Jessie and Pat

While growing up, I had never really imagined myself having kids or getting married. I knew I wanted to meet someone special that I would love for the rest of my life, but I wasn’t necessarily seeing the future the traditional way. I knew I wanted to adopt, and I was quite indifferent about having my own biological children.

At 21 years old, I met Pat and we realized that we had similar goals in life. I thought to myself: “This man is just perfect for me! I definitely hope he wants to share his life with mine…” When I turned 26, I realized that living together and having a dog wasn’t enough. I wanted to celebrate our commitment to each other: I wanted to share our love with our friends and family. While considering getting married, we’ve decided to stop any contraceptive and just go with the flow: not preventing, not trying!

After two years of zero pregnancies, I finally got pregnant: two months before our wedding! The excitement was surreal! My husband bought himself a book on how to be a great support during a pregnancy. We wrote down our favourite names. We dreamed of the perfect baby bedroom. We let ourselves imagine our future with a child, and we were simply excited, like any future parents should be.

A month before our wedding day, I noticed a bit of spotting while I was trying my dress for the final fitting. To be on the safe side, I called my husband and told him I was going to stop at the emergency to have it check. The doctor checked my cervix: everything looked fine, but she still ordered some blood work just to be on the safe side. I went back in the waiting room, called my husband to reassure him that everything looked great but that I was just going to wait for my blood work result. This is the first and last time that I have ever been calm at the sight of spotting during a pregnancy.

Since my first pregnancy, I’ve gone through 5 additional miscarriages that always ended up around 6 weeks. In five years, I’ve been pregnant six times. I don’t easily get pregnant and when I do, I miscarry. I’ve been followed by my amazing gynecologist for 4 years and by the fertility clinic for the past 2. Nothing is wrong with me or my husband. We’ve tried two IUI and nothing: not even a positive pregnancy out of them. When we get pregnant, it isn’t exciting anymore. I’m being extremely cautious, hoping that this time it’s going to be different, but at the same time I’m preparing myself for the worst because my statistics are horrible in this department and I need to protect myself from this horrible physical and mental pain that comes with a miscarriage.

From all of my unsuccessful visits to the obstetric clinic, I’ve developed some kind of post-traumatic stress disorder. This made me realized that sending someone who has dealt with many miscarriages to obstetrics is the equivalent of a nightmare: you’re surrounded by very happy pregnant women (or very pregnant women complaining about how uncomfortable they are) and you’re just there, wishing you were the one complaining about being too pregnant.

I’m not exactly sure what our future holds. At the moment, we are considering an IVF for September. In regards to adoption, we have completed the adoption training in 2015, which is necessary for anyone in NB who wants to adopt. We learned which countries we wanted to adopt from, but we also learned that adopting is 4-5 times more expensive than doing one round of IVF, so we’ve decided to put a hold in this project to complete all our options at the fertility clinic. Even though I’m terrified of going through IVF and end up empty handed, I feel like I need to end this chapter before starting another one.

Often, I’m wondering why I want to do this to myself. Each time I get my period, I’m sad. Each time I see a pregnant woman, I envy her. Each time I think about a child-free life, I cry.

Thankfully, we are surrounded by very supportive friends and family. I’ve also decided to open up publicly about our misadventure through my blog and it helped me and others find comfort with each others. I’ve also been followed by a psychologist specialized in infertility who has reminded that many times how: “Stress doesn’t cause infertility. Infertility causes stress!”

I think one of the worst parts of all this is that you have to be extremely patient for something that you have almost no control over it, so my therapist has suggested us to start planning things that we have full control…and you know what? It feels really good! We are not too sure what the future is going to bring us, but we’ve learned that we’re a great team even through tough time so we’re going to be ok!