Is Anyone Still Out There??

Well, let me start by saying that my last blog post just goes to show that just because you are sure your life is headed in one direction, it just doesn't seem to end up going that way!! The last time I wrote it was just over a year ago and C. and I were about to pick up our lives in FL and move back home to Upstate NY.......and we did......and thats pretty much where life veered off in its own direction....far away from the plans I were certain would be.

We got settled up in NY last fall, and were happy as could be to be back in the great northeast. We were a lot less stressed and so proud of ourselves for making the big move to come back "home". We somehow, by some miracle, managed to get PG on our own in Oct. of last year and I found out when that beautiful digital PG test said "PREGNANT"!!! I ran out and bought a tiny little Winnie the pooh bib for C. and gave it to him with the digital test when he got home that day...... we were thrilled of course, but very very cautious..... we'd been down that road before and learned our lesson to not count our eggs before they hatch! We hemmed and hawed and decided to share our happy news with our parents only....we didn't even tell our brothers. We had learned from our first m/c that while it is absolutely thrilling to be able to share your happy news with family and close friends, it is beyond heartbreaking to have to break bad news to them all (over and over again) if things don't turn out right. This pregnancy was very different from my first, in that I didn't have a drop of spotting whatsoever and by the second week we knew, I actually started to breath a little bit......perhaps that was my mistake! I was beyond thankful for the gift we had been given and I decided that it was time for me to start going back to church and get back in touch with my faith. I went to a new catholic church in my area, and it felt good to be back there.... I was actually almost moved to tears several times during mass, mostly due to my overwhelming sense of thankfulness.

Two days later, I began to spot after having some horrible cramps out of nowhere.....my heart instantly sank and I knew it was bad and it was going to be over. By the next morning, I awoke at 5 am to go to the bathroom and was gushing blood. I sat and sobbed by myself in the bathroom for I don't know how long.......then finally made it back to bed, to find C. awake...... inbetween sobs I told him it was over....AGAIN..... and just didn't know how much more I could take as a failure at being PG. We supported each other and again made it through our loss, though it was no easier than the first time around. After trying to heal and attempting to get on with life, I again came to the junction I have been at many other times in my life....questioning my faith. It seems to me that everytime I have turned to G.od to be thankful and look for support, I seem to be let down time and again. I know I have written many times about this previously and will not get on a soapbox about it, I just don't seem to understand why my faith is so cyclic and why over the last 16 years I've gone back and forth wondering if the big guy in the sky is really on my side...... I still don't know.........

Anyhow....... I believe in my last post I was sure that C. and I would quickly land jobs with IF coverage (d/t the NY State Mandates for IF coverage). Well.......that didn't happen until April of 2010. We both started working for the same company in my small little hometown and were thrilled to find out that we did indeed have IF coverage (for diagnostics, IUI's and MEDS!!!!!) However, with my new job came some insane hours ---for the entire summer! I ended up working nearly 60 hours every single week from April until the end of August which of course meant there wasn't a single free day to get to see a new RE in my area. So, my point in how this post started out, is that I was sure we'd have IF coverage and be back in the game by the start of 2010, and as it has turned out, I just FINALLY got in for a consult with a new RE up here last week (Sept. 2010)!!!

One of the downsides to living in the boonies of upstate NY is that the closest RE to me is 90 mins away!!! Yep...90 mins!!! That being said, I already really like my new RE's office. Our initial consult was with my RE's PA who was very very knowledgable. And while she already had all 70 pages of my past records and knew we had already been through a lot with our IF battle, she still took the time to very thoroughly explain a lot about PCOS and we talked in detail about doing a RPL (repeat loss panel) to see if there may be some reason that I've had multiple miscarriages. We also decided that we will be checking a slew of labs (in addition to the RPL), I will go back to see the PA next week for an annual exam since I am overdue (she was awesome and offered to do the annual so that cycling wouldn't be delayed by trying to find a new GYN in my area and waiting to get in to see them which could take a month or two). I will go in for an U/S on CD 3 when good old AF arrives, followed by an SHG after that, and will then meet with the actual Doctor on Nov. 4th to review all my labs/tests and establish a plan. The PA and I are in complete agreement that injectibles are the way to go with IUI and we will most likely stick with Bravelle and Ovidrel again as in past cycles as it is what worked well for me. I was also pleased to learn that they do put every patient on Progesterone Support after IUI (etc). This pleased me so much because I have always felt as though maybe that was something lacking in my to failed PG's and both my RE's in FL always were insistant that I didn't need to be on any kind of Progesterone....

