Category: infertility

infertility · pregnancy · trauma

“So, How Was It?” The Feels Edition

Molly Daniels Hayes2 Comments

I’m part of an online group for people who are pregnant through IVF, and it’s been bringing me back to last December full force. The minute clocking of how many days and weeks along, the agonizing over whether taking your medication early or late or not at all that day will cause an irreparable issue, the wondering, wondering, wondering.

I’ve already written a bit about the early days and weeks of my pregnancy with HB, how worrisome it was for me. There was literally nothing else on my mind. When I had abdominal pain acutely on one side of my belly, I was absolutely convinced I was having an ectopic pregnancy, which mandates “cancellation” of the pregnancy. This fear has to continue until the embryo is large enough to detect on an ultrasound, which means you’re even more pregnant than you were with a potentially non-viable pregnancy, which also means you’re even more invested in it going well, you’re even closer to seeing it come to fruition.

At my earliest possible time, I came in for an ultrasound because I was convinced my abdominal pain was the portend of bad news. She’d told me it was early, that just because they may not detect anything didn’t mean it wasn’t there. My blood levels were continuing to rise apace. Then, the frozen agony as she angles around with the wand like a spotlight in my body, searching, searching for life.

And there it was, a flutter on the black-and-white screen. A flutter in my uterus where it should be. She turns on the sound, and there it is… a heartbeat, an honest-to-goodness heartbeat. Not my own, something new, something hers. Her. New. Yes.

And this is how it was for every minute of every day for me. A terrified conviction that any moment could be the last, as it had been several times before. It was this way until my 20-week ultrasound, an in-depth three-dimensional view of the growing body inside me. I would not, could not with a fox, allow myself to breathe until that 5-month test. I know personally three women who’d had “bad scans” at that critical appointment, all three who’d had to make haunting, heart-breaking choices, and I could not allow myself to plan for the arrival of a baby until then.

To be honest, it was only a few weeks to the end of my pregnancy when I was posting in a group about my terror that it would all come crumbling down. This feeling didn’t abate until she was safely, healthfully in my arms in the hospital bed. It’s a horrible feeling. It’s a horrible cloud to live under during a time that many people feel can be the most blissful and abundant.

And this was usually the kind of content I gave when friends asked how I was feeling. The emotional piece. I expressed how difficult it was for me to trust, how I was awaiting the 20-week scan to really believe this would happen, how I was having a hard time wading through my own trauma. Funnily enough, after several minutes of my talking in this vein, friends would often say, “I meant, ‘How are you feeling physically?'” but I knew what they meant. That aspect just wasn’t that important for me to talk about (see previous blog!).

But there she was at 20-weeks, a face, eyes, nose, heart. Four chambers of a heart. All moving blood, red and blue pulses of light on the screen. Pulses of life.

Til the end, this is how it was, checking my underwear for spotting each time I sat down to the toilet. She was still right-side-up as my time came closer, and this worried me. (She did flip on her own eventually.) Two weeks to go, I hadn’t felt her move in over a day. I drank juice, did jumping jacks, drank cold water, and sat quietly in the dark awaiting her movements to confirm she was still there. Really there.

I came downstairs streaming tears. J drove me to the hospital. And she was there, really there, just moving less but healthy, beating, “breathing.”

Everyone does what they can to assure you, assuming things have been going well, that they will be well. Everyone with the best of intentions and with all the love they can muster try to hold your hand, physically or virtually, as you wade, slog, crawl through the darkness that creeps into the side of your vision. The unbidden thought. The momentary arresting of your breath.

So, How Was It?

Pregnancy is a nine-month mental labyrinth, regularly gnarling your joy into a Gordian knot.

Until it’s over. And the knot unravels, cascading open to reveal the most tender pulse of awe and magic this side of the veil.

beginnings · infertility · pregnancy

“So, How Was It?” Pregnancy Edition

Molly Daniels Hayes2 Comments
At Mom’s The Word in SF. 7 mos pregnant.

