Anxiety with Infertility
Infertility often looks like a normal and healthy life without children. Most would never guess what you have been through or currently working on right now. You may think that we want our life to be this way. We don’t have visual signs (mostly) of what we are going through. And we walk the world as everyone else does. We see the families with babies, the glowing pregnant women, even the ones that are successful after years of trying. We recognize the kids that are our babies’ ages, what our child could have potentially been.
When trying to make a baby, there are so many things that bring on a lot of emotions, especially anxiety. I have never experienced so much until we were in the depth of trying to conceive. There is so much spent thinking about the future that is can consume your entire life. We see it everywhere we look. I thought about it more than anything I ever had before. I had been thinking about it since I was a child.
We finally asked for help and became pregnant through IVF, and I calmed down quite a bit… until I had a miscarriage. Experiencing this loss was much heavier than I let on. I lost my shit. My grief was then dismissed by a male doctor that told me, “I know this is hard, but it happens. Why don’t you stop trying, and I can put you on medication.” I am not against medication, but this was not what I was planning to do. I was deep into my fertility journey, and I was going to keep on this path.
Looking back, I would still make this choice today. I knew my options, and I wanted to move forward with our next transfer. I said goodbye to that doctor, and we had our second transfer. We became pregnant again and were back on track.
During this pregnancy, I was not overly anxious. I felt like I was where I wanted and was supposed to be. I loved being pregnant so much. I was simply happy. In my third trimester, I became diagnosed with cholestasis. My doctors told me not to worry, so I didn’t.
And then we lost our baby at 31 weeks. I am not going to go into too much detail about the specific events, but if you want to check out my blog post on it, please do so.
After that, I was sad. Quite sad, but not anxious.
Now, six months out, I am not as sad but most definitely have anxiety.
I was diagnosed with autoimmune hepatitis a couple of months ago. After losing our daughter, I wanted some answers. I had liver issues in the past, but not enough to spark too much interest with doctors. My enzyme levels have been high, but not enough for caution. Well, now I came back, in full force, to my new doctor wanting a liver biopsy. I got some push back, but I wasn’t having any of that this time. Because of my persistence, I began testing for everything, including autoimmune hepatitis. I am still in the middle of this medical puzzle as this is rare, and not many know what to do about it. Another unknown that leaves me feeling confused and frustrated.
Also weighing on me, my mother has stage four cancer. She is strong and fights with all her might, yet it consumes a lot of my brain space. Because of this, I decided to take time off of work. Taking leave was big for me, as teaching is a part of who I am. I have defined myself as an educator, so who am I without this title?
Not being at work brings up money issues. We live quite comfortably, and I like it. If I take more time off to be with my mom, will I be able to live the same lifestyle? Time with my mother is worth it, but I would be letting go of another aspect of myself. These are the three things that are weighing heavily on my mind at 2 A.M.: liver health, mom’s health, and money.
The past month I have not been sleeping, and if you know me, you know I can sleep anywhere! As with most of us, I do not do well without a good six hours, at least. Honestly, I enjoy a pleasant eight restful hours but can survive with six. Now, I am getting about five, and they are not consecutive. I struggle with falling asleep and then waking up in the middle of the night and becoming overwhelmed with heavy thoughts. These dark ideas don’t seem to matter in the light of day. Why is that? Is it because our brain has more time to focus on these thoughts with the moon? No matter why this is happening, I am struggling.
I see a therapist, meditating daily, and eating well. I have taken a lot of exercises out because my joints were bothering me (autoimmune.) One thing I have noticed about all of my significant issues is that I cannot control them.
I have never really thought about myself as a control freak. I am pretty good at letting things go and moving along with the tides of life. But the waves these days are knocking me over, and I am drowning.
My liver doctor recently called, saying that she needs to make sure that this is autoimmune hepatitis with a few more tests. I told her that I have been googling it, and it can be quite daunting. People can die from it. I shared my take with her, and she said, “Oh no. don’t worry. This is not going to kill you.”
“Don’t worry.” That hit me like a truck. I have heard that before.
I do not have the same level of trust that I had before. I think about death a lot. Is my mother going to die soon? Did my husband make it to work on his commute? If I fall asleep not feeling well, will I wake up? Will the dogs choke on their food? Mortality is a concept I never worried about in the past, and now it is a part of my daily life.
I know that there isn’t anything I can do about losing our stillborn daughter. Nothing will or would have changed the outcome of what we went through. But, now I am fighting a new battle that does not have many answers.
It is taking so much more effort to be calm than to be anxious. I have to actively work on it so much more than I ever have. And it is exhausting. Even with all of the best wellness practices, I am still not OK. I am working on accepting that fact, but it is not easy. We all have to do this at some point in our lives, and each of us reacts differently. I love that there are resources out in the world, but it is another to implement and receive the benefits.
Living the life you never imagined and getting pulled farther and farther away is soul-crushing. And yet I think that can go for just about everyone. We don’t know what our lives hold, no matter who you are, this is life. We can fill our view with motivational and positive quotes, eat the right food, and you still have to do the work. You must sit in the shit and feel all that is happening. Just writing that sentence made my shoulders fall. I am in the shit.
I sometimes like to look at myself from an outsider’s position. I smile, I love to chat and make friends. I shower regularly, I get day to day things done, my husband and I have a healthy relationship, I read books, you know... All of this looks great. But you simply never know what weighs on people’s minds. I feel as though I have spent a lot of time thinking about what others are going through. As a teacher, you do this often. It has always been a fantastic way to distract myself. I throw myself into my job and thus get rewarded for this. Not today, though. Today I sit in the shit.
I acknowledge that even the best of us wage internal wars. And these wars are the hardest to fight and most natural to hide. Infertility brings out so much in us. It swings doors open we like kept shut. It slams windows, and we are left to clean up the broken pieces. It burns walls, and we can never rebuild the same way. Infertility shows us who we are, and sometimes that can be more than we are ready for.