Is She Dancing in There?

I don’t recall the last time my husband looked on with such amazement at any other view. Perhaps he hasn’t. I suspect this won’t be the first time. The ultrasound at ten weeks showed a little head, teeny legs, and these tiny arm buds that moved around as if she were dancing. Is she dancing in there?

After five years of trying to conceive, five years of crying once a month, five years of watching dozens of colleagues and friends become pregnant with ease, five years of throwing baby showers with a forced smile, and one year of chosen unemployment to de-stress as a possible solution to infertility, can it really be that now, now she is dancing in there?

We do not know, of course, as of yet if our baby is a boy or a girl, but “she” seems to flow out of me so I am going with that.

In some ways my husband and I are still in disbelief, even as we hear the heartbeat and watch this baby boogie down.

It is hard, very hard, to believe this is real, to know that we will have a baby in our arms, when we were once one step away from altogether giving up hope. Our Doctor gave us the news last year that intrauterine insemination (IUI) wouldn’t be enough, that IVF was the only chance we had and even those chances were slim.

After being unemployed for a year, the cost of IVF was seemingly impossible. It became my part-time job to find funds for this procedure. I found blessed organizations that provide grants to those chosen applicants, Fertility Dreams, Bumps, and the Cade Foundation. I poured my energy into filling out paperwork and copying necessary forms.

Along the way I found an all-expenses covered IVF clinical research study being done on women over the age of 35 at the Huntington Reproductive Center. I called and added my name to what I imagined was a very long and desperate waitlist of couples.

We also decided to try IUI even though it was not advised because it was simply what we could afford. The day we were to go in to start the medications for the IUI, we received a horribly devastating phone call, on Valentine’s Day.

My husband’s father had died. The week ahead was tragically sad and heartbreaking. Our family came together to support each other, and my husband’s brother grieved that their father would not be alive to see his first grandbaby born in only three months time.

Two weeks after we returned home, still trying to adjust to life and still grieving, I received a call on the 17th anniversary of my own father’s death. This call was from Huntington Reproductive Center asking if we still wanted to participate in the IVF study because someone just dropped out and I was the next name on the list.

The nurse who called probably hears this all of the time, and I simply couldn’t control it, I just fell to my knees and began crying tears of gratitude into the phone. If we had started the IUI process on Valentine’s Day we would have been ineligible for this free cycle of IVF.

In that one moment, I knew that both of our fathers had come together up there in Heaven and created this miracle for us.

It turned out that we were able to create seven eggs, six embryos, and two that were ready for transfer with the remaining four not progressing to become viable to be frozen. According to our most amazing Doctor at HRC, a man I now consider one of our Earth Angels, of those two embryos, one looked the best.

That one is now in there dancing away. That one was our child all along, just waiting to become a part of our family. After marriage, I never envisioned that our baby would arrive after a long process of struggle, sadness, prayers, research, luck, injectable medications, and help from Angels.

I thought, as most women do before infertility strikes, that a romantic evening would be more than enough. What I know now, more than ever, is that life unfolds in ways we could never ever expect or foresee, which to me means that there is always hope. No matter how our children come to us, as long as we listen to our hearts and keep our hope, our joyful dancing families are within reach.

Meredith Ball is a Licensed Clinical Social Worker with a love of seeing families and nature heal and grow stronger together. She is the creator of the app Green Quest, the Natural Living Editor at Bella Online, and she blogs at Be the Green Queen.