It Was the Best of Times, It Was the Worst of Times...

These past six weeks have been the BEST of my life and the WORST of my life.

This post is going to be a shock to most, but wanted to share our story with those of you still waiting for your miracle AND to ask for prayers as we move forward with our journey to become parents.

David and I did another round of IVF in June/July. This cycle was 100% better than our two previous cycles. We had MORE eggs during the retrieval this cycle, MORE eggs fertilized this cycle, we were able to do a FIVE day transfer this cycle, AND we were even able to freeze TWO blastocysts this cycle. To say that we were LOVING life during this cycle is definitely an understatement.

My parents visited us for ten days and it was by far, the visit that I will remember for a lifetime. We discovered that we were finally PREGNANT after trying for five years AND we were able to share that news with my parents and with my mother-in-love together. It was what we had been dreaming about for YEARS.

My beta numbers looked great and we spent the past six weeks celebrating!!! We continued working on our nursery, I bought a few baby clothes, we shared the news with our close family and friends, and mom and I talked non-stop about the perfect name for our baby.

Our dreams started to crumble though when we went in for our first fetal ultrasound on Monday. It was a day that we had been anxiously awaiting...mainly because we were excited to see our baby's heartbeat AND we couldn't wait to see if we had one baby or TWO!!

But, our appointment didn't go exactly how we had planned. The technician conducting my ultrasound could not find a heartbeat for the baby. She was also concerned because the baby was not as big as it should be for 6 weeks 4 days pregnant. We kept our chins up and prayed that in the next two days, our little baby would continue to grown and we would be able to see a heartbeat on Wednesday. We researched this scenario for hours, we prayed for the past two days, and felt confident that our prayers would be answered.

But as our doctor proceeded with the ultrasound yesterday, our dreams slowly faded into a distant memory. Our baby is at least a week behind in growth and there is still no detectable heartbeat. The baby has stopped growing and we are to expect a miscarriage soon.

We seriously feel as if someone has reached inside our chests and pulled our hearts completely out. We came home from our appointment mad, frustrated, heartbroken, defeated. How could this be happening?

After a lot of crying, praying, and talking we came up with some positive things that have come from this experience:

1.  I CAN get pregnant. This is a huge piece of the puzzle we have been trying to solve for the past five years. This cycle showed us that we CAN get pregnant afterall.

2.  We do have TWO beautiful blastocysts frozen that we can transfer and we will not have to pay an arm and a leg to have this done.

3.  Our doctor shared that the reason the baby stopped growing was because he/she had some sort of chromosomal malfunction...it had nothing to do with anything that I did or didn't do and that this is God's way of preventing more heartache later.

My heart is still aching this morning and I honestly believe that I am still in shock over this news. I am still SO in love with this baby...our baby, our FIRST baby. But I'm trying to look at it as another step in this journey to parenthood.

Please keep us in your prayers as we pick ourselves up and continue to move forward. We know that the hard times are not quite over, as we will be losing our baby sometime within the next week. But we know the he/she was never ours to begin with....

"I pray for them. I am not praying for the world, but for those you have given me, for they are yours." John 17:9

It truly has been the BEST of times and the WORST of times.