Everything Happens The Way It's Supposed To

One year ago today I got the best present I could have asked for, a little pink line a stick. It still brings tears to my eyes to think about the feelings that overwhelmed me when I saw that line appear. I had been waiting to see that for over a year and I think I was in disbelief when it happened. We had been trying to get pregnant for so long that I was at the point that I just wasn’t sure it was going to happen for us. But before I get too in to that let me start from the beginning.
For those of you that don’t know or haven’t read that blog post, I had a pretty tough miscarriage in the beginning of 2015 that took a toll on me not just mentally but physically too. Though we didn't know about the full extent of the physical repercussions until almost a year later. After the miscarriage we waited a bit to let my body heal from the trauma it had been through and honestly I needed to mentally wrap my head around what we had been through. For anyone who's had a miscarriage you all know that it's hard to comprehend that you were pregnant and then you weren't, that there was a baby there and now it's gone, and there really is no solid reason why. After I had time to at least mostly recover we started trying again to have a baby. I kind of figured it would be easy for us considering the first time around I had been on birth control when we got pregnant. Looking back at it all now that was definitely wishful thinking.
The first few months of trying I just kept telling myself it was normal for it to take a while to get pregnant, even if you are tracking. The weird thing for me was that my cycles were super irregular. Years ago when I wasn’t on birth control I had the most regular cycle that I could tell you down to the hour when my period was going to start. Yet all of a sudden this wasn’t the case. Again, I just kept telling myself that it was normal, that it most likely had something to do with the miscarriage and that things would eventually go back to normal. But every month things were the same or worse. I finally turned to Dr. Google and decided to search a little on what could cause what I was going through and I had every symptom of having scar tissue. I knew that it was probably a long shot but asked my Obgyn what he thought and he agreed that it was worth checking out so he ordered an HSG.
I really had no idea what an HSG was when it was ordered and I went in not really knowing what to expect. In short detail, they insert dye into the uterus and watch whether it flows through the fallopian tubes without getting blocked. I remember laying there watching the dye flow on the screen that the radiologist was watching and seeing the dye stop immediately on my right side. And then when the radiologist confirmed what I saw I was speechless. I am pretty sure I just said thank you to the guy and walked out to my car. I just sat there in my car thinking “you've got to be fucking kidding me.” Later that day my Dr called and told me what the radiologist had already told me and then said that because they couldn't confirm that the scar tissue blockage was definitely due to my miscarriage insurance would just classify this as infertility and wouldn't cover any surgery to remove it. I was devastated. There are no other words to describe how you feel when your doctor tells you your “sub-fertile”. After getting pregnant on accident, now I was on the other end of the spectrum.
Fertility treatments and surgery weren’t an option for us, mostly for monetary reasons. We resolved to just keep trying the “normal” way and maybe someday it would happen for us. At this point I was still tracking but I was quickly starting to feel that it was pointless. There was no way to know which side I was ovulating from so for all I knew it wouldn’t even matter that month. By the time we were nearly at a year of trying I decided to back off on the tracking but to also start acupuncture. I figured at the very least it would help to relax me. I went to one of the best fertility acupuncturists around, Dr. Ray Rubio, and everything that he did for me was above and beyond what I had expected. In my first appointment with him he straight forward told me to stop calling myself infertile or even sub-fertile because it would get me no where. If I kept that mindset that alone would work against me and I needed to remind myself that I have been pregnant once before. He told me that he felt that my body had just been through a lot of trauma and it needed time to heal. I know it may sound corny but it was one of the things that I needed to hear the most after a year of feeling so down on myself. The idea that my body had done it once before so why couldn’t it do it again. That, to some extent, became my mantra and I would remind myself of that every time I started to get down.
Now mind you, my “mantra” definitely wasn’t fool proof and some time in June 2016 I remember having a major breakdown. By major I truly mean major. I started a stupid fight with my husband over something trivial because I had so much pent up stress about “my stupid body” and by the end of the fight I was sitting on the ground sobbing in my husband’s arms. We agreed that if by August we still weren’t pregnant we would look in to next potential steps. That month I just “gave” up. My husband was supposed to be gone most the month because of bike races and I was 100% sure that there was no way it would happen so I just made every attempt to forget about it. Towards the end of the month I started feeling what I assumed were PMS symptoms but, as is always the case when you are trying to get pregnant, a little part of me hoped that they were pregnancy symptoms. I remember at one point I was at a friends house hanging out by her pool and her little boy wanted me to pick him up. I bent down to pick him up and he slammed straight in to my upper body and breasts and it was painful. And a different kind of painful then typical PMS pain but I didn’t want to think about it and I attempted to just ignore it.
July 4th rolled around and it was supposed to be the first day of my period but with the irregular cycles that I have I knew that it was a maybe and a good chance it would be the wrong day. One of our best friends had invited us to a BBQ and we were planning on going. I felt absolutely ridiculous taking the test but I figured what could it hurt. If it was negative it would be like every other month so whatever and I could go to the party and have a margarita and try to forget about it. I remember taking the test and setting it on our bathroom floor and walking away. I wasn’t about to sit there and watch it not show me that elusive pink line. I started doing things around our bedroom and actually had forgotten that it was sitting there. It was when I happened to walk back in to the bathroom that I looked down and saw it sitting there. At first glance I just thought “oh yeah, I should throw that out” but then as I took a step closer I felt my whole body go numb. It was like I was moving in slow motion as I bent down to pick up that test, I probably stared at it for a good minute or two, in disbelief. I then promptly dropped it and went running downstairs to tell my husband. I believe my exact words were “it worked, it finally worked, were having a baby!” No cutesy tell your husband announcements for us, when you’ve waited as long as we did I couldn’t have waited longer then the 2 minutes I did to tell him.
That moment makes it in to the top 10 best moments of my life. For anyone who is struggling to get pregnant that long awaited pink line is something you have dreamt about every single day. You think of how you will react, how you will tell your husband, etc. But when it does finally happen it does not go the way you expect it to, and if anything it is a million times better. On days when, like today, my son seems like he is on one and determined to press every single one of my buttons I will sit back and remember everything I went through to have him in my arms and it is like all my anger melts away. Tonight as he fell asleep in my arms I held him a little closer and smelled his sweet little head and I knew that everything happened the way it was supposed to.
For those of you out there struggling to get pregnant I’m not going to tell you any of those stupid tips like relax, stop trying so hard, or your not trying hard enough. That isn’t my place and honestly anytime someone said those things to me I wanted to strangle them. I will say this though, don’t give up on yourself or your body. As I said before, it may seem corny, but make a mantra for yourself, to tell yourself on those days when you feel like it’s all pointless. And last but not least remember the one thing that my mother has told me for as long as I can remember “Everything happens the way it’s supposed to.” I have a love/hate relationship with this quote but as I get older the love for it gets stronger and honestly no one can deny the truth of it.