Life. Period.
It's time for the story about my life and my uterus.
(Warning: I will be talking about menstrual cycles. If that makes you uncomfortable, you should probably keep reading so that you are better educated on women's health. Everyone knows a woman and most women have had a period before. And a lot of them have a crazy hard time with it)
My uterus and I started out on normal terms when I was 12. Normal meaning I bled from my uterus for a few days once a month. NBD.
A couple years of this went by and I started bleeding longer and longer, until finally I had bled for a little over a month straight and I told my mom. I think she called the doctor and the doctor was super concerned so they called an ambulance to my middle school and carted me off to the hospital in the middle of the day.
That was my first time riding in an ambulance. They didn't turn on the lights or the siren. I was super disappointed.
We got to the hospital and found out I was very close to needing a blood transfusion. I was very anemic so they put me on birth control and iron pills. They told me to skip the placebo pills and just take the birth control. That means no periods for while. Hooray! But the iron made me nauseous. Boo!
In high school I switched to a birth control patch because it was easier to remember than the pills. You would just stick it on your skin for a week and Voila! No periods. This was great for a while...
Until I started getting bruise-like marks popping up on my thighs and my doctor had to switch me back to pills. I'm pretty sure they don't make the patch anymore. Fun fact: I still have those marks on my legs to this day.
I remember girls in class telling me how lucky I was to be on birth control. For a while I was confused, because to me, birth control was only used for regulating my period. I had no idea it prevented you from having babies (99.7% effective). That was something my doctor and mom left out of the information packet. Boy, high school is educational.
Eventually my doctor told me I needed to start having my periods again (with my birth control).
A couple days into my first period back, I had a friend over to work on a school project. We were talking about ideas, when I started getting pain in my lower abdomen. "It's fine." I told myself, "Just a bit of pain. You can cope until your friend leaves."
But the pain got worse and worse until I was doubled over on the floor. At some point my friend opted to leave. Despite my protests. Luckily she lived in the house right behind ours, so it wasn't super inconvenient.
As the pain worsened, it made me nauseous and I began to throw up uncontrollably. That was when my mom took me to the ER, plastic bag in hand, for my continuous expulsions. They saw me right away as they probably didn't want me to throw up on anyone.
When they brought me back, they put in my first IV ever. Which is awful, btw. I hate IVs... and needles in general. Matt laughs at me when I get my blood drawn because I make funny noises and start to shake. It's a hoot.
But I stopped bleeding and throwing up, so that was nice.
After that is when my memory gets a little fuzzy. I'm not sure when I stopped taking birth control, but I did at some point and my periods were at regular intervals and the pain was at a moderate level. Nothing crazy.
Before I got married, I started back up on the pill, because we weren't wanting babies right away. After a year or so, I went off the birth control so we could try for a baby and amazingly, we got pregnant on our first try! We were surprised, but super happy.
When it was time for Olivia to be birthed, I had practiced Hypnobabies and was super ready to push this thing out of my vagina. Scared, but ready.
When we got to the hospital, it turns out she was upside down and needed to be extracted via c-section. I was devastated. All my hard work for nothing. Although, Imma be honest, getting that Spinal was a nice break from the contractions.
I didn't go back on birth control after that because we figured if we got pregnant before we tried again then it would be ok. And we wanted to try again in a couple years. Things were regular and pain was at a moderate level, maybe slightly higher than before, but not too noticeably.
Then I freakin' got pregnant with twins. This time it took us 4 tries to fall pregnant, but comparatively, that's still pretty good. Pregnancy is doubly hard when you have two babies inside of you. Double the heartburn, double the nausea, double the back pain, everything.
This time I and my super supportive doctor were determined to get these babies out vaginally (as long as everything was safe and going well- we're not monsters). So I researched some options for helping babies be head down and found a chiropractor that practiced the Webster's technique.
And it worked! Both babies were head down when I birthed them and it went fairly smoothly, even if it did take a really long time. Teddy only had to be in the NICU for a week because of some blood he swallowed. Other than that, everything was fine.
