It was 2010.
Two years after we happily walked down the aisle of a Catholic church and exchanged our wedding vows, we found ourselves in an unfamiliar place.
It was a place I never pictured we’d need to be.
I sat nervously twiddling my thumbs with my pants pulled down and a thin paper draped over my lap.
This is it, I thought. This is the beginning of our family…
It was the beginning of our first round of infertility treatments with a reproductive endocrinologist, and we were making plans based on what things looked like “down there” and “in there.”
The appointment ended 20-minutes later.
And even though we left with a plan to get pregnant, I cried as my husband and I walked out of that clinic.
The reality that we were now one of those couples — you know, the 1 in 8 who experience infertility — was almost too much of a burden to bear.
I felt like we had done everything right. We had good jobs. A beautiful home. We were paying off our student loans, and we were financially secure. We started asking ourselves, What’d we do to deserve this?
My sadness turned into frustration as we drove to the pharmacy to pick up my injections. Lots of injections. Hundreds of dollars worth of injections. We asked ourselves again, What’d we do to deserve this?
As if the thought of paying to become a human pincushion wasn’t enough, our insurance company denied coverage. And we continued asking ourselves, What’d we do to deserve this?
We justified the hefty price tag, though, with a renewed sense of hope from one of the top specialists in town. But like most couples with an infertility diagnosis, we had no idea what was around the corner.
Month after month, we gambled with our emotions, our finances and my body.
But they never worked. None of them. The infertility treatments never worked. Our specialist — as much as she tried to convince us otherwise — filled our hearts with empty hope. Our bodies failed us time and time again.
