Today, as I was spending a good 5 minutes not getting anything done, I came across a picture of a tweet from Neil deGrasse Tyson. I have mixed feelings about that man. While teaching kids (and adults) about science is a brilliant enterprise, and I say more power to him for that, he frequently tweets things that are basically just trolling the religious.
Now, he adamantly asserts he is not an atheist, he's an agnostic, and his interviews are very diplomatic when addressing religion. I recently watched one where he said the only thing he has to say against religion is that, while it has its place in society, it doesn't belong in the science classroom. He said the Bible shouldn't be used as a textbook on the natural world.
And, yes. I would agree with that. However, I might clarify that scientists have been quite literally inspired by God over the centuries, and faith in God's abilities to lead you to find truth about scientific principles should be taught in the classroom, but then, I'm extremely religious, and Neil deGrasse Tyson is not.
So, I'd mostly agree, and definitely not be upset with his public stance on religion, as told through his interviews.
But, his tweets?
This one wasn't directed at religion, but it was directed at a core principle of Christianity - Hope.
His tweet said, "If your sentence contains the word 'Hope' then you've confessed no control over the outcome you're hoping for."
What?
I mean, seriously. When has hoping for something been relinquishing control? Hope motivates us to take control.
Let's talk about hope. In fact, let's talk about the thing I hope for more than anything else in this universe.
(Cue story time!)
Being a mommy was always on my list of goals and aspirations for the future. But, when I was 13, there was a baby named Paytience. Her mom was an extremely young, single mother, who worked and partied a lot, and kind of struck me (in all my 13 years of experience) as an irresponsible child who really shouldn't have taken on the responsibility of motherhood. Still, she needed help with her baby while she worked, and my mom offered to babysit.
Before we took Paytience in for babysitting, my mom sat us down. She said having a baby around was a LOT of work, and she wasn't sure if she had the energy for it anymore. She needed our help. We all agreed, but when it came down to who was doing the actual work, apart from my mom, it was entirely me.
I fed her. I burped her. I taught her how to sit upright. I changed a million diapers. I played with her. I carried her around everywhere I could. After a while I took over my mom's duty of getting up at 3:00 AM to meet her grandpa at the door and bring her inside.
And I loved her.
Oh my gosh, I loved that baby.
Even now, when I think back on her (she'd have turned 16 by now), I wonder what happened to her, and I wish she had stayed with me and been my little girl.
That experience taught me that what I'd always known - that I wanted to be a mom - was actually my primary, number one ambition in life. More than anything else, I wanted kids.
Of course, I had to grow up first.
Over the years, other goals and desires have come up, and some have stayed. I want to be an author of historical fantasy and/or regular fantasy and/or sci-fi. I want to be a substantive editor. I want to own my own house, and have a car that doesn't break every other month.
I've reached a couple of those. I was an editor with a publishing company for a couple of years, and I've done freelance projects here and there. Nothing to support my family with yet, but definitely fun projects. Also, I am at present working on a historical fantasy novel.
But I'm not a mom yet.
That should have been the easiest goal to reach, especially after I got married. It doesn't take 4 years of college, and/or hours and hours and hours of work, to get knocked up.
I married a man who wanted a family as much as I did. We agreed that waiting at least a few months before having children was smart - it gave us time to get used to the ins and outs of living together, get settled in, etc. We agreed that in 6 months we'd start trying.
Well... we made it 5 months, honestly. We both wanted kids so much that we were like, "Yeah. Yeah, we could just, you know, not prevent anything this month and see what happens. We'll start actually trying next month."
I'll tell you what happened. A crushing, disappointing nothing. I'd wanted and hoped for a baby so badly that, by the end of my cycle, I was sure I was pregnant.
I wasn't.
I wasn't pregnant the next month either, or the next.
On the second month I'd started using the ovulation predictor kits (similar to pregnancy tests, except that there are always 2 lines), and by the third month of trying, I knew something wasn't working right. On Day 14, I should have been seeing 2 strong lines, the left stronger than the right. Somewhere between days 20 and 24 I'd see a slightly stronger left line, but it was never stronger than the right one. My family had a history of infertility, and I knew I'd gotten the genes.
I kept with it, though. Doctors won't look at you before a year of trying, so I kept with the only thing I knew to do: track ovulations and try to time things right.
Did my sentences ever use the word "Hope"?
Oh my gosh, yes. I hoped with all my heart that maybe this month would be the month. Every single month, I clung to that hope that maybe things would go right. My mom had struggled with infertility, and she'd become pregnant with 6 children (4 of which survived). My older brother and I had both been conceived with no help from doctors at all. There was definitely room for hope.
Was I out of control?
At that point, completely. I was doing everything I could, and I wasn't allowed to take the next step - help from a doctor - until it had been a year.
