There but for the Grace of God
I have been truly blessed to have gotten pregnant twice now without any difficulties. When we started trying the first time, I had this vague feeling in the back of my mind that it wouldn’t happen immediately. I had this fear that because we had purposely prevented a pregnancy for so long that now that we wanted one, we wouldn’t be able to achieve that goal.
Well, I was wrong.
I got pregnant the first month of trying. This time around, we weren’t even trying; it just sort of happened.
The reason I consider myself so very blessed and not just typical is because of my unique uterine condition. Obviously, this is something we didn’t know about the first time around; we just figured we were more fertile than we had realized. But the second time around, after learning about what it means to have a unicornuate uterus, we realized that our children must have a serious will to come into this world.
Two doctors have now chalked up my ability to get pregnant to luck. There seems to be no real medical explanation as to why I can become pregnant when so many with this condition can’t.
Infertility is cruel and seemingly random. I know good people who would make excellent mothers who are unable to achieve pregnancy. And then you hear stories about people who mistreat their children and you can’t help but wonder why this is the way the world works.
Tonya Wertman is starting a series that focuses on secondary infertility on SheKnows.com. Secondary infertility occurs when a couple has successfully had one child, but cannot get pregnant again. I imagine this must be exceedingly frustrating when you see your existing child and think… “You came into being relatively easily, how come I can’t do it again?”
Infertility causes a person to doubt everything about themselves and can become a source of both obsession and depression. My heart goes out to women who cannot conceive. Hopefully reading stories like Tonya’s will help those going through it to realize they are not alone. For those of us who can get pregnant, I think that we should also read these stories to understand what people go through and how difficult it can be to want something so badly, something so seemingly natural, but to be unable to attain it.
I never thought it would come to this… tens of thousands of dollars, hours upon hours of waiting in doctors’ offices, countless blood tests, ultrasounds and other invasive procedures, painful progesterone shots, timed intercourse, more negative pregnancy tests than I care to recall, more heartache and frustration than one person should be allowed and all the while holding on to a strong hope and longing that this will be the cycle we add a fourth member to our family, this will be the cycle we give our son a sibling.
