God is Good

I never shared or really talked about the miscarriage we had before being pregnant with Peanut.  I did share with few close people, but mostly I kept it to myself (and Michael).  But I wanted to share it now because it has been on my mind as I have been doing a lot of soul searching as of late.

Moving to Utah was a joint decision, Michael didn't make me, and I didn't force him to take the position.  That doesn't mean it was an easy decision.  We had to sell our first home, I had to semi-leave my job, we had to leave friends, and had to move farther away from family.  We basically jumped back into the pool of insecurity that we had finally swam out of.  We had stability in Denver, I liked that.  Now we are back to being less stable, and more trust on God.

We decided to try to start a family in January of 2012.  When I told my doctor we were going to try for a family, she said that if we didn't get pregnant within 6 months to come back and talk to her.  Well, July 12, 2012 we found out we were expecting, right at the 6 month mark basically.  We were so excited, we figured out that the due date would be March 24, 3013.  Not a bad time for a baby.  Gina, Adam and Sutton came for a visit that same weekend and we didn't say a thing, we kept the surprise.  Then we went on a little mini-vacation to Durango the week after that.  Things seemed to be fine.  I had my first appointment scheduled on July 31st, somewhere around 7 weeks.

On July 30th, the day before my appointment, I started bleeding right at the end of work and started freaking out.  I called Michael as I was driving home and asked him to pray because I felt I knew what was happening.  I was actually very lucky because it was a very easy miscarriage, not too painful and complete.  I still went to my doctor's office in the morning to confirm that the pregnancy had fully ended.  I was so thankful that I didn't have to have a D&C.  But I felt so empty.  I know it was early in the pregnancy, but I had no reason to believe that I would lose that little blessing and the excitement of your first pregnancy is so special.

Fortunately/Unfortunately it was one of my coworkers last day at work that same day as my 1st "prenatal" appointment, and they had a little going away party planned.  The last thing I wanted to do was go and hang out since I had just lost my baby, but it was the best thing for me.  If I would have stayed home, I would have just laid around and cried.  Instead I was forced to get out and ended up playing pacman and jenga with my coworkers at a local bar.  It was exactly what I needed.

Then next six months ticked by with no positive tests.  I did have two late periods that tested negative but were different, and I think they were other early miscarriages.  By now, I was wondering what was going on.  I felt broken.  I found a new doctor and she was great.  She really started going through things and trying to find answers since it had been a year with one confirmed lost pregnancy. I was young to be having any trouble conceiving at all.  Everything checked out fine.  So they decided to start me on progesterone, just to see if it helped my cycles at all, since my levels were 'low' but within the "normal range".  After I started on that, she got a wild hair to test not just my thyroid hormones, but my thyroid antibodies.  And if you have read any of the other health posts, those came back high, indicating that my body was attacking my thyroid.  She feels that this is linked to my miscarriage and absent pregnancies.  They have shown that high thyroid antibodies are linked to miscarriage and other pregnancy issues, but they aren't actually sure why, since the body's thyroid hormones are still normal. (We still do not know how this will affect conceiving in the future)

Well, it was the middle of February 2013 when we found out about the thyroid antibodies and I was already on progesterone.  We had no luck with that first round of progesterone.  It stopped my period from coming for some reason, but all pregnancy tests came back negative.  My doctor decided to take a different approach now that we found out about the antibodies so she told me to give her a call when we got my period and we could try either thyroid hormone supplementation or fertility drugs.

Needless to say, I wasn't very happy about how all of this was turning out.  Pregnancy was supposed to be this wonderful, exciting time, and for me, it was stressful and emotional.  I had started researching other, more healthy avenues other than drugs but Michael and I still weren't sure what we should do.  We really actually started talking about taking a break for awhile to try to see if we could fix what was going on with me.

This is where God really comes in.  I was pretty down by this point.  I didn't know what to do about my health, didn't know what to do about medication, and I was sad that it had been a year and 3 months of waiting for a pregnancy which just didn't seem in the cards anytime soon.  I had to go on a work trip at the beginning of March and I remember seeing moms trying to wrangle their kids through security in the airport and deal with them screaming on planes, and it looked terrible and so hard, but yet, I wanted to be in their shoes. Especially with my previous due date fast approaching, I realized that I would have been huge at that point.  I really started struggling with sadness then, and didn't even want to think about the 24th of March and how we would have been close to delivering our baby.  I really started praying then, for peace, for comfort, for trust to know that what God has planned is best.  God knew my future and the plans He had, and I had to trust God and His timeline.  It was hard, but this is once in my life when I can say I fully surrendered to God's will and fully decided to wait upon the Lord in this area.

Well, God is so good!  He knew how upset I was and I believe wholeheartedly that He gave me a miracle.  He was smiling as I was feeling down on my work trip in March, alone and sad.  He was laughing as I opened up with family in March that we were having fertility struggles.  He knew full well that on March 16th, 2013 I would find out I was pregnant again by noticing some weird symptoms, so I decided to take a test.  And by some random, miraculous chance that even my doctor couldn't explain, we were pregnant again.  And I didn't spend the 24th of March grieving, but instead spent it celebrating the new life inside of me.  I feel so special that God reached out to me and gave me a new hope, a new future, and comforted my grief.  The most amazing thing about it is over that trip in March, when I was grieving, watching all those moms and feeling sad, I was already pregnant, and I didn't know.

God is Good.  I just wanted you to know that.