Miscarriage of My Dream

This is it. My greatest fear in trying to conceive: miscarrying my baby. Two years ago when being presented with the idea of IVF at my post operation check-up I was told: "It is highly unlikely you will ever conceive on your own." I was terrified of IVF because what if I did get pregnant and then lost the baby. I knew that would be worse than never getting pregnant at all. And it is. Silly, naive me, I thought I was finally in the clear when we got the positive pregnancy test. Even though the rate of miscarriage is 10-25% and I've known so many people who've had multiple miscarriages, I somehow thought my body would not betray me once a pregnancy finally took. I have the pregnancy symptoms and we even saw the sac of the baby on the ultrasound. But sadly the HCG levels are not rising normally. After the second abnormal blood test today, I was told it doesn't appear to be developing as a healthy pregnancy. And it was nothing I did unless I was doing drugs each day. That made me think of all the mothers out there doing meth, heroin, cocaine, etc. who have absolutely no difficulty conceiving. Most of whom are on their fourth or fifth child. Why can they get pregnant with ease? And yet I try for four years and my body betrays me? Now after being told to go off the progesterone, I literally have to wait for my body to naturally kill the baby I so longed for or induce the miscarriage. Then have a procedure to scrape out the remaining cells. Ugh, those options suck! The idea of that is too much for me to process right now. So along with shutting down and crying, my mind revolves around these thoughts: "Why is this happening? What is wrong with me? Please, don't let me lose this baby." All we want is to be parents. And even though my husband never feels this way, I feel it's my fault. My body is unable to do the most natural thing a woman is supposed to do. Sure I'm reasonable. I know the fact that a miscarriage is nature’s way of preventing a baby that is developing with genetic and chromosomal mutations. But that doesn't ease the pain or make the loss easier. When I asked some miscarriage survivors how they kept going after losing their baby(ies) they shared that they just kept saying one more shot, one more step, taking it one day at a time and believing a healthy baby was in their future. I feel like I've been on that track for so long: a timeline of steps to help me achieve my dream of parenthood. So what's next? I'm running out of steps. We have one more frozen embryo. Can I do this again? In time I'll have to decide because of course at 35 I'm not getting any younger and each year older my rate of issues increase. But after that there's no more IVF in my future. After inexplicably almost dying twice after the egg retrieval procedure I know my body can't endure that again. What then? International adoption. The horrific experience of attempting to foster to adopt still plagues me so much that I don't know if I can stomach the process. This is a cycle of pain I wouldn't wish on anyone. If you've suffered a miscarriage, how did you get through it? The only thing getting me through aside from the amazingly, wonderful support from people in my life is hearing other people's stories. If you’re not comfortable posting a comment send me a message on IM, the FB company page, the web page at kingkahan.com or email me at chrissie@kingkahan.com [if !supportLineBreakNewLine] [endif]