As you may have read in my previous post, getting to pregnancy — and a pregnancy that “stuck” — was a long and winding road for J and I. That said, pregnancy itself? I’m reluctant to tell you!

One of the lessons I learned during pregnancy was that when people ask you a question about how it is going, often (though certainly not always!) the reason behind their questioning is loaded. Perhaps they will use your answer as a benchmark against which to compare, at length and with unasked-for advice, their own pregnancy or their partner’s. This looks like: “Well, when I was pregnant it was hell in XYZ ways; let me enumerate in great detail how I suffered.” “You’re tired now, just wait until the kid gets here.” “Better do ABC now because you’ll NEVER BE ALONE AGAIN.”

I really had a hard time with these conversations. And so, I stopped having them, mostly. The best advice I received during my pregnancy, and this lovely advisor told me to throw it out the window if I wanted!, was to Lie Positively. How are you feeling? Great! How are you sleeping? Great! [When the baby comes along:] How are they sleeping, eating, pooping, blinking…? GREAT!

The aim here is to stem the flow of unasked-for advice and the tide of misfortune that childbearers want, for reasons that completely elude me, to dump on you.

And why stem that flow? Why try to distance myself from that muck?

Because my pregnancy really was great. I loved it! (See, I told you you’d hate me for it!) At about 6 weeks pregnant, I awoke from a deep sleep because I was laughing. I personally believe/think/imagine that this was little Hannah telling me a joke or being delightful in the way she is and does. I think it was her telling me she’d come, and that she’d be a dose of sunshine.

I was mildly green around the gills for a few weeks, but I drank ginger lemon tea by the gallon, all day every day, and my nausea would abate. I didn’t retch once. And by week 10, the nausea passed.

I was ravenous. My coworker who’d been experimenting with baking bread (as many did during the pandemic!) brought me a large, circular loaf of crusty, whole-grain. I ate half of it before lunch time. Repeatedly, I took photos of the enormous hoagie sandwiches I bought at the corner store, after I’d already eaten my own lunch. I would text J that I was only going to eat half — this was my “accountability” text. Not because I was or would get fat, but because of the many times I’d already eaten it all and felt so sick afterward! And, inevitably, I would have to send the close-to-upchuck text that I ate the whole thing anyway! But, this time passed, too.

At about 17 weeks, even though I’d been waiting for the 20-week ultrasound to truly commit to “being pregnant/expecting a child,” I had to get new pants. After several fruitless internet searches, and deciding that, No, thank you, Gap, H&M, etc., I will not be wearing stripes throughout the rest of my pregnancy!, I bit the bullet and went to the “nice” maternity wear store and bought some wonderful jeans and a top that fit well and would serve me beyond pregnancy. I came home elated to show J: “I look like ME!” Not a circus tent, not a pastel-shrouded matron. Dark blue jeans, a black top, and bronze loafers: I looked like me. Just with a bump.

I’d always thought that I would be able to make due without the ridiculous accoutrements of pregnancy, like the pregnancy body pillow. However, on that tack, I was wrong. By the latter months, sleeping on my side wore on my hips, and luckily I was on summer break by now and could scour the second-hand online marketplaces, and found this C-shaped one that took me through the end comfortably.

My back didn’t hurt. My feet didn’t hurt. I didn’t get headaches or sweats or pox! I was just carrying.

The only wrinkle for me was my left knee. I’ve always had trouble with that one, whether when running or working out or skiing, and as my pregnancy progressed, so did swelling and pain. This meant I couldn’t even walk a block without limping and began to see a chiro and acupuncturist. I saw an orthopedist, and did eventually make the decision for a cortisone shot, which helped immensely, though temporarily. However, it also meant that I needed to find an alternative mode of exercise, and I started swimming at a local pool. It was glorious! I loved it. Outdoors, watching the trees pass by overhead, engaging in conversation with the retirees who frequented the pool and hearing about the gossip of which upstart was causing trouble in the fast lane (HA!). I’d never swum for exercise before, and it was quite lovely. Not the same as running, sure, but really nice and easy on my knee.