So, all in all C. and I left the new RE's feeling very positive. Even C. mentioned that it was really nice to have the PA and the nurse explain things in such detail and not rush us through our appointment. I honestly frequently felt that I didn't always recieve the best care in FL from my RE's since I wasn't an IVF patient. NOW....don't misunderstand me, I feel that anyone who has to endure IVF deserves a tremendous amount of attention and care.... I just don't feel its appropriate for some Dr's to make patients who are doing TI or IUI's feel like they are less important because they aren't shelling out $15K.

If your still reading, thank you and sorry for the exteme length of this entry but since I have been MIA from my blog for a year, I felt it only right that I catch back up to present day. As exciting as it is to be "back in the game" it of course is as equally scary. I'm really kinda out of the IF routine of daily injections and multiple dates with the vag cam in a month but I know it is just like riding a bike...... I'm back on and ready to glide back into things on our journey to become parents.

If you are blogging and would like to share your link please leave me a comment...I'm always interested in finding new blogs to follow. I wish anyone who is reading the best in their journey as well. IF stinks and its a horrible thing to have to deal with....its good to know there are others out there sharing the same dreams and journey that you are.

Update....New York Here We Come!!

Let me first start by apologizing AGAIN to those that follow my blog, as I've continued to be a blog slacker!! I promise it will get better, and very soon at that!!

Everything is in motion...........Finally!!! After many many months of deliberating and hemming and hawing and a lot of planning, we are finally ready to move back to the great northeast!!! Upstate NY here we come! Our entire house is packed up (for the most part), we pick up a U-haul on Sunday 9/6 and will spend Sunday and Monday packing it up and will start our journey north on Tuesday morning bright and early.
We are so excited and thrilled to go-- for the most part anyways...... I am heartbroken about leaving my mom here in FL. She is young though and healthy Thank God and is very very encouraging, just like a good mom should be, and she is thrilled we are getting to move back north. My mom and her Boyfriend are not very happy here in FL either and I anticipate that within a year or so, they will move out of FL too, perhaps to one of the Carolinas, which is great, the closer the better. I am an emotional basketcase when it comes to leaving my mom. I cry everytime I think about it, I cry when I see her and think about not being 5 minutes from here. I guess even at 37 years old, I can't seem to really cut the apron strings. I have said all my life that if I can ever be half the mom my mother is to my child, I'd be the luckiest girl in the world. (However we just can't seem to get there with having a child! Hopefully that will change when we get up to NY and I get a new RE and get crackin' with our treatments again, which I am desperately anxious to do!!)

I must say it is bittersweet to be packing up our life here though. We've lived in this house for 7 years, and owned it for the last 2 years. We took it from something okay and made it our home. We put so much blood sweat and tears into making it our home. We painted every single room in this house (some even have been painted twice). I spent 25 hours doing a faux finish on my kitchen and dining room to make it look like a tuscan/wine themed little slice of heaven (yes you read that right .....25 hours doing Frottage with balls of saran wrap). We spent endless hours ripping out tons of overgrown landscaping and planning and putting in all new stuff. We changed every light fixture in this house (a couple of which aren't paid off yet on the Home Depot card), spent hours diliberating on the perfect color to paint the living room to match the new furniture we'd bought, and when I painted the color on the wall, it looked like prison cell gray, so we bought 2 new gallons of paint in a different color..... its going to be a little hard to leave behind years of hard work and pride. We absolutely HATE our dirtbag neighbors and cannot wait to leave this neighborhood behind. C. and I said we are going to have a grand parade down our street the morning we leave (which will be at 5 am) and we are going to lay on the car and uhaul horns to wake up all the dirtbags!! Believe me, it would be sweet payback for all the shit the assholes on our street have put us through over the years!!

