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Experiences of infertility always have one thing in common: uncertainty. The countless visits to doctors, the months (or years) of planning, the tens of thousands of dollars, never add up to a guarantee. Even under the best of circumstances, there’s only so much about a pregnancy you can plan and in the midst of a global pandemic, the idea of planning anything seems foolish. For National Infertility Awareness Week, we’re exploring the uncertainty—and the hope.
I’ve been pregnant 17 times. Two live births, one tubular pregnancy, an ectopic pregnancy, and 13 miscarriages. I had one baby when I was really, really young, but after that it was nothing but losses. I had an ectopic pregnancy, then a year or two later I ended up with a tubular pregnancy and made it to 17 weeks pregnant before they caught it. I could’ve died; instead I lost a fallopian tube. From then on it was just nothing but miscarriage after miscarriage after miscarriage.
In 2016, my now husband and I were planning our wedding. Given my history, we’d talked about seeing a fertility specialist and doing IVF, but it wasn’t a financial option at the time. Then five months before our wedding, we got pregnant naturally. We thought that was a sign—this baby was meant to be. But a few weeks into that pregnancy, the day I was waiting for my first ultrasound, I started to miscarry.
It was my 11th pregnancy loss.
That miscarriage was my husband’s first experience with losing a pregnancy. He was already so attached. He was rubbing my belly, talking to the baby. We were picking out names. So in 2017 after we were married, we decided to try IVF. I thought maybe if I was monitored from the time I conceived, it would give me a better chance to sustain a pregnancy or at least have more control over figuring out why I was having so many losses.
Around that time I saw a Facebook ad for a company that offers fertility financing and dedicated fertility coaches. (I swear Facebook hears everything.) If it weren’t for that, we would not have been able to start our journey when we did, but with their help we were able to start IVF. I was ready to dive in.
Considering my history of losses, with each pregnancy I thought, I’m not going to get too attached to this baby. But IVF was different. It was harder because I was expecting it to go a certain way and it didn’t. My first two rounds of IVF ended in two more miscarriages. Then a fertility doctor removed my other fallopian tube, thinking that was causing the problem. But even after that, the next round of IVF failed and I miscarried again.
Not having answers and not knowing why it kept happening made it even more difficult. I was doing everything I possibly could to find the reason why I couldn’t sustain a pregnancy—knowing that and still not having an answer, still not preventing losses, was unbearable. It made it that much more difficult. At some point I just went numb to it all.
After having my second fallopian tube removed and having another loss, I was fed up. I left that appointment and I didn’t even make it into leaving the parking lot before I called my fertility coach, Nicole, and just started crying. I was like, “I don’t know what to do at this point. I’m not being heard.” I just lost it. She talked me off the ledge, as she had so many times before, and helped me figure out my next step. I ultimately changed clinics, and there I was diagnosed with an autoimmune disease and put on new medication. But after another IVF transfer, I miscarried again. My husband and I took some time to think and decided to give it one more try. My husband was like, “If this doesn’t work, we need to take a break for awhile because I can’t take anymore.”