Guest Post by Molly D, Footsteps for Family Building Committee Member
Last year, on the day before my first Footsteps for Family Building Walk, I drove to Boston at 6:30 on a Saturday morning for a pregnancy test.
It was my fifth such test in a week. I’d had a frozen embryo transfer three weeks earlier, and the level of HCG — the pregnancy hormone — detected in my blood 11 days after the transfer was high enough to turn an at-home test positive, but low enough to elicit a somber tone from the nurse who’d called to relay the results to me.
“It’s most likely a chemical pregnancy,” she’d said while I stayed numbly silent, using the clinical name for an exceedingly early miscarriage. I was told to return in two days for a repeat test.
Two days later, my HCG had more than tripled. It was still low, but it was rising — and I was tentatively, anxiously optimistic. For the rest of the week, I returned every other day, and every other day I spent a few agonizing hours waiting for my test results and feeling like I was getting my SAT scores back. My HCG continued to rise — until it didn’t. That Saturday morning, it dropped; my hopes fell with it.
I didn’t know it while I walked that Sunday, my 19-month-old daughter — the product of my first frozen embryo transfer more than two years earlier — on my hip, grief and disappointment in my chest, but my pregnancy wasn’t chemical; it was ectopic. The embryo had burrowed in some undisclosed location in my body, rendering it both unviable and a danger to me. Over the next month my HCG rose, then fell, then rose again, even after I’d received one dose of methotrexate — a cancer drug that arrests embryo development. After a second dose a week later, it finally fell, until it was once again undetectable by November. When I saw those test results, I was relieved. Then, I cried.
I remember with such rawness the 18-month slog it took to achieve my first pregnancy. I remember the cruel irony of constantly being forced to assume I was pregnant and act accordingly, despite never once seeing a positive pregnancy test. I remember the deep ache that came with hearing pregnancy announcements and seeing baby pictures. I remember feeling irrationally connected to everyone else’s family planning, because everyone seemed to be rushing happily ahead and leaving me behind.
I remember, too, the lightness I felt when I discovered I was pregnant, and the exuberance that carried through nine happy months. Throughout my pregnancy and my daughter’s first year, I truly believed the hardest part of my family planning journey was behind me. I had a beautiful, healthy baby and 13 frozen embryos — it was only a matter of time and choice, I thought, before I completed my family.
When my daughter had just turned one, though, I was diagnosed with Asherman’s syndrome, the result of uterine scar tissue that had grown, undetected, from a postpartum surgery to remove a stubborn, lingering piece of placenta. Suddenly, everything changed. I had three surgeries in five weeks to remove the scarring and clear a path for a developing embryo. I was hopeful once again, but more tentatively so. I was still grappling with my original unexplained infertility diagnosis, but the variables had changed, and I was facing a new set of obstacles in the path toward building my family.
Over the past year, I’ve had three more embryo transfers. All of them have failed. As I struggle to learn why, to “fix” what’s “broken,” to maintain my dimming faith, I’m steeled only by my resolve that I’m not ready to give up. I’m not sure what my path will look like one month, six months, nine months from now — but I do know I have to keep putting one foot in front of the other and continue along it.
I walk here, with these people, because walking this path alone is exhausting. And walking it in the face of legislative and societal obstacles that threaten to derail us is infuriating. The people who are part of the AllPaths community get it, and the work they do – running support groups; providing resources in the form of education, service provider recommendations, or insurance assistance; and advocating at both the local and federal levels for reproductive and family-building rights – is so necessary and so appreciated by those of us who need it.
Infertility is a uniquely personal, intimate affliction, but it also creates a particular kind of community. At the risk of sounding glib, no one who hasn’t walked this road truly understands its contours, no matter how genuine their empathy. I’m glad to have found a community so willing to listen, to understand, to help, to support, to cheer, to celebrate, and to keep walking — along every path — together.