I want to add a little about the emotional and physical toll that fertility treatments take on your body, your relationships and your overall mental health. The shots can sometimes be painful and other times hardly felt at all. I honestly don’t know what makes one poke hurt and another not. You can have issues with the regular blood draws and ultrasounds that are (painful!) uncomfortable while your ovaries hide from view. What the medication is doing in the body can also be uncomfortable. I can feel my ovaries as the follicles are being stimulated. The egg retrieval is fairly quick, but requires anesthesia. My second experience with the egg retrieval was more painful and draining than the first. There’s also the waiting. The waiting to know if your body is responding, if your retrieval was successful, if any eggs fertilized, if any blasts reached day 6 and waiting for test results. Being 45, the odds are stacked against me/us. I started this process as soon as I could, financially. I believed that this was an answer to many years of prayers. I do feel as though we have done all we can do. And I am at peace with that. This process is not easy.
Our second retrieval was on Friday morning and Sunday evening, after the retrieval I was in a church service at our church. The priest talked about how we pray and how we can reframe the way we pray.
Instead of praying that we would have one healthy embryo, I prayed that God would help me mother my children better. That I would nurture them well and care for them well and that He would give us one more baby to love earth-side. This shift in my prayers really helped me feel more at peace.
No matter where you are in your fertility journey, I hope you can find peace in the waiting and hoping and planning. And, I hope, by sharing my story, you are encouraged and know you are not alone.
