Despite the fact that Stephanie and I joined forces to launch this website back in 2015, she has been running Fashionably Nerdy pretty much alone for the past two years. Because of a very emotionally painful battle that has consumed my life, I have not kept up my end of the bargain.
I’d like to take the first steps towards remedying that situation today, as I try to dive back into this website that once meant everything to me.
I’ve spent the last four years, and over $25,000 trying to get pregnant. Nothing about this journey has been easy for me or my husband, as our finances and our marriage has taken a beating under the weight of our infertility.
Three years ago, after spending 14 months trying to conceive, my husband and I made the decision to leave Los Angeles.
Or rather, I made the decision. You see, despite the fact that I knew he would rather stay in LA, I begged him to move. I loved LA, we both did, but I’d given up my dreams of having an acting career in favor of having a child. So when that wasn’t happening either, I needed to leave behind the constant reminders that I had failed as an actress. Of course by that point, I had also felt like I failed as a woman.
I consider myself to be a feminist. I certainly feel like our role as a woman is about a hell of a lot more than making babies, but when going through infertility it’s still hard to dismiss the notion that this is what sets woman apart from men. Not parenting, obviously. My husband and I both agree, 100% that parenting is a partnership. However, growing a baby inside of my stomach. That is something special that only a woman can do (at least for the time being…science is making crazy advances every day). Not being able to do that one thing that makes me fundamentally a woman, broke my heart.
So we left LA, assuming that the financial burden, and the general stresses that comes from living in one of the country’s largest cities, was the reason we had been unsuccessful.
We spent the next year living in Florida, away from Stephanie, away from all of our friends, and trying to make a baby. During that time, we brought Meli on board.
Can I just say how much I love Meli? Bringing her into our team here at Fashionably Nerdy was an amazing decision, and actually getting to meet her and hang out with her is really the best part.
Because she is amazing.
She has been so great during our struggle, and has been so supportive and sympathetic of my infertility. I adore her with every fiber of my being, but her addition to our team also brought up some tough emotions for me.
You see, we asked Meli to join Fashionably Nerdy primarily because she was pregnant.
We hadn’t been able to cover maternity fashion on our site, and she is amazing anyway, so we knew she would be a great voice for us in this category. I loved reading her posts, and I sucked up all of her maternity clothing tips, because I knew I would use them soon. We had started working with a fertility specialist by this point, and I knew our baby was on its way.
I was so excited that the next person to cover maternity fashion on our site would be me.
Except, I wasn’t.
After a couple of failed IUI procedures, Stephanie privately revealed her pregnancy to me.
The announcement broke me.
She had been so considerate of my feelings, making sure she was the one to tell me. I appreciated that she didn’t want me to find out via social media, but I still felt blindsided. And I felt betrayed.
Listen, I know that Stephanie didn’t plan her pregnancy to hurt me. I know she wasn’t trying to beat me, or anything like that. But emotions can be shitty in the way they turn you into a person you may not really like anymore. I was so jealous, and I was angry. I’m not proud to admit this, but I didn’t speak to her for a week.
It was just too raw, and I didn’t trust myself not to say something awful to her. So I just didn’t say anything.
I mean, we obviously moved past this.
Stephanie has a huge heart and an amazing capacity to love. Without having ever experienced infertility herself, she understood all those complicated emotions I was having, and she didn’t judge me for having them. In fact, I’m pretty sure she told me that if I wanted to yell at her that I should, and she would just listen. I didn’t, of course. But looking back on that time in our friendship, I’m amazed at the level of grace and patience she showed me. Anyone in the infertility community understands how painful pregnancy announcements can be. It isn’t that we are not happy for our friends, we are. But announcements, pregnant friends, and even babies serve as painful reminders that our own arms are empty. I wouldn’t expect someone who has never faced this battle to understand any of that, but Stephanie did. She gave me all the time and space I needed to process the information, and when I was finally ready to talk she was there for me. Well, she was in Japan…but we Skyped.
I had a harder time reading Stephanie’s maternity posts, than I had with Meli. It just hurt a bit more this time around, especially since my husband and I were investing so much time, money, and energy into working with our fertility specialist, and it just wasn’t working.