I guess thats beauty of moving on for a new start. Along with great memories, we will be leaving behind some bad memories as well. Like our painful journey through Infertility and through our Miscarriage. Perhaps a new start in our old stomping grounds (we were both raised in Upstate NY), back in a slower pace of life around a lot more of our friends etc, things will make a big turn around for us and we'll know the move we made was the best decision for us.

Well, I suppose I should wrap this up and get some more packing done around here. Tuesday will be here before we know it!! So, my next entry should be from the great state of New York and I can't wait to be in a New York State of Mind!!!

In Honor

Let me start by saying I've been a horrible slacker at blogging. So if you follow and have been checking in here, I apologize for my slackerness (I'm sure thats not a word but it sounds good). Things --and by things I mean life-- has been crazy around here. We currently live in FL and are actually planning to move back to the small little mountain town I grew up in up in Upstate NY, most likely within the next two months at the latest. We've listed our house on the market, and have had some interest, despite the fact that the market stinks. So, we are keeping our fingers and everything else we can cross crossed in hopes that we will soon be New Yorkers once again, and I'll be blogging from the comfort of my deck in NY looking out at the mountains and a whole lot of natural beauty.

I don't really have any TTC news as we've put that on hold for the next few months as money is a bit tight while we save to move, plus we are both super stressed out so not the best time to try to press through another IUI (next up will be # 3 .... Ugh!) So thats all there is to say about TTC for now. As soon as we are back on track and trying, my blog will make a turn back to TTC. I am a bit nervous about finding a new RE up in NY, as I fear the closest ones to where we'll be living will be over an hour away, but I'm used to having to travel a bit to get anywhere from where we will be living.

So on to the other big reason for posting tonights blog. Today is the 15 year Anniversary of my dad passing away. My dad died far too young, only 48 years old of a major heart attack. I was only 22 years old. I miss him as much today as I did 15 years ago. I don't really have anyone to talk about how difficult loosing him was as none of my friends or C. have ever experienced the loss of a parent, so they really don't get it. They offer support and hugs, but it really is hard not having anyone to talk it out with who really gets it or has been there. I won't go on and on about it, I just feel the need to get it down on virtual paper atleast, so I don't keep it all in.

My dad was a really great man. A dedicated hard working family man. He and my mom were married 28 years when he passed away. He took care of all of us very well, and we all knew how much he loved us. I have a lot of great memories of him that I will carry with me always. I came across this nice poem that made me think of my dad, so I will close this post with it.

To my dad, I just want to say, I love you very much and I hope and pray everyday that you are at peace and that although you didn't get to experience so much of our lives here on earth, I take comfort every single day knowing you are taking wonderful care of the baby we lost, your grandchild, up there with you in Heaven.


We thought of you with love today
But that is nothing new,
We thought about you yesterday
And days before that too.
We think of you in silence
We often speak your name,
Now all we have are memories
And your picture in a frame.
Some may think you are forgotten
Though on earth you are no more,
But in our memory you are with us
As you always were before.
A million times we've thought of you
A million times we've cried,
If loving could have saved you
You would have never died.
You left us beautiful memories
Your love is still our guide,
And though we cannot see you
You are always at our side.
It broke our hearts to lose you
But you did not go alone,
Part of us went with you
On the day God called you home
.Forgive me Lord,
I'll always weep
For the best father I loved,
but could not keep

I've Joined the 30 Day Shred Fanatics.......

Well, since we seem to be in a holding pattern with TTC thanks to the crappy economy and a super long crappy streak of bad luck that just won't blow past C. and I, I asked C. to get me the 30 Day Shred DVD for my Birthday last month, since so many people have been raving about it.

