Lazy Sunday thoughts

We've been on break since the last retrieval back on 9/10 and it's been amazing. Without the hormones or doctor visits or extra bills or spontaneous tears we can just pretend we're back to our pre-treatment days before we were even trying.

It's working so well that I even found myself being hopeful about the next cycle, even the next transfer. Like, it has to work, right? It's gotta finally be the one. Then I overthink it and bum myself out: It didn't work before, why should it work this time? Why would time time be any different? Then I start calculating how old I'll be if this next transfer works when my kid is born or at age 13 or 18 or getting married. Eventually it gets too depressing to keep the thought going and I try to distract myself with something else.

I try not to let our emotional baggage follow into every cycle. I consistently remind myself that every cycle has its own chance at success regardless of statistics or what happened in the past. I can't let previous failures weigh me down. But since there's so much more to failure than just a busted cycle, it's hard keep the negative thoughts from leaking over to future treatment.

My husband and I started including "v'et zaareinu" (translated as: "and our seed") during the section in bentching asking Him to bless us, our family, our home, etc. Most people use it to refer to their offspring, but we use it in reference to our embryos currently chilling on ice. We know they're not yet children but they're still important. They're potential life, our prospective family, our possible future. We can't hold them or see them but we love them already. It kills us every time a transfer doesn't make it, so yeah I think they deserve an honorable mention. 

Reading that back is heartbreaking. How sad are we that we're grasping at straws to find ways to include prayer for our unborn babies at every turn. It just goes to show how much it's on our mind literally all day, every day. I don't know if I'll ever stop waking up from the bad dream that we're back in the doc's office and they're telling us there's no heartbeat, or answer another phone call telling us beta numbers went down instead of up. I recoil at the thought of putting ourselves through it again. Maybe in some way this reasoning subconsciously makes its way into our pros and cons list when we opt for retrievals instead of transfers. 

Despite all that, I can't help but be optimistic. I have to believe it's going to work. I have these two conflicting mottos in my mind: "insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result"; and "a winner is just a lose who tried one more time."

While I don't want to be one of those people who becomes obsessed with making this happen and keeps trying failure after failure, I can understand it when someone looks at our history objectively and says two chemical pregnancies and one blighted ovum aren't a reason to stop trying. The little negative voice says, "but they were five transfers from five tested embryos!! Why didn't they work??!"  I don't have an answer. Even the doctor says there's no reason to believe it shouldn't work. We've been on the wrong side of statistics and the only thing getting in our way of success is to stop trying. Even when we went to get a second opinion that doc said there's nothing medically to keep us from being successful that they can pinpoint. So the plan is to keep trying. As hard and emotionally challenging as it is, we take it one day at a time and hope for the best.