Sunday, March 26, 2017

Feeling Invisible

Since going public with my infertility, many people have reached out to share their stories. After my last post, a friend of mine who I’ve known for years, sent me a long message about their struggles with infertility. I had no idea. They said, “I’m not the kind of person who will go public on this and I don’t really have anyone to share this with...” I totally know the feeling. It took us years before going public. For me, this also led to feeling invisible.


Feeling invisible is probably one of the worst feelings. You see the people around you, but they don’t see you, or at least you think they don’t see you. I’ve learned that everyone has secrets. No matter how open people are, the phrase “you never know what goes on behind closed doors” always rings true. Some secrets are bigger than others. And some of them, are simply invisible to the outside world.


As I’ve spoken more about my infertility, I’ve had wonderful authentic opportunities to speak with others who open up to me, either about infertility or about dealing with invisible illnesses - a way I've often thought of infertility. There are so many people out there suffering from invisible illnesses who look and act perfectly fine, but on the inside something is wrong. My heart aches for those in viral posts on facebook shaming people for parking in accessible parking spots when they look totally normal (and have a sticker!). I grew up with a friend with a heart problem and you wouldn’t necessarily know it by looking at her, but she needed that accessible sticker.


The thing with most other invisible illnesses is that society isn’t obsessed with them. We don’t ask each other daily why you’re not running a marathon, so if you have an invisible problem and you can’t run, it won’t really come up if you don’t want to talk about it. And if it does come up, changing the subject to why running sucks and you much prefer yoga, isn’t a flat out lie, although obviously still not easy. Unless all your friends are marathon runners, there’s no societal pressure bringing up the topic all the time.


Infertility, on the other hand…



Sunday, March 19, 2017

Almost in Womb - The Journey


In life, we are always moving forward, almost getting somewhere. And most of the time getting there. Our day is full of almosts. Almost ready. Almost at work. Almost done this task. Almost done my coffee. Almost there. Either you haven't left yet, or you're almost there, and then you're "here". We plan our lives out, create goals, and figure out how we're going to achieve them - we'll almost achieve that goal, even if it's 5 or 10 years down the road.

My journey of infertility has been a very long "almost". We never spoke about it until recently. We were always almost there. This month it will work. Okay, now this month it will work. THIS month, it has to work. It's going to work. Well, for over 4 years, it has almost worked. For the first 2 years we didn't even tell our parents. We were always so close to simply being like everyone else we knew and would break the exciting news that I was pregnant... Instead we broke the news that I had had a 2nd miscarriage (and since that horrible day in August 2014, there has been no pregnancy at all).

For 3 years I have endured IVF treatments. That's 6 egg retrieval surgeries (almost 7 coming up), and around 15 embryo transfers. For the most part, the embryos look good. My uterus just can't hold them. For 4 years I have almost had an embryo in my womb, that I hoped would bloom into a healthy, beautiful baby.