Letting Go

Letting go is perhaps the hardest thing for a card-carrying, hard core, Type A planner to do. We've got a plan and we like to execute that plan efficiently, effectively and on our timeline.

At this point in the game I realized that I was in life's kayak traveling down a whitewater-filled river and somehow I'd lost the paddles. I had no choice but to see where life would take me. Good thing, because the new game plan had just begun.

While dealing (or trying to deal) with my parents separation and the impact on my long-standing, strong relationships with each of them, I became pregnant again. Ironically, I realized I was pregnant while on a business trip to San Diego while the city was on fire in the fall of 2007 and under a state of major crisis. The ultra tender breasts and aversion to many smells and tastes were giveaways. I took the red-eye home with a close colleague/friend and we were awakened by the pilot who informed us that the altimeter was not working and we would need to land at another airport. There was not one complaint as a plane full of terrified passengers hoped for the best.

We landed roughly, but safely, and began the 90-minute drive back to our city where I was to have my blood drawn at 8:30am. However, as luck would have it, we were in the midst of a horrible rainstorm and the highway was closed in several spots. No worries though, because the lab was open until noon -- right? Wrong. The 90-minute drive expanded to 3 hours, 4 hours, 5 hours. I finally pulled into the parking lot at 11:50am - just under the wire. Phew!

That evening I was out for a late dinner with a friend in a noisy downtown restaurant, and apparently didn't hear my cell phone ring at 10pm. When we left the restaurant I got the message -- I was pregnant, but my hormone levels were falling, and I needed to call the clinic ASAP.

After an emergency trip to the only open pharmacy, several days of estrogen, and a promising blood result that made us all feel that we'd dodged a bullet, I miscarried again. Something was wrong. And a few months later a surgery showed that my uterus was abnormally shaped, wasn't producing an adequate lining, and was likely the cause of these miscarriages.

Seven months, two surgeries, and hundreds of estrogen patches later, I came to the conclusion that my uterus just wasn't up for the challenge. The movie Baby Mama was released at about the same time, which was strangely funny to me. As my sister pointed out, "You've always liked Tina Fey". Good thing, because we were playing the same role.

I made the decision to go through IVF, harvest my eggs, fertilize them, and freeze the embryos. The process was not a lot of fun -- particularly because no one in my workplace knew what I was up to. Good thing the blood lab opened at 7am and my doctor's office saw me at 7:30am. I often wondered what my staff would think if they saw me injecting myself in the stomach through the little window in my office door. Well, I could always tell them I was a heroin addict.

The good news: the procedure was successful, 8 eggs were harvested, 6 fertilized, and 5 made it to the freeze stage.
The bad news: now I've got to find someone with a good uterus to carry them.

Hell, if you're going to rip up the game plan, you might as well burn it and then flush the ashes down the toilet.