Infertility.... in general

It sucks.  Infertility sucks.  Why is it that the one thing that I should be able to do naturally, I can't.  We can't.  There is something there that stops us.  The elephant in the room that at one time we never talked about, but now we do.  Which is good.  But..... that doesn't stop it from sucking.  It's feeling empty, it's feeling like you are failing.  It's being a part of a club that is exclusive but you don't want to join, you are made a member even when you fight it with all of your might.  The club, as it turns out, is larger than you would expect.  According to the CDC, there are 430 clinics in the US to treat those of us infertiles. 

The numbers are staggering, approximately 10% of women, or 6.1 million of us between the ages of 15-44 have difficulty getting or staying pregnant. 

Wow.  That's a lot.

7.5% of sexually active men have reported a visit to help with concieving a child.  Of those, 18.1% were diagnosed with a male related infertility problem.  Wow, that's what we fall into.

I don't want to be in that category.  I don't want to be one of those statistics.  Can't I give it back?  I want to!  I don't like being here!  It sucks, the sign on the club door should tell us to stay away, but we can't, it's like an invisible force that draws us in. 

The want to be parents. 

For me, it was almost a need.  It was the culmination of everything that I made right in my life after all that I had done wrong.  It was my opportunity to show the world that I made it to where I wanted to be, and I was going to be able to raise a child to be a good person.

So why did the universe have other idea's in mind?  Why did I have to fall in that statistic?  Did I mention that I don't want to be a statistic?  Especially part of this one! 

Infertility broke me.  It made me become the person that I never wanted to be.  I became the adult version of my teenage years because I didn't know how to handle it, and no one around me understood except for Kev, and he was dealing with his own issues because of it all.  We tried to help each other, but how do you help each other when you don't know how to help yourselves?  It's virtually impossible.

So, I found myself a support group after we started going through treatment.  They were a great group of women, very supportive, and all dealing with the same thing.  The big IF.  Here is my first post after our cancelled cycle:

I think I'm just looking for someone to commiserate with. We are going through IVF due to severe male infertility due to a medical condition DH had as a baby. There's nothing they can do to fix the numbers. I waited for a year before getting us checked, and that was only after months of DH urging that we needed to. He knew, I didn't want to accept it. Then another six months of going to Andrologist to see what we could do. Finally we moved on to the FC for IVF with ICSI. Started my first cycle, had to cancel two days before retrieval. RE told me that if he gave me the Hcg that I would be in the hospital. I had 60+ follicles with my estrogen at 5500 already, and none were mature enough to take. By the time we would have had some, there would have been 20+ mature and ready, and god only knows what my estrogen would have been at. I love my RE, and I understand why he cancelled, but that doesn't stop the hurt over it. We've been dealing with all this, and I had such a hard time with the Lupron/Repronex mix. He said he would have to change it, but he wasn't sure what he was going to do yet. He said give it 6 - 8 wks for my ovaries to cool down. Depressing. Any one else in the middle of it right now??!! It just Sucks!!!!

 

The support I got from the women over at mothering.com was amazing.  They deserve kudos.  But I didn't let them, a counselor, or even Kev and my friends and family help me as I should have let them.  Some of them didn't know how to or what to do, but I didn't help them to help me.  I became a shell of a person.

 

So, after our first cancellation we agreed to try again.  We just had to wait for AF (aunt flo) to show up.  Which she did amazingly quickly.  We called the RE, they had discussed my case wihin the clinic and had come up with a way to change my cycle.  It was an adjustment to the meds.  So I went into round 2 with a new level of hope.  Thoughts that it would work this time around.  After all, it couldn't keep failing, could it?