At my 6 week checkup, with Huey peacefully sleeping in the infant carrier, my OB asked me the same question. "What kind of birth control would you like me to prescribe you?"
I nearly laughed in her face.
Are my broken ovaries not birth control enough??
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Several people have asked me, since Huey's been born, if I "feel better." I'm not sure what they mean by this, other than do I feel that I can get over everything we went through to have him? The answer is, of course, no.
Just because I have my perfect rainbow baby does not mean that all the pain and hurt and loss we had goes away. The sharpness may be dampened, but it's not gone. It's part of our story and I wouldn't want to erase it, even if I could.
There are still triggers. While pregnancy announcements don't send me into an emotional spiral anymore, there are still feelings about them. Especially seeing people announce their third or fourth or beyond child.
Trey and I are lucky we have ONE child. That may be all we get. Yes, we still have four embryos left, but it took us FIVE embryos to get a baby. And my time is quickly running out.
At 38 a lot of options disappear. REs won't allow you to do retrievals after 38, most adoption agencies prefer you to not be 38 or older. I feel rushed to go ahead and do another transfer, possibly before we're physically, emotionally and financially ready, because I'm running out of years. I don't want to find out too late that none of the embryos worked and now I'm too old to do another retrieval. And now too old to look into adoption. And now too old for this and for that.
And it sucks that this is something I have to think about. What happens if we use all our embryos and it's too late to do another retrieval? Will I be ok having just one child when I wanted more? Will I always regret and feel guilty about how things played out? I mean, I probably will feel guilty about a lot of things for a long time because hey #momlife.
These are things families struggling with infertility are forced to think about.
Not to mention now we have storage fees for the embryos.
So, to make a short story long, be gentle with your friends who are struggling with infertility. Even the ones who have their miracles. Having a baby doesn't cure infertility and it certainly doesn't erase all that we went through to have those babies. There are still things that bother us, things people say to us thinking that we should "get over it," situations that we try not to put ourselves in.
Infertility is an ugly green monster that, I don't think, ever goes away.
