Infertility: A Roller Coaster Ride

I’m going to start by saying, life doesn’t always go according to plan and you usually end up on a different path than you would have imagined but things tend to work out just the way they should. Even though the road to getting there was not how you saw it, you still arrived where you were meant to be at the exact right time. This is what our journey of getting pregnant was like.

I think of it like a roller coaster ride at a theme park…you start by standing in line. Sometimes you get lucky and are at the park on a Tuesday afternoon and it’s not busy so there’s no line, you’re tall enough to ride and you can even choose to sit in the front cart. For us it felt like a Saturday night crowd and having to wait in the hour long line that snakes back and forth for miles. The long and never ending line at a theme park equaled to 11 months in the infertility world to us. That may not sound that bad compared to those who struggle for many years and go through testing, however it’s much longer compared to those who can, in a matter of one night, drink a little too much with no protection and end up pregnant. Trust us when we say, 11 months is plenty of time for feelings of doubt, sadness, anger, and fear to set in. Waiting in that line to get on the ride still leaves you with hope because you can see how close you’re getting as time passes, but infertility does not give the same sense of comfort because you don’t know when it will end, or if you will ever beat it.

Now we have finally made it on the roller coaster and we’re inching up the track to reach the top so we can prepare for the wild ride, of parenthood. This was always the scariest part of the ride at theme parks for me as a kid, the slow ascent to the top, then it pauses as it reveals what waits below, nothing but a steep drop with twists, turns, flips all at racing fast speeds. This is the part where we no longer are unsure if we can get on the ride, now we get to stress about if we’ll black out, throw up, lose our sunglasses on a sharp turn, or just scream with our hands in the air. But first we wait, at the top of the track as high as the clouds where we can look around and see for miles and as if time is standing still, the calm before the storm.

We didn’t know what to expect or where this ride will take us, and we were strapped in and ready, but not prepared enough for what was in store. Before we could go racing down the track, the roller coaster operator comes over the loud speaker with news something is wrong with this ride so we are brought back to the station and told to disembark. We found out with this first pregnancy that it wouldn’t be viable and healthy since it was underdeveloped at our first appointment. The heartbeat was half the speed it should be for a normal sized baby and sometime between then and a week later, we lost it.

It’s like I originally said, life doesn’t always go according to plan. We kept hope and knew we are meant to be parents one day and these struggles are all a part of our family journey. Thankfully, our time to get pregnant again was right around the corner, it happened just two months after going through the miscarriage. We have heard a fast and healthy heartbeat and seen encouraging development on this new pregnancy, and have been given the expected due date of April 18, 2021. At this point, we are taking things week by week, remaining hopeful and feeling so blessed by this and cannot wait for what is to come.