Secondary Infertility Is The Worst

OK that’s not entirely fair, since we’re TTC (trying to conceive) baby #2.

I’m so happy & lucky to have a little girl already.

We’ve had one naturally, so we should be able to have another one, right?

Two years of TTC and 1 ectopic pregnancy don’t leave me with much confidence.

Never mind my “advanced maternal age” (what a terrible term to describe a woman who is older than 35 years at the time of childbirth), losing 1 fallopian tube after the ectopic pregnancy, and so far lack of success with clomid.

We’re going to try another round or two of clomid to see what happens, but beyond that I guess I (reluctantly) need to start looking into what comes next.

I have friends in their 20s and 30s who I know TTC for years without success and eventually went on to have healthy babies (a few sets of twins & even triplets!).

I know this because they went from excitedly sharing they were planning to start a family to completely avoiding the conversation.

For most of them, I have no idea of their individual stories or struggles.

I’m not sure why more women don’t talk about these issues with each other. I probably am more comfortable talking about fertility than most (clearly since I’m sharing this story online), but I’m trying to balance the discussion.

The majority of the stories we hear about are the ones who “weren’t even trying” or “planned” to get pregnant.

If only it were as simple as making a plan.

After countless dollars spent on ovulation kits & pregnancy tests and month after month of seeing stark white where you hoped to see a positive line on a pregnancy stick, it’s hard not to feel deflated.

If one more person tells me to “just relax and it’ll happen”… what kind of advice is that? That has got to be the absolute worst thing to say.

Maybe that’s why women struggling with infertility don’t want to talk about it – they’re scared of what they might do to the next person who says “just relax”! This has become my personal analogy: I thought I was in a reliable little rowboat – it seemed to be floating well, and I took for granted that it would continue to sail.

Since the ectopic pregnancy loss 9 months ago, I feel duped – that reliable little rowboat I thought I was in turned out to be leaky & creaky and now I’m looking around for the life jackets!

I’m really trying not to get ahead of myself, but in the back of my mind I’m quietly thinking “maybe I should start looking into in vitro in case I need a life jacket”.

I’m not sure I’m ready to acknowledge in vitro as my reality yet, but I’m starting to feel like I just need to suck it up and deal before the odds stack up even more against me – what with my secondary infertility & advanced maternal age!