Category: Infertility and Time

Heartbeat

Infertility Honesty

I was missing you on the day things crumbled. My cart seemed so bare two days before Christmas as I struggled to procure the few things your Dad and I needed, trying to make the best of our holiday for two we felt no urge to celebrate.

I didn’t know then why Fairway Market was spinning and going black or why my heart was flailing about or why the vision of the woman cuddling her toddler in the cheese line suddenly felt no less barbaric than the act of trying to exist.

All I knew then was that I missed you. What I know now is that the towering experience of missing you was layered with a malfunctioning nervous system and I think back on that space in time with sorrow. And with a pointed acknowledgement of human fallibility. That space in time when I sat in my car and in my body spinning out of control trying to fathom your absence. An impossible feat under normal circumstances, an utterly defeating experience in the presence of unregulated blood pressure and minimal blood flow to the brain.

I dialed 911 as my heart relentlessly beat out of my chest. Read more →

WHERE AM I??

Infertility Honesty

The movie Cast Away sheds some light

Things have felt……peculiar lately.

I’ve been feeling that half here, half not here feeling.  But not the pulverized half here half not here feeling of a year ago, this one is different.  I’ve been feeling unsettled.  A bit disconnected.  Pain, my long time reliable compass, no longer rules my existence. Read more →

Sweet Words

Infertility Honesty

A doctor finally gets it right

I have two major biochemical imbalances that caused chronic and sometimes suicidal depression between the ages of 17 – 29.  They were finally diagnosed and pretty well treated by the Pfeiffer Health Research Institute via a prescribed nutrient therapy program.  While I should normally get re-tested every year or two, for me, this was just one more thing that got pushed to the side during fertility treatments and the subsequent loss of our children.

I think most if not all of us have situations where our infertility collides with challenges and crisis we faced prior.  Those experiences can be internal, or more external, as it was when I was driving to my first Pfeiffer appointment in four years about a month ago.  I was pondering how I was going to explain the infertility/childlessness trauma/PTSD amid grief symptoms amid symptoms of my biochemical imbalances with a dash of peri-menopause thrown in while marinating in that all too familiar not knowing if I was going to be seen, heard and taken seriously. Read more →

The Paradox of June

Infertility Honesty

An infertility survivor’s early summer musings

I had gotten through Father’s Day without much flinching.  These milestones, or non-milestones, depending upon how you look at it seem to, in me lately, provoke the question:  Does it get easier, or am I getting stronger?  Read more →

The Illusion of Back to Normal

Infertility Honesty

“I only sobbed for a couple of hours.  And then I laughed because it was just so absurd.”

“Holy crap”  I said.  My friend who was unexpectedly and tragically widowed four years ago was in LA filming a movie this year in mid-February.  She got through the whole of Valentine’s Day without a trigger, and it seemed her chosen tactic of ignoring the day had triumphed as she was driven back to her hotel.  Looking forward to chilling out after an intense week of work, she arrived at the hotel only to find a Valentine’s extravaganza of sorts in the banquet room in proximity to hers.  She was greeted at the hotel by dressed up ladies in the arms of their dates and “relaxed” in her hotel room to love ballads galore and amorous prompts filtering through the walls from the over eager MC across the hall.

Kind of like unintentionally stumbling upon a church service or a restaurant on Mother’s Day in our world.  Triggering times a million?  Oh, I think so. Read more →

JOY

Infertility Honesty

The Trauma and Loss Survivor Version

“I know, I get it……Just one more thing infertility ruined.”

This simple yet all – encompassing phrase came from a support group member back when I was TTC (trying to conceive). She lived in the same town where my husband’s restaurant had just finished the construction on its expansion. And I, in the meager 6 weeks between IVF #’s 2 and 3, having just learned that our medical obstacles extended well beyond endometriosis and age, had not been in to see the outcome. Cannon balling my way into what was my most fragile, devastated time, I didn’t want to see people in my husband’s restaurant world. Read more →

Pain In Progress (Part 2)

Infertility Honesty

A flashback to this past June, I guess this should have been part 1. But that’s not how I roll.

This past late spring, a peculiar thing started to happen. My physical symptoms of the losses and trauma I had endured started to wane while the “typical” on goings of life became less of an abrasion to my nervous system.

Whispers of normalcy shone through as if they were new inventions. One day while food shopping, my first reaction to a baby crying on and on in Whole Foods was an internal affectionate “aw, someone’s having a fussy day”. It was only 20 minutes later I started to become mildly triggered, which was hardly noticeable in the face of the absence of the gut wrenching feelings of death and despair a baby’s cry used to incite. Read more →

Pain In Progress (Part 1)

Infertility Honesty

Now What?

In the ether between excitement and despair there is a deep ravine. A ravine where you can lie dazed as a weighty inertia engages its claws with a Venus fly trap like cunningness.

In theoretical terms, healing is positive and exciting, the bearer of long-awaited ease, a blanket of comfort offering a Mother Theresa like energy.

Those of us who have had to actually do it know better. Read more →

Back From the Future

Infertility Honesty

When my mind got hijacked in an assisted living facility

I don’t worry much about old age. I know it’s a common concern for those of us who have ended up without children, and understandably so. Though my lack of caring has baffled me, I’m clearly burdened with enough in other areas so I’m actually glad for it in a way (while it lasts). I figure it’s either because A) I’ve got so much else on my shoulders I can’t see fear I do have, B) I’m far too busy grieving the future I lost to be bothered with apprehensions over the new one, or C) I trust that as a scrappy bitch I’ll figure it out when I get there and hey, besides a decades long future spent cold, starving and naked in a prison camp for a crime I didn’t commit, what could be worse than grieving the loss of my children anyway?

We all have our aspects of this child free not by choice thing that rattle us more than others – it is neither here nor there, worse nor better – it’s simply what is. And our individual triggers do not detract from the main truth that ALL of this, triggering or not, is both profoundly hard and life altering.

So you can imagine my surprise when one day….. Read more →