My Miracle Babies

I wanted to write a quick blog post to talk about my pregnancy struggles and surprises!

There is, now, a lot more talk about the struggle to get pregnant, more folks are speaking up about their experiences and it honestly makes me smile. My husband and I struggled to get pregnant the first time, we were trying for 2 years with no luck. During that time, I felt alone. I was a fresh immigrant in the US, struggled with depression, was diagnosed with an autoimmune disease, I had been told I might have thyroid cancer, I had to get surgery, I was grieving my father-in-law and trying my best to support my husband, and with all that, I was wondering why wasn't I getting pregnant. I couldn’t describe the pain I felt from that struggle, or perhaps I never thought I needed to put it in words, because it just felt like I shouldn't be sharing my failure. It felt shameful. I have no idea where I picked the stigma associated with infertility. Perhaps the fact that no one openly talked about it made it seem like a topic you don’t bring up, you simply hide, alone.

We got tested, we did all the possible tests, both my partner and I. Yes they were invasive and some hurt like hell for me, while the most uncomfortable screening for my husband was the urologist checking his genitals, just looking, no poking, nothing was inserted in his penis. After all that, the diagnosis we got was “Unexplained Infertility”. It pissed me off a bit, because if there was an issue at least we can work towards fixing it.

We tried IUI once and it failed. But after extracting 13 eggs for IVF, 10 got fertilized, 9 embryos survived, and 5 tested normal, we returned 2 the first time which didn’t take, and froze the rest, 1 didn’t survive the freezing, we returned the remaining 2, and 1 stuck. My first miracle baby!

I took a writing class 10 months after I delivered, and I suddenly felt the urge to try and put my feelings in words, especially because the feelings were slowly creeping up again, because soon, we wanted to start trying for baby number 2. This is what I wrote:

When we started to talk about trying for baby number 2, there was a lot of back and forth. I was scared of trying because, what if I fail again? Then we were officially living in a pandemic, we didn’t know how Covid-19 affected pregnancy and fetuses. So we decided to wait, but then I freaked out again, because how long will we live in a pandemic, and what if it doesn’t work like the first time, it means we might not get pregnant for a few years! So we decided to start trying. The first month didn’t work, I did a test, got my period, anxiety anxiety, oh anxiety. We tried the second month, and I was convinced that it didn’t work, so I was already checking out doctors and fertility clinics in my area. I looked at the calendar and noted down the date I should be getting my period, it was my birthday. I held off the urge to want to test earlier, it was so hard to fight off. Given that I have OCD, it was pretty much everything I was thinking about, that pregnancy test, on my birthday. I settled for this thought, which then played on repeat in my brain till the morning of my birthday. If I am pregnant, it will be the best present, if I am not, I will celebrate with a cocktail! That seemed like a good plan to calm my OCD suffering brain. I woke up on the day of my birthday, earlier than my husband and my kid, went to the bathroom, peed on the stick, and started breathing while looking at myself in the mirror. The alarm went off, and I looked over to see the results, and started bawling. I got the best present I could ever ask for my birthday. My Clearblue test told me I was pregnant!

My baby was born almost exactly 8 months after my birthday, and I gave them the name that means “miracle” in Arabic.