Now here's where things started going really downhill for my period (I mean it was bad before, but it got worse). I don't know if it was the stress of having twin babies (which is so stressful, I kind of can't remember their first year of life) or if having two babies inside my baby box stretched things in the wrong direction, but things got painful.
Along the next 2-4 years my periods extended to about 7-9 days long and occurred every 14 days. The pain got so bad, I would have to lay down for my worst days and only get up when the children absolutely couldn't do something for themselves. Then it turned into back pain especially when I would eat (while on my period). And it was really bad when I would eat fresh fruits and vegetables. The pain would extend up my entire back and make me feel nauseous. I often have to take Zofran to curb the nausea I have during the pain. I would have to take 800 mg of ibuprofen 4 times a day and that didn't even keep the pain at bay. Then near the end of my periods, I would get major headaches (not sure if they were migraines) that would last for a few days as I would wean off the ibuprofen.
So yes, you heard right: heavy bleeding for 4 days, total about 8 days of bleeding, debilitating pain when I eat, nausea, and headaches. And lots and lots of ibuprofen. Then I start again 14 days after the end of that period. It's exhausting... for the whole family.
Now all of this still happens, but I've been able to focus in on my symptoms and better identify the. Plus they've gotten worse and it's been easier to identify them that way. The biggest thing I have found out is that I has acid reflux when I'm on my period because of all the ibuprofen that I take (that doesn't work all the way, but that I can't give up because the pain is too bad). The acid reflux gives me, not only heartburn, but is the cause of my back pain when I eat! This was a major revelation for me. I've been working on adjusting my diet to see if certain foods are aggravating my acid reflux and maybe I can make it less painful when my stomach sphincters won't work when I'm pumping ibuprofen into my body.
You may be saying, "Kate, go on birth control again! You'll regulate your periods and be in so much less pain!"
To that I say: You're right, but I can't. You see... we're trying to get pregnant. We've been trying for over two years. And also, there's a lot of not great hormone stuff that happens on birth control. Like, it gives you synthetic hormones to replace yours so your body thinks it's ovulating but isn't actually (So you don't have a baby). There are some problems with this. Some of the hormones it's replacing, like progesterone, give your brain happy signals, but if you're not getting your homemade hormones and you're getting the synthetic ones, you could become more depressed.
For me, one of my biggest symptoms is I feel very apathetic. Which is not great when your kids want to play and you just don't feel like doing anything and you don't really care. But you do care and it makes you depressed and it turns into a bad cycle of bad emotions.
I've been reading this great book called The Period Repair Manual by Lara Briden. It's taught me a lot about my hormones and processes in my body that I wasn't even aware of. Like, did you know an egg travels around your ovary for 100 days of development before it's released? So if you do something in that time, like eat really crappy or are very stressed, it can affect the development of your egg, but you won't see the results of that stress for 100 days maybe!
Also, birth control replaces your hormones with synthetic ones and your body uses those as a crutch so that when you get off birth control it can over produce some hormones and throw you off balance again in the other direction.
There's a lot of really great info in this book and I've learned a lot. I only recently (within the past 6 months maybe) started reading through this book and I'm not done yet. So I don't claim to know everything and I'm not saying birth control is bad for everyone. You are grown adults that can make your own decisions. I'm just saying what has been happening here and you can go read the book if you're interested.
Anyway, we've been trying to get pregnant and at the beginning of 2019, I got the advice from a doctor that I should try going on birth control to maybe help calm my periods down and once things are less stressful, I can hop off and we can try again. I mean, that's what happened when we got pregnant with Olivia, so maybe it will happen again.
Well I went on the birth control. It was the NuvaRing. For the first month, I bled through the entire month. It was not fun. But after that my periods stopped.
It was amazing. I felt so free! We were nervous that my libido would drop and I would get super apathetic like I had before on birth control, but the doctor brought up a good point and said, will all that be worse than the lack of energy you have right now? I said, probably not. And we were right. My energy levels were higher than they had been in a long time. I could hang out with my family. I could get chores done. I didn't have to cancel appointments with clients. I could actually exercise.
