Round 8 Ends- I Want To Wake Up

About a week and a half ago I ended my two-week-wait to Round 8. (Round 8 was ovulation induction with Puregon/Gonal F injections and IUI.) You IF girls out there know how agonizing that wait is... we found out that my blood tested positive for pregnancy hormones but it was too low to be sustained.

My two-week-wait turned into a three-week-trauma. We did a couple more blood tests following that and this week it was confirmed that the pregnancy hormone levels dropped sharply and will continue to do so. In short, we were pregnant but had an early early miscarriage.

We are gutted.

We don't know the whys and probably won't for a while. It continues to remain a mystery medically and I've resolved to be okay with that. I would love to know but in the meantime... not knowing is also okay.

(I'm going to be upfront and say: If you have any new suggestions for reasons or ways to overcome recurrent miscarriage please DON'T share them with me right now, unless you yourself have gone through the same thing. It is just hard for me to receive such info at the moment.)

The word 'pregnant' has never been harder to spit out. I didn't want to use it because it sorta speaks it into 'being'. Sort of like saying it means I have to engage in all the possibilities it brings. I know some of you are familiar with this feeling too, whether or not the pregnancy is going well, where we don't dare to embrace the thought or reality because it could be too hard.

However, the truth is that egg-met-sperm, there was implantation, there was life, but beyond that, we don't know. It didn't go as we'd hoped.

I knew it'd get awkward at some point, blogging so openly about my life. Now I'm here- I don't know how to describe it. I want to be open, but sometimes that comes back to bite me because my vulnerability is also up for grabs.

As this dragged on, I struggled to have any social contact because I have not been functioning like a normal person. Up till a couple days ago, I pretty much just hid in my little shell and hoped everything would go away.

I hate that I've become so familiar with grief. I've been here before, but I didn't want to be here again, or this often. (Grief not just to do with loss but also to do with the disappointment of unexpected procedures, failed cycles, negative tests, the arrival of the pd- or AF.)

That 'shock' that really isn't just a simple zappy-jolt, but a lingering weight lasts longer than you think- where you are wading through a bog of thick air and everything is just empty inside. Hollowed-out. The worst part is that you feel like you are outside of time, but reality is that you are not and you desperately want the world to stop spinning because your everything has just frozen.

It has felt so much like a bad dream. A recurring one. Except the part where you wake up doesn't happen.

I hate that my texts/messages to those who have been waiting and praying with us have become the same: 'Worked but it is not going well...'

Sick of it.

I've had about ten days since the initial news to grieve, so the anger and frustration has subsided quite a bit. Thank you for praying for us and giving me the space to lie low. I'm very fortunate to have understanding friends and an empathetic workplace.

It has felt like it has gotten harder each round. We know it has probably got a lot to do with the reality of loss... so simply 'trying again' is really not so straightforward. It feels like another round is too hard to bear right now, so we are just going to try and focus on other things and see how it goes.

I hate that this is our fourth pregnancy loss and I hate that it sounds like just another number. This little bud of life was as precious to us as each of the other ones... and yet it is so hard to know how to acknowledge him/her because it was so brief and so invisible.

Oh Lord I have so many questions for you.

Thank you for praying for us and being there for us. We prayed for a miracle and in a sense we got it, but in another sense, we're also not sure what happened.

Thankfully, I'm been okay physically and I know the husband and I will recover. We know God is a God of hope, as much as it is hard to see.

In the meantime, yeah... this SUCKS so bad. But one-day-at-a-time continues to sound pretty handle-able.