Lab Rat

Wow! So much has happened since my last blog.

First of all, Happy New Year readers. It’s hard to believe that 2017 has come to end and we have been blessed to live in another year. Sometimes we take for granted the blessings we’ve received in our lives because they are mundane or “ordinary”, like waking up in another year. But the reality is that some people did not make out of 2017 with breath in their lungs but we did. I am so grateful to have another opportunity to live out the purpose that God has for my life.

With my “pause” from blogging, I had time to sit still with God and myself through this process of IVF. Subjecting your body, mind, and spirit through IVF takes its toll after a while. The constant doctor’s appointments, blood tests, injections, medications, etc. can tear you down if your focus isn’t in the right place. I found myself in a place of discouragement and discontent with the process. There were lots of times over the past several months when I wanted to quit.

So, let’s catch up to where we are in the process: when I last wrote to you, we were given the go ahead to move forward with the IVF process. After prayer and seeking wise counsel, we felt peace about the process. One of the greatest lessons that I’ve learned over the last 6 months to a year is that having peace about your process doesn’t mean the process will be easy. Part of the reason that Holy Spirit fashions us with peace is because we are going to have to endure. We have access to peace because we are going to need it.

Psalm 29:11 The LORD gives strength to his people; the LORD blesses his people with peace.

Realizing that peace was my portion was a game-changer in this process. When we arrived to the doctor’s office for medication training and anxiety tried to rob me of the joy of what God was trusting us, I reminded myself that peace was my portion. When I started to experience some of the side effects of the oral medications and I focused on that more than God, I reminded myself that I was blessed with peace. When the pain of the injections started to become unbearable, I reminded myself that peace was mine.

For those that have never gone through this process or are thinking about going through it, it’s important to know about this portion of IVF. It’s called the “stimulation phase”. This is where you are prescribed medication and injections that will stimulate your ovaries to produce more eggs than they normally do. Naturally, our bodies are supposed to produce one egg per month and if all goes well, that egg gets fertilized and eventually becomes a beautiful, bouncing baby. IVF is designed to give you the best opportunity to get pregnant, so stimulation is designed to produce the most eggs possible that can be retrieved, fertilized, and later transferred. This process requires daily injections of up to 3 medications (depending on the day) as well as a slew of oral meds as well. By the end of this phase, you feel somewhat like a swollen lab rat.

For me, my body didn’t respond as quickly to the stimulation so my ovaries became much enlarged. This made me LOOK like I was pregnant but that was the furthest thing from the truth. When we arrived at the doctor on the last day of stimulation I was experiencing maximum discomfort and my body was taxed. The original plan was to schedule the retrieval after stimulation, and the embryo transfer would be 5 days later. But because I was so physically worn out, my doctor elected to proceed with retrieval but to give my body time to recuperate before the transfer.

In that moment, defeat tried to get me to believe that my body just wasn’t cut out for pregnancy and motherhood. That no matter what I did, this just wasn’t for me.

I think we believe the ideas that we can’t “feel” anything if we believe God. But that just isn’t the case! We are complex creations knit together by an awesome Creator. We are able to believe but pray for God to help our unbelief at the same time (Mark 9:23-25). Our souls don’t have to be in torment because we know God’s nature but our situations don’t match that. When we find ourselves at the crux of what God promised and what we see differing, we have a choice to make.

For me, I chose to remember the peace God blessed me with. Not because that was the easy decision but it was the only way that I would survive walking out of that room and the next several weeks of retrieval and resting. Without choosing peace, I would have felt that everything we’d endured up until that point was for nothing. And that wasn’t an option!

With All My Love,
Mrs. Truscott