I just felt like a normal human being. I often asked myself, Is this what normal people feel like? This is amazing!
But it was over all too soon. The last month before I was going to hop off the birth control and we were going to try again, I was switching my rings and in between switching, I waited 3 hours before I put the new one in. And because of my delay, I bled for the entire month. Lightly, but for a month. Ugh.
To be clear, the directions for the NuvaRing say to wear it for 3 weeks, leave it out for a week and then put your new one in. But my doctor said I could wear it for 4 weeks and then change to a new one. He said sometimes people will have a small period, but sometimes none at all.
Mine was out for 3 hours and I bled the whole rest of the month. Not cool.
So then the decision was, do we start trying now or do we keep going on the birth control to settle down my raging uterus? And we decided to start trying for a baby.
But a baby never came. My periods went back to being bad. Luckily, I was pretty sure I was ovulating. Some months I would take a test just to make sure, but I didn't want to be crazy about testing for ovulation, because they say if you stress, you don't get pregnant.
Then at the end of September, my period was late. Which it has done before and I got excited and bought a bunch of pregnancy tests only to test negative and my period to show up a day late.
But this time I waited a week before I would test. And the test came back positive! I was ecstatic! Especially because Matt was away at a work conference for the week and I would be able to surprise him. If he had been here, he would have known right away.
My mom was staying with me at the time helping with the kids because Matt would be coming home that weekend and then flying out for another conference the next week. So I confided in her and we planned out the surprise for Matt.
I was almost a little upset because I had just come up with this great idea to surprise Matt each month with a period announcement. Like a pregnancy announcement that cute couples videotape when they surprise their spouse. I love those and I was getting more and more depressed with each period I was having. Not only because it meant we had failed.. again, but also because they are SO painful. Emotionally and Physically I have been exhausted and I was ready for some cheer even if it was a little morbid (They would all be blood themed).
It was perfect because Halloween was coming up and they have great blood things for costumes and decorations. I bought this black skull candle that would bleed out it's eyes when you melted the wax. Matt knew about it and knew I would light it when I started my period. So he was expecting to see a bloody face when he got home from his trip.
Well, when I went to pick him up, I brought the unlit skull with me and took a video of me showing it to him. He was so surprised and happy and excited and we cried.
Our excitement was short-lived however, because a couple days later I miscarried. And Matt had to leave a few hours after I told him for his next conference. Luckily my mom was still there and took care of the kids and I while I cried a lot.
A couple weeks later, I got an MRI to see if they could see anything in there per my new doctor's request. I had been seeing a specialist in endometriosis for a little while and she wanted to do all the things. It was tough because she had wanted to do an MRI earlier and we had it planned, but then I got pregnant, and then I miscarried and I had to go through the process of scheduling and cancelling and rescheduling and telling people over and over that I miscarried. A lot of strangers heard me cry that week.
The MRI came up with the results that I have a tilted uterus and that I have some sort of something in my uterus, but they are not sure what it is. The doctor said it could be left over from the miscarriage, or it could be fibroids. She was certain it's not cancer or anything like that.
The next step she wants to take is to do a laproscopy to look inside my uterus and abdominal cavity to check for endometriosis. Even though previous ultrasounds have shown no signs, she believes it could still be that. I had asked the doctors that were performing Olivia's C-section back in 2012 to check for it (because the only sure way of finding out is to open you up and look), but they said there was none. So I didn't have endometriosis when Olivia was born, even though I had really bad periods, but it can develop over time.
2 years ago, we prayed and asked if we should have any more kids and Matt and I both had a strong feeling that there was one more waiting. I told God though, after I'm off this birth control (6 months ago) that I would give him until January to give us a baby and then I was done. It's too much stress on me. It's exhausting. It's too much stress on Matt. It's too much stress on the kids who now know not to touch mommy for one whole week out of every month. It's too much.
We got to the end of December and were evaluating our experiences thus far.
- I had learned a lot about my body and my period
- I was eating better
- I had seen a massage therapist who did Mayan abdominal massage on me and that was great. My period that next month was very different from the others.
