What. A. Week.
I am totally overwhelmed, exhausted, broken, desperate, hopeful, excited, terrified…
Let me tell you about our week.
Last Friday:
We both get home from school and there is a letter waiting for us. It tells us that our appointment at Addenbrookes has been cancelled and that we are to contact the surgery who referred us to find out why. Firstly, I am already devastated by this point. Our appointment was for 11th Feb. We wouldn’t have to attend as this was like a triage appointment where they’d look over our notes and decide the next steps for us and what we need.
I call the doctor’s surgery and they have no idea why it has been cancelled as their systems are down but they promise to get back to us early hours on Monday. I tell my husband, who by now is also pretty gutted and asking God why these kind of things keep happening to us. He specifically asks God to just give him something to remind him that He is in control.
10 minutes later, my husband’s phone rings and it is the doctor’s surgery saying that they were then able to find out why. They said that the clinic had not received his second set of results (we read between the lines… the surgery just have not sent them…) but that on the system it just says the appointment has been postponed. She explains that she has sent the results and we will likely get the same appointment back again but we should phone the clinic on Monday to find out.
What!? What are we supposed to feel after that? Hope? Confusion? Are we going to have that appointment or aren’t we? We both felt drained and broken, but a little bit hopeful that maybe that appointment will be fine. We both felt angry because the surgery failed to do something that should’ve happened. Again!
Monday:
I call Addenbrookes. The lady is incredibly rude to me on the phone because I don’t know my husband’s NHS number and it is not on the cold, minimal letter they sent us to tell us that the appointment has been cancelled.
I ask her about what had happened, reminded her that the results had now been sent over and asked if we were keeping the original appointment.
Her response? Oh… no. Your whole referral has been cancelled and closed. You will need to get the doctor to re-refer you and start again.
What?
The whole referral has been closed? What does that mean?
Basically you no longer have your appointment and you will not ever get an appointment again, until your doctor re-refers you.
I ask if that means we are back at the bottom of the 12-week waiting list.
No, she explains, you will just be given the next available appointment.
So basically, yes, you will be at the bottom of the waiting list.
As she hears my voice begin to crack and quiver over the phone through tears I am trying to hold back, just in case one of my pupils walks into my classroom, she finally decides to change her rude, I-don’t-care-because-I-have-to-deal-with-infertile-people-everyday-so-have-lost-my-compassion tone, and she apologises and tells me to call the doctors and explain what has happened.
I call my husband. Again through tears, I explain what is happening. He is not happy and neither am I.
Every single piece of hope felt like it had fallen onto a hard floor and smashed into thousands of pieces and would never be able to be fixed again. At least, not in the way it once was.
It was another very dark and painful moment in this journey.
God… Where are you!? What are you doing right now!? Why are you allowing this to happen to us?!
All we want is to love, nurture and care for our own children. Surely that isn’t much to ask for?
So my husband calls the doctors and after initially being blunt and rude to my husband, he explains that it is not just a cancelled appointment because they didn’t do their job properly, it is our chances of having a family and his wife’s mental health that they are messing around with. The lady on the phone at the doctors realised how significant this cancelled referral and appointment is to us and also almost cried down the phone to my husband. She apologised profusely.
But her apologies wouldn’t make us feel any better.
Every cancelled or delayed appointment is another day further away from having our own children. It’s another step down into this dark, scary place my mind finds itself in. This is not a nice place and I don’t feel good, I don’t feel good at all.
The doctors re-refer us and tell us that we need to contact the clinic later in the week to check they’ve received it and see if they can bump us up the list because of the human error involved.
Monday evening:
I have counselling on the same day as the cancelled referral news. I wept my way to see her.
I played a particular playlist that I have saved on my phone. It is a playlist with Christian music that was put together by someone struggling with infertility too.
This is the line in a song that crushed my soul:
I know you’re good, but this don’t feel good right now.
That line completely sums up how I feel right in this moment, driving to see my counsellor. I know with everything I have that God is good. He has proved that so many times in my life. But there is not a single part of my heart and mind that feels good right now.
After counselling, which reached right into the depths of my hurt, I drove home listening to the playlist. A song called Even If by MercyMe came on. Again I just sobbed.
I know the sorrow, and I know the hurt would all go away if You’d just say the word. But even if You don’t my hope is You alone.
People who aren’t a Christian often think that those of us who are, never doubt what we believe in, that life is easy for us and that we see our lives as perfect.
That could not be further from the truth. Every single day in this journey, I have questioned God, I have asked Him why he won’t just take this pain away. And why, when he has all the power in the world in just one small word, is he not changing this situation? All he has to do is just ‘say the word’ and all of this would go away. But when I find myself questioning that, I have to remind myself of all the times God has been good to me and the times when he has changed unchangeable situations in an instance. I know He is good and I know He loves me. But that does not mean that I will not come against difficulties in this life, but in those moments I have a choice. I can choose to walk away from my faith and find myself through a terrible season, or I can choose to turn to God more than I ever have before, accept His peace and comfort and trust Him with all I have – which at the moment isn’t a lot – and wait and see how He turns this into good. Because I know He will, even if it isn’t the way I wanted it.
So I come home, I cry with my husband and I continue to question everything I have ever known.
As a side note, I need to tell you about something really significant that happened. I will be talking about faith stuff again, which I won’t appologise for, but if it offends you, just skip past this part…
On the Monday after our news, my sister-in-law specifically said that she would be praying that this cancelled referral would mean that we would have the appointment even sooner. Both Pete and I thought that this is ridiculous and would never happen.
Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday:
Not a lot happened except that I continued to fall into a very broken state.
I have often found myself in a place that a lot of people struggling with infertility have found themselves in. It’s a very sorrowful pit of darkness where everything is marred by this longing ache to just want a family. There are days when it is easier to climb out of this and smile and sometimes even laugh. But there are days when this pit is debilitating. These 3 days were debilitating. But I kept on going anyway.
Friday:
We knew we had to call Addenbrookes to make sure the referral had reached them. By now, I have come to accept that we will be waiting another 12 weeks for the appointment which should be only a week and a half away if only the doctors didn’t mess up the paper work.
My husband rang them.
He tried to call me but I couldn’t answer at the time.
This was his text to me:
…In short. They put through our referral quickly. We are seeing the lead expert in IVF at Cambridge Research (Addenbrookes). 10th March, 10am. Both of us need to go! That’s good 🙂
My reply:
Wow. So what about that initial/triage appointment that we didn’t need to go to?
Him:
Already done.
Me:
Oh… What?!
Him:
Yep 🙂 been ‘triaged’ already. Right sorry, got to go!
Hang on, hang on, hang on! So when our sister-in-law specifically prayed that our initial appointment would end up being even sooner…. That actually happened?! Not only that, but it has already happened??? An actual miracle.
So out of something horrible that completely crushed me, we now have even bigger steps forward than I could have ever even dared to dream or pray for.
We haven’t spoken to the consultant at the clinic yet, but we are assuming that because we are going to see the IVF specialist, that means that is the path we are definitely going down.
I am overwhelmed with how incredibly God has turned this situation around. I am terrified of what we are about to go through. I still feel a great sense of darkness and pain over this situation.
But this is a major step forward in our journey to family and I am excited! We are one day closer to holding our babies, however they come to us!
Journeying to Family 