As the time drew nigh, and J and I moved into new place with more stairs than Coit Tower (ouch!), I hurriedly drove hither and yon to acquire second-hand clothes and other items. As it drew even closer, I finally turned to the internet to just send me this crap.

And, by month 8 and 9, we were ready — or as ready as we’d ever be. (And sure, I’m glossing over the fear and terror that occasionally gripped me solid. But that’s another blog.) 😉

(Forgive typos/grammar; published after one draft; baby calls.)

evolution · infertility · marriage

Is it bad I’m glad he’s sad?

Molly Daniels Hayes1 Comment

Sounding like a nursery or Dr. Suess rhyme came the question I asked myself two Sundays ago when it became clear that my embryo transfer did not “take.” After about a week of waiting, Googling “How to survive the two week wait” (so common, it even has a handy shorthand of 2WW), poking and prodding my body, analyzing every change or perceived change — in direct flouting of all the suggestions from the aforementioned Googling… — J and I came to know that this time didn’t “work.”

And when I told him, when I asked him how he felt, he said, “Disappointed.”

A few notes about J. When we met, he was 43, a so-close-to-being-confirmed bachelor that he wondered if he would indeed ever find someone to be with, let alone marry. He was, and is, persnickety, exacting, a creature of habit yet loathe to make plans for fear they may impinge on whatever spontaneous outdoor adventure may, perhaps, possibly, crop up. The rootedness of his idiosyncrasies meant that there was a narrow aperture through which a mate might skate, so narrow that his hope of having a partner felt increasingly elusive — family an order of magnitude more. Being a family man was not a dream of his boyhood or young adulthood; it simply wasn’t on his map.

And yet, when we started dating four years ago now, within the first month I knew that I had to bring up the “kids” conversation as it was on my map. We were eating on the back patio of a burger joint near my old apartment. Plates of sweet potato fries decimated between us, napkins curled up into balls, we sat in the dappled sunshine and I screwed up my courage: “So, what do you think about kids?”

I’m sure his answer was a quick-witted quip that soon turned earnest, as he did and does. He said he was ambivalent.

Not wanting to appear like this was a deal-breaker, not wanting it to seem that this would be an irrevocable rift, I, too, said I could “go either way.” And soon we parted for the afternoon. A few hours later I was on the phone with a close friend. I still remember sitting in the driver’s seat of my car, where I was parked, the color of the October leaves through the windows.

“You want kids,” she told me on the phone, “you’ve been pretty clear about that for several years.”

“Yeah,” I hedged, “but I don’t need them. I mean, I have students I teach and as long as I have children’s laughter in my life, that’s enough.”

“I’m telling you that’s not your truth,” she insisted. “If this is something you really want, you can’t just throw it aside as though it’s not. You will be miserable.”

And she was right. So I called J back and asked if we could talk. I told him that although I’d said that I could go either way about kids, I really couldn’t. And that if we really wanted to see where this would go, he needed to know that in that picture, for me, would always be a family.

He said okay. It was still early days, just a month in — plenty of time, I thought, for him to adjust the way he felt about having a family.

So we carried on. We went skiing, we went on trips, we snuggled and laughed and caught each others’ eye. And every now and then, I’d ask the question about how he felt about kids.

The answer remained “Ambivalent.” It remained so through meeting my family, through a 5-month break-up and reconciliation, through our engagement, and even through our wedding.

And I convinced myself that his stance, disappointing though it was (intermittently bordering on heart-breakingly devastating), it was at least not a “No.”

I convinced myself, sometimes rightly, that J had changed so much in our time together, had softened, had loosened, had lightened, that perhaps in time this same opening would traverse into the realm of our having a family.

