October 2014 we had experienced a miscarriage. We went in for the 12 week ultra-sound and there was no heartbeat. It was devastating. It was recommended I have a D&C. What should have been a pretty routine procedure took hours and needed two doctors. Apparently my cervix is angled awkwardly. Awesome. To further complicate things, my body retained some of the tissue. Even more awesome. Because of how complicated the D&C was, the potential risk of hurting my cervix was too great, so it was recommended to just wait and pass it naturally.
It's really hard to mentally heal when your body hasn't physically healed. For 3 months I had to go for weekly blood work and every two weeks for ultra-sounds. There is nothing worse than having to go to the maternity ward for ultra-sounds, surrounded by excited pregnant woman, after a miscarriage. I had to go to 5 of them. Why this is so important is because when my body had finally healed physically in January, it took a couple months to mentally be ready to start trying again. But we got there and we tried and tried, with no success. After months of trying, I started to wonder if maybe the complicated D&C had something to do with our failure to get pregnant. So we started to work with a fertility clinic. After more blood work, more ultrasounds and a HSG test, the clinic said everything looks normal, just keep trying and if you want some help give us a call. That good news came on a Friday...exactly one week before my breast cancer diagnosis.
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| My favorite picture of us as a family of four. I was 11 weeks pregnant. |
When I received my cancer diagnosis, one of my first questions was "What does this mean for me and pregnancy?" Doctors had a hard time answering that. Sometimes chemo puts you into early menopause, my cancer just happened to be Estrogen and Progesterone positive, so being pregnant would feed the cancer (so thank God I wasn't pregnant at the time). My oncologist at St. Francis Hospital did not support my request to freeze embryos. Because I was Stage 3 they wanted me to start chemo immediately. Thankfully I was able to get a second opinion at Mass General Hospital, with one of the top surgeons in the country. She along with my medical oncologist said, "We see this all the time, go do what you need to do and call us when you're done." I cried. I was so happy. There was a glimmer of hope that we could still have another baby...one day.
So again why was the unlucky miscarriage so lucky? Because we had already been working with a fertility clinic, I had a fertility doctor, I had a file. My cycle was timed perfectly with my diagnosis. I called the clinic, told them plans have changed...I have cancer and we need to freeze embryos. I was able to start injections that day. It was amazing. After two weeks of injections, lots more blood work and an egg retrieval, we successfully froze three embryos. Three chances to grow our family. How lucky are we?
When we were going through the pain of the miscarriage one of the hardest things to hear was "these things happen for a reason." When you are a mourning mother it is the last thing you want to hear. At the time I didn't want there to be a reason for my loss, I just wanted my baby back. But now I can see the loss of our baby brought us to where we are now. And this is supposed to be our story. This new baby that we are about to celebrate is meant to be here and change the world.
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