Insomnia continues to be an issue for me. I didn't sleep a wink on Christmas Eve, and last night I had a restless sleep. Every little distraction had me looking at the clock just to see that time was crawling by. I drifted in and out of a light sleep in between. I have been grinding my teeth at night and wake up with tension headaches. I had a dream last night that I went to lunch with a childhood friend of mine. She is pregnant, and in the dream she started to tell the table about a complication with the pregnancy. I instantly started sobbing as I jumped to conclusions fearing the worst for her and her baby. She reassured me that it was nothing like that, but it just showed me that my subconscious is still working on this fear of mine.
It is very difficult for me to be around friends and loved ones who are pregnant. A small, small part of it is the sting of jealousy, but mostly it is the consuming fear that their baby isn't healthy. I know that once their babies are born and I can see that s/he is healthy, I'll be fine. But pregnancy strikes on a nerve for me and is a painful reminder of a weakness in my faith. It is an aspect of the "seeing is believing" that I have a hard time putting aside. It worries me for the future as I think about the possibility of becoming pregnant again myself.
I try not to get too far ahead of myself and play the "what if" game. Thinking about all the possible outcomes... it's overwhelming. And yet there is a part of me that believes that I will be able to joyfully go through a pregnancy if I should be blessed with one again. One thing is for sure: we will celebrate EVERYTHING if we have the chance again! Pregnancy announcements, gender reveal, baby shower, we will embrace it all. The next day isn't promised, so you have to live in the moment and love what you've got. And we will! One of my biggest regrets is that we canceled Rosa's baby shower... sadly, she was stillborn the exact day we planned her baby shower. I look back now and wish that we had rescheduled it to earlier in the pregnancy. It breaks me up knowing that we didn't celebrate her in that way. She deserved it, and we failed to give that to her. I don't know how, but I'll find a way to make it up to her.
In other news, John & I had been going back and forth on testing our frozen embryos. It's expensive ($5K!) and we're not sure how the future will go. If we do not have a take home baby amongst our four ninja squirrels, then we're going to look into adoption in 2017. Should we save the $5,000 to put towards a potential adoption? Ugh. It's so hard to know which way to go! John wanted to save the money and was also afraid about the risk to the embryos in the thawing and refreezing process. I wanted to test the embryos because I think it's worth every penny to have that peace of mind if we do have a subsequent pregnancy. A few weeks ago, John said that he was willing to do the testing even though he didn't want to. I was hung up on him agreeing with me, so we "slept on it" for the next few weeks (I am laughing because of the irony of him snoring while I lay awake with insomnia!). After a beautiful Christmas Eve mass, I was able to pray on it and then had a beautiful moment of clarity. It was like Jesus was born into my heart to answer my prayer: TEST THE EMBRYOS! I don't need John to agree with me. If he agreed with me, then it would be easy. But the fact that he doesn't agree, and is still willing to put his fears aside to make me happy is the ultimate sign of his love. We decided on Christmas morning that we will indeed have our embryos tested. We are going to dedicate 2016 to seeing these four embryos through. We are 100% committed to them and invested in them.
I have a few appointments coming up that are important: we finally got on the schedule for a preconception visit with our new MFM. That's on January 6th. The next day, I have my hysteroscopy. All I want for Christmas is health & happiness for myself and my babies. So here's to a healthy uterus and four healthy embryos! And Rosa & Robin smiling down from heaven as they wait for us!
