SO.MANY. SHOTS. It’s hard to believe that prior to our fertility cycles, I was afraid of needles. After 4 years of trying to conceive, 6 months of fertility treatments, 37 clinic visits, 2 IVF cycles, 3 ER trips, 1 failed cycle, 1 ectopic pregnancy, 108 needles later and I am no longer the girl that got lightheaded at the sight of needles.

Pregnancy 

We were so excited when we learned that the 2nd treatment cycle was successful. I was so excited (and nervous) that I took a pregnancy test daily until our official beta blood test at our fertility clinic. Over the course of a week and a half, I took 3 beta blood test at the clinic. These measure the amount of the pregnancy hormone hCG in your bloodstream. The goal was to ensure that the amounts were doubling within a 48 HR time frame. Our numbers were doubling beautifully.

After the hCG levels reached over 1,000 we were moved along to doing ultrasounds. The two week wait from our last beta test to the ultrasound was harder to endure than those two weeks of waiting after the embryo transfer before the official blood test to confirm the pregnancy. At the first ultrasound that’s when our joyous occasion started to shift.

The baby did not have a heartbeat. Those were the first words that in this journey that caused my heart to skip a beat and I begin to silently panic. After a week filled with more ultrasounds conducted in 3 different offices by 4 different doctors it was determined that not did the baby not have a heartbeat but that the pregnancy was outside of my uterus; it was an ectopic pregnancy.

Loss

After researching and talking to a few different doctors, we learned that any pregnancy outside of the uterus wasn’t viable. Especially in our case where the pregnancy was on the horn of the uterus and the fallopian tube. It was devastating to learn that the baby we prayed for and worked for so hard through fertility treatments had no way to survive. Even worse the longer the pregnancy continued the lower the chance of my survival got. Because the fallopian tubes aren’t built to hold a pregnancy, they will eventually erupt resulting in the loss of the baby and severe internal hemorrhaging and possibly the loss of the mother’s life if the hemorrhaging isn’t caught in time. Not only was the pregnancy not viable because of the location but my life was in jeopardy.

Our last set of ultrasounds revealed that I had already started to hemorrhage so I was given a shot to help the pregnancy tissues reabsorb into my body. At my checkup the following week we discovered that the shot did not work and the internal hemorrhaging worsened and my tube had ruptured. According to my Dr. had I not been scheduled for a check-up that day and went another24-36 hours without detection of the hemorrhaging I would have died. Subsequently, we were scheduled for emergency surgery that same day to stop the hemorrhaging and remove the ruptured fallopian tube.

At this point, I was already in mourning over the baby we had lost. I didn’t care about the need to have surgery to save my own life. I actually asked the doctor if it was possible to just wait and do it later. Since I went to my appointment on my lunch break, I still had work to do and it was much easier to navigate doing office work than to think about having emergency surgery. And not to mention, I had planned this big comfort meal for dinner and I desperately wanted to eat it. Yes, in that moment getting back home to those beef ribs were all I wanted. Unchecked grief will have you thinking irrationally, but thank God for a sensible husband!

Recovery

The surgery was scheduled as an outpatient procedure and was supposed to take an hour and a half. The surgery ended up being close to 4 hours and resulted in an overnight hospital stay. I can only imagine the turmoil that my husband must have gone through in the waiting room. Visiting hours ended in the middle of the procedure so he spent a good 2 hours waiting alone, with no idea why the surgery was taking so long or if I was ok.

For us, it’s been a daily process filled with highs and lows. Because of the extensiveness of the surgery it took almost 3 months for me to recover physically. While the surgical healing has finally come to a close, the process of spiritual, mental and emotionally healing has been a journey of its own. With this month marking the month we would have been expecting to birth our child, unexpected bouts of grief have reappeared.

This process has been a difficult one for us to navigate through but we have done it together while holding tightly to our faith in God. In such times, it’s hard as a believer to remain steadfast in the faith. But I have found that it is the very things that have the ability to cause us to lose hope that, if endured, will cause our faith to be strengthened even more.

Through it all our hearts have stayed steadfast, that God is with us and for us. He has brought comfort and peace like only He can.