Dear Baby,
I never realized I was the type of person that could be triggered. Which sounds odd, now that I think about it, because over the last few years, everything seems to have affected me in some way. I just never considered myself triggered until today.
Let me start by saying that over the last few weeks, I’ve been fighting like crazy to stay positive. I’ve been walking around with a plastic smile glued to my face, telling anyone who would listen that I was doing well. I was better. I was fine.
But I’m not fine. This is hard, and pretending that it’s not hard any longer is actually making things worse. Issues have come up recently that are knocking me down, and the more I struggle, the more I fight it, the more it tears me apart. I’m having anxiety attacks again. My body is aching. I’m having trouble sleeping. I finally had to shut myself in my office last week and just cry it out, because I wasn’t strong enough to deal with this any more.
It’s hard because we found out that the donor bank we’ve been in touch with, and have been setting aside money for, has just raised their prices by $1000. I can’t magically pull an extra thousand bucks out of thin air. I’ll raise it; we’ll set it aside, but the money isn’t the issue. The issue is that this delays our next chance of finding you by a month or more. I know in the grand scheme of things, a month isn’t very long, but we’ve been looking for you for over ten years now. A month is agony. I’m tired of waiting, and I’m tired of being patient. I’m tired of getting so close to you and something coming along and moving the finish line.
It’s hard because we found out that your dad is a carrier for a rare and very serious genetic condition called lamellar icthyosis type 1. This didn’t matter when we were going to use my eggs, because I’m not a carrier for anything, genetically speaking. But now, since we’re going to try using donor eggs, we have to make sure any potential donors aren’t carriers for this, either. Which would be easy…if donor banks screened for it. But they don’t, so before we can move forward we have to contact the bank, ask them to contact the donor, and then ask the donor to undergo extensive genetic testing, which we will have to pay for. All before we can narrow down our search for you. Which adds even more time, and a greater expense, and pushes the finish line even further out of our reach.
It’s hard because I started talking to my doctor about transfer fees, since up until recently, I thought we’d procure donor eggs by April and I wanted to be ready. I have tests I need run, procedures to start, vitamins to take, and acupuncture treatments to schedule before we think about a transfer. I needed to nail down the exact cost of the medical procedures, so we’d know where that finish line was. Because paying for donor eggs and paying for the actual embryo transfer are two very different races, with two very different finish lines. I had budgeted a set amount for my transfer, based on the cost of a frozen embryo transfer that I would have undergone if any of our eggs had survived.
And I was wrong.
A transfer from donor eggs has added fees – an egg thaw fee, a separate fertilization fee, that sort of thing. My budget was off by nearly two thousand dollars. No telling how far away we are from that finish line, but it’s a lot farther out than I anticipated. I was hoping to be pregnant with you by the end of this year. I don’t think we can make it by then.
So, yeah. Lots of things have been on my mind. And then today, I realize for the first time in all of this what it meant to be triggered. Something happened that took an otherwise good morning and turned it sideways.
I told you social media is a cesspool, right? And that you should stay off of it until you’re 40?
I should take my own advice.
I saw a video today of some guy trying to mansplain fertility in women over 35. His “facts” were inaccurate at best, flat out wrong at worst. He was mocking everything I’ve been through for the last ten-plus years. He was trying to be funny, but he said that freezing eggs was a waste of money and wouldn’t work anyway. He claimed that research on fertility was based on women in the 1600s and had no relevance in modern society. He had an “expert” – a woman in her 40s who had three children at age 36, 38, and 40, respectively, and therefore his thesis was that fertility struggles in women over the age of 35 were a bunch of hooey.
Was his expert a reproductive endocrinologist? Nope. A fertility specialist? Nope. Was she even a medical doctor? Ha! No. She was just a psychologist, promoting her book, claiming that there was no such thing as infertility in women over 35.
Normally, when I see things like this, I just skip over them. People are assholes. Social media is a cesspool, and people will say or do anything to get attention. But the person that posted this video is a very dear friend of mine. She knows all I’ve been dealing with, and has seen me struggle for years. She’s been right here in the trenches beside me.
She knows I have friends who didn’t think to preserve their fertility and are now dealing with AMH levels below 0.5. They may never have children, and this video mocks them. This video mocks all the science I’ve had to endure over the last decade with my low egg quality and decreased ovarian reserve – that started well before I was 35. She knows that my only chance – ever – of finding you is through frozen eggs, and her posting something saying that it was a waste of money and wouldn’t work anyway was a slap in the face.
And so today, I finally understood what it meant to be triggered. I was having a great day, but for some reason I decided to check social media and spent the next several hours hurt, angry, and depressed. I felt so alone. If my dear friend couldn’t understand how this affected me, how could anyone?
There are douche bags out there trying to get attention who make a mockery of this pain, and the pain of all childless, infertile women out there, whether or not we’re over the age of 35. I guess it’s easy to laugh at something you don’t understand. But laughing at those of us who deal with poor egg quality, decreased ovarian reserve, recurrent miscarriages, and abnormal genetic screenings – things that weren’t even considered in the 1600s – that’s just cruel.
I was triggered because it came from someone I trusted. Someone who I thought had my back. Someone who I thought understood my pain. Damn it, she got it. But she doesn’t. And if not her…then no one else really can, either.
And that’s hard.
Mom
My Stork Got Lost 