And yet, his answer remained the same through our early pregnancy attempts, through our miscarriages, and even into the “serious as cancer” business of IVF. I mean, you can’t rightly state that you don’t want to have kids as you’re ejaculating into a cup! But, I suppose you can state that you are ambivalent — if it happens, cool; if it doesn’t, cool.

His answer remained, sometimes cheekily, sometimes frighteningly earnest, “This isn’t going to affect my life in any way, right?” And I would tell him that A) it would, and B) that he would still get to go skiing. And then I would roll my eyes so hard they stayed that way.

But, when, just a fortnight ago, I asked him how he felt and he replied, “Disappointed,” I was a bit shocked (and secretly elated).

I asked him to say more.

He said he’d been beginning to look forward to it, to having a family, to being a dad.

He’d been increasingly wondering about whether the homes we toured had enough space for a family, for kids.

He’d even started watching kids in public a little more, this time without an air of withstanding some unpleasantness or as though watching an alien species. He started to talk about kids’ skiing lessons, about cars big enough for all our gear — he even knew about the Snoo.

He said he was disappointed, that he was looking forward to it.

And so, following our “miss,” in perhaps one of the most bittersweet wins in history, my husband — the love of my life, my collaborator and my irritant, my playmate and my shoulder — begins to look forward to our future as a family.

curiosity · fertility · infertility

Schrødinger’s Baby

Molly Daniels Hayes1 Comment
'The Annunciation'. 1501 - 1535. Oil on panel. ARCHANGEL GABRIEL. VIRGIN MARY. Painting by Leon Picardo

Although perhaps not exactly as in the Bible, today I’m feeling a little like The Virgin Mary: Today my own Angel Gabriel will be a UCSF physician. As of about 3pm this afternoon, J. and I will leave the clinic, immaculate, and I will or will not be pregnant.

It’s the scariest, most life-altering thing to ever hope for, I think. To know that you are intentionally, and by appointment, asking to change your life and identity in an irrevocable way. And while, of course, it’s something you (I) say you want… I truly believe that you have no idea what you’re in for when you set these dominoes in motion. I don’t have any clue how I will change as I molecularly evolve from a woman to a parent. I don’t have any clue how I will approach the mess or the cries or the eye rolls or the unbounded love, despite the number of books I read to guide me.

I doubt there are many experiences like this seismic shift, though I recently equated it to an actor desiring to be famous and then having to deal with that fame when it comes! I guess I feel that parenthood is a “Be careful what you wish for” endeavor, but one that you… want(?) to not know how it’ll go! Talk about looking into the Abyss!

Another aspect that has been rolling around in my thoughts is the question of what, or when, is life? As an avowed Right to Choose-r, I have long thought, donated, and voted to support the right of women to make choices that support their needs. I have seen billboards with tiny babies and block letters claiming that a heartbeat starts 9 days from conception and bristled at their rigid, often erroneous, Right to Life dogma.

So it has been a jarring, unmooring experience to be regularly and consistently monitoring the health of my now-frozen fertilized eggs as though they are alive, as though they are beings. To receive a sheet that states how many eggs were retrieved, how many were inseminated, how many survived a few days’ gestation, and how many were reported to be genetically normal so they will be considered for implantation… well, you can see how my consideration of the health and development of these dozen-celled pods might call my long-held understanding of human life into question.

And that, I here report, is dysregulating. While I continue to hold mightily to my stance on a woman’s right to choose, I have to acknowledge that my conception (forgive the term) of What Is Life/A Life has become much more grey and nuanced these last few months. And, for that, I must here admit that I am also grateful. I do think that wherever I may have my own dogmatic clinging, any experience that can help me to open my mind to alternative viewpoints, even if I ultimately disagree with them, is a positive and widening human experience.

But… it’s “weird,” you guys! To know that I’ve thought and crossed fingers over eggs that have become embryos that have become tested frozen embryos … that now have become gendered? Yeah, I know the gender (or sex, rather) of our embryos. I know what they would and could and might and might never become. And that’s startling. It’s startling to celebrate the potential arrival of something that, under “natural” circumstances, I wouldn’t know for at least 5 months. And this specified knowledge begins to create a reality of a human, a picture of a human.

