This is my story. This is our journey so far to get to where we are now of doing IVF. Everyone’s journey is different, but no matter how it happened, dealing with infertility is painful.
We found out we were pregnant with our 2nd baby and were thrilled! We didn’t even think about waiting till the “safe” period was over to tell anyone, we were so excited we told everyone! Our little boy was ecstatic to be a big brother! Since finding out, I had this gut feeling something might be wrong. I ignored it and went on with the joy of it all. It wasn’t until I woke up in extreme pain one morning that I knew there was definitely something wrong. My husband rushed me to the ER and that is where we found out.
We had discovered I had an ectopic pregnancy. This was not a viable pregnancy. We were told that the baby was growing in my fallopian tube and that they needed to stop the pregnancy from growing so it didn’t burst my tube and kill me. After sometime of absorbing what we had just found out and realizing we had no choice, we got the injection and was sent home, for almost a week we dealt with the loss of our baby.
You would think that would be the end of it. Well, sad to say, it wasn’t. I went for my checkup with my OB Friday morning, when he looked over my ER chart from the last weekend and with my levels he got back from my blood work, he was concerned. I didn't know why he seemed concerned or why he wanted to do an ultrasound, I knew the baby wasn't there anymore, because they had told me the baby was gone in the ER. We just followed orders and did a trans-vaginal ultrasound.
The concern on my OB's face turned to panic and I soon realized why when I looked at the ultrasound screen. We could see our baby, growing, right there in the sack in my fallopian tube, heart beating strong. The methotrexate shot they had given me in the ER had not worked from last Saturday! Over the course of a week our baby had grown very much, and was ready to burst my fallopian tube-which could cause me to die-at any second. We were all in shock, and the horror of having to re-live this entire experience, after I thought we had already lost our baby the last week, this was almost unbearable.
In a matter of minutes, we found out that not only was our baby girl alive, hearing her heartbeat, seeing her hand waving across the ultrasound screen, I’ll never forget that moment. It will be burned in my mind forever. But in a matter of minutes, we found out that I was going to be rushed into emergency surgery to remove this baby girl from my body and save my life. Talk about overwhelming, that was an understatement. Thank God my parents were close enough to help with our son, and they rushed out of their jobs and came straight away to the hospital as they were admitting me for surgery.
I ended up being in the operating room for 3 and a half hours. The doctor said he could most likely go in laproscopically (not sure if I spelled that right) which means they make a tiny opening they can get their tools down in my abdomen to complete the surgery without having to open me all the way up, but when he did that, there was a tremendous amount of blood that poured out of me surrounding everything they saw and they were afraid my tube had already burst, so they ended up having to open me all the way up (like a c-section opening) to see what was going on. When they did that, and cleaned out all the blood, they could see that not only did they have to remove my entire left tube, to their shock they had to remove my right ovary as well. To their astonishment, and in all their years of medicine said they’d never seen this before. My ovary had burst open and been hemorrhaging/bleeding, and had even clotted-which means it had been bleeding for a while. If they had not gone in and done the surgery to remove the ectopic pregnancy, chances are they would have never found that my ovary had burst and clotted which was poisoning me, which then could have killed me. I was seconds away from this happening.
This unborn baby saved my life. Literally. Had I not gotten pregnant, I would have never known about the internal bleeding. So in a way, this was my miracle baby, my angel baby. God had put her there to save my life.
We have named her Clover, for a few reasons. One of them being that it reminds me that God is always with me, through the horrible stuff in life, to the glorious stuff in life. He is always right by our side-sharing in the pain and the joy. Like a year before this had all happened, I was taking a walk where I came upon a Cross in a field by a church behind our house, and I went to the cross and looked down on the ground and I saw patches of clover, I thought gosh...I've never seen a 4-leaf clover, wouldn't it be awesome to find one under this cross?! Right then, I found a whole patch of them!!!! All 4-leaf clovers! I couldn't believe my eyes. I picked all of them! I felt Gods presence that moment. Fast forward a year later and I'm in the hospital and as we're losing our baby and getting horrific, life-changing news I notice the wallpaper with clovers, the nurse with a clover scrub top, and a screen saver with a 4-leaf clover, and it wasn't ANYWHERE close to St.Patrick's day! It didn't even dawn on me until after we got home from the hospital and I'm laying in my bed in excruciating pain, and I roll over and see the framed 4-leaf clover on my nightstand. I broke down crying and remembered all the clovers I had seen that day in the hospital. All reminders of Gods love for me, for us, that he never leaves us. He's always there. That is why we felt the name Clover for our precious angel baby is quite appropriate. One day, when I’m in heaven I’ll get to hold my Clover baby. For now, God has her safely in His arms.
It has been a journey, a process, an emotional one. I am lucky to be alive. I thank God that I am still here and able to be a mommy for our son and a wife to my husband. Although we now will never be able to have any other children together biologically unless we do IVF because my missing ovary and tube on opposite sides, God had opened our hearts up to adopt a long time ago, so we can be comforted in having more children through adoption and/or IVF. We have chosen to do IVF right now for multiple reasons, but still plan to adopt in the future to expand our family. We can’t wait to see all of what God has in store for us revealed…hopefully starting through IVF!
It’s a long one, but phew…that’s my story.
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