Several years ago I created a playlist which I titled “especially when it rains.” It came from a song lyric. The same song from which the title of this post is borrowed. At the time when I’d created this playlist I was really struggling with life. I’d been on a long run in the pouring rain (without said playlist or any music) and all I could think while running were these depressing thoughts. I thought that life wasn’t going to get any better. I thought I would keep struggling forever. I thought that I would never find ways to talk about the pain I was living with. I took a selfie at the end of the run and looked at my drenched face on the water-splattered screen. It felt like looking at an old photo of my dad on a boat. It moved me away from the sad feelings into some strange place where I felt safe and like home. I went home and built this sad-happy playlist. I’m listening to it now.
I bring up the playlist, the sad-happy state, and that whole memory cause it’s the easiest way for me to enter this conversational space with the unknown, to talk about something that I haven’t been and am still not entirely sure how to talk and write about. It’s hard to share about stuff what we feel we have no control over, things where we aren’t sure how it will go. That big unknown, sad-happy in my life is infertility and continuing to try to conceive.
Recently, a good friend reminded me that being afraid of something or not fully knowing where it will lead is no reason not to share your experience. She reminded me that writing is kinda my thing. She reminded me that my voice is important. So let’s talk.
About six years ago, while talking about our future together, my partner R and I began the conversation about having a family. That conversation mixed and melded, ebbed and flowed. We got married and then the pandemic overran our lives. We moved into a new place and the conversations blossomed again. We began trying. Some major life changes happened (my Dad had a stroke and I became a caregiver, R changed job responsibilities, I suffered through a year of debilitating illnesses). We kept trying. We persisted and persisted. I will get into the deep history of all this in another newsletter because it’s been a long, challenging journey. But for now, I would like to start at this new beginning.
As this past winter began to swallow fall, R and I sat on our couch and talked about whether or not to continue this path toward having kids. We’d been trying/persisting with no pregnancy for years. I remember crying. I remember being pulled in so many directions. I remember looking into his dark eyes for something that felt like an answer.
It is hard to explain the level to which I felt like a failure at the core functionality of my body. I’ve been told many times throughout my life, whether it was in science class or by others, that the main thing a woman’s body is meant to do is conceive children. After this immense journey, was it really that my body couldn’t do this thing that everyone else believes it should be able to do? I was crushed, embarrassed, and frustrated. What could I have done differently to make this work? Where did I go wrong in my life and make my body an unsuitable host? Are women’s bodies really meant to grow humans or was it just me? We’d had a battery of tests done by my OB but they didn’t provide conclusive answers. I felt broken.
Sitting on that couch, everything feeling like an ending, I finally asked R if we should call the reproductive endocrinologist that my OB had suggested a year prior. Should we give this whole thing one more shot, a last ditch effort. We’d heard about IUI and IVF, but they felt like far off concepts that only rich people could afford. No one in our immediate circle of friends and family had been through it and could give us any guidance. I remember holding his hands so tight, his fingers turned white. I remember him gently wiping tears from my face. What was there to lose in trying. We decided the answer was yes.
On January 2nd of this year, we drove thirty minutes to the large, brown hospital center. We rode the elevator up to the third floor and followed the signs toward the fertility specialist’s office. As we walked in, I was struck by the layout of the waiting room. Did they mean for it to be structured like a woman’s reproductive organs? You enter the door as if it is the cervix and the small standing area in front of the desk is the uterus. On either side are the waiting areas, like ovaries, with a plethora of chairs like egg follicles. Tell me this doesn’t look like a woman’s reproductive system.
We sat in the cushioned chairs with the edges of our knees touching and I stared around at the pale green walls. R played chess on his phone. I tried to glean some meaning from the large photographs of flowers. Someone probably went to IKEA and grabbed whatever gave off a joyful vibe. Flowers were joyful, right? The harsh red of the tulip against the pale blue sky felt like a fight. Something you have to gut through. I wondered what it meant. Or what it meant that I was thinking that. The doctor we were to meet with came to the door and called our names. I knew it was her because I’d spent an hour on the company’s website reading all about her, studying her photograph. Wondering if she could fix us. She looked the same in person. Her dark hair pulled back from her face. Her excited demeanor bubbling. We followed her in.
The doctor talked over our past test results and reviewed a plan of action for more testing. She asked us some questions and looked straight into our eyes when talking. I broke her gaze often to look out the window at the pale blue sky. Or at the wall behind her with framed accomplishments. Or at the photo of two dogs on the bookshelf. I don’t like constant eye contact. It makes me feel the like person is trying to get something from me, trying to dig deeper. My eyes continued to flit about. From our past testing, she gleaned that IVF was likely the best option. My heart sank a bit. But! she said loudly, it looks like you have really good insurance coverage, so that’s great. A balloon floated up from somewhere. Would this be possible? I hate getting my hopes up. She said she’d have the billing team reach out to us to review. I could feel myself holding my breath. I reminded my brain to breathe and held R’s hand.
