Hope

Hope

 

What a weird thing that is.  Hope.  There are all these movies that say hope is one of the greatest assets of the human race.  It can propel you towards goals not physically possible without it.  I guess up until IF I agreed with this whole heartedly.  Being an open realist, I never had much idea how much closeted optimism I house.  I think it’s mostly because of faith.  Everything I’ve seen of God and his touch in my life has made me full of hope, love, and charity.  At least I think that’s true…hope that’s true.  There is another side to hope though.  It is pretty much uncontrollable for instance.  I have been going through cycle after cycle (after cycle) without much of it.  I mean still sad sometimes don’t get me wrong but a sarcastic (if not bitter) “pretty much what I expected” thought with every recurring CD 1. 

Today, out of nowhere hope rears her pretty little head and says “What CD are you on?” and then “Doesn’t it seem different this month?”.   I have been doing an absolutely stellar job of not obsessing.  I have a fairly good idea of when I ovulated this month and am about 50/50 on whether the baby dance was done in that window.  This cycle I am full of “Eh…whatever”.  Now she says “what if you are pregnant right now?” and it does not feel good to hear it.  There was a time when I would think “what if I’m pregnant?” and get all kinds of great fluttery happy feelings everywhere but that time seems like forever ago.  I believe I may have sent that question to die with “What if you’re NOT pregnant LIKE ALWAYS and you start thinking you are again??”  Yep, shot it dead. 

The hope.  I missed it and at the same time was glad to see the peak of hope go so that I might try to live on through the valley of disappointment.  Anyway, here it is today without any prompting from me.  There’s absolutely nothing I can do about it. I can’t undo hope, she does what she wants.  All I can do is pray that she is right, if not now…eventually.

 

Until we meet again…

Epic

 

I’ve been thinking (you probably see that I tend to do too much of that).  There is an epic amount of everything in IF.  Don’t you think so?  It seems like there’s just too much of every damn thing.  It’s too much heartbreak, too much sorrow, too much hope, too much monotony.  Looking for a rarity in biology, (a 15% chance after 30 and rolling steady downward after that) that is even more rare in your case (for whatever your reasons are) means that we are steadily looking at rules instead of exceptions.  We are even looking at (and analyzing) the hope for those exceptions.  The hope itself is in enormous quantity.

 At the same time that we have these millions of couples out here struggling to conceive, we have millions more (what seem like billions to us) blasting their successful rarities…what we know to be true miracles…in top quality surround sound and 3D pictures to match.  It is a lot.  Epic.  If I had to describe infertility to anyone in one word, that would be it.  Everything about it is huge.  All things going into it and coming out of it (whether you end up with a baby or not) are gargantuan. Every baby on the planet and in the womb is somehow in the mix. Them and everything about conception HAS to be in the mix. 

 Millions of sperm (if you’re lucky), one egg (if you’re lucky), and one hope for a purposeful meeting of the two…and finally you watching it not happen as many times as it takes or until you (or your body) give up.  I have had around 55 unsuccessful cycles. 55.  FIFTY FIVE.  I have a lot of patience and I still believe I have a lot of faith but the truth is I might not have enough of ANYTHING to keep my sanity against the enormous epic of EVERYTHING that is infertility. 

Thank God it’s not me alone.  This is where I pray because I need something more than I got to fight for what I want.

 

Till next time…