Me and my Pee Stick

I've been thinking a lot about failure and trust this week. Specifically the past failure of my body and now my resulting inability to trust it! William D Brown said, "Failure is an event, never a person." The past failure of my body does not make ME a failure. It was simply a series of EVENTS that happened in the past.


So why do I mistrust my body? Well... pretty much ever since I can remember I have been battling Poly Cystic Ovarian Syndrome - widely known as PCOS. It has caused me to stop ovulating making it impossible for me to conceive a child without "help." It also makes me prone to miscarriages. People with PCOS have a 50% rate of miscarriage. In addition to the PCOS, once I got pregnant with my son "L", my body failed to appropriately nourish him, causing him to be born with Intrauterine Growth Restriction (IUGR) at 35 weeks, and giving me HELLP syndrome. On top of all of that my body doesn't process sugars correctly giving me both gestational diabetes during pregnancy, and insulin resistance outside of pregnancy.

Yeah... So as you can see I have some valid reasons for the complete mistrust of my body. I guess since I posted this, it isn't necessarily a secret that my husband and I have decided to try and have another child. This is not a decision we came upon lightly - due to all the past difficulties, along with the physical and emotional pain of my past pregnancies. Tonight I was reminded of how this new journey is going to be for me. You'd think that 4 years would have erased it all. But it clearly hasn't. All of the struggles of the past came rushing back to me as I sat in the bathroom tonight with a Dixie cup of pee and a small stick in my hand. NO it is not what you think. I was NOT taking a pregnancy test. I was taking an OPK - otherwise known as an ovulation predictor kit for those of you lucky enough to never need one (wish I knew how that felt even for one moment). The test was negative. It should at least be moving towards positive any day now... and it isn't. So far everything points to NO.

NO, you will not be normal.

NO, you will not ovulate.

NO, weight loss did NOT help you in this area.

NO more kids for you! (OK, I had a brief flash of Seinfeld's Soup Nazi there for a moment... but I digress).

I so desperately want to be normal for once. I so desperately want my body to work as it was intended to. I hate it. I mistrust it. It fails me, and in turn I feel like a COMPLETE failure!

I know, I know, I just need to relax you say, give my body some time to adjust to being off of synthetic hormones, I need to stress less, and have fun, I need to appreciate what I have - this wonderful, beautiful, little boy (and I so so so do):

But I just can't trust that my body will ever work. That he'll ever have a sibling, that anything will ever change for me, and that makes me incredibly sad. It's a sadness that slowly trickles through you body and kind of feels like it is tearing every muscles as it ripples through you. No, its not sadness... its more like despair.

I'm trying to be positive - unlike my pee stick - but sometimes I feel I have nothing to hold on to. With all the failures of the past, how likely is a success. I'm trying desperately to believe that I have done all that I can do, I must trust my body to work as intended, and give the rest up to a higher power.

But for now... me and my pee cup sit alone, and we wait and wait and wait some more, and both of us try so desperately to be positive.

"Forget past mistakes. Forget failures. Forget everything except what you're going to do now, and do it." -- William Durant, founder of General Motors