Experience + Council

I've wanted to post again for awhile now, but we've had a lack of internet connection (feels like my arm has been chopped off!) But I'm trying to get back into the swing of things despite the ultra slow wireless signal from an obliging (or unaware) neighbor.

I felt like I should post about an experience that Spencer and I had a few weeks ago. In April I kept trying to set aside a day that we could go to the temple and something would always seem to come up at the last minute and we'd have to postpone our plan. This happened several times actually as we planned to go to the temple. We all know full well how to choose between a good thing and a bad thing. What's difficult is when the choice is between two or three or four good things. Especially when it consists of helping someone during a time of need. Not that all of the distractions pulling us away from our temple plans where good things, but a great number of them were. It came to the end of the month and I attempted to put down my foot to Spencer and say, "It will happen on [this] day. We're going." Well, once again several things came at us all at once, and I lost it. I fell apart. I felt so discouraged. By this point I just felt desperate to get to the temple. I felt spiritually starved for it, and I knew that Satan was standing on my coat tail (or skirt tail) trying to keep me from getting to nourishment. It was doubly frustrating to me that it seemed like Spencer was assisting him. For some reason he didn't seem as anxious as I thought he should be to make our plan happen.

Finally, a Friday night, May 1st to be exact, we started the 2 hour drive to the Atlanta Temple as soon as Spencer got off of work. He seemed especially quiet and irritable the whole drive up. I wasn't exactly the prime of contentment either. As we parked the car in the temple parking lot, somehow a nit picky comment doubled over into a knock down drag out. We attempted to get out of the car, but the argument seemed to escalate, and to avoid humiliation we got back in. A stupid argument about where to leave a cell phone and where to put trash turned into a spill-over of random bottled up emotions and feelings that had never really surfaced. Things about our relationship and the way we communicate. But one of the most important realizations that surfaced as we vented all of our frustrations to each other was that most of the frustrations we were feeling were directly and indirectly caused by our infertility situation and we weren't loving each other through it and relying on each other for comfort the way we should have been. We both had been feeling distant, confused, and unloved. I think knowing that we couldn't carry all of those frustrated and upset feelings into the temple forced us to sit there and reconcile our situation, not just a temporary "I'm sorry" fix, but a real spill out of deep feelings.

It has been amazing the change in Spencer since he was able to let it all out. Men tend to bottle things up inside. He's seen me cry and cry and cry until I've made myself sick, but not once have a seen him really let out his emotions on his own personal infertile circumstance. He's always been rational and seemed rather impartial on the subject. So to hear him say that he had been angry with God and for him to describe hopeless feelings was somewhat of a shock and relief at the same time. He confessed that the temple was the last place he felt like being at the moment. At first I concurred, but then a flash of thought came to me that I knew was the Spirit. I said, "I know. But I also know that inside those walls is where we have been promised an eternal family. I know we have children. And being in the temple is the only place on earth that I can feel as close to them as possible. And I want us to be together as a family, even if only in the temple for now." We both embraced as we felt the same stir of emotions.

We collected ourselves and finally made our way inside the temple for the last session of the night. While inside the temple there was a certain point where it all suddenly hit me: The Priesthood. We hadn't sought the power of the priesthood yet and we needed to seek a priesthood blessing. And not just any blessing...A Father's Blessing. And not just any Father's Blessing...My dad is an ordained Patriarch. I have heard truth and prophecy pour out of his mouth and felt the power from underneath his hands on numerous occasions.

The following Sunday happened to be Fast Sunday and we all prepared ourselves. We both had a blessing. In my blessing I was blessed to be relieved from any anxiety I felt over the issue of bearing children, that I would indeed be blessed in the Lord's due time to bear children and that I would be able to carry to full term during each pregnancy and that I should prepare myself in every way to be a mother. Spencer then was blessed and counseled to be cautious about what he puts in his body, to take his vitamins and any thing else the doctors recommend to him, to continue his exercise program, and that after he did all that he could do, the Lord would make up for what he couldn't do for himself, and that he would be healed and would be able to father children. WOW! We have been on cloud 9 ever since! I still feel overwhelmed with joy and comfort as I recall all of these things.

Forgive me if all of this seemed long-winded or too personal to share. I was feeling it all in my heart and just had to share it with some awesome women that I knew would be happy to hear it. I'm so thankful for the Temple and for the Priesthood and for the council that the Lord was willing to send us. I just hope that we can be faithful to that council. I'm clinging to it for all it's worth!

