2011 Year in Review

Another year that I'll be glad to leave behind.

Started the year out just coming out of the shock of losing the girls and having it hit me full force.  Wow, I'm in a much better place for this New Years!

The first few months were spent in desperate flailing, trying to figure out how to put one foot in front of the other on the path of life.  I was trying to find a job (never really happened), trying to figure out my next fertility treatment, it was just awful.

In spring, I got all introspective, writing all sorts of posts about my philosophies on various life subjects like how to communicate with your partner, how we measure pain, crap like that.  I guess we'll call that my pretentious phase.

Summer was all about failed FET's and massive dieting.  The IVF clinic had me on a roller coaster of false starts and arbitrary rules.  For a while there, every moment of every day was all about how to get the maximum energy from the minimum amount of food.  Calculating maximum protein per calorie.

And then the fall came.  One last full blown IVF attempt.  The do or die.  And I did.

Entering winter, I spent every day sitting in wet panties and going to the bathroom every 20 minutes to check for blood.  And it was often there.  Spent some time in the ER, had wayyyyy more ultrasounds than a person is entitled to, and just sat around, very tense all the time.

And now I enter the new year.  As I enter 2012, I also enter my second trimester with what I was mourning a year ago back in my belly.  It's been almost 3 weeks since my last bleed, and I got a brief moment of baby heartbeat on the fetal doppler yesterday.  I'm finally starting to chill out and actually live every day instead of simply endure it.

Dear 2012,

You have the potential of being the best year of my life.  The year that I look back on and smile about when I'm on my deathbed.  The year that songs are sung about.  Your cousins 2010 and 2011 did some nasty things to me.  The kind of things that ensure job security for therapists.

But generations have been anticipating you, ever since the Mayans made up that calendar.  Now I know that you've been raised to believe you're a bad seed, the end of the world, and all that, but I know you can rise above those expectations.  Just look at how your uncle, Y2K, turned out!  People talked smack about him for years too and he turned out to be really swell.

So you can do it.  You can be marvelous, heralded for generations as the year that the infertiles gave birth.  I know you can.  I'm counting on you.

Sincerely,
Knocked up, not out