my babies

are boys. they look good and strong although one has a choroid plexus cyst on the brain. (nothing too major although could be a marker for trisomy 18 but everything else looks great in terms of my odds for that.)

i am 18 weeks pregnant. with two more boys. i still can not buy anything however, and now with this cysts i do not want to even buy a stroller until they are born.

paranoid much, K? why, yes. yes, i am. and no one IRL understands.

my mother is a friend too and has been involved in this journey but never really got it. even though i cried hundreds of times to her and spent hours talking about it. so when we were chatting yesterday she happened to say something about my struggle:

"i never really thought you had it that bad. matty was not even three when you got pregnant again. my friend beth tried for three years."

i am completely shocked that she doesn't get it. does M's age really have anything to do with it? we knew by trying to get pregnant with him we would have problem, so we just started early. if i waited until he was 7, it still would have been a really bad 2-plus years. does it really matter if you have to try for 1 year or 5 years? do i have it better than those women who can never conceive? of course, and i could not imagine anything worse. but was i just being impatient? what the fuck? we had hard time with M, although he was ultimately conceived naturally (still did 6 clomid cycles with two bouts of OHSS). and ultimately, after all of this hell, we were told we would NEVER have gotten pregnant naturally becuase of my bad eggs.

does swallowing dozens of pills, giving yourself hundreds of injections, enduring the vag-cam many dozens of times, having two egg retrieval surgeries, one HSG (which is no fun at all), and spending a pretty large lump of money actually sound good to anyone? no, it was pretty bad. does staring at a pregnancy test and willing a second line to show up sound like a good time?

what about all the side effects from these drugs? the immediate and the unknown future risks? i can not even imagine how many times i cried? 500? 1,000? feels like a million if you want the truth. including right now. yes, it still fucking hurts.

is it not bad to wreck your marriage, lose pretty much all intimacy with your husband and sink pretty much to rock bottom? is it good to be completely desperate? and now, finally pregnant again, i can not even fathom how we are going to stregthen our relationship. i hurt to much still from things V said. and from things i said. will we survive? yes. do i love him? yes. was he what i needed during this hell? not at all. did i cope in a mature and calm manner? not at all.

is it not bad to think that if IVF was not covered in Mass that we would not be pregnant bc we could not have spent $30,000+ trying twice this year. how fucking lucky is that? and that is all it is, luck that we moved to boston when V lost his job.

it can not be good to still be this worried about losing this pregnancy at 18 weeks. somehow, i do not think most pregnant women are completely stressed out. and i am certain any OB doctor would think stress is bad.

so i do not see anything good about any infertility journey. they are all bad. those who try for one year year or those who try for 5. it is a bad time.