Results are IN and the results are GOOD :)

Despite our rocky start, our IVF cycle has apparently worked! Blood test yesterday confirmed what 4 days of frantic peeing into a tiny little plastic tub and setting a dip-stick in it had hinted at. By "hinted" I mean the first day I did an hpt it came back negative. The next two days were very, very, very faint positives, but somewhat after the time limit. The last day was FINALLY within the time-frame and darker than the others, but as all my extensive (as in "Internet") research pointed to a great possibility of getting positive hpt results as early if not earlier than when I tested, I was slightly nervous. Maybe my hcg levels just weren't very high? Maybe this wasn't going to be a viable pregnancy? Maybe, maybe, maybe... And while we're nowhere near actually having this baby (or babies) in arms, at least the results from my blood test came back nice and strong. Phew. And YIPPEE!! :)

Marking Time

One of the strange things about suffering a miscarriage or a failed IVF cycle is the marking of time. As the months pass, I think "I would have been this far along", or "I would have looked about as big as that woman does right now". It is sort of a melancholy thing, to be thinking about something that never came to pass, but that easily could have been.

I have already marked the first of two days this year that "might have been". February 22nd was my due date for the pregnancy I lost to miscarriage. Like a distinct tying of lose ends, my pregnant sister-in-law (who called a week after my miscarriage to announce that she had just discovered her surprise pregnancy) gave birth a few days before "my" due date.

As for the other marked day, I have the misfortune of having not one, but two friends who are both due on the exact June Friday that would have belonged to my baby, if our most recent attempt at IVF had worked. So instead of preparing for my own little one to arrive, I get a front row seat to exactly what might have been instead.

Sometimes I wonder if it is worth risking more failures and more marked days to expand our family. But as any woman who has dealt with infertility knows, every month there is a marked day, a possible due date, and the heartache of losing that possibility all over again.

So is it worth it? Sometimes I just don't know. But then, I realize that the heartache of not trying at all would be far worse - a fact of which I am reminded every time I look into my sweet little boy's eyes and wish for him to have a sibling.

Marking time is one thing, but regretting time wasted is quite another.

Better to have tried and lost than not to have tried at all.

IVF #2 ...here we go!

We're doing an IVF cycle this month. As in, I started my period on Tuesday, and on Wednesday had my FSH and E2 tested, ran to the pharmacy and bought $800 worth of Gonal-F (no prescription necessary) and started the injections. And the whole doing-infertility-treatments-in-your-non-native-language has already bitten us squarely on the rear. Sigh. A nagging little part of my brain kept telling me, "I think we started doing something BEFORE day 1 (starting my period) of the cycle we planned to do IVF in...but did we really???" Back at our initial consultation, in December, Dr. Bossano very clearly stated, "when you're ready to do IVF, just call us on the first day of your period and you'll go in for hormone measurements and we'll start from there." Awesome! Unfortunately, what he meant, and probably explained somewhat, is you start that whole menstrual cycle and on day 21 of THAT cycle, you do some drugs and then get your period AGAIN and do the actual ovarian stimulating drugs. Duh! You'd think I'd remember that! It was three years ago, though, and surprisingly, much of that IVF is pretty fuzzy by now.

So all day on Wednesday (Day 2 of my cycle) this nagging feeling was getting stronger and stronger...Finally I googled "IVF timeline" etc., and the nagging blossomed into full-fledged worry as I saw and began to remember the REAL timeline. Yep, spreads over TWO cycles. Dang it! We don't have TIME to do this schedule! We leave Uruguay on June 12. We literally will NOT be here to do IVF according to the timeline. I held on to a slim hope that they do it differently in Uruguay, that we were still going to be able to squeeze a cycle in. And then I called the office. I hate, hate, HATE talking on the phone in Spanish. Especially when it's something important and vital information is being exchanged. I hate it. But, it had to be done. And yes, the nice lady told me my hormone levels looked perfect and she'd set up an appointment for day 21 for an ultrasound and etc., etc. So I clarified that we weren't actually doing IVF in this cycle, and then let her know about our, ahem, misunderstanding and how we were moving and HAD to do it this cycle. Silence on the line. She said she'd call me back. So I sat by the phone, my mind flitting through various options, on the verge of slight panic. She called back about 2 minutes later, and told me the new plan. Injections immediately, and we'll go for it. Yeeeessssss!!! Though I don't remember or know what I'm missing out on by skipping the previous steps... Hopefully nothing too important.

So, there it is. We're going for it again. AND, we're not telling anyone! Well, scratch that. Our families of course know, and many of our friends here in Uruguay...and y'all....okay, basically, I'm just not putting it on our blog, because we want to surprise at least SOME people if we are blessed with a pregnancy again. How cool would that be? Very.