Long awaited heartbeat?

The day had come, Wednesday, December 2, 2015 when we would go for our 2^nd ultra sound and find out if this pregnancy would continue or not. We knew that we would need to see a baby (fetal pole) AND a heartbeat at this point and the pressure was on. We once again had Lindsey helping us with our scan. Were were anxious, excited and also just wanting to get this over with so we would know what our future holds. 

The ultra sound began and we were holding our breath! As she was zooming in more and more and really trying hard to get a good view, there it was…still an empty space inside the gestational sac. The more she tried more angles and views, the clearer it became that there wasn’t anything to be seen. Justin and I both started to break down and cry as we realized the reality we were facing. She sweetly gave us some tissues and apologized, gave us hugs and told us to take out time in coming out and left us to ourselves. We finally managed to get ourselves together just enough to leave the building and get to our car where we would again break down and sob. With all the procedures, different strategies, shots, hormones, pills, crèmes, positive test results and the roller coaster of emotions, it all felt to be crashing down along with our future we had planned of having a new little baby join our family July 18^th, 2016. Those dreams vanished in a matter of minutes and our new reality was setting in. 

Those next few hours were hard and sad for us, and still continue to be. However, on our drive home a few hours later, we were both sitting in silence and I asked Justin how he was feeling. He answered that he was extremely sad and heartbroken, of course, but that he also felt a lot of hope somehow and was at peace. I was so happy to hear that as that is EXACTLY how I felt. We both knew it would all be ok and knew that our Father in Heaven had us in the palm of His hands and was helping us so much to get through the hardest thing I’ve probably had to go through. Yet, somehow this felt bearable, with His help. 

My mom is a sweetheart and drove to our house (over a 3 hour drive) to be there for us to help and serve however she could to ease our burden. She has been such a huge blessing, bringing all sort of remedies and aids, recipes, food, yummy chocolate cake, heating pads, facial stuff, nail stuff, and everything else you can think of to pamper and take care of me, and Justin. We both have such great families who were so sweet in their messages, flowers and doing all they could to comfort and help us through. It was great to feel the love and comfort my my sweet sister Jarica who is always good to cry with me and then help look at the positive and faith side again. She has a way of making me feel so loved and even offered to look into being an egg donor if it would help us start our family. (Of course I burst into tears at her even offering)! What a selfless offer and it made me love her all the more! 

I had a great call with my brother who said sometimes God wants us to be willing to sacrifice something that we really love and when we are willing to do that in order to have trust and faith in His will for us, it shows Him that we really do love Him more than anything else that we may think that we want. And His plans for us are always much better than our own anyway. He has a plan for us and timing that is important to that plan. I can look back on many times in my life, especially the last 4-5 years and see how when I let go and let God take over my life, it always goes much better than anything I could have ever planned out for myself. He also reminded me that when we truly sacrifice, that’s when we have the most peace, love and joy. That made so much sense to be and perfectly summed up how I was feeling. I still have bouts of sadness and sorrow that hit me out of nowhere, but overall, I really do feel such comfort and peace that outweighs my sorrow right now and makes it bearable. 

My sisters are so sweet and ordered some beautiful flowers for me and a sweet friend had flowers delivered too (I’m not even that close with her, but when she heard, she sent them and that meant so much to me). My sweet nieces drew the cutest and sweetest cards to cheer me up and let me know we were loved and melted my heart! I had a couple friends bring us dinner and our favorite comfort snacks (Dr. Pepper, Pepsi and chips and salsa), many others offering love and support with messages and offers to help. 

I work with the Young Women in our ward (girls aged 12-18) and absolutely love these girls and the other leaders who work with them. That night for our activity, we had been scheduled to make homemade hair bows and bow ties for newborn babies at the nearby hospital. With what we were going through I really didn’t feel like I could go and keep myself together as that would be a constant reminder of what I just was losing. I also didn’t want to break down and bawl like a baby the whole time in front of these girls. So, I didn’t make it. I felt bad and wanted to be there for the girls, but this was one time that I couldn’t do it. About 9:00 that night, there was a knock on the door. There was one of the leaders and 6 of these girls there on our porch saying ‘we love you” as I opened the door. Giving me bug hugs, handwritten notes they’d all written and a cute statue of a girl praying. It had such tears of joy and gratitude for those sweet girls and leaders and the big boost they gave me. They said, "we are all your daughters'! And they really ARE. I love those girls with all my heart and pray for them and love them like they are mine. I told them they need to take turns and nights coming to stay with us. It really was soo touching and sweet and meant the world to me. 

