This week has been an emotional week . A hormonal week as well which magnifies all my feels by about a gazillion. But it’s been more than that. I finally feel like I am moving forward. My husband and I have been trying quite unsuccessfully for a year to get pregnant. And I’ve been off birth control for much longer than that. Much longer. We think it’s possible that there was a pregnancy last year but the potential victory was extremely short lived. I had symptoms, sickness, the works but I think I lost it before it became real enough to test positive. Maybe it was just a pipe dream, maybe it wasn’t. My one personal saving grace, in a bitter kind of way, is that after that happened, my body became drastically different. It may have been a coincidence. It may have been a influx of hormone changes but things were definitely different. Things were so different in fact that I was sure the next six months would not yield any pregnancies. I was right.
I spoke with a nurse practitioner. She made me feel like my concerns were silly and I was jumping the gun. “You’ve only been trying for six months, you need to wait longer.” She told me. It’s what they tell everybody. Who’s more impatient than a woman who wants to be a mother. I’m not mad at her but mad at myself. I feel like I wasn’t clear about my worries that maybe I minimized them because I was afraid of what it would lead to. I was afraid that if I pushed too hard then we would find out something was seriously wrong with me. That maybe I didn’t have the ability to have children. And that froze me inside. It made me minimize my worries and that nurse practitioner probably sees worried young women like me all the time. Plus I was hoping so much that she was right. I asked for a PCOS test and she said that I wasn’t overweight so that’s very, very unlikely.
Now we are at a year and I can finally go to an obstetrician’s office in confidence and say that things aren’t working and I want answers. Bless my OB. He not only took me seriously and said right away that he would refer me to an fertility specialist but he also told me that he wanted to check for PCOS and Endometriosis right away. He didn’t poo poo me. He took me seriously. And even though I am still afraid of what the ultrasound will find, my testosterone came back normal. That’s a good sign for being negative on PCOS. His immediate trust in my own feelings about my body made me feel like I could trust myself again. I could trust that whatever it is causing this infertility may be healed. I could trust that my body with its eczema and constant gut problems and allergies was no longer my enemy.
No, not all at once. Some days, I cry because I wake up to bloody scratches on my legs from scratching myself in my sleep. Sometimes when my husband takes me out for dinner, I growl in the frustration of realizing that I can basically eat a plain chicken breast cooked in tinfoil and microwaved veggies. Or if I don’t, spending the next few days feeling bad and looking terrible. I’m not not frustrated. My saving grace is that I feel like I finally a little more in control of my life. Even though I firmly believe we are not really in control, I feel like I am no longer just floating. Floating is indifferent. Floating is… painful. I am not floating anymore.
her winter song 