I wanted to be happy, not to be depressed. Not to read about cancer institutes where half the articles are memorials or written by people with late spouses and think I'm amongst one of the number. I'm one of the young women with breast cancer, forever, for the rest of my life.
I wanted to fight for a life, not fight for survival. And now I'm being told I have to fight for my life, I'm having that defined by a 5 year or 10 year survival (similar to my 74 year old grandfather) and possibly be in pain from treatments and drugs for the rest of my life. How unnecessary was this?
It took me a month to write this, because half the time, my brain doesn't function. I can't remember whether I've done things, or where I've left my phone. I can't walk up the stairs without running out of breath.
I need to apply the same dedication and but I wish I had been more resourceful, earlier.
Intractable that ovarian cancer. Understand how intractable this is, how much more difficult a battle this is. How much more resources and finances it is going to take? Hundreds of thousands of dollars, to sustain a life that was never in question, one that I now realized I sacrificed for another life that never came into being, because I was unwilling to compromise, even though all the signs pointed to IVF not being the route for us.
I would never tell anyone not to pursue IVF. It is not fair to, and neither would it be the right thing to do. The truth is, having a child, being able to hold your own child in your arms and being pregnant, it cuts to the heart of being female. For those who want it, or who have expected it, that's why despite all of this, we go kicking and screaming down some version of that path.
I wish that we had embraced infertility as an opportunity to live an awesome, different long life way to build our family. Instead of trying so hard, to not be so different.
I wish we'd left the door open for hope, instead of trying to close it so firmly on infertility, because we were worried about time, worried about it never happening, worried about it being difficult, worried about being different.
Even within the choices we had, we could have chosen those that were minimally messing with hormones. I don't think we did. We were getting over it and we were moving forward but we did it in an ad hoc way, according to circumstances, we were led by hope rather than our thresholds when honestly it should have been the other way around.
We can't regret hope. That's how we live.
I want you to celebrate your day, your life, because it is perfect, whole and healthy, the way it is. Don't invite things in to make it any less of it. Infertility is not actually the inability to create pregnancy, it is the neurotic self-doubt, the longing, pain and dissatisfaction, unhappiness that we put ourselves through.
Sometimes I think that via our blogs, we perpetuate this idea that it's something you need to stew in, that it's something that never leaves you, that it's something worth thinking about always and again. That it's the worst thing, or even a negative thing, or something to overcome, when it's not.
Forget helping charity, overnight you are the charity. You know when people tell you to pray or meditate that they think it's up to God, that they don't know what to say about the situation. They don't even know if you can be helped.
Our pride and idealism, kept us from moving forward faster. To get to a point where it wasn't so harmful for us, both emotionally, mentally and physically.
Ironic that we were so worried about time and now, if you want to be, you really can be. Once you get cancer, it feels like the clock starts ticking down on years of life. It feels like everything else you do to help the situation, even if it's horrible, is better, because this could take your life. I don't know what else compares really, to the mental, emotional torture.
For someone who hated feeling sick, always hated taking medicine, I wonder how I could have been so cavalier, and this really is torturous.
The hundreds of thousands of dollars to get medication or sustain it afterward, lifelong oversight and subject, and even if you can get that, to need a surrogate because we won't even I won't even qualify to adopt for many years. This is a hole. What I had before, wasn't a hole. It was a very, normal life. Can you imagine the emotion at each annual checkup? Can you imagine never being able to have sugar, or having to think before reaching for a snack, or food, or something you enjoy eating or be concerned about radiation from technology. Who wants to live like that? I would never, never have chosen this. No matter what else you want in your life, I don't think anyone would.
I thought that was my challenge. Not that everything I did before would become a challenge. Not that being healthy to begin with, would become a challenge.
Everyone tells you that IVF produces lots of babies and doesn't really produce cancer. But for the few for whom it is the other way around, that feels like an unfair and misleading message.
Delicate hormonal balance. Everyone has cancer cells in their body, our immune system is just strong enough mostly, to overcome it. And the estrogen can add fuel to a fire that may have never turned into a flame.
The ironic thing is my hormone levels were fine, two years ago. Before we began any fertility treatment. Some of it was at the low end of normal, but it was all in normal range.
Is it possible that the natural cycles didn't tip over into healthy eggs because estrogen was being suppressed to keep my body balance in check? Yes. Maybe that was the natural state, infertility and trying so hard to do something about it, pushed it into overbalance.
Is there overlap with not having a child earlier or advanced maternal age, that can also be associated with pregnancy, absolutely yes. But 33 is pretty young for that to be kicking in.
