At my electrolysis appointment today, zapping those pesky laser-resistant PCOS chin hairs and cringing in pain (fun times), my face zapper told me about her experiences taking Clomid for her third child, sharing the multitude of emotional challenges and miscarriages faced before she was able to get pregnant and “it stuck.” I took a deep breath, in between the deep breaths of pain zaps, and wondered how I will be able to survive this emotional rollercoaster which lays before me to attempt having a child.

Having a kid is hard – as in, actually being a parent. Kids don’t give a shit about how your day is going, they need your attention and love and patience. Getting pregnant, when you have PCOS and don’t ovulate normally, is a whole other different kind of hard, and I am not sure I have the emotional strength for this. I think I can handle not getting pregnant — if it works it works, if it doesn’t, it doesn’t. But the very high risk of miscarriage as a woman with PCOS freaks me out. I know after the first 10 weeks the risk goes down a bit, but later-stage miscarriages do happen, and miscarries in general are quite common when your body is a metabolic disaster.

There are many woman who go through infertility treatments and eventually get pregnant and stay pregnant. There are others who try for years and give up, only to have a “miracle” child naturally years down the line. I’m trying to take this all one day at a time, accepting that what will be will be, but it’s really hard when you know you have only a set numbers of years left of peak fertility, and your mind starts drifting to wonder if you would have been better off being a teen mom and dropping out of high school vs waiting so long to establish yourself, find the perfect partner, and start trying with so little time left. I mean, even in a healthy person with normal ovulation, you only have 12 chances in a year to get pregnant are 20% in any given month. And that’s IF both partners are 100% healthy on the fertility fronts.

The odds start dropping fast when you have infertility problems. Sure, there are a lot of modern medical interventions to help, but they aren’t perfect, and plenty of couples have spent tens of thousands of dollars for only a whole lot of heartache. It’s just a lot to handle on top of all the other things one has to manage in life — and unlike other health-related problems which, granted, I’m grateful I do not have, infertility is something you must deal with silently. You have to take time off work, but don’t want to tell your boss that you’re getting blood tests or going to yet another ultrasound appointment. You are on meds that mess with your emotions, but no one can know that your sensitive state is caused by drugs you’re taking to try to induce ovulation, or that, even if you do get pregnant, you’re distracted by fear that you might miscarry, since the risks are so high.

That’s part of the reason I started this blog – I need an outlet to talk about this stuff, and it certainly won’t be something I bore my friends with outside of perhaps any major successes or losses. Here, I know that others who are going through the same thing will find a similar story, and hopefully we’ll all gain some comfort in knowing that we’re not alone. Maybe I’ll be lucky and the infertility portion of the blog will be short-lived… maybe this first round of Femera will make my body figure out how to work and poof, I’ll be pregnant in a heartbeat. But chances are, there will be many more blog posts to write, and many more stories of emotional and physical challenges to tell. Until next time…