As it happened, I was on day four of my ovulatory cycle so she went into the long list of all the tests she wanted to run. Almost entirely a repeat of our tests from a year and change prior. Which, while annoying, turns out is pretty normal. When it came up that I don’t like needles, she said listen, I want to prepare you, and launched into a twenty-plus minute speech about all the shots I would need to take as part of the IVF process. My stomach turned inside out. She wrapped up by telling us that we could start the tests today and shuttled us into another room. This one windowless and pale yellow. I looked at R, well that was a lot. Yeah, but it makes sense, and we’ve done the tests before, it’ll be no problem, R said confidently. All I could see in my mind were needles.
A new nurse came in and read through the introduction packet with us. She mixed up our doctor’s name and I immediately took it as a bad sign of things to come. I felt skittish, but tried to calm my nerves by pushing my palms heavily into my thighs. We signed the paperwork and then she led us through the interior of the office for different tests: urine, blood, and an inter-uterine ultrasound. I remember staring off into space while the nurse was collecting vial after vial of blood, and she asked me if I was okay. I’m fine, just was a lot of process, I replied and she kept talking about how everyone feels like that at first and how I’ll do great, blah blah. I zoned back out and wondered if I could actually do all this. Could we afford it? Could it work? Or were we destined for more failure?
We left the office an hour and half later and in the brilliant sunlight R said, It’s really happening. I don’t know if I will ever forget the sheer joy as it moved across his beautiful face. I wanted to be excited like he was, but all I could think about was the money and the needles and things not working out. I smiled weakly.
Over the next month, my enthusiasm continued to wane. In classic fashion, I withdrew into myself, teeming with fear. The picture the doctor painted of needles, medications, doctor visits, blood work, ultrasounds overwhelmed me. I wasn’t sure I could go through with it. I wasn’t sure I wanted it [a baby] this bad. The physical pain was one thing, and the money was another. The numbers were staggering. I spent hours on the phone with our insurance and the fertility center’s billing team trying to suss out our costs. I am the type of person who likes a plan, likes to have control over what they are doing, but this process has shown me over and over that control is an illusion.
A particular low point of the testing was the day I had to have the HSG test done. This involved pumping a dye into the uterus and taking x-rays. It might be one of the more painful tests women get to endure. I was prescribed something strong for the pain, but as we walked into the clinic where this test was to be done (and hour and half away from where we live), I still didn’t feel anything and began to worry. R and I were split up as he had other tests to do, and I was sent upstairs. I waited in another pale green room and tried to will the pain meds to start working. As time continued to pass, I decided to also take some Tylenol as a backup. Finally, a nurse called me back.
The room where the HSG was to be done was in the basement. Anyone who has ever seen a horror movie knows, you never ever go in the basement. They’d painted the concrete walls a light teal, but it didn’t help. The giant machine and all the contraptions loomed from the center of the room. A little partition to change behind was setup, complete with tissues and pads. Later I would be surprised that I didn’t notice the open wastebasket was full of bright-red bloody tissues sooner. The room was chilled and the machines generated a hum that grew to a roar once they were working. The nurse and doctor positioned my knees in the high stir-ups, and I pushed on my chest with both hands. As the dye pumped into my body, pain seared through every part of me. Light broke through my brain and I couldn’t think. Hot tears soaked my face and hair. Please, please let this be over soon, I cried to no one. I thought I had a high pain tolerance until that moment. By the time they were done, I was convulsing in pain and cries. The doctor and nurse just looked at me and tried to explain the results through my sobs. I still am not entirely sure what they said, but I could tell that the image of my uterus looked strange at best.
The entire drive home I thought about how my uterus resembled one of those floppy inflatable tube people. The drugs finally began to kick in so I’d giggle to myself and then pass out, wake back up, giggle, and fall back asleep. I kept thinking about the quote from The Princess Bride, Life is pain, highness, anyone who says differently is selling something. The pain from the HSG lasted three days, two of which with me unable to really move around and in bed all day. A nurse called to say that the test results from the HSG warranted another test, a saline sonogram. When I asked if I would need pain medication again, they said no and assured me that this one would be less agonizing. It was, but mostly because I had R beside me holding my hand as I cried through another invasive, painful procedure. After all this we waited and waited for our next appointment to determine the course of action.
Somewhere within all this I began talking to people about us starting IVF. My therapist and R separately suggested that I start sharing about this journey with others. I think they were hoping that it would help me start to build a community and that I would find support for all the challenges that IVF offers. I had little moments of excitement and it came up surprisingly easily in conversations, so I did indeed start sharing. That is also when people started talking back.
Before I want to pause to remind you of something. If you don’t share what you going through (regardless of what it is), you don’t get the bad responses that inevitably arise if you do share. Throughout my life, I’ve been pretty open about my mental health. I have no problem sharing the challenges I face as someone with a long and complicated list of disorders. I have learned how to blow off the idiots and cultivate ways to share my experience so that others like me don’t have to feel so alone. But I have never been great about sharing my health issues. I have learned over the past year how to be better about opening up, but health always felt more personal, more private, and I’ve always been more guarded around talking about it.