This morning was Day 1 of "the Shred". It actually wasn't nearly as bad as I thought it was going to be, although that Jillian chick is rather hard core. I actually kept up for the whole 20 mins which surprised me slightly since I've been slacking with going to the gym and haven't gone in a few months.

I will admit, however, that I do have a habit of swearing at the TV during exercise videos, and I did call Jillian a whore at about the 7 minute mark and I called her the Devil at about the 14 minute mark.........sometimes you gotta do what you gotta do to get through the exercise right?

So in lieu of my TTTC woes, for the time being I'll fill my blog with my trial and tribulations of the 30 Day Shred. I wonder how many more names I'll call Jillian in the next 29 days............

Regrets........

I was standing in the kitchen today doing dishes, and because I hate to do them, my mind always wanders to other things. My mind also always wanders every time I stand at the sink because it looks out at my angel garden statue and roses (the ones in the post below this).So today my mind wandered in part because a friend who I haven't been in touch with in a while found me on Fa.cebook. (she was more than just a friend honestly, she was my MOH in my wedding and we kind of just lost touch after my wedding in part that she lives 1500 miles away). So, I was thinking about that, which led me to thinking and wondering if I had never moved to Fl and stayed in NY, would things be different from the way things really are. NY has mandated fertility coverage, which I kick myself for almost daily, since I spent all my years as an adult in NY working in healthcare with top notch health benefits, and I never even knew I had any kind of coverage (not that I was in need of it back then but still). Now in writing this, I certainly don't mean I wonder about not being with my dh, thats not what I'm getting at.

What I'm getting at is the fact that if I had stayed up there, where I had better IF benefits coverage, how many children would I have by now!? How much shorter could have/would have my IF journey been?

And speaking of regrets, one of my biggest regrets that seems to haunt me quite often is the fact that I think I knew I had "girlie" problems for a long time, but never did anything about it. I always had weird/long/missed periods, and I never ever got PG (although I did have a couple "maybe I'm PG" moments along the way) with any of the boyfriends I had. I never took BCP's and my BF's very rarely used protection (I was always in a monogomous relationship when there was no protection). So, of course I think to myself, had I done the right thing back in my 20's and looked into the matter more, could some of my IF journey have been avoided or atleast lessened ?

I still blame myself for the fact that we don't have a child. I am the one who is broken, who needs to stick herself in the belly with needles and get poked and prodded multiple times a month with a Vag-Cam etc. I blame me for not taking better care of myself in the past...........

Had I done so, I wonder if my life now would be a lot different than it is. I try not to live my life with much regret. I generally look at things that don't go my way and try to find a lesson in what went wrong, learn from it, and move on knowing I won't make that same mistake again. But this is something I can't really learn from and not do again...........I guess all I can do is remain hopeful and keep believing that someday C. and I will be parents to a little one that is destined to bring joy and happiness and love to our lives.

An Epiphany of Sorts?

Yep, an epiphany. I was looking out my kitchen window today, and noticed my bird bath had tipped over in the wind last night (not really sure how as it is a cement bird bath, but nevertheless it fell over). I also noticed some beautifully blooming roses in my garden where the bird bath is. This garden is my "Angel Baby Garden". After I M/C'd, my family (aunts and cousins) sent me the beautiful garden angel statue you see in the picture above. Last May, I created my garden with the garden angel as the focal point, but spend hours upon hours selecting plants to go in my memorial garden for the little one we lost. I think I spent two hours picking out the perfect rose bushes (the ones you see above). There are a couple posts about it in my blog, probably May 2008, but I am a doofus and don't have a clue how to insert a clicky link here back to it.

So back to today. I was out fixing the bird bath, and trimming back some branches and bushes. When I was done, I stopped to really admire the beauty of the roses that are blooming. I looked at each rose bush carefully and my eyes then darted to all the blooms on each of the bushes. The 3rd picture above has larger roses and the middle picture has smaller tea roses. The larger rose bush has atleast 10 buds on it that will flower when they are ready and the smaller tea rose bush has 50 buds that will bloom!

