Last spring I went to a baby shower for the first time in eight years. It was hard, in fact, there was a time I thought I'd never, ever go to another baby shower.
In January of 1997, Matthew and I had been married for five years, and we decided it was a good time to start a family. But we didn't get pregnant and didn't get pregnant, and didn't get pregnant.
About the same time, we found out that my mother's breast cancer had moved to her bones - one of the most painful kinds of cancer to have. So we put thinking about a family on hold in order to deal with her sickness, chemotherapy, and radiation.
Mom died at home on January 28, 1998, a little over a year after her bone cancer diagnosis. In her final days she was in a lot of pain, but all she could think about was seeing Jesus. It was a tough time, and we grieved deeply, but God's grace allowed us to move on with our lives.
We still weren't pregnant, so we decided to go to a doctor. He recommended a "mild" fertility medicine, which we prayed about and researched thoroughly. We found that it was possible that we might have twins, but nothing like that kinds of result you see in the news, so we took the medicine.
That's when I started having pain so severe I couldn't walk. Matthew would carry me from bed to the couch. We went back to the doctor and he did a laparoscopy - a tiny incision where a scope is used to look around and laser out anything that doesn't belong. When the doctor opened me up, he found endometriosis so bad he couldn't do anything but sew me up and send me home.
The severity of the endometriosis explained why I wasn't getting pregnant. The next course of action was a different, powerful drug that induced menopause in order to shrink the endometriosis. Of course the best treatment for endometriosis is pregnancy, but if endometriosis is preventing you from getting pregnant...
When you're trying to get pregnant, each month is a cycle of excitement and grief. You can't help but get your hopes up and think,
Okay, it will be this month. You spend two weeks waiting to see, and in an instant you're crushed. It dominates your life; you can't think about anything else.
In the meantime, all your friends are getting pregnant and having babies, you become angry because it seems so unfair. Your friends drift away as they spend time with people who have children. As a couple, you become isolated, alone. People don't know what to do so they just don't do anything.
As a couple you are dealing with stress and grief because your family isn't becoming what you dreamed it would be. Infertility is a big reason for failed marriages, and this is the stage that can make or break a marriage. Fortunately for me - and unfortunately for all other women - I have the best husband in the world. We decided we were in this together and had to grow together instead of letting it pull us apart.
For a long time I struggled with anger, even hatred, toward anybody who got pregnant, Just hearing the words "I'm pregnant" took me months to get over. At one time we had 19(!) friends who were pregnant, and this only heightened our sense of isolation. I felt awful for having such strong anger toward those people because I knew they had not done anything. Ultimately I discovered I was not angry with them, I was angry at God.
The months I was on menopause drugs we couldn't get pregnant, so it was somewhat of a break, but I was more aware of time passing and getting older. After six months, they did another laparoscopy and lasered out as much of the endometriosis as they could, hoping to give me enough relief to get pregnant.
And ... nine months later I was pregnant! As a high-risk pregnancy, I started early with weekly doctor visits and ultrasounds. As one ultrasound, we discovered it was twins. We were elated. We wondered if God was giving us an extra blessing after we'd waited so long. But at another ultrasound, between three and four months, they found one of the twins had died. Two weeks later, the other twin was not growing either.
Since we had been trying for so long - five years - everybody knew we were pregnant. One thing I'd always daydreamed about was telling our family we were pregnant. Everybody immediately started buying thing for us and stocking the nursery. When we found out we were having twins, they started buying diapers. But when you come home from the hospital with nothing, to a room full of diapers and clothes, it's like you're being stabbed in the heart. It hurts that bad. And it continues to hurt; no one pulls that knife out.
That entire time, from the surgeries through the miscarriage, we lived in a pit. We couldn't understand why it took so long to get pregnant, why God allowed us to be so happy when we were, and why we couldn't keep those babies. It made no sense.
About two months after the miscarriage we started trying to get pregnant again. My pain got much worse, and we decided to completely reevaluate our lives. We had so many questions. Why do we suffer? Does God think we would not make good parents? Why are teenagers throwing their babies in trash cans? What do some people "accidentally" get pregnant while others can't, no matter how hard they try? Why are there parents who continually complain about their children?
We decided to make something out of our pain. God took us down this path for a reason, and we did not want to waste our pain. We felt led to take steps to be able to minister to other couples who go through this, to people who are around them, and to the churches who should be reaching out to them.
