When words feel too hard, an act of service is enough

A small moment, carrying years of hope, fear, and quiet bravery.

One in the freezer for safe keepy’s. 🤍💉👶🏼✨

Inside that sentence is a universe.

If you’ve listened to the latest episode of our podcast, then you might already know what this stands for.

For those of you that haven’t - Ryan isn’t always comfortable communicating about this fertility stuff at home… sometimes he’ll even threaten that it’s too much for him to handle, but this bunch of flowers was all I needed to reassure me that we’re reading from the same hymn sheet. And he is VERY good at using words when it’s really needed. This was NEEDED. You can imagine how much this bunch of flowers meant to me… even when exchanged in silence at the end of a very long grey working day.

In truth those words hold years of planning, weeks of needles (years including the biologic-jak inhabitor-biologic switch), scans, waiting rooms, clenched jaws, forced optimism, and tears, lots of tears. It’s the kind of bravery nobody gives you a medal for - and why would they because we’re chosen to pay to go through this process when we could just… not. We could just accept the cards we’ve been dealt. But I don’t want our past trauma to dictate our future.

For those who know this road well, it needs no explanation.
Staring at wee sticks.
Counting follicles like prayer beads.
Tracking bloods meticulously
Learning a whole new language in the hope that it will help us edge closer to our goal.
By educating I thought I could control the outcome. But this isn’t predictable like other areas of my life. There is no playbook.

From our first cycle we went from seeing 20+ gooood looking follicles on the scan, to getting 8 eggs retrieved to holding onto hope that many of them would make it to day 5. I did a lot of research and looked at many many stats for people in a similar situation to me (and us), but every case is SO individual and we ended up with just one.

One embryo.
One possibility.
Not the perfect outcome.
Especially with an amh averaging 25
It makes me wonder if something else is wrong
Not enough to say ‘we’re done.’

But a chapter where something worked. And that feels like an ok place to start. So we’re letting ourselves process that.

One in the freezer.
One in our hearts. x