I felt like have so much more to learn and I wasn't ready yet to give up on making myself feel better! I hadn't succeeded yet, but I wasn't done learning. Somehow the past six months had opened my eyes to so many learning opportunities and options.
But
- I was still going to have periods and they were going to be painful
- It was possible that the things I try will make things worse for my body
- What if I have another miscarriage?
- Our kids are older now and we want to start getting rid of our baby stuff and clearing up space
- Everyone is potty trained!
- The kids travel with way less stuff than they did before
But
-We know what great big sisters and brother they will be
- And what about that feeling of knowing one more was coming?
I was angry for a while, knowing I had felt like there was one more and yet not receiving the child I was promised. I questioned a lot.
But then we made a decision. We decided that I would keep learning about how to help my body work better and hopefully feel better. Since that still means no birth control, we'll still try to get pregnant. And then when I get too fed up, we can look into an IUD or a hysterectomy.
Yes, we know there are other ways a child can come into your life, like adoption and being a teacher and mentor and what not. And We feel like if the opportunity comes along, we think we will know that this is the one we've been waiting for.
After making our decision I feel so much lighter now. It feels right. Maybe God is telling us not to put him on a timeline! Whoops!
Why we can't get pregnant when we could before? Nobody is really sure. Is it the combination of having a C-section and then having twins? Is it stress? Is it my age on top of everything? I did just turn 30, although that's not that old for having a baby. Is it just not the right time?
Who knows? All I know is, I'm working on being healthier. And maybe I'll get wiser too. And maybe I'll never hold a baby in my womb again. Only time will tell. At this point I just want my body to work better.
I'm starting with hope, I'm starting with trying to be more positive in the way I talk about my body, and educating myself as much as possible.
Wish me luck!
P.S. I'm hoping to record more of my experiences from here on out. Mainly so I can keep track of the changes for good or bad. And maybe someone else or a loved one has experienced a lot of pain with their periods and will learn what or what not to do from my experiences. Or just wants to commiserate with me. That's ok too.
(Warning: I will be talking about menstrual cycles. If that makes you uncomfortable, you should probably keep reading so that you are better educated on women's health. Everyone knows a woman and most women have had a period before. And a lot of them have a crazy hard time with it)
My uterus and I started out on normal terms when I was 12. Normal meaning I bled from my uterus for a few days once a month. NBD.
A couple years of this went by and I started bleeding longer and longer, until finally I had bled for a little over a month straight and I told my mom. I think she called the doctor and the doctor was super concerned so they called an ambulance to my middle school and carted me off to the hospital in the middle of the day.
That was my first time riding in an ambulance. They didn't turn on the lights or the siren. I was super disappointed.
We got to the hospital and found out I was very close to needing a blood transfusion. I was very anemic so they put me on birth control and iron pills. They told me to skip the placebo pills and just take the birth control. That means no periods for while. Hooray! But the iron made me nauseous. Boo!
In high school I switched to a birth control patch because it was easier to remember than the pills. You would just stick it on your skin for a week and Voila! No periods. This was great for a while...
Until I started getting bruise-like marks popping up on my thighs and my doctor had to switch me back to pills. I'm pretty sure they don't make the patch anymore. Fun fact: I still have those marks on my legs to this day.
I remember girls in class telling me how lucky I was to be on birth control. For a while I was confused, because to me, birth control was only used for regulating my period. I had no idea it prevented you from having babies (99.7% effective). That was something my doctor and mom left out of the information packet. Boy, high school is educational.
Eventually my doctor told me I needed to start having my periods again (with my birth control).
A couple days into my first period back, I had a friend over to work on a school project. We were talking about ideas, when I started getting pain in my lower abdomen. "It's fine." I told myself, "Just a bit of pain. You can cope until your friend leaves."
But the pain got worse and worse until I was doubled over on the floor. At some point my friend opted to leave. Despite my protests. Luckily she lived in the house right behind ours, so it wasn't super inconvenient.
