Spring Break 911

I hate to be the one to relay more depressing news from the DeBell world, but Rachel isn't up to it and I have been wanting to chime in for a while. Yesterday was pretty much a horrendous day. I don't want to come across as self-pitying, as I know many people have worse lives than us. But in a continued effort to paint an accurate picture of the struggles of an infertile couple, I'm gonna do my best to document the events. (Rachel, I will try not to sound too "Dear Diary.")

Rachel woke up puking, which we had feared would happen. She appeared to have the bug I got, and the Dr wanted her to go to the ER as a precaution. None of this would have sucked THAT bad if we weren't supposed to, at that moment, be headed to Waco for our niece's 1st birthday party. The news that we would be spending the day in an ER absolutely devastated Rachel, who was already feeling as bad as a person can feel physically - trust me.

As usual, entering the ER felt like entering a third-world country. Everything seems to have a film of yuck on it, the staff is disgruntled, you hear wailing and moaning beyond the waiting area. I don't want to sound like a complainer but all week we were looking forward to cooking out and celebrating a birthday with cupcakes and giraffes and instead I was sitting beside smelly tattooed fat people in a waiting room while Rachel threw up in a public toilet. Buzz...kill.

Anyway, back to my ER rant. The robe and the blanket waiting for Rachel on her bed were of course stained with some sort of goo, so we had to get that replaced, and she didn't get any relief until about one hour after arriving when they finally added some medicine to her IV. We spent a great deal of the waiting time in here praying and spending, for what it was, a fairly sweet time with the Lord. There wasn't much else to do. I think it was enough to convince us that maybe this was God's way of surprising us when we least expected it. We got our hopes up and sure enough, they were going to do a pregnancy test that day and let us know where we stood.

After about 3 hours an African-American lady with gold teeth who smelled like tobacco came and rolled Rachel to the sonogram area where they would check her ovaries for signs of overstimulation - the reason we came to the ER in the first place. I followed them down the hall until Gold Teeth told me in her scratchy menthol voice that I was not allowed back there. So, after 2 years of struggling mightily together against this infertility, my wife is going to get wheeled away with an IV jammed in her and tobacco breath wafting over her to find out if we are pregnant or not. Alone. In that instant, as were were separated by the double doors, I felt the gravity of this whole thing for the first time.

The pain of infertility is not the waiting, it's not the shame, it's not even the money. At the end of the day, it's the separation. Making a baby is supposed to be about togetherness, but in this whole process, almost everything has to be done separately. I make my donation in one room, Rachel makes hers in another. Our embryos grow behind closed doors, overseen by a complete stranger through a microscope. Then the embryos are put back into Rachel, but only once she has been again wheeled away behind mysterious doors. And now, in this ER, I don't even get to be there when the verdict is announced. This is NOT how making a baby is supposed to work, I kept telling myself. And the pain of being separated from her in that moment was one of the worst things I think I've ever felt.

I sat in the waiting room with another strange couple, this time the woman was picking something out of the man's hair and flicking it on the ground, probably lice. I wanted to scream or yell or punch something because it just didn't seem fair. Luckily they only kept Rachel an hour and, THANK GOD they did not tell her if the test was positive or negative. By now she was feeling better and it was just good to be back together. We were going on our 5th hour or so in this craphole and both of us were ready to leave.

Dr. B's on call came in and gave us the rundown. Lots of stomach bug, no overstimulation, go home, rest, drink Gatorade and take some promethazine. Then we asked her about the test, and she clearly had saved that for last. It was negative. She definitely did her best to keep our hopes alive. Since the optimal test time is not until Wednesday, it is in no way official. But for us, it was almost comfortably familiar: of course, it's negative. We are the couple who miss a baby's birthday to sit in a disgusting hospital. We are the couple who had 5 unsuccessful IUIs. We are the couple who have no teaching job in the fall. Yes, the self pity bug took up where the stomach bug left off and we were both heavily infected.

I know this probably seems incredibly different from what Rachel posted on Friday night. Maybe I'm too raw to be posting now, but I do feel its important to be honest. We do our best to always stay positive. We pray like the Dickens and beg God for stronger faith and a deeper longing to trust His plans. But some days, we are human and the energy runs out. Yesterday was one of those days. Could it be worse, as many people have assured us? Yes. It could be much, much worse. But accepting that truth does not replace the pain and heartache.

I don't magically feel better about yesterday because worse things could have happened. The person who's child dies in a car crash doesn't medicate themselves by saying, "Oh, well at least my wife didn't die also!" The person who finds out they have breast cancer doesn't laugh it off because, well, at least it isn't brain cancer. The fact is, in the moment, it SUCKS and there's nothing to do except feel the pain.

I hope this provides a little bit of an emotional window into the life of an infertile man. In no way are we giving up hope or abandoning faith. I think I have always felt this pressure to present all of this in a somewhat positive, Christiany light, and the truth is, yesterday, there just wasn't a lot of sunshine. We are not giver-uppers, neither of us, and we know God is certainly not one to abandon his children. There just wasn't much sunshine yesterday. Who knows, though, maybe the sun will come out. It is Spring Break after all.