It hit me while I was on my hour-long commute to a doctor appointment the other day that maybe that is what I'm supposed to be learning through this whole drawn-out, painful journey...patience. The old cliche of "If God is going to teach you patience do you think He'll just give you patience, or will he give you opportunities to be patient?" Touche.
I thought back and counted the numerous situations that I've needed patience through the beginning of this whole ordeal. The obvious situations like the waiting rooms, waiting for the doctors, the 2-hour roundtrip drives to and from the clinic. Those ones were easy, I could handle those. I could even handle the 4-5 hour wait to get the test results back each time blood was drawn.
But it's the harder ones that really started to take a toll. The constant and what seemed to be never-ending wait to see if the follicles (what hold the eggs) were growing, which they barely did over the course of a month until the doc seriously ramped up the dosage on my meds multiple times. (Which in turn seriously ramped up the side effects. SO sorry, Joe :) We weren't even to the point of waiting to find out if the test was positive or negative, we were just at the point of waiting to see when or IF we could try. Multiple ultrasounds and each time hearing the doctor say "We're not quite there. Nothing seems to be happening" was like a punch in the gut every. single. time. Why won't my body just cooperate? Why is it so easy for everyone else? WHY US?!
I drug myself into the office once more for another ultrasound check and finally, FINALLY we were at the point the doctor had been looking for. The meds finally did their job, the waiting paid off, and the prayers worked. The following morning brought a self-administered shot of Ovidrel to induce ovulation and then, well...I'm sure you can figure it out.
If I thought all the waiting up until this point had been hard, the infamous "2 Week Wait" was excruciating. I literally drove myself crazy stressing over if everything had worked, analyzing every little symptom that I thought I was experiencing which turned out to just be from the meds, trying so hard not to take a test because I knew full-well that it was too early to detect anyway, hoping so hard that all the time and money put into this was going to pay off.
I wanted so badly for this story to have a grand and happy ending, but it doesn't. All tests came back negative. It didn't work, we weren't pregnant. We knew going into this that the odds of conceiving on the first round of fertility meds were slim to none but that didn't make the reality of our failed attempt hurt any less. All of the dreams and wishes I let creep into my head over the past month were, in a single instant, dead. So here we are, back at square one with a doctor appointment scheduled to start this whole process over again.
I'm starting to come to grips with the fact that this is probably going to be a much longer journey than we had anticipated. It's most likely not going to be the quick fix that we were hoping for. I've realized that it's not our story that didn't have a happy ending, it's simply this one chapter that was more painful than hopefully others will be. Our chapters will be filled with lots of waiting, lots of meds and doctors' offices, a lot of pregnancy announcements that won't be ours, a lot of heartbreak and a lot of tears. But hopefully at the end of this journey, whenever that may be, there will be that one final chapter of our story that brings the happiest ending. And that will make this my favorite story of all.
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