We thought seminary might give us background and training to minister or start a ministry. We began to pray and research, and my dad suggested we look at Trinity. We soon discovered the bioethics program and scheduled a campus visit. The whole time we were here on that visit, it was clear that this was where the Lord wanted us to be. So we sold all the things we'd planned for a family - the home with a big backyard and a swing set, family cars - and moved here.
God's hand in our being at Trinity is even more evident when you consider the fact that on our first visit here I was in extreme pain. In fact, I could barely walk around the campus; I was in a wheelchair for a large part of the trip. When we got home my doctor scheduled me for a surgery to remove one ovary and Fallopian tube, and, again, as much of the endometriosis as possible, with the hope of preserving my fertility.
When we did move to Chicago, I'd been on bed rest for eight weeks recovering from the surgery, and we still had some hope that we would get pregnant. About that time I found out that both my brother and I were born after my mother had one of her ovaries removed. I found a little hope in knowing that.
The doctors said surgery would give me eight to ten pain-free years, but it was only months before the pain returned. Since we moved here in June of 2002, I've spent every day in pain. Some days I can barely function or walk, but most of the time I decide that it isn't going to get the best of me, so I take medicine, and by God's grace, live my life.
Back when we first couldn't get pregnant, our doctor in Louisiana recommend that we try in vitro fertilization. We went to a local fertility clinic and they told us that since pregnancy is best cure of endometriosis, and IVF was our best chance of getting pregnant, that was the thing to do. We had already decided that we were not going to do IVF. It is a complicated issue, and there is no chapter and verse in the Bible on IVF, so I was thankful that we had taken the time to set our own limits ahead of time.
My main doctor was an awesome doctor, and although he was not a believer, he was very respectful of our beliefs. He did everything he could to help us get pregnant within the boundaries we had set. The doctors at the fertility clinic said IVF was our only option, and if we didn't do that, we wouldn't get pregnant.
When we moved here and started a doctor search, all of them said IVF was what we needed, and if we weren't interested in that they would ask, "Why are you here?" We finally found a doctor who was more accommodating, but I wasn't super crazy about him. Although he suggested IVF, he was willing to talk about alternatives. Just one more testimony of God's hand is that we recently found out he's one of the area's leading physicians in endometriosis and surgical treatment of it. God is good!!
Because the pain has gotten so bad that I can no longer live with it and because I now have adenomyosis as well. I'm going to have a complete hysterectomy this month (April 2004). Deciding to have a hysterectomy was a hard decision because it will take away any chance, however slim it was, of ever having a baby. It's a whole new grieving process.
This has been, and in many ways continues to be a difficult journey. But, and I want to stress this point, we absolutely could not have made it through without God. There were times when God felt far away, and there are lots of things we still don't understand, but we know that God has been actively working "behind the scenes," as it were, much like in the Old Testament account of Joseph. As we look toward the future, it is with great hope that God will use the journey of our lives to bring glory to Himself. In order to remind ourselves of God's goodness and to memorialize our twins, we named them Joseph and Hope.
So I have a small glimpse of a great future - even if it is without kids. I'm not all gloom and doom like I have been at times in the past. We believe that we can serve God in ways that we might not be able if we had children.
I remember years ago reading a book on infertility. In it a women said she knew she was healing when someone told her she was pregnant and it didn't cause a week of tears. I remember thinking, "That will never happen for me, I will always go into a personal pit after finding out someone is pregnant."
This year, for the first time, I found out someone was pregnant and it didn't sent me into a tailspin. I thought I must be getting better.
And I went to that baby shower even though I thought I never, ever would.
By Ginger Eppinette
Former Member of Trinity Wives Fellowship
Suggested Books: When Empty Arms Become a Heavy Burden by Sandra Glahn and William Cutrer
Empty Arms by Pam Vredevelt, I'll Hold You in Heaven by Jack Hayford, The Ache for a Child by Debra Bridwell, Disappointment With God by Philip Yancey, Deceived by God by John Feinberg, Does God Need Our Help?: Cloning, Assisted Suicide, & Other Challenges in Bioethics by John F. Kilner and C. Ben Mitchell, Bioethics: A Primer for Christians by Gilbert Meilander
