Fear is a funny thing. We are born with instinctual fears.  Many come later in life as we grow and learn what it is to really love. Fear paralyses us so that we can no longer move.  Constantly treading water but not going anywhere. Eventually you get tired, give up and drown.  For this reason alone is why we are given such a vast array of other emotions that will pull us through, that will make us start swimming for the shore that we know is off in the distance, the hope of once again getting on stable ground.

We all know fear but we all experience it in different ways.  I personally will be afraid, then angry; the anger helps me on my way to get back to normal, gets me moving, makes me refuse to be a victim.  I forget how useful that is. Some people don’t get angry and therefore don’t get moving.  The worst is to realize looking back that it was you holding yourself back.

Recently what was holding me back was changing jobs, changing states, selling my beloved house, and leaving family.  It took a while, and some marvels of chemical science but I am back to almost normal and with out fear of these things.  I completed all and I survived though I never thought that I would.  When you just focus on the next step and completing just that one thing before you worry about the next, you move farther than when you stop and stare into the distance.

They say that there are 4 stages of grief, well I think that there are the same stages of fear.  You need to go through these in order to get back to where you are in control. But you must also let your brain tell you when it’s time to stop feeling sorry for yourself and your situation and to start moving.  You must be willing and want to start moving.  With out will there is nothing.

I have been doing a lot of soul searching and healing of my own grief and fear.  Going through fertility treatments at 25 is something that I never thought in a million years that I would have to deal with.  I never expected it to be this hard to try to get pregnant but I never truely expected it to be easy.  It took my mom 5 years and 3 miscarriages to have me, which is why I am an only child. 

On the cusp of jumping into the so called “deep end” of the fertility game I find that I am much more rational and thoughtful about what I am doing or planning to do.  I have as of late found an inner peace that I never thought in the first few months that I would feel.  I can rationally and with out emotion really examine and probe the painful parts of what I have been dealing with for the last 18 months. Finally I can see the whole topography of my situation and I am finally with out fear.

Part of me still fears that I will never be able to give my husband the child that we both so desperately want, I fear his tears when he really considers for the first time that this might not happen but now that my own heart has healed a bit more I’m better able to comfort him as he realizes what I realized months ago. This just might not happen.

The saying “When the going gets tough, the tough get going” is pretty brilliant if you stop and think about it.  When things get hard (and they will) the worst thing you can do is stop moving forward. If you don’t keep living and keep working toward normalcy you become stagnant, a victim of your own inactivity.

No one knows what tomorrow will hold, it could be beautiful or painful.  The one constant is that life will continue to move, with or with out you.  The only decision you have to make is whether you are going to let go of your fears and be apart of it.  We only get to go around this ride once, why waste any time of it on fear?

The alarm sounds at 5:50am, reaching over fumbling with the alarm to try to turn it off hitting the wrong button and having to reset it to go off in another 5 minutes just so I can hit the snooze button again my hand travels further over my night stand, hitting my watch, knocking my glasses to the floor and finally landing on what I was searching for. A thermometer. Popping it into my mouth and lying perfectly still till the 3 high pitched beeps sound, I flick on the small light to read the numbers. 97.4*. Putting the thermometer back I lie back and try to find sleep again.

Out of the shower, dressed and downstairs for coffee. Popping pills, first metformin, then the clomid, then the folic acid, then the prenatal (just in case), realizing that I will go another day with out being hungry for one solitary thing.

This has been my life for the last 6 months. Granted the clomid I only take for 4 days (cycle days 5-9) before that is the progesterone (taken for 12 days) it’s still a ritual that I have had to come accustomed to.  All this in the grand hope of finally achieving that what so many teen-aged girls fear. 

My husband and I bought a house last September and after over 3 years of marriage we decided that now we were finally ready to have the family we have always talked about. So I did what most women do and went off birth control. I thought that was it. No biggie right? I mean mothers and sisters and friends and school put the fear of god into you that if you have unprotected sex you will get pregnant. God if I only knew. After 5 months of trying but with out any successive periods I made an appointment with my local family doctor. Well she wouldn’t do anything with out blood work and a pap so I obediently spread like so many women do every day.  The results came back fine and I had no abnormalities, then two days later my period finally came. Thank god! No pills! I’m normal. Then after a full month it wouldn’t stop. I went back, this time with my best friend & nurse in tow.  My family doctor was bullied into sending me to an OB GYN that actually dealt with possible infertility issues.

