labterea on "I Am So Numb, So Sad, So Angry"

loss mentioned, chemical mentioned

Super freaking long angsty, angry rambling.

My beta was originally scheduled for today, but I started spotting on Monday night, and by Tuesday I was having a full blown period. I knew that it was over so I called RE and scheduled an appointment for Wednesday.

It was still dark when I left for the clinic Wednesday morning, in a city that’s 40 minutes away. I still had a band of bruises on my abdomen from all of the shots that I took over two weeks ago. I felt like I was driving to my execution. I practiced saying “good morning” out loud the entire way there so that I could walk in and say it without bursting into tears. It didn’t matter anyway. The doctor has two entire floor to ceiling walls full of pictures of his successes. Those walls always offered me hope before. That day they darned near knocked the breath right out of me. As soon as I saw all of those pictures I knew that any hope I had of not crying was all over.

The nurse drew my blood, and I went home to cry some more. I was bleeding harder than I usually do with normal AF. She called me that afternoon and she told me that she had good news, that my test was positive. I was stunned. And confused. And frightened. And so freaking relieved. I had a chance; it was positive, and the beta number was a decent number. She told me that a lot of women bleed during the first trimester. She told me that maybe I had a disappearing twin. She gave me some hope. Despite the fact that I was bleeding, I had a chance.

They put me on PIO shots to help stop the bleeding. The bleeding did mostly stop by this morning, and I felt that little glimmer of hope strengthen. I headed off to the clinic to have my blood drawn again. They called this afternoon with the results. Not good news. My beta dropped from 79 to 18. It has ended in a chemical. It would have been so much better had the test just come back negative on Wednesday. Now I’m going through the same mess of raw emotions all over again. I’m absolutely crushed.

I KNEW, going into this, that I had a very low probability of success. I KNEW that 10 to 15% was really a rather dismal percentage. I KNEW that, statistically speaking, the first cycle of IVF doesn’t tend to work in women who are much younger and much healthier than I. Knowledge is power. Forewarned is forearmed. Bull sh!t. I thought I was prepared. Intellectually I was prepared. In fact, intellectually I STILL have a grip on the situation, but there is a disconnect, and I can’t make the leap. Emotionally nothing prepared me for the pure, ragged devastation that I feel right now. Even though I already pretty much knew, nothing prepared me for how gutted I felt when the official phone call came. I had somehow managed to carry some miniscule grain of hope right up until that phone call made it absolutely certain. Nothing prepared me for the decimating blow to my self esteem. Nothing prepared me for the desperateness of my sadness or for the depths of my anger.

When I was cycling, when I had my retrieval, and when I had my transfer, people kept telling me to think positive. The thing was, I WAS thinking positive. I realized a few days ago that it wasn’t even forced positive thinking; I was truly and genuinely optimistic. That doesn’t generally happen with me. I don’t tend to be optimistic about much of anything. I don’t really think I’m pessimistic either—just realistic. However, this time, maybe for the first time ever, I was truly optimistic; I didn’t realize how optimistic I had really been until Monday night when I went to the bathroom. The possibility of AF was so far off of my radar that it took me a good minute to recognize what I was seeing and even longer than that to process what it meant. There was some tiny pure place inside of me that absolutely believed that this was going to work. That’s the same place that latched onto hope on Wednesday when I miraculously tested positive. How much more naive could I have possibly been?

Of course the “what could I have done differently” question has been circling around and around in my head. I’ve gone over every single movement I’ve made in the last 13 days. There are things I possibly could have done differently, but I don’t know that those things would have made any difference. It’s not like I went out drinking and dancing. I didn’t do anything out of line. I took it easy. There was no lifting and no exercising and no cleaning the house. I took my medication religiously. I even walked more carefully. I did everything they told me to do. The embryos were ten celled, grade one with no fragmentation. My uterine lining was good. Nothing was wrong; it just didn’t work. I have to keep telling myself that. Nothing was wrong; it just didn’t work.

I pinned the sonogram pictures of my post transfer embryos to my bulletin board above my desk. I can see them in there as plain as day. As stupid as this sounds, I would talk to them when no one was home, ask them to give me a chance to be their mommy, promise them that I’d take care of them. They were a part of me and a part of DH, and now they are nothing. I am firmly pro-choice. I know good and well that they were nothing more than a tiny group of cells. There was no conscious, no life. Yet they were MY tiny group of cells, and they had the potential to become little human beings, and I so desperately wanted them to. Now I can’t take the darned picture down. I can’t bear the thought of putting it away, because I have no d@mned idea how to mourn something that never was in the first place.