Cancelled
When Lola died, my world ended. Yes, I was technically alive, my family was alive, the world was still chugging along as if nothing had happened… but my world as I knew it was over, never to be the same.
Hearing the words “I’m sorry, your baby has died”, is not something I would wish on even my most hated enemy. It rips away your past, present and future in one fell swoop. Over time, lots of time, you find yourself getting up from crying in bed, and going to cry on the couch for a few hours. Or getting up from the couch to go to therapy, or to the fridge… you get the drift. After a while, you start to allow yourself to have small thoughts about what life will be like now that you have lost a child, and then, very slowly, small rays of hope begin to peak through.
For us, that hope came in the form of trying for another baby, an arduous decision in itself because of the impacts on our physical, psychological and financial selves. Another baby will add to our family, but it will never replace Lola or cure the ache I feel every time my heart beats. She is forever a part of me, us, our lives. We are also, 1 in 6 couples in Canada who need access to assisted reproductive techniques. So, once my body had recovered, and I received the all clear from my OB, we met with our fertility doctor to discuss doing yet another IVF cycle. I’m not getting any younger, and my husband suffers from a progressive, degenerative disease; time isn’t on our side. With that in mind, even though the wound of Lola’s death was still raw, we wanted to proceed as soon as possible. Our team supported us and we proceeded with a grueling egg retrieval in January of this year (2020). From that cycle, we yielded two embryos that were placed in the freezer until my body could recover from the retrieval. This was promising news.
Before we knew it, March 2020 rolled around and we were permitted to proceed with a Frozen Embryo Transfer (FET). ‘This is perfect’ - I thought - ‘just the right timing to still have a baby in 2020’. I started the hormones, called in my cycle, and patiently awaited our transfer date to come. Then, on March 18th (ironically, also the 6 month anniversary of Lola’s day) I got the call… FET cycle cancelled due to COVID. “We are so sorry, we have no choice, our association has mandated the closures and we don’t know when we will be able to re-open”… well fuck. I had been holding on to this one tiny shred of hope to get through my days and try to heal my grief and it had been ripped away with no clue when it would ever re-appear. Emotionally, I had fallen off the cliff I spent six months climbing and I wasn’t sure I had it in me to get back up again.
Now, this is where some (probably rational people who have never experienced a devastating trauma or loss) will pause and say “Well, people are dying, it’s a pandemic, this is serious, it’s for the best to wait until everything is safer to get pregnant.”…[sidebar, NEVER say “it’s for the best” to anyone marked by grief… EVER]… but the thing is, the grief, passion, and desire for a baby you’ve lost and another baby you’ve yet to meet, is never rational. These feelings stick to you like a grime you can’t wash off. They are the pit in your stomach and the ache in your heart that will never leave. They are the mosquito in your ear when you’re trying to sleep. So here we are, waiting in purgatory along with tens of thousands of other families whose dreams were indefinitely put on hold because some asshole ate a bat.
In the spirit of this, I ask you to please respect the state of the world and stay home. The longer this lasts, the longer my babies are trapped in the freezer instead of in my arms, where they are meant to be.
Emily xo