It’s amazing how kind acts of love from others can make the biggest difference. It really makes me want to do better about serving and loving others as I think I cried almost as much from those acts of love that day as I did in tears of sorrow. The reality is that we all have hard things we go through in life. This just happens to be our hard thing. They are personal for each of us and require so much energy, trust, faith and hope. Despair, sorrow, hopelessness is always there and we have to be sooo careful on which ones we give energy to and for how long. I’m a firm believer now that in the past few years and the many trials we have gone through (individually as well as since we’ve been married) that the more we try to see hard things as a blessing and gift somehow, the better and easier the trial becomes. 

Justin and look at how we handled out miscarriage last year and how we are handling it this year, and it really has been so much better. We are starting to get better at our trials even though this one really is even harder than last year. We’ve put so much more faith and trust in Heavenly Father this time and really have become so much more open to our ways maybe being different from His ways. 

We don’t know why this has happened and right now it doesn’t make sense yet. But, for the last month or so, I keep thinking about a video I saw by Elder Holland where he and his son were in a truck driving down a dirt road when they came to a fork in the road. They prayed and both felt like they should go right, so they did. Within a short distance, the road came to a dead end. So they turned around and then took the road to the left. His son confused, asked why they both felt good about going right when it wasn’t the correct way. Elder Holland answered (paraphrasing) that sometimes He lets us go down the wrong road knowing that it will cause us then to have confidence and full assurance that it was wrong and the other road is right. I have loved this and think of it often. I wonder if we maybe had to go this route with IVF, so that if it didn’t work, we could go another direction with more assurance and confidence that it was the right way. We are now strongly considering and hoping to go a new direction of adoption. We are excited and hopeful about that direction and we will see how that feels when we start down that road. Right now that feels right. So if anyone knows of a situation where someone may consider placing a baby for adoption, please let us know. We are so grateful for all of our family and friends and know the outpouring of love and prayers that have been said on our behalf. Thank you from the bottom of our hearts and know that they help us tremendously! 

Nervous look right before we started out 2nd ultra sound

Not what we wanted to see

My sweet mom who is always smiling and serves any chance she gets

Part of the dinner brought over by my sweet friends Angie and Misty

Yummy chocolate cake my mom brought, which always helps to cheer any girl up!

Beautiful flowers from my sisters. These are some of my very favorite flowers and smelled soooo good with the gardenias!! Love my sisters!!

Sweet flowers from Tara (my sister Jarica's sister in law who is such a thoughtful and sweet person)!

From my Young Women and leaders that made me cry!!

Also from the Young Women and a great permanent reminder to "pray always and be believing"!

The sweetest pictures from my niece Claire

Miracle of Peace

Monday was an interesting day for me. I started out Googling misdiagnosed blighted ovum stories, looking for hope. I found several posts where most seem to have been correctly diagnosed and telling their stories, but there were also some who had been told they would be miscarrying and then went on to have healthy pregnancies. I felt like I was in the Dumb and Dumber movie “so you’re saying there’s a chance” came to mind and I was going to hold on those stories and hope for the best. There’s even a misdiagnosed miscarriage website and it said that they get several stories a month of incorrectly diagnosed blighted ovum s and that many of those tend to have a tilted uterus (which is what I have too). Sometimes that can make it harder to see in an ultra sound and for whatever reason sometimes things appear smaller because of this as well. Yay!! Maybe it really was just too early for them to see because of my tilted uterus and this week’s ultra sound would be better. J

I also made the mistake of calling to find out my HCG results from the previous Wed, since I never actually got this information that day, like I usually do. I had been in a good and pretty hopeful mood until I got the call back with my results. They said my HCG was 12,881. I hung up and quickly went to Google to see if this was “normal”. There’s a website where you type in the date and the HCG number and then the next date and HCG number and it tells you how many hours it takes for your number to double based on those two entries. So, it says that once your HCG is above 6,000 it can take up to 96 hours or more to double. Well, mine was doubling in 154 hours, which is waaaayyyy over 96 hours. Betabase.info is a great website by the way! 