I’ve always weathered my health issues [more or less] alone and didn’t really think about sharing about IVF initially. But I did try and to be honest, it didn’t go great. Here are a handful of comments that people said to my face: Oh my friend did IVF, took her like ten tries to have their baby, but so worth it right!?, Oh wow IVF, you guys must make a lot of money, Well, if it’s not happening, you know on your own, maybe it’s not supposed to?, why not consider adoption? It’s pretty wild the myriad of ways that people do not think before they speak. It took me a long while to recognize that I did not need to explain anything to anyone. The journey R and I were on went through many different considerations (including adoption, which we pursued for a bit before having a bad experience and backtracking), and we’ve made a lot of sacrifices and hard choices to get to this point. All the weirdness and negativity made me shut right back up. Until now. Until I had the right support system in place to help remind me that being able to speak up, through all those harsh voices, might help someone else.
Every person who finds their way into parenthood does so differently. Each mom becomes a mom in a distinct but unique way. Each one of their journeys are special to them. There is no wrong way to become a mother, to become a parent. Each of us are dealing with our own heartbreaks and challenges, and no one path is *correct.*
When we stepped back into the building for the follow up with the fertility doctor, a woman with a small baby stood in front of us waiting for the elevator. The baby smiled at us and R and I held one another’s hands tight. Someday that would be us. Our desires trying to will this future into existence. Back in the doctor’s office, she told us that there was a plethora of issues inhibiting us from getting pregnant. Some of my issues were/are fibroids, polyps, and a swollen fallopian tube. In some ways it was comforting. We were trying with all these infertility factors holding us back. But in many others ways, it felt overwhelming all over again. I kept drifting off staring at objects in her office. The photo of her dogs. The books on her shelves. Her assistant’s incredibly expressive face. IVF is your definitely best option for conceiving, the doctor said. I had another thousand questions, but we used up our hour and change appointment and again we were shuttled into another small windowless room to wait for the next nurse with the next set of steps.
I looked at R under the fake florescent light. Everything about him made me feel safe in a space that otherwise would have had me anxious to leave. I have never been good at being in doctor’s offices. I always want to bolt. Same with hospitals. I don’t like being held in with all the body failure that these kinds of buildings contain. But when he looked into my eyes, I decided to be ready. I decided to try this. And I decided to let a lot of my need-to-know-everything-have-it-all-perfectly-planned self go a little bit. The nurse came in and ran through all the steps we would need to proceed. More papers that I would leave on our kitchen counter and vaguely keep referencing.
We exited into another sunny Colorado day and I smiled wide at the bright sky. You seem to feel different this time, R said. Yeah, I’ve decided that I’m ready. His face spread into that wide, joyful smile again. We were about to begin something very new, but we were ready.
Over the last couple weeks since that appointment, there have been other small follow-up appointments, consults with all my other doctors to ensure I would be ready to start this process, and the coordination of the health insurance and medications. We got the prior authorization from our insurance and I spent hours upon hours on the phone with different folks at the insurance company and the specialty pharmacy figuring out pricing, billing, and coverage. I got all the medications I need to start the egg stimulation phase ordered and shipped. When all the meds arrived, everything suddenly felt very real.
The pile of packs of needles and medication boxes made me cry. Because I was happy-sad. I felt like after all this time and all the heartache that’s come with trying to conceive, I finally had a way forward. I look at that pile and am not as scared as I was when we first went down this road. The needles are just needles and I know that I am tougher than I give myself credit for. I know I have resources and help. I know that this will not be the hardest part that lies ahead, and that somehow gives me strength.
I have no idea where this path will take us. I don’t know if IVF will work or how many rounds it will take (or we can afford). I am not sure how I will handle the pain of all the many, many needles and shots and all the hormones. But I do know that I am trying something that is nothing like anything I’ve tried before. And isn’t that kind of incredible? I am walking a path that I never have until right now. I am living outside the bounds of knowing. I am untethering myself from needing to be sure of where I am going. I am moving freely into the oblivion of unknown.
Every person’s journey into parenthood is different, and I’ll say it again: there is no right path, no path more ideal or better. There are just many roads. Many ways in which you can move forward. And I have decided to write about mine. If you are curious about one person’s journey into and through IVF, I invite you to tag along. As much as it makes me nervous, I will do my best to not shy away from sharing the good, the hard, the painful, the scary, and the beautiful. Because together means the failures are softened and the victories, sweetened.
I start all those medications for egg stimulation next week. I hope that I will have the mental energy to post about my experiences in a timely fashion. I will make my best effort to share what this is like and do so in the most literary way that I can. I hope it brings you some insight, some understanding, some compassion. I feel a little like these are letters going out to nowhere, but I am embracing that there is someone on the other end that is hopefully touched by all this. Plus, if reading literature has taught us anything, it’s that journeys are always interesting things to play witness to.
What lies ahead is the absolute of unknown, it’s the ultimate sad-happy, and the only way for it to become known is to enter it. I am here. I am ready. I am going on.