With Emma’s first birthday rapidly approaching I wanted to
write a series of posts chronicling our journey to becoming a family of three.
I did not blog in the early days of parenthood so these stories were left
untold and since I am coming full circle on this life altering year I wanted to
share them with you. I went through a really hard time in the beginning of my
parenting journey, which is why I was so glad I happened to stumble upon mommy
blogs for guidance and understanding. Sharing my stories over these last few
months has become therapeutic for me and has allowed me to get to know myself
as a parent. I am super thrilled to be able to share my passion for writing
with you, the audience (all 10-15 of you yay!), to give you an understanding of
who I am and where I come from based on the experiences I have lived through. Hopefully my past posts and what I am
about to share will resonate with some of you. I am about to share my very
personal conception story in hopes to connect with any body who is going
through a difficult time to let you know that you are not alone, I have been
there.
With that I will start my family journey with the
“conception” story, which will include everything but an actual description of
the conception so hold your horses there! I guess I will start my story in
2008, when I met my husband. Really so many events in my life had to happen for
me to meet my husband thus resulting in having my child, but until I have time
to complete my memoir we will have to start here.
I met Thomas,
my husband in 2008 after I had moved back to the East Coast from a short stint
in LA studying film (yup wanted to be an awesome feminist documentary film
maker but again a story for another day.) Shortly after my husband and I
started dating, I ended up going to my OB complaining of pains in my ovary
area, not just cramps but pains. He was of the mindset that I had cysts on my
ovaries which, if they were severe, would need treatment. The best way for him
to judge was to do a laparoscopic surgery in which they make a small incision and
insert a camera to see what’s going on in there. Looking back on this now I’m
not sure if I really needed the procedure, but I did give it a good bit of
thought and decided it was in my best interest to go through with it at the
time. I only told a very select group of people that I was having the
procedure. I had several close friends there to support me mentally and
physically during and after the surgery. No one in my family except for my sister
knew about it. It was an outpatient procedure so I would be in and out and I
did not want to worry anyone.
I remember before the procedure I was very nervous. This was
my first surgically invasive procedure ever. I was barely with it when I saw the
doctor pull my friend aside as they were rolling me in to tell her it might be
cancer. At that point, my friend started to lose it and all I could do was
close my eyes and try to shut out what was going on. That was one of the
scariest moments of my life and I don’t even know how people live through
actually being told they have cancer, my few minutes of “what if” was nothing
in comparison. The surgery went well and I somehow remember wanting a huge
bacon cheese burger after, which I miraculously kept down. Odd the details you
remember years later.
Well after what seems now like weeks later but was probably
only a few days, the results were in and they were so far off from what I had
even imaged they would be. There were no cysts, there was no cancer (thank
God). … My tubes were blocked. . …Um wait what? Blocked?!!? What does
that mean? What was to follow that bit of news was one of the most difficult
conversations I’ve had to have. Basically I was told that with my tubes blocked
I could not get pregnant. I would need to have a procedure to unblock them in
the future and even then I might never be able to conceive. On top of that, if
by some chance I was to get pregnant, it would mostly likely be an ectopic
pregnancy which is deadly. It is hard to convey the true shock and extreme
sadness that set in immediately after hearing the news in this short post but
believe me it was immeasurable.
My world shattered right then and there. Here I was told
that I would have a difficult journey if I would ever tried to conceive if I
could even conceive at all. Thomas, my boyfriend at the time, was with me when
I was given the news. He was right there in the room. While my mind faded way
he was alert and asking questions. We had only been dating for a few months but
we both knew our relationship was special, and now he knew the full extent of
my troubles. I might not be able to have kids, ever and certainly any risk of
getting pregnant anytime in the near future could be deadly (not that we were
planning to have kids anytime soon, just the thought of having to be extra
careful with our contraceptive usage came to mind.) I was very upset for weeks
to come crying in random intervals and I thought I saw a glimmer of doubt cross
Thomas’ face when I asked him if he would be ok with possibly never having
children (a heavy loaded question after only a few months of dating.) After
talking it over for months and falling deeper in love we both somewhat settled
into the idea that we might only have dogs as our children and for the time we
were ok with that.
Check back soon to see part two of my conception story.
Did you have any trouble conceiving? If you feel comfortable
sharing, I would love to hear your story or feel free to add your link in the comments.
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