It’s also
the one-year anniversary of Hubster and I beginning this journey towards
pregnancy and parenthood.
That makes
this day…bittersweet.
We survived
a deep disappointment last week in the form of a very late period that followed about a week of hope that we might
have finally achieved our goal. We had not.
So this
birthday is tinged with sadness for me. I can’t say exactly, looking back, what
my expectations were a year ago, but I can say with confidence that I thought I
would have achieved pregnancy by now. Since that’s not been the case, I am left
trying to figure out where I stand.
A week ago
at this time, I was on pins and needles waiting for a call to tell me whether
my blood test for pregnancy was positive or negative. The ensuing call left me
wrecked emotionally, wondering how such a hopeful situation could have gone
wrong.
It also
left me wondering how I was ever going to manage to celebrate my birthday in a
week. My mom had sent me several texts asking what I wanted for a present, and
while normally I delight in the fun gifts my mom sends me, it took restraint to
not text back with something like I don’t
want anything for my birthday, because I don’t want to celebrate.
A tad
melodramatic, perhaps, but it was really how I felt. How could I celebrate when
I had just suffered such a loss—perceived, yes, but a loss nonetheless.
Today I
have a little more distance and a little more perspective and I feel much less
awful than I did a week ago, or even four days ago.
My birthday
turned out to be lovely, thanks to the wonderful people who surround me in
life. My husband told me quietly amidst my melancholy that while I didn’t feel
like celebrating, he was going to celebrate me, because my birth is a big deal
to him. I appreciate his honest and open affection so much of the time, but I
appreciated him even more in that moment. Leave it to the man who makes my life
complete to know just what to say to help life my spirits.
Through the
last week I have had to face some hard things emotionally, but I am happy to
say that I think I am coming out the other side with some hard earned wisdom. Through
the past four months, I have been fortunate to work with a wonderful
Naturopathic doctor (ND), who not only is great at what she does, she is a kind
and caring person. More than just diagnosing my signs and symptoms, she asks
and listens to how I am feeling about things. When I was devastated by this not
pregnant news, she called me to hear how I was feeling physically, and then
asked me how I felt.
Then she
said something that I have been chewing on for a while. She said that fertility
and women’s health is far more than just trying to get pregnant. It’s a journey
that’s about health—your health, then the health of your pregnancy and baby,
then about the health of you as a mother and your children as they grow.
Fertility isn’t a one-time stage in life, it’s an ongoing journey and it takes time.
What wisdom
this is, particularly now that I have had a chance to think about it!
She also
told me that she feels like the endometriosis that I suffer from might be
receding, because a long period is indicative of progesterone, not estrogen.
Endo is an estrogen thing, because bleeding is dictated by estrogen levels. So
more progesterone (which women with Endo tend to be lower in, to my
understanding) is a good thing. It means that all the work we’ve been doing in
regards to cleansing the liver and adjusting the diet is working to help my
body naturally regulate my hormones, which is the goal all along.
This is all
good news, and all fits with this idea that fertility health is lifelong, and
not a one-time shot.
And
interestingly enough, all of this seems to run counter to everything our
society would have us believe. In fact, more and more I find that the things I
believe run counter to what society is telling me.
Think about
it: we live in age when most things are immediately available. I want to watch
a movie, I stream it online. Food warmed? Microwave. Talk to someone? Email or
text. I feel badly? Take some Tylenol. I don’t have time for brewed coffee? Use
some instant.
Now, I am
not claiming that all these things are bad, because certainly many of them make
our lives easier. But in some ways they make our lives harder too, because we
have become accustomed to having things happen RIGHT NOW. This makes medical
problems tough to deal with in a lot of cases, because we want things that
solve our problems immediately. It would be nice if that could really work, but
in the long run, does it?
Not that I
can see. All of my friends who have done things like take pills to kill
cravings or eat low calorie diets with vitamins for 6 weeks all end up in the
same boat: the cravings come back or the diet ends and those 16 pounds they
lost in two weeks promptly reapply themselves.
I’m not
saying that I wish quick solutions would work; I do wish that. You are reading
the work of a woman who is not known for her patience. I hate waiting. I hate
waiting so much that I typically won’t watch a TV show until I can get it on
DVD and watch it at my own pace, so I never have to suffer a cliffhanger ending
again. I have all kinds of stories about late night runs to Barnes & Noble
to get the next installment of the Twlight
series, because God forbid I have to wait until morning to continue the
story.
I LOVE
things that happen quickly.
But I also
recognize that most things in life that are worth having have two things in
common: they are a lot of work, and they take a lot of time.
And so I
consider my health to be worth having. Which means that by nature, it will be
work and it will take time. The faster way to get pregnant would have most
likely been to stay in the hormone pills the OBGYN gave me and suffer through
the side effects until the results came back the way we wanted them to.
But I don’t
believe that was best for my health ultimately. I didn’t want to get pregnant
in a fog of emotion so intense that I was blind to everything else around me. I
want to enjoy the experience as much as possible, and get pregnant when my body
is ready to be pregnant and gestate a child.
And getting
to that point, as we’ve already seen, has been two things: a lot of hard work,
and taking a long time.
Changing my
diet and adding a gazillion supplements has been tough—both economically and
mentally. Yet I see results from the action, and that means something. It’s
been 4 months since I started working my ND, and the changes in my body have
been slow but steady. We add and change and take out things a little at a time
and watch for the effects.
It’s
working!
It is (at
times) maddeningly slow, but it’s working. What a beautiful reality.
Though (at
times) I throw up my hands and cry for the fact that I am not yet pregnant, I
can’t deny that I feel better—I am better—than I was when I started this
project. My stomach problems have essentially disappeared, which is miraculous
given that at its worst, I was diagnosed with Irritable Bowel Syndrome and was
on meds to try and calm my colon every
day. Now my stomach doesn’t revolt for no particular reason, and what a
blessing that is!
All of this
being said, I am choosing each day, as best I can, to remember that I am making
progress in this fertility journey, and that it’s a journey for a lifetime. It’s
not just about getting pregnant once, it’s about being healthy and being
healed. It’s about protecting and caring for my body, which I hope will hold
out to have several children and keep working years after that.
It’s about
learning patience and perseverance.
It’s about
remembering that the things that are worth having in life are two things: hard work
and time consuming.
But they
are worth having.
So I work and I wait, and today I
am contented with that.
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