Losing

    Since my last entry, so much has happened. Tonight, I don’t want to talk about work. But it has been a struggle, and it still is. I’m just…not going to focus on that aspect of my life right now. I already know what I need to do and what the next steps are. I just hope that all my stars will align when the time is right, and I hope that’s sometime soon or in the very near future.

    On Friday, we received some devastating news. My husband and I had finally decided to embark on our IVF journey in early April. We were hopeful that it would work in our favor. We got started without any major issues other than having to come up with $30,000 for the package. And it had to be paid in full before we started our treatment. There are options to finance, but we’re looking at a minimum of 9% APR. So, we decided to pay a small portion of it with our savings and the rest on a credit card with a 0% APR so that we have some time to pay it off. We didn’t want to ask for help from our families.

    The “journey” seemed to move very quickly. I started self-injection hormones the same week we paid our balance. I had to inject 2 different types of medications every night and take 2 pills to help boost egg production. Those 2 weeks went by so quickly. Every other day, I was at the clinic, getting blood work done as well as getting ultrasounds on my follicles to see their progress. By early May, I was ready for my egg retrieval. I was nervous but I wasn’t nervous about the pain, but I was more nervous about my eggs and Husband’s sperm not passing all the tests that it must go through. The wait was so brutal, I was on edge. The first round of tests were the genetic tests – that was through our bloodwork. Both Husband and I tested negative for the major genetics’ tests (over 200 genetics), and that was such a relief. Next up were our embryos. The Dr. was able to retrieve 7 eggs, however, only 5 of the 7 eggs were fertilized. Unfortunately, only 2 of those embryos made it to the last stage. But the wait wasn’t over yet. The embryos were then biopsied and sent to the lab for PGT-A testing.  This was the last test the embryos had to go through to see if they were transferrable.

Friday morning, when I was at work, I got that call. Our IVF coordinator gave me the bad news, our embryos did not pass the PGT-A tests. One embryo had an extra set of chromosomes 2, and the other embryo was missing a set of chromosomes 2. I fell to the ground and felt my heart breaking. I couldn’t hold it together at work. After we got off the phone, I called the Husband, and I could barely make those words out. When I pulled up the report on my phone, I saw that the embryos were a boy and a girl. We came so close to starting our little family but in an instant, we lost it all. Devastated doesn’t even begin to describe how I felt. My coworkers escorted me home that day and I’ve been a mess all weekend. I didn’t know how to share the news with our parents – because I didn’t want to break their hearts. But this is something that we’ll have to eventually address because they know about our journey, they just didn’t know that we had started the journey, and now, that journey has come to an end.

    I’m utterly heartbroken at the idea that I may never become a Mom or have our own little family. I know people say adoption is always an option. My husband and I have discussed this and it’s not just something we’re passionate about. The idea of building our family was to have our own little offspring, little beings made up of our DNA. We were hoping for a healthy baby, whether he or she would have my eyes and lips, their daddy's nose or if they'd possess their daddy’s intelligence and their mommy’s sense of humor, all those dreams vanished within seconds.

    I still don’t know how I feel or how I’m supposed to feel. It feels like a loss but is it really a loss if we never made it to becoming pregnant? We had hoped for a boy and a girl, and we came so close. Will another round of IVF work? Can we try again? Those are hard questions because I spent the entire weekend researching, reading articles and looking at statistics and it didn’t look good. The one thing that I was most worried about, happened. I kept saying that I wasn’t ready for the IVF journey because I wasn’t ready for the heartbreak if it failed. And it did. My heart shattered to a million pieces. But this is our reality. I'm still struggling to accept it as our new reality - I guess this is the part where I'm in denial.

    My Husband said to me, “Remember when you said that the universe wouldn’t give you something you can’t handle?” And with tears in my eyes and a crack in my voice, I told him, just because I can handle it, doesn’t mean I want to “handle it” anymore. I’m so tired. Why does everything have to be so difficult for me? Some days, I just want to throw in the towel and call it quits. I’m tired. I’m losing hope and I’m losing faith.