As the pain worsened, it made me nauseous and I began to throw up uncontrollably. That was when my mom took me to the ER, plastic bag in hand, for my continuous expulsions. They saw me right away as they probably didn't want me to throw up on anyone.
When they brought me back, they put in my first IV ever. Which is awful, btw. I hate IVs... and needles in general. Matt laughs at me when I get my blood drawn because I make funny noises and start to shake. It's a hoot.
But I stopped bleeding and throwing up, so that was nice.
After that is when my memory gets a little fuzzy. I'm not sure when I stopped taking birth control, but I did at some point and my periods were at regular intervals and the pain was at a moderate level. Nothing crazy.
Before I got married, I started back up on the pill, because we weren't wanting babies right away. After a year or so, I went off the birth control so we could try for a baby and amazingly, we got pregnant on our first try! We were surprised, but super happy.
When it was time for Olivia to be birthed, I had practiced Hypnobabies and was super ready to push this thing out of my vagina. Scared, but ready.
When we got to the hospital, it turns out she was upside down and needed to be extracted via c-section. I was devastated. All my hard work for nothing. Although, Imma be honest, getting that Spinal was a nice break from the contractions.
I didn't go back on birth control after that because we figured if we got pregnant before we tried again then it would be ok. And we wanted to try again in a couple years. Things were regular and pain was at a moderate level, maybe slightly higher than before, but not too noticeably.
Then I freakin' got pregnant with twins. This time it took us 4 tries to fall pregnant, but comparatively, that's still pretty good. Pregnancy is doubly hard when you have two babies inside of you. Double the heartburn, double the nausea, double the back pain, everything.
This time I and my super supportive doctor were determined to get these babies out vaginally (as long as everything was safe and going well- we're not monsters). So I researched some options for helping babies be head down and found a chiropractor that practiced the Webster's technique.
And it worked! Both babies were head down when I birthed them and it went fairly smoothly, even if it did take a really long time. Teddy only had to be in the NICU for a week because of some blood he swallowed. Other than that, everything was fine.
Now here's where things started going really downhill for my period (I mean it was bad before, but it got worse). I don't know if it was the stress of having twin babies (which is so stressful, I kind of can't remember their first year of life) or if having two babies inside my baby box stretched things in the wrong direction, but things got painful.
Along the next 2-4 years my periods extended to about 7-9 days long and occurred every 14 days. The pain got so bad, I would have to lay down for my worst days and only get up when the children absolutely couldn't do something for themselves. Then it turned into back pain especially when I would eat (while on my period). And it was really bad when I would eat fresh fruits and vegetables. The pain would extend up my entire back and make me feel nauseous. I often have to take Zofran to curb the nausea I have during the pain. I would have to take 800 mg of ibuprofen 4 times a day and that didn't even keep the pain at bay. Then near the end of my periods, I would get major headaches (not sure if they were migraines) that would last for a few days as I would wean off the ibuprofen.
So yes, you heard right: heavy bleeding for 4 days, total about 8 days of bleeding, debilitating pain when I eat, nausea, and headaches. And lots and lots of ibuprofen. Then I start again 14 days after the end of that period. It's exhausting... for the whole family.
Now all of this still happens, but I've been able to focus in on my symptoms and better identify the. Plus they've gotten worse and it's been easier to identify them that way. The biggest thing I have found out is that I has acid reflux when I'm on my period because of all the ibuprofen that I take (that doesn't work all the way, but that I can't give up because the pain is too bad). The acid reflux gives me, not only heartburn, but is the cause of my back pain when I eat! This was a major revelation for me. I've been working on adjusting my diet to see if certain foods are aggravating my acid reflux and maybe I can make it less painful when my stomach sphincters won't work when I'm pumping ibuprofen into my body.
You may be saying, "Kate, go on birth control again! You'll regulate your periods and be in so much less pain!"
To that I say: You're right, but I can't. You see... we're trying to get pregnant. We've been trying for over two years. And also, there's a lot of not great hormone stuff that happens on birth control. Like, it gives you synthetic hormones to replace yours so your body thinks it's ovulating but isn't actually (So you don't have a baby). There are some problems with this. Some of the hormones it's replacing, like progesterone, give your brain happy signals, but if you're not getting your homemade hormones and you're getting the synthetic ones, you could become more depressed.
