Dum Spiro Spero: While I breathe, I hope...

Welcome! My partner, B, and I have just started on our adventures in infertility with CCRM--from abroad! So, we thought it would be helpful to provide a place to share that experience for those who are considering embarking on this journey from afar.

As some background, we're in a subcategory of infertility (IF) called Recurrent Pregnancy Loss (RPL), which raises different issues that other kinds of IF. For example, we have been pregnant three times in the past two years, but have lost all three. I do ovulate regularly (but not such good eggs) and my partner has good swimmers. So, IF interventions alone aren't really helpful or going to solve our problem of not being able to have a viable birth.

Which is what brought us to Colorado Center for Reproductive Medicine (CCRM); they do Comprehensive Chromosome Screening (CCS), which is a genetic test that is conducted at day five, when there are more cells than previously available tests that test at day 2 or 3. Because there are more cells available, they can take a larger sample and get a better idea of the variation that is within just that one cell versus the entire embryo.

About us:
We got married in the summer of 2009 and didn't know it, but were almost five weeks pregnant then. We lost our little one at eight weeks, it was a natural miscarriage, two days after my 39th birthday (awesome!). We told lots of friends and family about being pregnant (consider that painful lesson #1- it's awful and awkward for everyone to have to answer questions after the loss). It took us a long time to recover, but we bounced back, ready as ever to have kiddos. We didn't do genetic testing, we had no idea we were RPL candidates at this time.

The following March, we got pregnant again and held our breath...we lost that baby at 8 weeks on May 1st--on the very day that we were moving (awesome again!). We didn't tell anyone we were pregnant (painful lesson #2- over correcting isn't the right answer- it's just as awful to be alone in your pain and loss). That's when I hit the wall, my heart grew harder, I grew bitter and angry after that loss and we grew scared to try again. We did genetic testing and found out she had a trisomy dislocation so she never would have lived, even if she had made it further along. Her name was Astrid, for the stars. Eventually, with some time, love, and a really wonderful rabbi's help, it got better...[Edit: we later found out this pregnancy was actually twins.]

In October, we got pregnant again...and again, we held our breath. We were so excited, we wanted to do everything as right as we could. When the doctor told us we shouldn't travel (to be with family) because we were high risk and there's a possible connection between flying and miscarriage, we canceled our flight plans and began planning a quiet holiday break alone. On December 23rd, we went in for our 6 week ultrasound (it was earlier than they would typically do a first ultrasound because I was diagnosed RPL and on early watch). It's interesting how you can read a complete stranger's face. I knew when I saw the radiologist's face what the fate of the heartbeat and our LO was...there was no heartbeat. We had yet another miscarriage.

But this time we were to learn about a new kind of trauma-- the missed miscarriage.

Since my body wasn't showing any signs of wanting to let him go, we needed to make plans to intervene. But, because it was 1 day before the Christmas eve, all of the clinics were closed until January 3rd. As an alternative, the doctor told us we could go to the hospital and wait (starving and nearly naked on a gurney in the hallway), until they could get to us. Then she told us about a patient who waited for two days, not eating, to get a simple d&c. (Yes, we live in a developed country.) Not a real option. When the clinics reopened on January 3rd, they had a week's worth of emergency and back up appointments to address, so we didn't get any medical services until January 10th, nearly three weeks after we found out that he didn't have a heartbeat. We decided on a vacuum aspiration because we were concerned about potential scarring from a D&C. Adding insult to injury, what we didn't know going into the procedure was that a resident would be doing it--she was inexperienced, didn't tell us what was going on, and was generally just awful! We did have a pathology exam done on the embryo and found out that he also had a trisomy disorder. We didn't have the heart to name him, it was just too much to bear, especially at that time of year. I just kept thinking, "Now, this is the stuff of Job here, folks. I mean, come on!" It was surreal. Disassociation with the pain and my feelings was the only way I could find to deal with the despair.

Since that time, we've been trying and I've been burying myself in research about adoption, IVF, embryo adoption, and egg adoption. So, it's been about 9 months that we've been trying this time around, but I have to admit to being scared to get pregnant without any interventions to give us our best chances for a healthy kiddo...which is why we've decided to go to CCRM.

Throughout this experience, I've often thought of my friend Elena and her eight (now adult) children and four miscarriages that she openly shared with me in my youth. In tough times, she used to say Dum Spiro Spero- while I breathe, I hope...

Hey, we're still breathing!