Today is CD1, and our 17th cycle TTC over 2.5 years. My last cycle was 118 days. I never know how I am going to feel when CD1 hits. Today I am feeling all the feelings. Relief that the last cycle is done, gutted and angry that I am still not pregnant, anxiety not knowing how long this cycle will be. Cycling through the feelings today is exhausting!
Cheers to all of us, for dealing with these feelings and continuing to march forward. It is a grueling trudge while we are in it.
Hi Brittany, I can imagine how frustrated you must be with the unpredictability of your cycles. Have you gotten any answers from a doctor about why your cycles are inconsistent?
Hi! Nope, no answers. All my hormones always right in the middle of "perfect". The only outlier is that I am overweight. My husband has had extensive testing too and annoyingly his numbers are really great. For some unknown reason I struggle with amenorrhea and have irregular cycles that have ranged from 16-119 days. I do seem to ovulate the majority of the time, which is great, but it is so hard to time and keep up with all the tracking!
Wanted to share What I learned in Therapy For Choosing JOY Over the Pain Through the Radical Acceptance Approach~We have been trying to concieve since 2014. We had 3 failed IUI's, 2 Failed IVF's. Radical Acceptence is Complety and totally accepting something from the depths of your soul with heart and mind, you stop fighting reality. When you stop fighting you suffer less. I have spent months healing after our last failed IVF. In this time I learned to keep finding the places inside our heart where Joy still existed. The joy ultimately burned out the pain. I learned our Infertility Circumstances were interfering with experiencing JOY. I had to learn how to re wire my brain for lack of better words, of how to make choices every day to find moments of JOY through the Pain I was working through. Once I accepted the challenge from my Therapist I started looking at our Infertility Journey differently. My quality of life changed for the better personally and within my Marriage. I started planning different options to consider for our next steps for 2019 to get us our child. For us those options included using AVA Bracelet, Embryo Adoption, Adoption ( Ideally we want to have our baby and adopt older child, however we are open to adopting baby) This gave me certainty that I was able to keep moving forward after our previous treatments. My path to JOY was born out of the painful circumstances that were given to us that were out of my control. Instead of allowing the pain to continue to hurt me physically and mentally, I learned to feel it by accepting it and coping. I did not realize how how damaging the pain was to my stomach internally. I was getting so sick with intense cramps to where I could not eat. I literally had a knot in my stomach that constantly hurt. Mentally I knew the pain was making me feel unbalanced, depressed, weak full of Anxiety. I learned since I was aware of how this pain was hurting me, I had to the power to gain control of my life again. Although pain comes in waves with infertility , I learned through Radical Acceptance that I had the choice to stay stuck in the pain or allow myself to fight through it. Until I connected with my pain it took over the best parts of my life, my marriage, my personality, my happy go lucky side. I missed who " Manda" was and who my husband was too. We were so stuck in distress that we literally lost ourselves. We took the shift into change and focused on finding our JOY again. Through Radical Acceptance we ultimately decided if we were unable to have our own child, we were okay with just adopting! We can't waste any more time on treatments because we have so much more life to live. It's not fair to us to keep putting our lives on hold for something that may never happen through IVF. Making these choices have given us control back of our lives again! I realize that everyone's situation is different and the path that we chose is not for everyone. I just wanted to shine some light on the ability to make the shift in your lives that could give you peace again. At the end of the day finding the Ultimate happiness for YOU is what is important. I feel that more conversations about how to improve our quality of life through TTC is needed. Thank You For Listening!! Manda AKA Miracle In Motion
What a beautiful perspective! Thank you for sharing, Manda!