Laughing with Sarah

The very first words I typed today, just a few minutes past sunrise, were these: "If there were any doubt that God still works miracles, the last 12 hours are proof that he does..." Adelaide Zoe was born on Thursday, September 8, 2011, to my good friends Dawn and Brian. An adorable and sweet little girl for two wonderfully deserving people. That following Monday, however, I got a phone call from Dawn, who was crying so hard she could barely speak. Through a ridiculously fortunate series of events, the doctors had just discovered that Adelaide had a serious heart defect - hypoplastic left heart syndrome , to be exact. This meant that she was born with a severely underdeveloped left ventricle, and would need a series of three surgeries to "fix" it. And by "fix," I mean rewire the heart so that the right ventricle would take over all heart function. (You can read about the series of procedures here , here , and here .) The first of the surgeries too...

Within days of getting home from the hospital, I received a letter from the hospital. My first thought was, "Wow...they are QUICK with their billing..." But when I opened up the envelope, I found something very different inside. In the envelope was a letter, expressing sympathy for my recent pregnancy loss, and an invitation to a support group called SHARE, that was developed to support families who are grieving miscarriages, ectopic pregnancies, stillbirths, or newborn deaths. I flipped through the brochure that they included about the program, and tentatively penciled in the next SHARE group date onto my calendar. Last night was the first SHARE meeting since my episode at the end of September, and I decided I should go. I found my way to the education building, took the elevator up three floors, and stalled mightily (checking my email on my phone and filling my water bottle!) before getting up the courage to walk into a huge boardroom with a ridiculously long table r...

Today, I scheduled my initial consult with a reproductive endocrinologist, which is the first step toward the prospect of IVF. It is a first step that I have absolutely no regrets or second thoughts about making, but a first step that is nerve-wracking nonetheless. I've started working through their extensive new patient health history information form. Overwhelming to have to explain our whole ttc journey in short, clinical, multiple choice responses. And a pain in the butt to try to resurrect dates on all of the various steps along the way, even if most of those steps didn't even begin until this past March. A strange and unsettling thought came to me as I worked. No matter how personable and wonderful the doctor is who I work with for IVF, I suspect that, at the end of the day, I will still feel far more like a science experiment than a person. I hate that IVF will make me a medical curiosity when I really just want to be a mother. Such is the way of this journey,...

Saturday evening, instead of our regular Saturday worship, we instead planned a Thomas Mass. Basically, this means that instead of there being a sermon, there are instead a handful of stations for worshipers to visit, to interact with the day's lessons on their own, and to encounter God in a different, more hands-on way than listening to a sermon. These services, when we do them, are quite beautiful. At Saturday's, we had a prayer wall set up where people could post their prayers, we had a station where you could explore your faith journey through creating art with the assistance of a visual artist from the congregation, we had a station set up outside to burn prayer doves and watch the smoke rise up to God, we had a station for confession where you would place glass stones in the font as a symbol of reconciliation, and then, as we always do for these services, we had a station for anointing and healing. When I write the words "anointing and healing," and then al...

Snapshot #1: I just responded to a book review written by a friend of mine on his blog. I was attending a conference based on this book during my "one week wait," that is, the last seven days before you either get your period or figure out you're pregnant. It's a strange window of time for those of us trying to conceive. You try to figure out if you feel any signs of being pregnant, and then even if you think you do, you have to figure out if they might simply be PMS symptoms that you hadn't thought to notice before. It was during my days at this conference that I started feeling strange things that led me to believe that I might be pregnant. I remember my time at the conference being clouded by my preoccupation with every twinge, pain, or cramp, trying to piece together any preemptive evidence that might give me a clear picture of whether or not I was pregnant. The conference took place on a Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday...and it was Sunday at the end of t...

As I drove to work today, I caught myself thinking, "I feel like myself today!" Indeed, I am getting back to normal. I still get tired from a regular day full of activity, and I still have a stupid pinched nerve in my neck that is giving me headaches (literally), but really, I have turned a serious corner in my physical healing. But it turns out that having a broken, healing body is a nice emotional distraction. For this whole last week, I've been telling people, "I'm sure the other emotions will hit me later, but for now, I feel good that I am alive and well. And I am thankful to have answers." But as my body heals, it frees up space for me to feel more emotions. I think that the hardest part of this journey is on the verge of beginning. This morning, I started thinking about how expensive, invasive, and yet uncertain IVF really is. It's not fail-proof. It doesn't guarantee pregnancy. It is the hard way of achieving a chance result. A...

A friend shared this link on Facebook today and I thought it was worth sharing. It's an article called " The Barren Woman Bible ," written by one of my former seminary professors. She says, amid other things, In real life, barrenness is much more complicated. It's infertility and miscarriages. It's bleeding and not-bleeding—but on the opposite schedule than you want. It's counting days, doctor visits, taking blood, running tests, more doctor's visits and a slew of bills and—if you're lucky enough—insurance forms. And did I mention what it does to sex?! What was once fun and adventurous can become calculated, programmed or halted. And then there's the ending. In real life, God's "fix" is not always a boy-prophet. Sometimes it's adoption. Sometimes it's a birthed child. Sometimes it's nieces and nephews. Sometimes it's finding peace with childlessness. At least that's how it is for me and the other women who I...

Feeling more and more like myself today. A tired, slow, low-energy version of myself, but a version of myself nonetheless. Yesterday was a hard day. I went back to work for the afternoon, and even though I think they were well-meaning questions from my fellow co-workers, I kept getting asked things like "You really aren't feeling better yet?" Today, I can try to interpret those questions as people really just being concerned. But yesterday, those questions felt 100% like guilt trips, as if I were being told that I should be fine, because laparoscopic surgery is "easy" and my dedication to my job should mean that I come back to work and gut it out because doing anything less would mean I'm not a team player. I'm in a slightly better place today than I was yesterday, when I put up an admittedly passive-aggressive Facebook status and spent ten minutes bawling my eyes out in my office. Today, I think I just wish things felt normal. I'm not sure...

After an initial few days of great progress in recovery, I hit a wall on Friday. Late Thursday night, I started getting a headache, which was no big deal. I took some painkillers, went to sleep, and expected to feel like myself in the morning. It took my by surprise on Friday morning, when I woke up feeling tired, groggy, headachy, and lacking all energy. I spent the rest of Friday battling a migraine that kicked my butt so hard that I pretty much had a panic attack at 1am because my head hurt, I felt dizzy, I felt nauseous, and I couldn't find anything that would make me feel better. That was my low point. Saturday felt better than Friday, mostly battling the dreaded migraine hangover, and my parents came over for dinner, and we had quite the lovely evening. And even though I was disappointed that I didn't feel good enough to go to church yesterday, I was proud of myself for spending more of my day sitting up than lying down. Throughout all of this, however, I'v...