Eight Weeks

We had our 8 week ultrasound today and you know what's amazing?! The baby looks great! Heartbeat is strong and everything is perfect. You know what sucks?! The trauma of our miscarriage takes all the excitement out of the ultrasounds. I walk into every ultrasound expecting to not see a heartbeat. I live in fear of the ultrasound. They make me anxious.

I really want to bring Eliza to an ultrasound appointment. But I am so afraid. What if there is no heartbeat? How would I explain that to Eliza? I don't think I would be strong enough to hold it together for Eliza not to see how sad I am.

I remember so clearly our 12 week ultrasound. Carmelo and I walked into the room so excited. For my pregnancy with Eliza this was our favorite ultrasound. She was a little jumping bean at 12 weeks and it was so much fun to see her moving so much. For the second baby, the technician put the ultrasound wand on my belly and up on the screen the baby popped. Not moving. Carmelo said "The baby must be sleeping." I remember looking away from the screen because I knew what I was seeing. Then the technician said "I'm sorry. I can't find a heartbeat." I have never been so sad. I have never seen my husband more sad. The whole thought just breaks my heart and I would never want to expose Eliza to that.

We have our  next ultrasound scheduled for June 21. We will be 9.5 weeks pregnant. Our second baby stopped growing at 9 weeks. I'm hoping after the next ultrasound my fear will be lessened and I will be in a place to bring Eliza to the big 12 week appointment. But until then I am going to watch this video of my baby's heartbeat for the 1,000th time, celebrate the life that is growing because I am so in love already.

This Mother's Day

This Mother's Day felt different. Last year turned into my Cancer coming out party. Carmelo took one of my favorite photos of Eliza and I at Elizabeth Park and when I shared it on Facebook, there was no turning back, it was out there. Eliza's mom has cancer.

Mother's Day 2016

Fast forward a year and so much has changed. I beat cancer. It's gone. But I also found out I couldn't carry another baby. So it isn't just the cancer that is gone, but also the hope of getting pregnant.
It's a strange feeling being told your first child is your last. There was no planning or preparation for it. I didn't go thru my pregnancy with Eliza thinking "I need to remember how everything feels because this is my last time." I'm thankful that Eliza was such an easy pregnancy and I enjoyed every second of it. I never complained. Never felt sick. Never felt more beautiful than when I was pregnant. If I could have been pregnant 100 times, I would have. I loved it. But although I enjoyed it, I don't think I took the time to really appreciate it and mentally capture every moment. I would have taken more pictures, which I have thousands, but it doesn't feel like enough. I would have taken more videos of the way my belly moved when she would kick or roll over. Being told you will never be pregnant again, when you haven't had a chance to prepare, really makes you not take all those small things for granted. I just wish I knew that 4 years ago.

6 Months Pregnant (in August) with Eliza

Now we have the most amazing gift in that we froze embryos and we found the most perfect surrogate. So although my dream of being pregnant is gone, the chance of expanding our family isn't. And what that has taught me is, you don't need to carry a baby or birth a baby to be a mother. Friday was our big day. I went with Stephanie first thing in the morning to get her bloodwork. This bloodwork would measure her hCG levels and tell us if the embryo we had transferred had implanted and if in fact she was pregnant. Waiting for that phone call felt like it took forever. It was the longest four hours of my life. But the nurse called and we got the news we wanted to hear. WE WERE HAVING A BABY!
When I heard those words, my whole body collapsed and I cried. I cried because every prayer we had said was answered. And I was going to get to be a mother again.
So this pregnancy will be different. I'll never feel this baby kick from the inside, I won't be able to talk to this baby every night or sit in the rocker singing "you are my sunshine" like I did for Eliza. But I hold onto to the thought of when we meet our baby for the first time and I am so thankful for that moment. My motherhood story with Eliza will be so much different than my story with our next child. I may not carry this baby in my belly, but I have carried this baby in my heart for so, so, SO long. And that is the Mother's love this baby will know and feel.
So this Mother's Day was different because there was so much to be celebrating.

How Lucky Are We?

For all the unlucky events that had to take place, we still feel so lucky. 

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.

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.