For me, one of my biggest symptoms is I feel very apathetic. Which is not great when your kids want to play and you just don't feel like doing anything and you don't really care. But you do care and it makes you depressed and it turns into a bad cycle of bad emotions.
I've been reading this great book called The Period Repair Manual by Lara Briden. It's taught me a lot about my hormones and processes in my body that I wasn't even aware of. Like, did you know an egg travels around your ovary for 100 days of development before it's released? So if you do something in that time, like eat really crappy or are very stressed, it can affect the development of your egg, but you won't see the results of that stress for 100 days maybe!
Also, birth control replaces your hormones with synthetic ones and your body uses those as a crutch so that when you get off birth control it can over produce some hormones and throw you off balance again in the other direction.
There's a lot of really great info in this book and I've learned a lot. I only recently (within the past 6 months maybe) started reading through this book and I'm not done yet. So I don't claim to know everything and I'm not saying birth control is bad for everyone. You are grown adults that can make your own decisions. I'm just saying what has been happening here and you can go read the book if you're interested.
Anyway, we've been trying to get pregnant and at the beginning of 2019, I got the advice from a doctor that I should try going on birth control to maybe help calm my periods down and once things are less stressful, I can hop off and we can try again. I mean, that's what happened when we got pregnant with Olivia, so maybe it will happen again.
Well I went on the birth control. It was the NuvaRing. For the first month, I bled through the entire month. It was not fun. But after that my periods stopped.
It was amazing. I felt so free! We were nervous that my libido would drop and I would get super apathetic like I had before on birth control, but the doctor brought up a good point and said, will all that be worse than the lack of energy you have right now? I said, probably not. And we were right. My energy levels were higher than they had been in a long time. I could hang out with my family. I could get chores done. I didn't have to cancel appointments with clients. I could actually exercise.
I just felt like a normal human being. I often asked myself, Is this what normal people feel like? This is amazing!
But it was over all too soon. The last month before I was going to hop off the birth control and we were going to try again, I was switching my rings and in between switching, I waited 3 hours before I put the new one in. And because of my delay, I bled for the entire month. Lightly, but for a month. Ugh.
To be clear, the directions for the NuvaRing say to wear it for 3 weeks, leave it out for a week and then put your new one in. But my doctor said I could wear it for 4 weeks and then change to a new one. He said sometimes people will have a small period, but sometimes none at all.
Mine was out for 3 hours and I bled the whole rest of the month. Not cool.
So then the decision was, do we start trying now or do we keep going on the birth control to settle down my raging uterus? And we decided to start trying for a baby.
But a baby never came. My periods went back to being bad. Luckily, I was pretty sure I was ovulating. Some months I would take a test just to make sure, but I didn't want to be crazy about testing for ovulation, because they say if you stress, you don't get pregnant.
Then at the end of September, my period was late. Which it has done before and I got excited and bought a bunch of pregnancy tests only to test negative and my period to show up a day late.
But this time I waited a week before I would test. And the test came back positive! I was ecstatic! Especially because Matt was away at a work conference for the week and I would be able to surprise him. If he had been here, he would have known right away.
My mom was staying with me at the time helping with the kids because Matt would be coming home that weekend and then flying out for another conference the next week. So I confided in her and we planned out the surprise for Matt.
I was almost a little upset because I had just come up with this great idea to surprise Matt each month with a period announcement. Like a pregnancy announcement that cute couples videotape when they surprise their spouse. I love those and I was getting more and more depressed with each period I was having. Not only because it meant we had failed.. again, but also because they are SO painful. Emotionally and Physically I have been exhausted and I was ready for some cheer even if it was a little morbid (They would all be blood themed).
It was perfect because Halloween was coming up and they have great blood things for costumes and decorations. I bought this black skull candle that would bleed out it's eyes when you melted the wax. Matt knew about it and knew I would light it when I started my period. So he was expecting to see a bloody face when he got home from his trip.
