What a shit day.
My good friend Bailey who I met online and have been really good friends with for a while had her fir…
Ok wait, let me explain who Bailey is as she’s been a big part of my life for a few years now.
I met Bailey almost two years ago on an online forum that we both joined when we started trying to conceive. We hit it off on this online forum and basically had our own thread where we spent months just talking to each other about our journey and our lives. We eventually moved things away from the forum and started talking on WhatsApp. We then met in real life last year when she invited me to her 30th birthday party.
Our relationship grew and we basically speak every single day via WhatsApp. I was there when she went wedding dress shopping, I was so touched that she invited me. We’ve met up several times now in our respective cities and I even went to her wedding this year. In fact, Telis was invited to her husband’s bachelor weekend! Her wedding was actually during the week I miscarried, but I didn’t want to miss it. We’d been talking about it for months and I knew that I had to put my sadness aside for one day and be there for her. I would regret not being there as my sadness wouldn’t be forever.
So anyway, our journey followed an eerily similar path. When we both first started trying, we didn’t think it wouldn’t happen. But each month we were both faced with disappointment. I guess the disappointment and the shared journey really brought us closer together. Many months went by with nothing to show for it and we both eventually knew that IVF would be in our future.
I started my IVF journey first, and we all know how that ended. She started hers last month. She had a month on down-regulation to switch off her ovaries and then she started stimming this month. Today was day 10 of stims and she had her first scan.
When I got her message this morning, my whole body physically responded to what she sent. I was shaking, my heart was racing, it really shocked me to my core. After 10 days of stims on the highest dose of meds, her ovaries had not responded. At all. She said she only had one or two follicles on each ovary but they were too small. Her lining was also too thin. They cancelled her cycle. The nurses treating her said that it was likely she’d have to consider donor eggs. Bailey said donor eggs wouldn’t solve the problem of her womb not responding.
I just… I had no words. Like, what could I say?
It’s just so shit! Her and her husband are wonderful people who bring so much love and light to those around them. How are they deserving of this?
Everyday I read stories on reddit about how people were treated by their parents and the abuse that they suffered in childhood. And I think about how easily pregnancy came to these parents. How they were given a child to hurt, to destroy, to break. Taking for granted the gift that was literally bestowed upon them. I think about situations like this and I really think life is just one big joke. You have good, loving people who would move mountains just to have a taste of parenthood, to nurture and create a happy human, but life just looks for ways to make the most fucked up of people instead. It conjures up evil and pain for no other reason and lays the path to success to the feet of the most vile and treacherous of beings while the good, humble people of this earth are left to eat shit. It makes no sense why bad things happen to good people and vice versa. It makes me think what even is the point?
Why are we doing good in this life when the only reward is misery? Life can’t just be one big test of overcoming hurdles because then it really gives you no reason to be alive. I don’t want to be looking over my shoulder waiting for the next big shit show all the time.
My friend Bailey and her husband do not deserve this. Telis and I do not deserve this and yet here we are.
It’s just so rubbish. My heart is completely broken for my friend. We were in this together. But how do you overcome potentially not being able to have your own biological child and/or not being able to carry a child at all. It’s so fucked up. Going forward, how much can I share with her? How can I tell her about my own journey when I’m producing eggs and making embryos? I didn’t think our paths would start to diverge. We’d always had a shared story. I just hope both our stories end with us carrying our biological children to term. We can’t start this as two naive youngsters and end it as a pair of bitter childless hags.
Fuck, infertility sucks.