Tag Archives: pregnancy

It Only Takes One

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Before I met Tommy I spent a lot of time dating in hopes of meeting the right man to marry. Mostly blind dates, these were often an obvious mismatch which would end up as stories shared over a bottle of wine with other single friends. We’d laugh, commiserate, and wonder “where all the normal guys had gone?” After awhile I began to tell myself, “Toby, you don’t need to meet a million guys or dates, it only takes one.”
I have often find myself comparing my experiences in the single’s scene to our struggles with fertility. Both take a lot of patience, perseverance, and most importantly a significant measure of luck. Fertility treatments, especially, encourage you to focus on the numbers and statistics: age, hormone levels, follicles, sperm count and quality, ova retrieved and embryos transferred and everyone’s favorite beta levels. At the start of each round ultrasounds, on an almost daily basis, allow you to track the growth and number of eggs, but it is with the retrieval that you know how many can be reached. You then wait patiently for 24 hours to discover how many eggs are fertilized, you wait some more after that-3 or 5 days- to find out the number and quality of mature embryos and if you are lucky, how many will be transferred. Finally, it is a two week wait to find out your Beta level to determine if you are pregnant (and you pray that those levels will continue to increase as they monitor the early stages of the pregnancy).

I find it remarkable that today’s technology  offers many more options to people dealing with infertility, yet my experience has been that at times I was lost in the details and forgot the big picture. It’s difficult not to be disappointed when every ultrasound leading up to an egg retrieval indicates that you have plenty of eggs, but on the big day you learn that very few were retrieved-especially since you know that even fewer will fertilize and mature. All you can do is hold your breath and hope for the best.

Last June we went through a round of IVF that was both extremely difficult and disappointing: the cycle was longer than most because of holidays, I became very ill yet still managed to cut my head open while on bed rest, and for all our efforts we ended up with very few eggs and then embryos. So few that the doctor who performed the retrieval – not my regular doctor because in the public system your procedures are performed by whichever doctor is on duty that day – asked me if I was aware that I had endometriosis (all I could do was wonder if he had bothered to read my file before pumping out my eggs!!). We had 5 eggs, this was not a promising number and I was disappointed. I looked at Tommy and said “It only takes one.” It became our mantra. We repeated it as we waited for the rest of the numbers, assuring one another and ourselves, that all we needed was one fertilized egg to hang around in my uterus for 40 weeks and then we’d have a child. For all the positive thinking, that round did not end with a pregnancy.

I was done, we’d have to try some other route to parenthood. Tommy wanted to give it one final chance and encouraged me to try a new doctor- we had already agreed to try IVF for two years and there was still a bit more time. He reminded me that it only has to work once. So at the beginning of August 2014 we started all over again. I can’t say I was optimistic but I did my best to make it as manageable as possible: I pampered myself at a day spa with a massage, continued with acupuncture and generally did my best to take it easy. Throughout, Tommy and I repeated, “it only takes one.”

As I write this post, cradling my sleeping daughter with one hand, I am still in a bit of disbelief that it worked. One egg and one sperm, became one embryo that was transferred into my uterus, and with plenty of luck, it managed  to stay around for 39 weeks. Even as my belly grew, I was skeptical as to whether it had actually worked;  was there actually a baby on her way? I watched her  grow from a dot on a screen under a laboratory microscope until I held her in my arms moments after her birth. Still, I cannot believe that it had worked. In the end it only took one and this one is ours.

Other People’s Pregnancies

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We all heard about it months ago: Kate and William are expecting! We were notified when she went into labor and waited with bated breath to find out if the royal family would welcome a new princess or prince – I believe that is his official title. I’m not gonna lie; I’m jealous. She has a great body, beautiful clothes, never a bad hair day and for all that she only has to put up with the constant scrutiny of the public eye. On second thought, no thank you, I’ll take my life instead – frizzy hair and all.

Then it hits me, the royal couple were married after us. We have been trying to conceive for about a year and a half and have had a year filled with IUIs, two rounds of IVF, a chemical pregnancy, and finally OHSS (ovarian hyperstimulation syndrome). So the question that begs an answer is how do I react to the royal couple’s news, and more importantly that of my family and friends who are pregnant or parents?

Truth is, it depends. My biggest fear when I first began to share our struggle with infertility was that people would respond by treating me differently; that they would hide their pregnancies from me. I didn’t want to be overcome with jealousy upon seeing a friend’s belly begin to show. How would I feel when my sister called to tell me that she was expecting again, or far worse, when she avoided telling me? I worried that infertility would slip into all aspects of my life including my relationship with others.

Eventually, the day arrived and my sister told me she was expecting her second child. In that moment, I was overcome with joy at the thought of my adorable nephew as a big brother. Then I realized that she is due right around the time when I would have given birth if the chemical pregnancy had turned out otherwise. I actually felt relieved because it would have been difficult for my mother to be in two countries at once!

That’s when I stopped myself and thought, “Toby, how do you feel about this?!” I allowed myself to feel both happy for my sister and disappointed at my own situation. Mixed emotions are one of my favorite things in life.

There are those evenings when Tommy and I come home from a night out with friends who have children and wonder when it will finally be our turn. Those are the moments when I am most grateful to be going through this with him as my partner. We both know that there are multiple paths to parenthood and we will get there one way or another.

Every person who deals with this does so differently; there is no one way to approach all the emotions that accompany infertility, but in my experience it is helpful to speak with other women and couples who have been through or are currently involved in treatments. Their support and empathy helps me to overcome what can be an otherwise lonely and isolating experience and offers me an outlet to deal with various emotions.

A few days after my sister told me she was pregnant I received another phone call, this time from my 93-year-old grandmother. More than 50 years ago she, too, struggled to get pregnant.

“Tobaleh, I’m calling to see how you are doing, are you OK?  I want you to know that I love you!”

“Bubbie,” I said, “I love you too, and yes I think I will be just fine.”