The Desire of My Heart

It’s been over five months since I last posted here. If you asked me what I’ve been up to in that time I could tell you a lot of things. I took a Mediterranean cruise and got to show my favorite travel destination, Italy, to my family for the first time. I went camping with Aurora and Snow in Southern Utah and had an absolute blast reconnecting and doing all the silly things we do when we finally get together, naked dancing under the stars included. I spent a week on a catamaran off the coast of Turkey. I went paragliding. I started another school year. But the one over-arching thing that comes to my mind about the last few months, in fact, about all of 2016, is my struggle with infertility.

Infertility.

I can use the word now—although I joke that I prefer “reproductively challenged”—since it has been almost 11 months since I went off birth control and the oven remains positively bunless.

I’ve tried everything. This spring my cycle was on the short side and my basal body temperature tracking seemed to indicate that I was ovulating late. Since the egg needs 10-14 days after conception to make its way to the uterus and implant, a short cycle or late ovulation can mean that you might be fertilizing an egg every month but it’s getting flushed out with your period before it can implant. I read that taking vitamin B6 can help lengthen your cycle, so I started taking that this summer, along with fertility vitamins that cost me about a dollar per day. Sure enough, July brought with it a 35 day cycle. I kept taking pregnancy tests like mad, but they all came back negative.

In August I put my husband on male fertility vitamins, too, and I started using ovulation prediction tests. That month I ovulated but started my period only 9 days later. Back to square one. In September I never even got a positive ovulation test, indicating that I had either missed the hormone surge or I didn’t ovulate at all. Another period came, another month of disappointment.

I made an appointment with a random gynecologist, just hoping to start the process of fertility treatments. It turned out that he was a fertility specialist, and since my appointment happened to be on day 3 of my cycle, he started me on Clomid that very same day. I took the medicine for four days and came back three times in the next week for hormone injections to encourage the follicles to develop and ultrasounds to see their progress. At the same time, my husband had his sperm tested. We found out they could be better, but they also could be worse.

And now, we wait, again. School starting has taken my mind off of it somewhat, so I’m doing better than I was this summer, when every period brought tears. Each doctor appointment required us to drive over an hour each way to the hospital, so it sort of feels like I’ve done nothing in the last couple of weeks except go back and forth to those appointments. And have sex of course. Lots of sex.

Beyond the frustration of not getting the desire of my heart on my own timeline, the whole journey has started to alter my thinking in ways I wouldn’t have expected. I haven’t gotten to the point of hating pregnant women or throwing things at the wall every time another pregnancy announcement or baby photo comes up on facebook, but I’ll admit that it didn’t feel great to read a post the other day from my cousin who has been on welfare since she got pregnant at 19. She’s now 35 and pregnant again, with her 9^th child. 9!

And sex doesn’t appeal to me like it used to. I sometimes wonder if I will ever be able to enjoy it normally again, without the pressure of scrutinizing the calendar. When you try something and fail over and over again, it starts to traumatize you. Well, we’ve probably had sex over 100 times in the last 11 months without conceiving. That’s 100 times of trying and failing.

I used to dream about creative ways to tell my husband I was pregnant, or my parents. I would daydream about crafting the perfect facebook announcement, about buying maternity clothes, and, of course, about meeting that precious little human for the first time.

Now I hardly think about any of that. The only thing occupying my fantasies is the image of two pink lines—a positive pregnancy test. If that happens I think I might just tell everyone I know, because that’s how excited I will be. The hell with the cute announcements.

Then, of course, I’ll have a whole other slew of worries to face. Miscarriage, which would be all the more devastating given how long it has taken us to conceive. Birth, which obviously won’t be fun. A thousand defects and maladies that could afflict my child. And then the ultimate challenge: keeping a kid alive and actually raising him well.

Getting pregnant can happen in an instant, but for me it’s turned out to be one of the most time-consuming tasks I’ve ever attempted. Three months of trying became six months, which became nine months, and regardless of all the wonderful experiences I’ve had this year, many of which were made possible and/or easier and more fun by the fact I was NOT pregnant, I still feel like there’s been a dark cloud over 2016. With two months left to go, I’m wishing with all my heart that I’ll see a light at the end of the tunnel soon.