Seven months later, Lulu was born.
She came out looking just like her Momma, though she may have been even more fashionable.
I’d thought I’d have an easier time getting more involved with our blog again once she came. I mean, looking at maternity photos is hard, but everyone likes looking at cute babies…and Lulu is one cute baby.
It wasn’t easier. If anything, it may have been harder. I stopped reading our site altogether.
Now, by the time Lu came, I’d had surgery to remove some of my endometriosis.
Oh, and I was officially diagnosed with endometriosis.
The month Lulu was born we had our first IUI post surgery and my hopes were high that it would finally work. Lulu’s birth month, my birth month…that would be the lucky combination.
I’m sure you already know where this is going.
It didn’t work. Still no second line on a pregnancy test, still no hope of a baby.
That was when my husband and I decided to plan a vacation. We still had two more IUI’s before the doctor would insist on moving onto IVF, but I wanted more to look forward to than just a pregnancy. I wanted my life to be about more. We decided that if the next IUI didn’t work, we were going to Europe.
So…we went to Europe.
We still had one more IUI in May, after we had already booked our trip, but that one didn’t work either.
This was around the time I got the idea for Fashionably Nerdy Adventures. I still loved the little site that Stephanie and I had built, and I wanted so much to become involved with it again. I suspected I’d be traveling a lot in the next 12 months, and I was right. In fact, as I write this I am sitting on an airplane.
It is the 13th airplane I have been on in less than 12 months. I’ve also been on 5 trains, 15 or so busses, three boats and countless Ubers. So lots of opportunity for adventures. I even filmed quite a bit for the blog while in Europe. I just never posted it.
Because one of the worst parts of infertility is what it takes from you. All this time, I’ve been trying to keep living life as if nothing had changed. I kept trying to be the same me as always, and trying to force myself back into the things I had always loved in the past. But living with grief doesn’t really work that way. Infertility causes the most profound grief; not the grief of loosing a child, but of never having gotten one to begin with. It makes you mourn the life you always imagined for yourself, and mourn the loss of something you never had to begin with.
We started IVF shortly after returning from Europe.
I’ve never liked needles, but I certainly became an expert at giving myself shots.
In fact, I’ve now given myself over 40 shots, and my husband has given me an additional 20 or so. It wasn’t pretty. I got terrible bruises all around my belly button, and the welts that formed in my rear end from the Progesterone shots were so painful that it hurt to sit down. I was doing it for good reasons. We were told we had great odds of success given my age, and given the fact that my endometriosis has not yet advanced to stage 2. This was going to work. It had to.
They retrieved 11 eggs on the day of my retrieval, and we got the news the next day that 7 had fertilized. I had been hoping for a higher number, but I wasn’t upset about having 7. I knew the doctor wanted to transfer two embryos, and if that didn’t work we would do a frozen embryo transfer at a later date. 7 was good. I knew all 7 wouldn’t make it to day five, but most probably would and that still gave us a few chances to finally get pregnant.
I found out on the day of the transfer that only two embryos had made it to day five, and they were the two being transferred that day. The news was hard to process and I had to force myself to calm down before the procedure.
So this was it. This was our last chance to have a biological child. We didn’t have another $20,000 laying around, and we would be paying off the loan for the first attempt for the next three years anyway.
We transferred our beautiful little embryos in December.
The doctor was pleased with how they looked, and said without a doubt in his mind, that this would work. He even said the placement in my uterine lining with absolutely perfect and the best he could hope for. We were extremely optimistic.
Stephanie and Russ were actually visiting with Lulu two days after the transfer.
I’d started to have really bad cramps. The pain shot all the way down my leg and made it difficult to walk. The cramping was terrible, but I was thrilled. This was the first moment that I knew I was pregnant.
My heartburn got really bad a few days later, and I actually had to sleep sitting up to be able to get any rest.
I caved a took a test on day 4, which was way too early. I had just gotten so excited by the cramps and the heartburn. I was heartbroken and I sobbed uncontrollably in my husband’s arms. He comforted me, but also scolded me. He also knew it was too early to test.