Thats where my epiphany came to be! I stopped dead in my tracks, my breath caught and the tears started flowing like rain. It was then and there, at that very moment that I realized that we may have lost our little angel, but its spirit lives on in my garden. My baby couldn't survive inside me, but it thrives in the garden that was created in his/her honor. I was so touched and pleased to think that these rose bushes are doing so well, are thriving with help from our angel baby. Perhaps our little angel has come down and spread its spirit and "growing dust" about the garden and helped it grow the way it has. On a cloudy rainy afternoon, it was like someone was shining a bright light right down in front of me and I finally realized something I've been yearning to know for quite some time now.

I don't know if I'm even explaining it properly, but the emotion I felt and still feel from that is at times overwhelming, and my eyes are welling up with tears even as I type this hours later.

I guess after all this time since our loss, just shy of 17 months, this is one of the only times I have ever felt even a slightly positive sign about our loss. It feels good to think there is something a little positive about it, even if it is just something tiny.

Sorry..... Its been a rotten few weeks....

Its been a really rotten past few weeks, to say the least!! Obviously I'm not PG, or there would have been a HUGE post about that well before now.

Three days before I was supposed to POAS, C. called me 5 mins after he left for work, telling me he had been in a really bad car accident and couldn't breath! I went running from the house and flew the mile and a half to the scene to find him sitting on the curb trying to catch a breath. His car was totalled after a 74 year old woman pulled out right in front of him at an intersection and he couldn't stop in time, and T-boned her. She was ticketed, we spent 10 hours in the ER after he was taken via Ambulance, and after he endured neck and back x-rays, knee and ankle xrays, a CT Scan of the upper body, followed by passing out in x-rays (round 2) and another CT Scan to make sure he didn't have any internal bleeding. Good times....... thank God he is okay....although was very beat up and is still healing now, 3 weeks later.

So fast forward to 12 DPO, where I was toying with POAS with FMU, and I went in to PIAC, wiped and whammo-- AF arrived, making it a lovely 27 day cycle. So on top of dealing with all the stress of C's accident and trying to take care of him, we got slammed with a BFFN on top of it all.

Bad luck you say?? HA!! Wait, I'm not done! After two days of crying about the BFN, we decide that will roll into another cycle (Cycle # 35 for anyone counting) as I've still been off from work due to my work injury. I called and scheduled my CD3 U/S, hop up on the table only to hear MORE great friggin' news...... I had a HUGE cyst on my Left Ovary, and my RE wouldn't allow me to cycle, put me on BCP's and was told call back when AF starts up next month. And of course, I of little strength at that point, started bawling right in the middle of the RE's office, and practically ran out the door to the car, where I proceeded to call C. and give him the bad news, and then I cried the entire 40 minute drive home!

So how is all that for a big old pile of shit ass rotten luck? I swear C. and I have some of the worst luck around by far, we just can't ever seem to catch a break.

I'm honestly so beat down about it all, I just want to once again run away somewhere I don't know anyone and hide away forever. I have slightly "up" days and some "downright shitty" days and some days where I feel like I'm just wandering.

I've really started to consider the adoption route as I don't know how much more of all this I can take emotionally. I'm about to turn 37 in 6 weeks and feel like time really and truly is running out. I got some information in the mail today from Bethany Adoption Agency, but I'm not sure they would be the way to go for us, and it clearly states in their information that you need to make a statement about your strong Christian Faith in your application. I kinda question my ability to do that, after how my faith has been so tried and beaten down throughout our Infertility Journey. I don't know.... I'd like to think that we have a couple more cycles of trying in us atleast, before money runs out (we are certainly in no postion right now to even consider IVF (financially) nor has either of my RE's mentioned the fact that they feel we are a candidate for IVF-- during my last IUI, Dr. S. said, "In my opinion, I think you guys have just had some really bad luck") .

I don't know-- today is just one of those really crappy days for me where I'd like nothing more than to run away and hide and never look back. Hopefully tomorrow will be a better day.....