Well, when I went to pick him up, I brought the unlit skull with me and took a video of me showing it to him. He was so surprised and happy and excited and we cried.
Our excitement was short-lived however, because a couple days later I miscarried. And Matt had to leave a few hours after I told him for his next conference. Luckily my mom was still there and took care of the kids and I while I cried a lot.
A couple weeks later, I got an MRI to see if they could see anything in there per my new doctor's request. I had been seeing a specialist in endometriosis for a little while and she wanted to do all the things. It was tough because she had wanted to do an MRI earlier and we had it planned, but then I got pregnant, and then I miscarried and I had to go through the process of scheduling and cancelling and rescheduling and telling people over and over that I miscarried. A lot of strangers heard me cry that week.
The MRI came up with the results that I have a tilted uterus and that I have some sort of something in my uterus, but they are not sure what it is. The doctor said it could be left over from the miscarriage, or it could be fibroids. She was certain it's not cancer or anything like that.
The next step she wants to take is to do a laproscopy to look inside my uterus and abdominal cavity to check for endometriosis. Even though previous ultrasounds have shown no signs, she believes it could still be that. I had asked the doctors that were performing Olivia's C-section back in 2012 to check for it (because the only sure way of finding out is to open you up and look), but they said there was none. So I didn't have endometriosis when Olivia was born, even though I had really bad periods, but it can develop over time.
2 years ago, we prayed and asked if we should have any more kids and Matt and I both had a strong feeling that there was one more waiting. I told God though, after I'm off this birth control (6 months ago) that I would give him until January to give us a baby and then I was done. It's too much stress on me. It's exhausting. It's too much stress on Matt. It's too much stress on the kids who now know not to touch mommy for one whole week out of every month. It's too much.
We got to the end of December and were evaluating our experiences thus far.
- I had learned a lot about my body and my period
- I was eating better
- I had seen a massage therapist who did Mayan abdominal massage on me and that was great. My period that next month was very different from the others.
I felt like have so much more to learn and I wasn't ready yet to give up on making myself feel better! I hadn't succeeded yet, but I wasn't done learning. Somehow the past six months had opened my eyes to so many learning opportunities and options.
But
- I was still going to have periods and they were going to be painful
- It was possible that the things I try will make things worse for my body
- What if I have another miscarriage?
- Our kids are older now and we want to start getting rid of our baby stuff and clearing up space
- Everyone is potty trained!
- The kids travel with way less stuff than they did before
But
-We know what great big sisters and brother they will be
- And what about that feeling of knowing one more was coming?
I was angry for a while, knowing I had felt like there was one more and yet not receiving the child I was promised. I questioned a lot.
But then we made a decision. We decided that I would keep learning about how to help my body work better and hopefully feel better. Since that still means no birth control, we'll still try to get pregnant. And then when I get too fed up, we can look into an IUD or a hysterectomy.
Yes, we know there are other ways a child can come into your life, like adoption and being a teacher and mentor and what not. And We feel like if the opportunity comes along, we think we will know that this is the one we've been waiting for.
After making our decision I feel so much lighter now. It feels right. Maybe God is telling us not to put him on a timeline! Whoops!
Why we can't get pregnant when we could before? Nobody is really sure. Is it the combination of having a C-section and then having twins? Is it stress? Is it my age on top of everything? I did just turn 30, although that's not that old for having a baby. Is it just not the right time?
Who knows? All I know is, I'm working on being healthier. And maybe I'll get wiser too. And maybe I'll never hold a baby in my womb again. Only time will tell. At this point I just want my body to work better.
I'm starting with hope, I'm starting with trying to be more positive in the way I talk about my body, and educating myself as much as possible.
Wish me luck!
P.S. I'm hoping to record more of my experiences from here on out. Mainly so I can keep track of the changes for good or bad. And maybe someone else or a loved one has experienced a lot of pain with their periods and will learn what or what not to do from my experiences. Or just wants to commiserate with me. That's ok too.
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