If you follow my Instagram (@thebabystepsblog) you already know how our third IUI turned out – another big fat negative. Three failed IUIs. Nineteen failed cycles. When will it be our turn?
Testing day, Thursday, August 15, was no different than the two before this one. I woke up a few minutes before my alarm was scheduled to go off and quietly made my way into our bathroom. I had opened a test the night before so I wouldn’t have to waste any precious seconds of finding out that I was pregnant… oh to be hopeful. But this time, I decided I was going to pee directly on the stick rather than in a Dixie cup like last time. So, here we go – it’s 5:35 a.m. and I suddenly forgot how to pee like a normal person. I missed and soaked the test window so I immediately tensed my whole body so I could awkwardly reach for another test. I never knew I could hold pee midstream for so long, looks like I’ve got another winning trait to add to my infertility resume!
Again, I used the First Response Early Result HPTs so I all I needed to do was see that second pink line. I decided that this time, I would leave our bathroom – surely if I wasn’t watching over the test like a hawk, a second line was bound to appear, so I made my way out of our bathroom and saw J waiting for me. He immediately asked “Are you done? What was it?” And me, being the peach I am every morning said “NO, JEREMY! Don’t you know how long three minutes is?” (All tests suggest waiting three minutes for your result to appear.) And so for the next three minutes, we both stared at the clock in our room before making our way back into our bathroom to see not just one negative, but two.
You’ve been through this with me three times now, so you know the next part is full of tears, angry thoughts escaping our mouths and then putting a brave face and picking ourselves up once again. We have yet to be “lucky” enough to have our testing day be on a weekend, which would be much easier to deal with a negative than having to go to work. Although it’s tough to put on a brace face, my two closest girlfriends at work, who work in the same building as I do, know every part of our cycles, so they always know when testing day is. It’s nice having them there for me, offering slurpees and sour gummy worms, but J is much more reserved about our struggle. However, he did breakdown this time to two of his coworkers. You don’t know how much I wanted to rush to his office and take all of his pain away.
I know I’ve said this before, but this one was supposed to work. Our numbers were good, and everyone said: “I have a good feeling about this one!” J, our moms, friends, coworkers. But it didn’t, my body failed us again and we let everyone around us down. I know you may think that sentence is a bit dramatic, but it’s not – these feelings are something you only go through and understand when facing this battle. I have to be completely honest, I may have been the only one who didn’t have a “good feeling” about this one. Although our cycle went pretty well, I was defeated from the day of our follicle scan and never came out of that funk. Some of you may think (as I’ve heard this from way too many people) that there was no hope for it to work if I didn’t believe in it. NEWS FLASH – you cannot think yourself pregnant if so, we would have an army of children right now. No matter how defeated I felt, I still took my daily medication and supplements, acted like I was pregnant, followed a few old wives tales and kept repeating sayings to myself about the number three. “Good things come in threes.” ”Lucky number three.” “Third time’s a charm.” Then when I would see a pregnancy announcement, I would keep track so we could be the third announcement for the saying “Good things come in threes.” But then another couple would be the third announcement, so I started bargaining with myself saying things like “Well, those three announcements were all celebrities, so we don’t fit in that category.” And then I would move onto counting announcements of girls in my support groups, but there was always a third. Then I moved onto friends and coworkers, and once I counted the third in that group, I knew we were never going to be the third. At least not for this cycle.
