Lesson #1... If it sounds too good to be true...

Then it probably is...

I have heard this my entire life, but it was not until this month that I realized that this statement is always true. ALWAYS! For example, my very wonderful, loving and supportive husband and I decided in October of 2007 that New Year's Eve of 2008 would be the kick off to starting our family. I had literally been bugging the crap out of my husband for a baby for about a year and a half at that point and he always argued that we couldn't start trying until after I finished law school and blah blah blah... I think deep down I always felt as if we would have issues getting pregnant. I didn't know why, I had always had fairly regular cycles and my husband is in good health but since I first mentioned it to dh I have been able to feel the sword of Damocles swinging over my head. 10 months passed...still no baby and what was worse was that my cycles never went back to normal after I went off of my birth control. So I went to my doctor with my overly-elaborate temperature charts and begged her to check my thyroid, my bloodwork anything to figure out what was going on. [Okay- at this point, I may sound really uptight and nervous, which I am, but you must understand that I come from an overly-fertile family. I mean, I have 3 cousins with 9 kids under the age of 7. We are a highly productive lot. According to the rules and regulations of my family I am not only 7 years behind in my baby production but I should also be able to get pregnant when my husband looks at me.]

After my doctor realized that I had never had any blood work done on me before, she decided she would "do the right thing", especially since she herself had drank from Ixchel's chalise and was a swelling 7 months into her pregnancy, and send me in for an ultrasound. The ultrasound showed signs of PCOS and I was referred to a reproductive endinocrinologist who took one look at me, wrote me out a script for Clomid, patted me on the head and sent me on my way.

You're thinking okay...what is your point and where is your lesson... This past November/December was literally one of the best months of my life. We planned a wonderful vacation to Disney and Cocoa Beach and my Clomid worked like a champ. After 11 months of negatives we were very surprised that it worked. I had implantation cramping on 12/12- the 4 year anniversary of the day that dh proposed to me. We got a bfp on 12/15 and decided that it would be a wonderful Christmas present to tell our parents (who subsequently told everyone else in the family) that they were going to be grandparents. I couldn't have written the story better if I had been God myself. I had literally never been that happy. It was too good to be true.

And in fact it was. On New Year's Eve, the other shoe fell. Our first fetal ultrasound showed a beautiful gestational sac and a yolk sac and no heartbeat. The next week we found the same only our hopes grew due to the development of a fetal pole only to be crushed again last week when the doctor looked at me and told me that the odds of this baby developing into anything that I would go on to successfully deliever were absolutely 0. He once again wrote me out a prescription. This time for a pill called cytotech, which causes the inducement of labor and we lost our beautiful little bean this past Saturday.

I think at this point, I can abandon most of the grief I have left in preparation for my bar exam in 5.5 weeks, but I sit here looking at another year. Another year of trying to have something that so many other people in the world take for granted. Another round or two or three or twelve of pills. Pills to knock me up, pills to cause me to go into labor and the thought of having to do this all over again just make my head spin. And the only thing that scares me more then having to do all of that again is the fear that after I do all of that again, I will have to do all of this again...