(For anyone curious about statistics, using genetically tested embryos, accounting for my age/health/etc., there is nearly a 2/3 chance that there will be a baby at the end of this. Which, conversely, means that there is a 1/3 chance that there will not be a baby, a possibility for which, while I am not precisely prepared, I am at least aware and not new to.)

And so, here we are, about to be maybe pregnant and maybe not.

To the ever surprising, edifying, and evolving nature of existence — and, for what it’s worth, considering it’s frankly a damn miracle that any of us were even born at all, maybe today do something cool, just because you’re alive to do it.

Love, M.

fertility · infertility · resilience

Don’t Fear the Reaper: A Different Kind of Harvest

Molly Daniels HayesLeave a comment

Swollen, painful belly. Trouble bending over to tie my shoes. Tired and nauseous. Pregnant? Well, that sort of depends on your definition.

If you’re asking whether somewhere in the world, there are tiny combo cells of my and J’s genetics, multiplying and developing as Nature intended, then yes, I suppose we are making what could be children.

If you’re asking whether those cells are developing within my own body, then no.

Last Saturday, J drove me to UCSF to have my IVF egg retrieval–or, amusingly dark, my egg “harvest”–and though the procedure went quite smoothly and as pleasantly as possible, I now get the equal & opposite reaction of having amped up my hormones and egg-producing parts in the form of the aforementioned common, but highly uncomfortable aftereffects.

On the plus(?) side, I’m getting to see how bloody inconvenient it is to be unable to bend to tie your shoes or sit without hinging at the waist. But. I’m not complaining… too badly. I’m grateful that it’s “Zoom school” for another few weeks for me, during which prep periods I can lay down and take steadying breaths to quell the nausea.

So, how did we get here? How come our genetic combos didn’t listen to all the very well-meaning, if increasingly painful platitudes and advice such as:

  • “It will happen”
  • “These things take time”
  • “There’s always next month”
  • “Have you cut out __ from your diet”
  • “Have you tried __(insert alternative medicine here)__”
  • “Are you taking prenatals”
  • “I have a sister/cousin/aunt/instagram follower who __ but now __” and
  • “At least you know you can get pregnant”??

(Don’t say these things, folks. We all know you mean well, and I’m sure I’ve even said them in the past, but unless they specifically ask for advice, just say something like, “That sounds so hard, I’m so sorry you’re going through this” and give them a squeeze on the arm.)

How come, despite all that and several mild interventions to boot, my body still refused to hang on to a pregnancy? Well, it should be noted that 1 in 4 pregnancies end in a miscarriage and 1 in 8 people experience fertility challenges, so it’s not altogether surprising. But as far as any medical reason? Perhaps my age (therefore my eggs’ age), perhaps the chemo, perhaps just the bad luck of the draw.

I’d said to J before we began “trying” that if and when we needed to talk about other options, we’d know. I said it after I had a chemical miscarriage last October; I said it after I had a true miscarriage this April; I said it after I had another chemical miscarriage in June: When the time comes to talk about other options, we’ll know.

And so it was, in mid-June on the final Zoom faculty meeting of the year that a coworker made an announcement. Coy and stilted, she announced that she, like the school, would be making some changes come the fall. A half-second’s thought of, “She’s not leaving, is she?” followed immediately by her display of a black-and-white photo we’ve all come to know from our social media feeds is a sonogram.

. . .

I smiled tightly for a moment. And then I turned off my Zoom camera and wept. Her little one was due the same month I’d been due when I was BFP (big-fat positive). The same month my pregnancy app community posts were gleeful with messages about Fall babies and pumpkin-toned newborn photos.

Camera off, I doubled over. In my desk chair in my living room, I wailed — with grief, with confusion, with exhaustion, with … well, despair.

When J came home that afternoon, I told him, “It’s time.”

