There's a bedroom in our house that's belonged to someone for years, but has yet to be lived in.
In 2020, everything was complicated in unexpected and unforeseen ways. My then-fiancé and I had to postpone the big wedding ceremony we had planned in the Chicago suburbs with all our friends and family because of the pandemic. Still, we decided to find a house to rent together and figured the marriage part would fall in when the time was right.
Before that, we were living in two separate apartments a few miles apart from each other, and it just made more sense, personally and financially, to find the right place for us. With job situations being tentative and uncertain, we figured it wasn't probably the right time to buy but started looking for a larger house with a yard for my son - and for the children we hoped to grow our family with.
From day one, we were both so open about how much we wanted children - and my son has been asking for siblings since he was old enough to realize that some of his friends had them but he did not. So when we found a large house with plenty of bedrooms and a gorgeous little backyard with fruit trees, we fell in love immediately. And then, a few months later, we were married right there under our decorated pergola by friends of ours who understood that Covid wasn't going away and that we were eager for the rest of our forever to begin.
It was summer of 2020 and that was when we first started trying to have children. I didn't know what to expect. As a teenager/young adult, I was told by my doctor that pregnancy would be difficult or even impossible for me because of my size and different health conditions. Then, after significant weight loss in my early 20s, I got pregnant very easily and, admittedly, unexpectedly. The pregnancy was difficult for a lot of reasons, but fortunately my health and my baby's health were not among them. Everything about the physical part of the experience was as smooth as it could be. But was it a fluke?
I was in my early 30s so I knew that physically, there might be some differences with trying to get pregnant - not to mention I had gained a lot of weight after my difficult marriage and subsequent divorce. But otherwise, I was in pretty good health according to my routine lab work. Still, we struggled.
After a year, we started to seek help. My husband and I each saw specialists and determined that the main cause of the infertility was on his side, and he began treatments to improve his lab numbers. After a little more time, we were given a referral for IUI treatment.
At that point though, I was almost 400 pounds. I've been large even when we got married, but stress, anxiety, and the emotional toll of the pandemic had pushed me another 25 or so pounds higher. Still, my blood work was coming back clean, so my husband's urologist said we shouldn't have any issues being approved for the IUI at the fertility center.
But I thought back to my first pregnancy, and all the feelings and the stress and the complication and everything that came with it - and even if my body could technically handle a pregnancy, I didn't feel like it was the right choice for me at the time. So I sat my husband down and told him: please, give me one year, and I'm going to get as healthy as I possibly can to be in the best possible position for our children.
He understood and agreed without any selfishness or demand. In fact, his only concern was about my safety with weight loss surgery and the long-term effects and adaptations that would come with the permanent modification of my anatomy.
A year later, I was down over 150 pounds, and we were ready to start trying again. We tried traditional methods, hoping that the weight loss may help with ease of conception. But we also reached back out to the urologist to get my husband back on medications to hopefully get re-approved for IUI.
As always, if you want to make God laugh, tell Him your plans. Shortly after we started trying again, my husband had some major professional shake ups and was relocated out of state for a one to two year position. It was not ideal for our family and less so for our attempts to conceive. We have been visiting each other as much as possible, and still pursuing pregnancy in the meantime.
A few months ago, I told my husband he should look for a new urologist in Colorado so that we could pick up with our process and not lose another two years. After seeing the specialist a few times and having some lab work done, he was diagnosed, medicated, and we were now given a referral for IVF instead, due to the nature and severity of the infertility.
So here we are. We have gone to a fertility center here in California and started the IVF process. Our first cycle has already started and we've got injections, egg retrieval, and our first attempt at embryo transfer coming up in the next few weeks. I am overwhelmed with feelings across a tremendous spectrum of positivity and fear, and I need a place to get it all out. So I'm hoping to use this as a bit of a sounding board as the next few weeks and beyond continue to unfold.
I used to blog a lot, and I had a tremendous group of followers, many of whom I still consider good friends and have maintained close contact with. Times are different and I know blogging isn't necessarily the community it once was. But this is more for me than anyone else - my head is swimming with constant thoughts, hopes, concerns, and everything you could possibly imagine.
