journey – Babies

Jordan scheduled an ultrasound for yesterday. Fortuitously.

She began miscarrying last night.

Fortuitous because she had some warning.

She had all day to grieve because the ultrasound revealed the fetus hadn’t grown since the ultrasound we had at the U.

Obviously there were many tears and cries of anguish—and there will continue to be on occasion. But she said a few things to me yesterday that were comforting—a sign of understanding and maturity.

In so many words, she said “things only get better.” A strong stance for someone who has been through so much in the last years.

But a stance from someone who is willing to hold on and continue to place God first.

Do we definitively know the eternal status of the fetus? No. Is there hope no matter what? Yes.

Are there still wails and tears? Yes.

I was impressed at Ester Rasband’s funeral by this scripture:

45 Thou shalt live together in love, insomuch that thou shalt weep for the loss of them that die, and more especially for those that have not hope of a glorious resurrection.
Doctrine and Covenants 42:45

I don’t generally weep from those who depart mortality. My tears come for the missing and the temporary loss—when they come at all.

My tears this time were for both the loss and for Jordan. Which provides a reflection for me: love was at the center of these tears (more especially hers).

So this leaves us very much back at the beginning. Together, but not expecting another.

Is it possible we will try again, have another embryo implanted? Possible. But it’s time to regroup and mourn.

We can’t take two years like last time.

Hopefully we can find peace and healing through atonement sooner this time.

A year ago, we started pursuing this “maybe we should have a baby thing” as intensely as we ever have. (I want to be really clear, I don’t know that we slaved and prayed and cried the way some people do/claim to do.)

Anyway, we took it seriously. Because it wasn’t happening naturally, we started making appointments with doctors to see what could be done.

Last July, we met with a doctor who practices NaPro (natural procreation) methods, with the intent to try to address the root causes of why we weren’t having children. NaPro claims to be as effective as the most aggressive methods (IVF) for reproduction, without having all the excessive amounts of drugs added to your body.

Long story short, it actually doesn’t work at all if the guy is the main cause of the problem. (And these couples aren’t included in the success statistics. So NaPro is actually quite a bit less effective than it claims to be.)

So we move to a men’s fertility specialist who told us all the things we already knew from the test results and offered a potential solution: have surgery that might (~30% likelihood) solve the problem.

Because this is a journey a couple goes on, I figured it was worth going under the knife to see if we could save Jordan a bunch of drugs, injections, and hassle. So in October 2019, I got two new scars just above my pubic bone, where they removed 1.5x the normal number of varicoceles. (Yes, I had trouble running and jumping fro a while.)

Post surgery, they wanted us to wait 3 months to see if my counts improved. They didn’t so we were on to more and different fun.

To this point, we’d worked exclusively with the University of Utah medical system. It’s the first system I’ve dealt with that seems to have its act together, and I really didn’t want to go to a new set of doctors.

But Utah Fertility Center is literally 5 mins away, and Jordan didn’t want to go to SLC for all her appointments (possibly a good thing, but for different reasons). She got what she wanted. That story is elsewhere.

(It was a good thing we went through UFC, even if the customer service has been poor: UofU shut down all non-essential things, including fertility, and UFC didn’t.)

We implant today. We have some (unknown at the moment, but we’ll know in less than 90 mins) number of viable potential humans in test tubes (or petri dishes) that will get a chance to grow up into little gods.

So it’s been a year. The next step of the journey will be almost another year, but by March next year (assuming the worst statistics still ignore us) we’ll have a little human running around.

Well, lounging. It won’t start running around till October 2021 at the soonest.

It’s quite the progress for a year. And we need to start looking into what the next leg of the journey looks like, and how to balance new requirements with good things we already do.