’ve got in me to give.

I’m 6 weeks today. That makes tomorrow 6 weeks 1 day. And 6 weeks 1 day has historically not been a good day for me. In Pregnancy #1, I began spotting on 5 weeks 1 day, and it ended in a miscarriage on 6 weeks 1 day. Pregnancy #3 seemed to be going fine. No spotting, nothing. 6 weeks 1 day came, and I thought we’d make it past that point. I was starving for lunch by 10 a.m., my sense of smell was very strong, I was running to the bathroom every couple of hours, I made R come bring me a huge dinner at 4:30 p.m., there was not even a speck of spotting. Then, at 7:15 p.m., I felt some cramping. I was in Target. I went into the bathroom, and there was a lot of blood. We lost twin A a few hours later, and then twin B 9 days after that.

I’m nervous and scared, about the blood test and about the whole day. Not that getting through tomorrow means that we’re in the clear by any means. Every day is limbo, and each morning I get up and go through it all over again. It’s like I’m living the pregnancy version of Groundhog Day. If this isn’t going to result in us holding a live, healthy baby in our arms in 7 ½ months, I just want it to be over with now.

Like I said, my enthusiasm for this is less than underwhelming.