Feeling a bit better

Now that I've had some time to settle in and digest this news, obsessively google cervical incompetency/cerclage/MTHFR/etc (real research forthcoming so I can gather my list of questions for the next meeting with my Dr B) and meet with my therapist, I feel more balanced.

Cerclages work a lot. And close monitoring helps tremendously. No guarantees, but then there never are any.

I think it's just a matter of standing at the platform, all hooked up now, ready for the bungee jump. I've read the disclaimers and understand how it all works. I've paid attention to the safety instructions and am all harnassed up and now I'm stepping out on the platform and it's hitting me full in the face - you are about to jump off a platform and the only thing saving you (in this analogy, life = sanity) is this thing cord which has been known to fail on occasion. But only rarely! Good luck!

It's scary. It's scary to look this in face and gather my courage. And trying again to conceive requires courage. Trying again after a loss is hard enough. Trying again after the death of your baby is harder. The more pregnancies I lose, the more despair lurks around the question of if we'll ever be parents. And not to demean an early loss (I've been there, it was devastating and hurt), but losing Gabriel was much worse for me than losing Chickadee. That pain is indescribable, and to sign up for the ride again knowing that pain is lurking out there, and worse, knowing exactly what it feels like . . . I don't know sometimes what we're thinking doing it again. I distinctly remember holding Gabriel in my arms and looking DH right in the eye and saying, "Never, never again. I will never go through this again."

And here we are. I'd say that 75-80% of the time we are ready and calm and eager to try again and get pregnant again. I've started temping again and have new opk's (more on that in another post) and we're joking about how we have to figure out how to have sex in the backseat so we can give it go this cycle (my fertile period looks to fall over our out of town visit, where we sleep in different rooms and keep very odd hours, making sex a difficult proposition at best).

And then there are those times, where it stares us right in the face and I have to ask if we are doing the right thing. Dr. K told me yesterday that she was relieved to hear how nervous I am, because it means I'm sane and I'm taking a serious look at what this requires rather than sugar-coating it.

I don't know. Only time will tell, I suppose. I feel better knowing I have an excellent medical team behind me, that I have good odds with a relatively simple procedure ahead of me, if I can get pregnant again. I know I'm not thrilled about having to be back at square one again and I know further that I am not enthusiastic about the roller coaster ride that trying to conceive after a loss is. When you have repeatedly lost your chance to be a parent to a living child, you begin to wonder if it's possible and it makes the lows lower and the highs higher and the middle times anxious.

But I'm doing the best I can, we are doing the best we can. And we have to trust in the safeguards holding us up . . . and jump. The longer we stay out here on this platform looking over, the scarier it gets. We can only hope that the end result is exhilaration and bliss (such as parenthood is - don't think I am romanticizing it), rather than injury and pain. Such is life, always.

I just have to believe what it says up there in the header - that all will be well, and all will be well, and all manner of things will be well. Otherwise . . . what is the point?