The Universe, and my own soul, were achingly obvious in this message: You said you’d know when? Well, “despair” is when.

It wasn’t a hard decision to go for medical help, since I’d already made it, knowing that I would do what I could to aid a little one into the world. And I’m glad that it felt obvious and neutral. (There’s a book of index cards in the clinic’s waiting room filled with notes from other patients, some encouraging, angry, grief-stricken, even funny, and some telling of how IVF was something they’d never, ever considered and hope they’d still never have to.) But, though J and I tacitly agreed long ago that we’d accept and seek out medical intervention if necessary, we’ve also spoken that there are limits to what we feel, for us, is palatable intervention–or encouragement–of the “natural” parenthood option.

I had initial meetings with one public and one private fertility center. I moved my rainy-day fund from savings into checking. And a few appointments and Zoom calls later, my dining table was littered with syringes, vials, and swabs.

It’s all been a bit surreal, a bit wide-eyed as J and I filled out legal forms: What do you want to do with any frozen embryos if: you die, he dies, you divorce, you both die but within 30 days of each other?! But, it’s been 1000 times better than sobbing.

We’re in a waiting time right now; and any person trying to be a parent–“natural,” “assisted,” foster or adoptive–will tell you how very much of that there is. But, today I’m comforted in knowing that we’re taking the steps one at a time, little petri dishes of hope settled in a corner of an SF lab; comforted in knowing, too, that I’ll know when it’s time to have a new conversation.

community · infertility · uncertainty

Here’s hoping for a different set of flowers.

Molly Daniels HayesLeave a comment

pink-stargazer-lilies-nancy-watsonOver Winter Break, I spent several days sorting through papers and boxes in preparation for our move back to Oakland right over New Years (yay, diversity!).  In those sortings, I came across much of my writing from my graduate program in creative writing, one part of which was apparently to define and refine what my purpose was in my writing.  In one notebook or another, I repeatedly recorded that my purpose was, in essence, to illuminate my own experience that I may grow and heal, and that it may inspire others to grow and heal as well.

Apparently, that’s still my purpose in this writing.  As, in that spirit:

J. bought me flowers on Monday.

Before you die of envy, to be specific, he bought me “I’m sorry you’re not pregnant” flowers.

On Sunday, 40 days into my cycle (yes, late for me), with the repetition of October’s “boob heaviness” and fatigue and slight baby pudginess, I experienced some pain in my low abdomen. It went on throughout the day and I knew that sometimes there is cramping when a fertilized egg implants into the wall of your uterus.  I kept my spirits light (also knowing that it would be a little bit late if that’s what was happening), and when some spotting came in the afternoon, I spent time on the internet reading about implantation spotting… hoping.

It became clear the next morning this was not what was happening.  And so, as my body flushes out whatever may or may not have existed, and my temperature dips back to its normal level and my boobs return to their still awesome shape I assure you, I made an appointment with a doctor and will follow up with their fertility specialist today.  And have been relatively going on with my days.

But yesterday at the end of my workout class, the teacher asked us to bring our attention into our bodies. What were we feeling?  What was our body saying?  I closed my eyes, breathed in.  And my body swarmed with emotion from my feet and nearly out my eyes. I welled up; I nearly cried:  It appears my body was sad. I was sad.

It’s been a pell-mell dive into the new year, with the resumption of school and also did I mention a cross-county move?!  It’s been a week of writing things on and ticking things off a to-do list (where is that bottle brush anyway?).  To feel last night that I am experiencing some emotions was a bit of a surprise, frankly.  It’s natural, if not easy, to feel busy.  It’s hard to slow down and ask what’s really going on.

So, I’m grateful to that workout instructor who went off-script.  I’m grateful to J. for being such an understanding partner.  And I’m glad that I do have a purpose — to share, to shine light, to heal, and to create community through that sharing.  I’m not grateful for the hardship I go through, but I am grateful that I don’t ever have to go through it alone.

Namaste, b*tches.