Battle Weary

Unfortunately, we were once again devastated when we received the news that the fetus had not continued to grow and that my wife would have to force her body into having a period to expel the remnants of the fetus. This was the most difficult process of our lives. The grief was immeasurable and all consuming. It was difficult to concentrate on any thing else. We basically became shells of ourselves and went through the paces of our daily routines because it was too hard to open our eyes to the world around us and too painful to sit alone in silence for more than a few seconds at a time. Why did we have to struggle so hard for what comes all too naturally for so many? We decided the pain was too intense to dive back in immediately and so we took a few months to gather our strength and reclaim our hearts.

Several months later, we felt we were ready to try again. After all, we still had fifteen embryos frozen at different stages. We started the process again and they unfroze all four embryos at stage five and only two survived. We transferred the two surviving embryos and again began the anxious wait to hear if we were finally going to be blessed with parenthood. We were again distraught to learn that neither embryo implanted and we would have to try again.

Once we were ready to try again, we unfroze four of the remaining eleven embryos at stage three and waited for them to progress to stage five. We were informed that none of the embryos survived and so we decided to unfreeze the remaining five embryos. Only three progressed to stage five. We made the decision to implant all three since only one of three was considered to be of top quality. We very impatiently awaited the news we were hoping to hear. Once again, our hopes were dashed when we were informed that all three embryos failed to produce a pregnancy. At this point we were at a complete loss of understanding. How could we go from being told we would never have children of our own, to having twenty eight viable embryos and one pregnancy on the first try, to now having nothing but twenty thousand dollars in additional debt? We were speechless and the clinic could not give us a valid reason as to why things didn’t take. Once again, we found ourselves at a crossroad and decided to take some time to reassess our situation.