I took another test 7 Days Past transfer, the day after Christmas. When the very faint second line appeared, I probably wouldn’t have believed it if I hadn’t already known I was pregnant. I was already feeling exhausted, which combined with the cramps and the heartburn served as a pretty good indicator. Also, I looked again at my test from three days earlier. I was going to use it to see the difference between a positive and negative test. However, once everything had dried, that first test was also positive. One or both of our embryos had implanted early.
My husband and I were cautiously optimistic. It was really early and still over a week until my clinic would do a blood draw and perform a beta test to measure my hormone levels to see if the pregnancy was viable.
I was pleased when the line on the pregnancy was darker the next day. I allowed myself to say that I was pregnant out loud for the first time (but only to my husband).
The line was a bit darker the next day, but I was worried it wasn’t dark enough. I started to get scared that I would miscarry.
I tested for two more days, but the line stopped darkening. I still tried to stay optimistic, but I was worried.
On New Year’s Eve morning, I started spotting. It was dark, and the clinic assured me this was old blood and totally normal. But my cramps came back and this time, it felt different.
I put myself on bed rest, even leaving work a bit early. We watched TV on the couch as my husband assured me everything would be fine.
On New Year’s Day, I spent the day in bed, trying not to cry as the worst cramps of my life came on fiercely, before fading away again. This continued well into the night. I didn’t start bleeding until 6pm, but once I started, it didn’t stop for a week. The miscarriage was the worst emotional pain of my life, but the cramps were probably the worst physical pain. Looking back, I don’t know how I got through the week. I wouldn’t have been able to without my husband.
I still had to go in for 2 beta tests, because the first one showed a slightly elevated HCG level and they wanted to make sure that I hadn’t just miscarried a twin. But I knew. The second test was lower, and we were officially classified as biochemical pregnancy.
The doctor believes that had we opted to genetically test the embryos, they would have both come back abnormal. I just didn’t make good eggs.
The grief washed back over us. The grief of infertility, but also now the grief of losing a baby. We only knew that baby existed for a week, but in that week we planned out the whole life of that little one.
Getting back into some semblance of a normal life has been difficult. Looking back, it’s hard to believe that all of this happened over four months ago. In some ways I feel like the months have flown by, and I also feel like a lot of that time got lost in a fog.
I’m not the same person I was four years ago when we began this journey. We have been through so much, so it’s unreasonable to assume that we could be the same people we once were.
I do know that I’m a stronger person now.
I never used to think I’d be able to survive a miscarriage after all we had been through. In fact, I was certain that if that was how this journey ended, I would be ruined forever.
There is something you learn when going through hell. You can either bend, adjust, and persevere; or you can break.
A close friend confided to me that she was pregnant about two weeks after my miscarriage. She had known for a while, but hadn’t wanted to tell me until after I found out I was pregnant. She too had been so certain this would work. Once I miscarried,
I think she felt guilty for not having told me. She was terrified the news would kill me and that she would lose a friend over it.
That was the moment that I knew how strong I am. That was the moment that I knew how much I could handle. Because I wasn’t angry. I was sad that we wouldn’t get to raise our babies together, that we wouldn’t be pregnant together…but I was happy for her and her family. I didn’t even cry.
I’m not sure why I decided to write about all of this now. I’ve been going through this for as long as Fashionably Nerdy has been a website and I’ve never chosen to write anything even remotely this personal before. But I haven’t been loyal to this blog, and I haven’t been a good partner to Stephanie, who has bore the brunt of work on this site for the last two years. I want to care about the things I used to care about. I want to reclaim at least a small part of what infertility has taken from me.
So, I’m sitting on this flight to Los Angeles, in route to Stephanie’s wedding, and I needed to open up about everything. I want to reclaim who I once was, but I still have to embrace who I am now. If I can’t own the things I have gone through, I’ll never be able to be true to the person I am now.
I’m still Nerdy.
I’m still Fashionable (I hope).
But I’m also infertile. That will always be a part of me. It’s written into my life and nothing, not even a pregnancy and a baby, will ever be able to remove that part of me.
And you know what, that’s okay.