Infertility article

I found an article today about breaking-the-silence-of-infertility and I will admit that it has helped me to talk about what my husband and I have been going through.  Many (if not all) of my real life friends (as opposed to my message board friends) do not know what I go through in my experiences with infertility.  I am glad for that as I would not wish this on anyone.  The thing about all of this is that I am suffering.  I put on that happy face every day and face the world, but inside I am a mess.  Years have been wasted.  Years that I can't get back.  Thankfully time is on my side, but even though I am still young the years it has taken to get to this point have drained me.  

I am not a person that holds anything back.  I tell people I just met about my struggles, it has even helped a few women and for that I am grateful. I have been told over and over that I am a strong person.  The funny thing about that is that I have no choice.  How am I supposed to act?  I can't exactly cry every moment of every day even if that is how I feel.  I could give up as I have numerous times in our (almost) 11 year journey trying for children, or I could fight.  I have been fighting for our next child now for 19 months straight.  Before that, I had been trying to get pregnant for almost 3 years!  I was going at it blindly of course, but 19 months of doctor intervention has given me a pregnancy that ended in miscarriage, too much emotional pain to share on a blog, fights with my husband about what to do next, and 15 extra pounds that won't seem to go away (I blame down regulation, Clomid, gonal f, Provera, etc.)  When will my time come?  I know I am young, but I feel like I have been struggling for so long to make my only child a sibling...    

Taken directly from the article:  Risa Levine, a 48-year-old attorney in New York City, endured 10 IVF cycles and four miscarriages, yet remains childless. "Someone who had a breast cancer scare once said to me, 'What you went through is nothing; it's not like you were scared you were going to die,'" Levine recalls. "My thought was, Yeah, but I wanted to."  <- Although I haven't been through IVF (yet) I have had a miscarriage.  I did want to die.  I had the baby that I had been longing for in my womb, and it was taken away so quickly...

I have become numb to things that people say.  I don't blame them for not knowing what they say hurts my feelings.  Two of the worst thing that have been said to me in the couple of months are "Well, what if IVF doesn't work?  How are you going to get through that?"  Uh...day by day I guess???  And the second worst thing said to me "You are not infertile, you have a child."  I actually laughed at that one.  That is what my OB thought also (he wanted to give it "time"...I gave him 2+ YEARS to get me pregnant...yea, that didn't work!  Have to have an egg there buddy!).  I had to explain what infertility is to that gal.  If you don't know, infertility is when a couple has been trying to get pregnant after at least a year of unprotected sex (DH and I had unprotected sex for 5 years, found out we were pregnant with DD a week after our 5th anniversary), so we sufferred from infertility, and now we are suffering from secondary infertility - going on 4 years now (secondary infertility is the inability to conceive after having one or more children).

Something that I have been thinking about since reading that article is that one of 2 things will end up happening.  I will either get pregnant and finally conquer this secondary infertility mess that I am in, or I won't get pregnant.  My husband and I will have to eventually give in.  Well, that or go bankrupt trying and trying...