This is not how I hoped to share this news, but here it is. We did IVF and it failed. It sucks. Really, really sucks. IVF is hard. It definitely takes a toll on your body. I struggled with whether or not to share our story, but at the end of the day, if this can help even one woman feel like she is not going through infertility struggles alone, that is all I want. So yes, our IVF cycle failed and we will most likely not be doing another one (I have learned in my 32 years to never say never), but please, if you’re interested, read our story. Share it with anyone whom it might help. Every couple’s story is different – just because ours didn’t end in the way we thought we wanted it to, I don’t regret it. We learned a lot, grew closer, and we both know that God has a plan for us. For right now, our hearts are broken and we are grieving, but that won’t always be.
While I am normally an ‘open-book’ type of person (obviously, I have been blogging about my everyday life for over three years), I had a hard time when it came to our IVF journey. At first, I thought I would want to share everything, but then every time I would go to write about it, something stopped me. It wasn’t that we were hiding it or ashamed or anything along those lines, but I felt like we just needed to go through it together. I needed it to just be me and Jake.
When we first decided to consider IVF, we only told our sisters. I still wanted to be able to surprise our families with the “We’re pregnant!” announcement. Our families didn’t even know we were going through the tests in May/June of 2020 because I so desperately wanted to be able to surprise them. They all wanted us to have a baby so badly. My dream was to surprise them with the news. However, we just couldn’t keep it a secret. The longer it took for us to get pregnant naturally, the more worried I got. So when we decided to do IVF, it very much came as a surprise to them because no one knew what we had been going through. Our families and a few close friends knew we were trying to get pregnant, but that was pretty much the extent. When I first started my portion of tests, I reached out to a few girlfriends who had gone through some fertility issues. The more tests we did and the more answers we got, the harder it was for me to talk about it. The tests, the waiting, the results…they all take a toll on you. I think everyone deals with it in different ways and I needed a lot of alone time to process everything. And once I started my IVF shots, I was a hormonal, blubbering mess, so I definitely couldn’t talk about it if I wasn’t prepared for someone asking. Once I realized how emotional I was on the drugs, I decided I needed to keep our news between me, Jake, our families, and a few close friends.
While I struggled at times with not telling everyone what was going on, I love sharing everything that goes on in our lives, it was kind of nice having a small, positive support group surrounding us. Despite all of that, I KNEW I wanted to not only document our experience, but also eventually share all about it with my readers; my friends. So, I created a private page where I could blog as we went. I loved having this as an outlet to write, cry, process, and document. I was going to go through and edit everything – my tenses change often since sometimes I wrote things as they were happening and some things were written after they had already happened, but I decided to leave it as is. It shows the days I was able to sit down and write, the days I couldn’t and had to come back to document the next day, and everything in-between. I hope the tense change doesn’t confuse you. I tried to put dates by things to help.
Ready to read about our journey to Baby Bradley? It’s not over yet, but it’s already full of twists, turns, tears, shots, ALL the bloating, laughs, and lots and lots of love. Jacob Bradley, I could not survive this without you. I love you.
Here we go…
Just click through the pages – you will see a list of them at the bottom of each page.