Wednesday 29 January 2020

Birthday Post Part 2 - A year in the Operating Theatre

A year of trying in 2017 went by and with every passing month I became more affected - affected by pregnancy news, other people’s pregnancy pictures, longing (in a weird way I know) the sickness that came with pregnancy that other people got to experience... basically by anything pregnancy related. It also didn't help when you visit friends and family who had just given birth and the kinda comments you get after was "so you lah next!". All we could offer was a smile and an "InsyaAllah if ada rezeki".

This probably caused the failures in our tries because my body was stress and so badly wanted things to work. Every period that came every month would silently kill me. Every person who tells me not to wait too long without knowing I was already trying made me upset. (Note: always be careful when making statements about having a baby because for all you know, the person you're talking to is actually struggling).

By the end of 2017, Aiman and I had a chat about seeing a fertility expert. We were scared because we never realised how difficult it was for me to conceive and how at that time we were having a chat about meeting a fertility doctor, something we never thought we’d ever have to talk about.

We agreed we needed to ease our minds so we had to get ourselves checked just to see if there are any problems.

We did, and we were told we had an unexplained infertility. So 2017 was a very trying time for the both of us as we had made the decision to get help. We went through our first IUI in 2018 and because my tolerance for pain is very (I mean extremely) low, the first IUI experience was a nightmare for me! It was so painful that I wasn’t making it easy for the Doctor. What was supposed to be a quick 10 minutes procedure had to be put on hold and quickly became a full-on procedure in the Operating Theatre (OT) with both my legs tied up so that I don’t end up kicking the doctor out of anger and pain (research about IUI guys, it’s just a simple procedure so don’t let my experience scare you). This failed, and we had expected it because my body was stress during the procedure.

Second IUI. We were successful, I got pregnant! Did we get through it though? No. This was the miscarriage that had happened in 2018, where I was able to carry till about 9 weeks, found out after, that baby’s head was filled with fluid, his heartbeat was slowing down and we had a missed miscarriage and had held on to the baby inside up till about 12 weeks. You can read about it in my previous posts. So this failed.

Third IUI. Failed.

Fourth IUI. Failed.

Fuhhh 2018 was so tiring! Few rounds of drug treatments, injections and continuous visits to the OT and failures. By this time, there have already been a lot of tears lost throughout the years, heart breaks and hope that was diminishing. I kept telling myself that God is testing me only because I can handle it and this always made me feel better afterwards. 

After the fourth attempt, in December 2018 the Doctor had a discussion with us about next steps and the three scary letters.

I. V. F. 

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