Well, this started my downward spiral for me that day and I really went to a dark place that day and felt hopeless. I know from my own past experience that when my numbers doing go up like they should, or they go down, that has meant a miscarriage for me. And the thought of another miscarriage was soooo sad to me as I thought of the fact that “this was our one shot at this” so in my mind, this could mean that I wouldn’t ever experience things like feeling a baby grow inside my belly, or go for an ultra sound to find out the sex of the baby, or go through labor and the beautiful feeling after when you hold that new baby of yours in your arms. I cried a lot and also poured out my heart to God asking him to please help me to feel comforted and at peace again. My poor husband kept telling me, “hun I’m really worried about you.”  I would laugh and tell him that I was worried about me too. I have a whole new appreciation for people who struggle with depression or bipolar disorders as I had a taste of that myself this week and it was really frustration and hard for me to work through. 

I even talked with my mom who said she would like to come stay with me for a couple days starting on the day of the ultra sound, and either celebrate the good news with us, or be there for us if it wasn’t good news. I know how busy my parents are and for them to drop everything to come be with me means sooo much to me. Even if they didn’t come, I know they are always willing to be there for me no matter what. Talking to my mom always helps me as she is positive and optimistic, but also loving and realistic too when she needs to be. She had helped to get me a little more stable and hopeful. My sweet dog Mila is so sensitive and a sweetheart too, she did her best to come cuddle me, make me play with her and just do the funniest things to make me laugh at her. She is such a blessing to us through all our hard times.  Justin even took me to a movie that night that was supposed to be a comedy (turned out to be kind of a weird movie), but it did get my mind off of things for a while. I also have to admit that the past several days have been much harder for me to be motivated when it comes time to do my 2 shots. I’ve become more and more sore already and with not knowing if the shots are even going to make a difference, it’s been harder to motivate myself to endure them well. 

I had a really ugly sob type of cry for while that day and pleaded and prayed to my Father in Heaven to help me get through this, to give me comfort and peace and if possible, to allow me to continue with this pregnancy. I went to sleep that night still feeling concerned and unsure of what the future holds, but was doing better to try to still have hope and faith that it would all be ok. It wasn’t how I hoped I’d feel but it was better than earlier that day, and sometimes we just have to take it a day at a time and it’s an accomplishment to just get through the day. This was one of those days.

THE MIRACLE: That night something changed for me. I had gone to bed nervous about how I would get through one more day before we would be able to go for another ultra sound and know more what to expect. That night, I had a dream about going into labor and then having a tiny little baby girl. I was even figuring out things like how to nurse and just holding her, not wanting to let her go, and feeling such peace, love and joy from being her mom. I woke up a couple times in the night to use the bathroom and then went back to my dream, since it was such a good one and I wanted to keep those feelings. (I’m not usually able to return to dreams, especially when I want to). I woke up the next morning feeling such an intense feeling of peace and gratitude for being able to feel a small glimpse of what that motherly feeling might be like. It gave me so much hope and comfort that one day I’ll know what that feeling is like for real, whether through child birth or adoption. It was the most beautiful feeling of love and made me excited to feel that and know that it really will all be ok. I was so grateful to be able to pray to my Father in Heaven that morning and thank Him for the experience and that He answered my prayers in a way that only He could and that it was exactly the way I needed it answered. 

It made me so happy to know how much He really is mindful of us and helps us through our very darkest times, when we ask and let Him in. I had a renewed sense of hope and peace and knew I could handle just about anything. Justin later that day said that he hadn’t seen me be that happy in a long time. It felt really good and I couldn’t even worry about anything if I’d tried. What a gift and blessing that was for me, especially under the circumstances. I felt like I’d had an attitude overhaul done and I felt back to my normal (non hormonal) state of being back to my best self and knew that it was from Heavenly Father being there for me and helping me through. We still prayed like crazy for the outcome we wanted and went to a session at the temple, doing all we could to keep our peace and to pray like crazy. We went to sleep that night feeling at peace and just anxious for the next day, whatever was ahead.