Canceled.

Yesterday should have been a day of excitement and celebration. Instead, we were hit with yet another round of bad news. Another delay. Another setback. As many of you know I am very quiet about the exact timing of my transfers and then an open book once they’re done and we know the results. I was supposed to have a transfer on Tuesday, March 30. I’ve been on medications to prep for weeks, suffering from horrible side effects and keeping this secret. All of my bloodwork has come back amazing and everything looked great until yesterday.

One of the final steps before the actual transfer is a final ultrasound. They are looking for a few things, one that your uterine lining is 3 layers and thick enough to support a pregnancy- mine looked great yesterday. Second they are making sure you don’t have any follicles growing as that can potentially harm implantation, I shouldn’t have had any because of all the drugs I’ve been on to suppress and yet there that little bugger was. Finally they look at the fallopian tubes to ensure they look healthy. I have endometriosis, and up until yesterday I've never had signs of it inside my uterus or tubes.

I could tell something was wrong during the ultrasound, but the tech is not my doctor and they cannot tell me everything they are seeing. I’ve been a patient long enough that I knew, I could read it all over her face. When doctor Batcheller called me later, not my nurse Andrea, then I really knew this transfer was getting canceled because the doctor only calls to deliver bad news. One of my fallopian tubes appears on ultrasound to be dilated meaning it’s full of fluid, the technical term for this is hydrosalpinx. This can happen because of infections but in my case it’s most likely because my endo has finally grown inside one of my tubes. Once this happens you cannot reverse it, and once it happens to one of your tubes it’s likely the other is not far behind. The treatment, surgically remove both of my fallopian tubes. Once those tubes are gone I will never ever be able to naturally conceive. Was the chance of that happening extremely slim, yes. Was it ever going to happen like that, probably not. But, as an infertility warrior you still hold out a little hope that someday you'll be the miracle pregnancy everyone talks about.

I was speechless, choking back tears just trying to take in the latest devastating news for us. My doctor is amazing, she was comforting and confident and apologetic and all the perfect things but in that moment all I could focus on is your transfer is canceled.

We started this process to get pregnant again last July. The original plan was a transfer early September, but then I had polyps that needed to be removed due to a faulty IUD. I healed from that and we transferred in November. Then I got pregnant, but the baby wasn’t doing well. On December 16 we lost Noah. The next plan was to miscarry at home and do a transfer in February. My body wouldn’t heal and I needed to then have a procedure to check for retained tissue, transfer was delayed. Procedure went well, new plan transfer in March. March transfer canceled. No words.

Next week I will be brought in for a test called an HSG to confirm what they saw on ultrasound. There is a small chance I won’t need surgery, but a larger chance I will. Then I will schedule the surgery, heal and start the very long road back to a transfer. This isn’t a small delay. Months.

Last night was the first step, stop all current medication and Rob had to give me two very large intermuscular shots in hips full of progesterone in oil to force my body to have a cycle. Next week is my test, and then we will take it one step at a time.

Woke up this morning to just one more reminder that this is over, lovely gigantic bruise deep into my muscle where last nights shots went in.

I feel time slipping away. My boys are already almost 3, I’m going to be 37 in two months, Rob just turned 39. Infertility steals time from you. Time with your babies, time spent grieving, time spent healing, time time time time. If we had transferred on Tuesday like we had planned our due date was 12/16, the day we lost Noah. That felt like a circle of life moment, like he was with us and a part of this. Losing that date feels like I’m losing him again. The grief I had neatly packed away to make room for excitement came rushing back yesterday. I know he’s all around us, I have been putting off writing a blog about it, keeping him all to myself for now. Yesterday I cried. Today I’m pulling up my bootstraps and preparing to soldier on. It’s all I can do. I hate infertility.