The hope became painful, even dangerous. With each month of failure, the feelings of desperation grew. I had no idea what was going on - was I just not ovulating, or was I getting pregnant but miscarrying every month? That fear led to feelings of guilt and disgust with my body. I knew they were wrong - it was so far from my fault. But what if, what if deep down, my lack of consistent exercise and slightly above ideal BMI was killing my children?
I threw myself into exercising. I tried ridiculous, low-carb diets. Anything to make me feel like I had control, that I could save my babies from miscarriage. Every desperate attempt to change my lifestyle crashed as I tried things beyond my abilities. I learned a lot about what I could and couldn't do during that time. I had the ultimate motivation, but even that wasn't enough. Nobody could say I "didn't want it badly enough," because I did. I wanted it with all my heart.
After 9 months, I'd had enough. Too many crashes, too many heartbreaks and fears and things out of my control. The disappointed hope was flat out agonizing, and there wasn't much of it left.
My husband and I went to the doctor.
My doctor was a joke. He didn't want to treat me, but I insisted. I had a family history, and I was nearing 30, and for the size of family I wanted to have, I was running out of time. So, he took some bloodwork, and prescribed me Metformin.
Metformin is horrible, and I had a plethora of the worst side effects. It turns out, I had problems with my blood sugars. The point of Metformin is to lower your blood sugars, and my body already had a hard time processing them. The doctor told me I should have some mild stomach discomfort and diarrhea, but that would be it. I had intense nausea and diarrhea, weakness, dizziness, sweating, and when the heart palpitations started, I quit taking it.
When I called the doctor on Monday, he told me I wasn't experiencing those side effects, that I must have the flu. People don't get those side effects.
I told him I had looked up the side effects of Metformin, and those were all listed, and the flu doesn't give you heart palpitations.
He told me that those were very rare, and in my case, it definitely wasn't what was happening. I had something else.
All those symptoms are symptoms of low blood sugars. It was definitely the Metformin.
I hung up the phone, muttered something charitable like, "Go to hell, you quack," and went back to the drawing board.
A little before that, I had found a blog online. It was written by a girl named Lauren, my sister-in-law's sister-in-law. (My brother's wife's brother's wife, if that's confusing enough.) She was writing about her journey through infertility, and how she had found a wonderful doctor that was kind and helped her so much. At the time, I wanted to wish her luck - I understood the emotions and heartbreak of the whole thing - but I didn't think much about the "wonderful" doctor.
After deciding I would never ever go to that OB/GYN again, I decided to give Lauren's doctor a try. Dr. Conway was extremely busy, and it was a full month (with another failed pregnancy attempt) before we could get an appointment.
While filling out the paperwork, I fudged the timing a little, using our first unprotected sex as the date we "started trying," in hopes of being taken more seriously. At that point, it had been 10 months of failed attempts to have a baby, with us currently in the 11th, so not quite a year, but very close.
Our new doctor, Dr. Conway, was every bit as wonderful as Lauren had described. She listened to me, asked questions about my symptoms, agreed that the ovulation predictor kits were indicating a problem, and asked about my mom's problems and what I might have inherited. Then, she did an ultrasound to check the progress of my cycle, and found that, on Day 11, when I should have nearly mature eggs in my ovaries, there was nothing. Not only that, but there was no indication that there had been eggs in my ovaries for a very long time. She officially diagnosed me with polysystic ovarian syndrome, which is a lack of hormones, meaning a failure to release eggs, or in my case, even produce them.
Basically, my ovaries worked as well as they did when I was 6.
That was, to some degree, a comfort. It made it clear that my fear of miscarriage was unfounded, and my body hadn't been killing my children. In addition to that, ovaries that don't produce eggs like they're supposed to are very easy to treat. 2 pills of Clomid a day for 5 days was all it would take.
And suddenly, I was in control again.
And suddenly, I hoped.
Oh my gosh, the hope! I was happy, giddy, floating on clouds to know what was wrong, and how to treat it.
That month was devoted to diagnosis. They took my bloodwork again, tested my husband, shot me full of X-ray dye to check the status of my fallopian tubes, and everything came back okay. The only problem we were facing was the fact that I didn't have high enough hormone levels to produce eggs...or to release them... or to maintain a pregnancy... but it was all in the same root problem, and all very, very treatable.
The control made the hope. The desolating disappointment and lack of control stripped it away from me, but suddenly doing something about it brought it all back and filled me with excitement. I didn't even mind the treatments. I took the pills. I got a shot in the stomach to trigger the ovulation. I actually liked getting wanded and prodded in the girly regions, because it meant I got to see the progress of the drugs, and count my little eggs, my potential babies. I did mind the progesterone suppositories - they leaked something awful, gave me a diaper rash, and made me feel like I was sitting in a swamp all day. Seriously, I fully expected to start growing algae in my underwear. But, despite that, I happily took them every night, telling myself that a lack of progesterone was one of my mom's problems, and there was no way I was going without them. Then, after two weeks, I got stabbed in the arm and my blood taken for testing.
