The Darkest Journey

So, this is a first for us. We have a guest contributer to our blog. We sincerely thank Dana Sanchez for sharing her story of infertility with us and with you. Dana can be contacted directly at nmzebras@yahoo.com.

The calls have become somewhat normal now, yet my internal reaction to them is anything but. With each call, I feel elated and devastated at the same time. How does one have that dichotomy of emotions?

“Are you ready to be an auntie?” he asked me. Of course I was. I am always ready to be an aunt. However, I am really ready to be a mother. It seems like I’ve been on the receiving end of dozens of these kinds of calls over the past several years. While I am so excited to receive the news, my heart yearns to be the one making that amazing, life-changing call to friends and loved ones.

My journey through infertility has been the most difficult adventure of my life. I am at the magic age of 35, when your fertility naturally declines and you simultaneously witness your friends’ kids becoming teenagers and going to middle school. You start thinking about how strange it will be IF you ever conceive, your child will be a newborn while your friends’ kids are finishing high school. Your life doesn’t make sense to you. How is it possible that I cannot do the one thing that I was placed on the earth to do?

You feel so many emotions while you are on this uncertain road of infertility. Sadness. Emptiness. Desperation. Hopelessness. Depression. Then, you start taking pills, getting shots, going through procedures and you began to feel a whole new set of emotions. Excitement. Hope. Anticipation. Promise. Even joy. Then, the stick shows a “minus sign” or your monthly visitor arrives or the doctor’s office calls to tell you, “No…I’m sorry. You’re not pregnant.” The negative emotions return in a 300-foot wave and you feel overwhelmingly broken.

You and your spouse are in it together. You see people with babies in the grocery store and give each other “the look” that symbolizes your desperate desire for a child, paired with a faint hint of resentment toward those who have been fruitful. You and your spouse try anything and everything to bear a child and with every failed attempt, you feel like the opportunity to be parents is slipping further and further away.

The two of you try not to blame one another and you each try to be the culprit during this painful event. “It must be me,” you both think, while sometimes wondering to yourself, “Maybe it’s him/her.” You hope and you pray. You modify your diet and exercise. You try supplements and acupuncture. You move your love life to different locations and into different positions. You go to a reproductive endocrinologist and then go to another for a second opinion. They tell you that you are both “fine” and that your infertility cannot be explained. You dig deep to understand what is going on but can only find yourselves asking one question: “Why not us?” Others get pregnant at the drop of a hat. You’ve invested hundreds of days, thousands of dollars and millions of tears and you haven’t even had a blip that you might be pregnant. 

You do, however, start imagining symptoms of pregnancy. If you are nauseous, you must be pregnant. If you are dizzy, you must be pregnant. If you have an odd craving, you must be pregnant. If you have to use the restroom with more frequency than normal, you must be pregnant. If your breasts are sore, you must be pregnant. If you are unusually moody, you must be pregnant. Nope…for all the times you thought that THIS was the month, it was just PMS. 

You go through the poking, the prodding, the peeing in cups, the taking pills, the shots in your rear end and the inseminations. All sense of modesty is out the window because you are quite sure that most of the free world has seen below your waist. You have a relationship with the ultrasound machine. You learn more about sperm counts and cervical mucus than you ever thought you would. Your calendar becomes your best friend so that you know which CD (cycle day) it is at all times. You are now urinating on two different sets of sticks – one to see if you are ovulating and one to see if you are pregnant. You go home at lunch to check if it is the best time of the month. If it is, you call your husband and hope he can come meet you at the house…quickly!

And don’t forget the wonderful side effects of the crazy drugs they put you on. You think to yourself, “Oh, good! I get to go through menopausal symptoms twice in my life!” Hot flashes, cold sweats, yelling at people for no apparent reason. You feel relieved that your husband loves you as much as he does because in this hormone-induced frenzy, you really are not sure if you love yourself.  You go through all of it in the hopes that in nine months, you will have someone in the world who will call you “Mommy.” That would make it all so worth it to take home that bundle of joy. After years of the entire experience always ending in the same result, your feelings of inadequacy, hopelessness and emptiness overtake you. Thank God for your husband…for so many reasons.

Recently, I was getting dressed and was waiting for my jeans to finish drying. I had a towel around my waist and had already put my shirt on. I walked past the mirror in my bedroom and the way my shirt laid on top of my towel gave me the cruel illusion that I was pregnant. The moment caught me off guard and I proceeded to have a complete emotional meltdown. I managed to put myself together, physically and emotionally, and made my way downstairs to tell my husband what had happened. He said, “Oh…baby,” and let me cry, as he has so many times before. Neither of us had to say anything. After 4 ¼ years of infertility, it was all too familiar territory. Nothing had to be said. I just needed to be in the solace of his arms, letting the tears flow freely.

So, now what? IVF? Adoption? Surrogacy? Childlessness? We try to chart the best route for our family but hang on to a very dim glimmer of hope that it might still happen for us. In the meantime, I am sure the calls will continue to come and I will always be thrilled to be the “auntie” for all of my friends’ children. I just hope that one day, I will be asking them if they are ready to be an auntie or uncle to our baby.