Hail Mary Pass

I injected my first dose of Lupron tonight. I'm scared. It has been 21 months since E died and we have achieved some degree of normalcy and happiness and now we're wading back into the water for one last Hail Mary Pass at having a baby through IVF with PGD. It's our best shot at having a biological child without losing him or her to Kell again. So after months of recovering from our loss and then more months of waiting for the genetic testing to be done and all the minor tests of my uterus and blood, I injected the Lupron.

There is a lot in this process that could unsettle me. The potential mood swings from the drugs themselves. And then the potential trauma of an IVF cycle that fails, or succeeds but ends in miscarriage, or succeeds and results in a high-risk pregnancy in some other way. Even a healthy perfect pregnancy will certainly rake up a lot of sense memories of my last pregnancy. And that is an unlikely outcome anyway. I'm so old now, relative to the fertility world. I'm 41. My FSH numbers aren't great. It has been 6 years of trying to build a family with 2 kids in it and here we are.

So why not just stop now and be grateful for Sam? Oh my God, I am grateful. Every day I am so grateful for him. I could settle into being a happy family of 3 and move on. Why not?

But I'm just not done. I just snuggled Sam to sleep and that Mama bliss is what makes me soldier through this. I want more of it. I want more of the physical experience of pregnancy and nursing, if I can have it. Maybe I can't. But we have this chance and I need to give it at least one try. And if we try and still can't have it, we'll look at our options. But it would be nice to not have to work through that loss. And that's also the most likely thing. But if there's a chance, we have to try.

So here is this bag of drugs sitting next to me on the bed, as daunting as anything I've ever owned. I am so lucky to have access to these drugs, so lucky, and they scare the crap out of me. But we move forward. Second Lupron injection tomorrow morning, followed by the baseline ultrasound.