Month #1, our 12th month of trying, resulted in failure. I was very used to the emotions it caused, and I can't say I was terribly surprised (success on the first month? Please. Only the really lucky get that.), but I still had had so much hope for success that the crash that followed was awful.
Month #2 had to be it, right? I mean, Lauren, who went to the same doctor I did, got pregnant on her second month!
Month #2 was a failure. So was month #3. And #4.
It's funny, the emotions that come with infertility. So many of them are utterly irrational, and you'd like to just claim they're from the hormones, but they also come at times of your cycle when you know they're not hormone based. You feel like you've failed. You feel like, as someone incapable of performing the most basic function of life - procreation - you are less valuable of a creature than the cat that popped out a kitten in the middle of your living room when you were a kid. You wonder if your very fertile husband would be happier with some other woman - someone who can give him the children he wants - and you shouldn't have been so selfish as to marry him. How could you stick him with this trial that should be yours alone, even though there isn't another human being on the planet you would rather go through this with.
And deep down, you know all these thoughts are wrong, but you're so caught in your pain and disappointment that you can't help but think them. And you try to tell yourself you're being dysfunctional and you need to knock it off, but until you finally let it out, and your husband holds you and tells you he doesn't think it's your fault, you are consumed with inadequacy and the guilt of what you're doing to him.
For month #5, we moved up to the next level of treatment - the dreaded IUI. With my husband's lack of problems, we didn't think it was something we needed. But, it can still help, and timed intercourse with medication obviously wasn't working. In addition to that, a saline ultrasound revealed that I had a teeny, tiny polyp on my uterus, which shouldn't have been much of a problem, but could have been making it a little tougher.
Month #5 never happened. When I went in for the ultrasound where they wand you in the cervix and count your follicles/eggs, I had six of them. Two to three is ideal, four is a little dangerous, and six is a flat out nope. The clinic won't risk impregnating you with six babies. So, we had a choice. We could do a very expensive and painful follicle reduction, or we could cancel the cycle.
I still had hope for the cycle, and my six little babies in there, that maybe one of them would get fertilized, implant, and grow. I opted for the expensive and painful follicle reduction.
When the day came, there were some other complications that are probably not appropriate to put on a blog, so we'll just call them "complications," and we had no choice but to cancel the cycle.
That month was a little easier. I didn't have two weeks of progesterone suppositories leaking (even though I'd figured out a good pad-changing schedule that prevented the diaper rash, they were still miserable), and more importantly, I didn't have two weeks of waiting and hoping and trying not to hope, but still thinking it might have worked, but being terrified of letting that hope get too high. The results were out of my control - I'd exerted all the control I had, and now it was in God's hands, and without that control, I was afraid to hope.
The next two months were November and December, and the most important day of my November cycle fell on Thanksgiving, while December's day fell on Christmas. We were traveling 1,000 miles to home for those holidays, so we decided to take those two months off treatments, but still do things "naturally."
January, treatment month #6 and overall month #19, was our first IUI. (Yes, it was exceedingly uncomfortable.) They told us we'd try that for 3 months before reconvening with Dr. Conway to discuss other options.
It didn't work.
More emotions. More dysfunctional feelings. More feeling completely and utterly out of control.
I'm in treatment month #7 now, and I have 12 days left to wait before I find out if it worked. I'm playing a game I like to call distraction. Apart from this blog post, I'm not thinking about it, for as much as I can. I'm working hard. I'm dinking around on my phone (Clash of Clans is a pretty addictive game). I'm crocheting. I'm writing my novel. Anything but counting down the days, and definitely not looking for pregnancy symptoms that might give me hope.
But that hope... I need it, and I'm terrified of it. The more I hope, the more it hurts when that hope isn't realized. But to live without it is desolation.
Feeling like I'm in control has given me hope. Every moment I've done something proactive, every time I've taken control, I've been flooded with hope.
The most hopeless times were when I felt no one was in control. Even though I asked and resolved this question years ago, I still wondered if God existed, and if He did exist, why He hadn't taken control and given me the baby I'd wanted so badly for so long. That was another one of those emotions I knew I shouldn't be feeling, because I know God exists. I asked Him, and He told me, and flooded me with a feeling of His love for me. I know He is there, I know He is in control, and, after months of prayer and begging to know why, I know He won't give me that baby until a certain time has passed, until I have learned the lessons this trial is meant to bring.
And with that knowledge, comes real hope. It doesn't give me hope for this month, but it gives me hope to keep going. It gives me hope to take control even if this month fails. My faith in God, His omniscience and wisdom to know how this pain will make me better, His omnipotence and control to overcome what I and my body are not able to do, and above all, His promises to me that I will have children, all fill me with hope. I know that someone, even if it isn't me, is in control.
Control gives you hope. And more than that, that hope gives you the strength you need to move forward, and to take control. And when you've done everything in your power and you're completely out of control and you feel yourself drowning in hopeless despair, turn to faith. Because God is always in control.
