January 10th

It's January 10th. This day is always a day of mixed emotions for me. 5 years ago today I miscarried our first baby from our first IVF. 4 years ago today, I had my egg retrieval for our second IVF and Colt and Cora were fertilized through ICSI. I wonder which one was conceived/fertilized first. Every year, a little before Thanksgiving to January 10th is emotional. That's the amount of time we got to know our first baby.


This post is long and entirely too much information. I think I just need to type this out for my own sake, so don't feel that you need to read it. I might not even post this for anyone to see. I have so many mixed emotions this time of year. I'm truly thankful for my amazing blessings, but I can't help but think of the baby we lost and the Christmases before. Even New Years. You think a new year, new great things could happen. From the time I was a little girl, I couldn't wait to have a family of my own. The holidays make it worse when you dream about your children opening gifts, but you can't seem to reach that dream. After meeting Shawn, we decided to try and have a baby as soon as we married in March. I wanted 4-5 kids. Shawn wanted 1-2 kids. We figured we'd meet in the middle. We'd know when we were done. We'd cross that bridge when we got there. By Christmas 2006, we weren't pregnant, but I knew that wasn't uncommon. After a year of trying we were diagnosed with infertility. I was diagnosed with PCOS, went on medications, the whole 9 yards. No baby Christmas 2007, 2008, or 2009. We had a failed IUI in 2009. That's when we decided to become foster parents to adopt. I prayed long and hard for children in our home. I also prayed for an answer. We agreed we would stop pursuing fertility treatments if we got a baby in our home. If we didn't we would continue treatments. I prayed about it often. We had another failed IUI in 2010, but in February and still at Christmas, we had 2 children in our home. It was the best Christmas. August 2011, they were ours permanently.  Since they were 5 and 6 when they came to live with us, we decided to continue fertility treatments. IVF was our only option. I remember when we first found out we were infertile we said IVF was not for us and that we'd never do it. Ha! You never know what you're really willing to do until you're faced with it as your only option. We agreed we would do IVF once. If it worked that would be amazing. If it didn't, it just wasn't meant to be. By Thanksgiving, we were pregnant with our only surviving embryo. It was an amazing Thanksgiving. On December 21st, as we watched our baby's heart flicker on ultrasound, we were told our baby was measuring too small and that he or she would pass soon. I noticed my pregnancy symptoms were lessening and I woke up Christmas Eve with no symptoms whatsoever. I knew our baby was gone, so it was the hardest Christmas ever. I expected to miscarry right away, I even wondered if it would happen Christmas day. We went back to the RE January 4th and it was confirmed our baby had grown no more and had passed away shortly after the last ultrasound. He said I had a missed miscarriage, that's why I hadn't miscarried, yet. I told him right away I didn't want a D&C, unless it came to it. I wanted to miscarry naturally. He went ahead and wrote me a prescription for cytotec and told my to fill it if I decided I couldn't handle waiting it out any longer. He said that it could cause heavy bleeding and occasionally it was severe enough for a blood transfusion. I didn't want that. He also said I would probably just see blood clots and pieces of tissue. I started spotting January 9th. By the 10th, it was heavy. I stayed at work because I just knew it wasn't going to happen while I was at work. I worked at the school. I took Zac and Abby home and made them supper. I remember taking supper out of the oven, feeding them, and then telling them I didn't feel well and was going to take a bath. Let's just say I had horrible cramps and just taking my clothes off and stepping in the tub left a mess. I did not know you had contractions when you miscarried. They are very small compared to 3rd trimester ones, but they are contractions none the less and they still hurt, just not as much. I miscarried our baby while in the bathtub. The perfect little sac came out whole and I held it in the palm of my hand. I held our baby in the palm of my hand. I needed that. God knew I needed to hold our baby. I'm so thankful I did. December 21 to January 10th was a long time to wait to miscarry. I was bleeding too heavy to go back to work the next day, so I stayed home, but I went back to work the following day. I tried to go on and ignore it. I wasn't ready to deal with it. I brushed it off for 3 months until I finally broke down in April and grieved. In May, we finally talked about what we wanted to do. We never thought we'd get pregnant, but lose the baby. We also had no frozen embryos. We decided to try again, but at a different office that offered a shared risk program. We would get 3 fresh and 3 frozen cycles for a certain fee. If we didn't come home with a baby, we got our money back. I really didn't think I could sink any lower than I did that first part of the year, but I was wrong. After our first appointment in May, we got a phone call on the way home that Shawn had 0 sperm. Once you reach 0, sometimes you never get them back. I cannot tell you how difficult that time was. I blamed myself. I thought I had miscarried our only chance of having a baby. If it weren't for Zac and Abby, I'm not sure I could have kept putting one foot in front of the other. Praise God, after Shawn was back on medications, he was able to get some swimmers back. The life cycle of a sperm is 3 months, so it takes at least that long to see if the medication was working. It took 6 months to get a decent amount, so we decided to aim for Christmas break for our next IVF. Christmas 2012 was nerve wracking. The what ifs were terrifying. Most of the time it takes 10 days of stims (IVF meds) before your eggs are ready for retrieval. It only took 9 days and my eggs were retrieved 1 year to the day after our miscarriage. January 10th. They were also fertilized that day. Colt and Cora were fertilized that day. We only had 2 embryos survive to transfer day on the 15th, but they were above average quality. Thank God they are here with us today! Christmas 2013 I sobbed like a baby. Every year I cry from Thanksgiving to January 10th. I count my blessings and I miss our first baby all at the same time. I'm still infertile. Out of 25 eggs, only 2 lived. Do you know what it would take for us to have another baby? It might not even happen. I know God is the only reason we had 2 embryos live. I'm truly blessed. I like to tell Shawn that I won. We have 5 children like I wanted. 1 is in Heaven. I also feel a little sadness on our baby's due date August 2nd. These are things I will always carry with me. They've molded me into who I am today.