One month later, alone I was sitting in another office, not sure of what would come. In she rushed this commanding formative woman who rattled off things like PCOS, D & C, HSG, Clomid, Metformin & Progesterone.  My brain froze, I had no idea what she was talking about I couldn’t even comprehend what we were planning. Then out she rushed as fast as she had come. Alone again, sitting on a vinyl covered alter of female humility I cried.  The RN came in and explained that I was to have surgery to clean out the walls of my uterus and this was to be done next week.

Numb I made my appointments, took my registration slip for the out patient surgery, made my way to my car and wept.  Physically yelling at myself to “Get it together! Your better than this!” I alternated between weeping so hard I could barely drive and brief moments of utter clarity (though they never lasted that long).

How do you tell your husband what is going on when you have no idea yourself? All I knew is that we both needed to take off work because I was getting surgery (hard enough when you work together in a tiny office) and I didn’t know why I was getting surgery or what exactly it was called.  But we did it all. They knocked me out with a lovely cocktail of drugs, scraped out the walls of my uterus and then sent me on my way with prescription for vicodin and high dose ibuprofen. A week of recovery passed and my hopes were high. Another appointment made to check me out and then I was to get drugs to finally make me pregnant. That was the goal and I felt so incredibly close to achieving it.

I was diagnosed with PCOS. Poly-cystic Ovarian Syndrome. That is what they tell you when they don’t know why you don’t ovulate and can’t have babies. So on Progesterone for 12 days then you should get your period, then day 5-9 you take the Clomid, all the while you take the Metformin and the prenatal. She seemed so confident that this was all I needed.  I was confident that this was all I needed. We were going to get pregnant! We were on our way!

1/2 way through my first progesterone induced period I had a HSG scheduled. This is where they go in through your cervix, inject you with a radioactive dye and look at your fallopian tubes and ovaries on a big screen to make sure there is no blockage. “Mild cramping” they said. They lied.  I wanted to die, I wanted Matt, the first didn’t happen, and the second had to be at work. Done, hurting, humiliated (I am a person, acknowledge me, not your med student) I made it back to work.

On to the drugs! This was it! Oh we were so excited, so hopeful! We had been through the worst and we were going to get pregnant and have a family. Then nothing. Negative pregnancy test after negative pregnancy test the hope faded the cheer dwindled.  I became obsessed with achieving this one small goal.

My charts, cervical mucus, my morning temperatures, cervical positions dominated every thought. We were not having fun anymore, we were on a mission. We were a machine and I was driving us further and further along with no gas and no oil.  We were on a mission though, I thought that if we did everything just perfectly then it would work in our favor and I wouldn’t be a complete failure.

Nothing has worked. Not even remotely. We are no closer to becoming a trio than we were a year and a half ago. The hope has been replaced by reality, and she is a cold cruel bitch.  I have 3 months left on Clomid. Any longer and I am increasing my chances for cervical, uterian, and ovarian cancer. This I risk in order to do what most women don’t even think about.

Every day I come closer to the reality that I might have to consider “other options” and “alternatives” which is a nice way of telling you that unless you are going to drop some big dough and really crawl through glass you are shit out of luck.  The next step would be IUI. Inter Uterian Insemination.  The thought makes me cold inside. At this point you take sex completely out of the picture. It wouldn’t just be about my husband and I, it would be about my husband, my doctor and me. We would finally be a trio, just not in the way we hoped. If that fails then you are thrown into the big league with Invitro. At 10K a pop I don’t see that as something that is even considerable.

The farther we get from what was supposed to easy, the more complicated we get the more inner peace I have found.  I will not be trite and say “God has a plan” ” What’s meant to be will happen” because I believe that’s all a load of shit. I think that’s what people who don’t know what else to say tell you.  What I do realize is that no matter if we ever have a baby or not I will always have my husband and his love and compassion and brilliance.  Some days, on really good days, I am almost convinced I would never need anything else.

Our time is almost up for this drug, do I go to another drug? Do I go IUI? How do you make these decisions? For the first time in my life I really don’t know what I’m going to do.