Bite Sized Pieces ...

You know how it is when stuff happens, stuff that’s totally outside of your control, and it’s totally overwhelming … sometimes you don’t know how to deal with it?

Stuff like that has been happening to me for a few years now, and that includes, but is not exclusively with our struggles to have a baby.

My struggles with IF have made me a different person - that much is true.

One of my ways of dealing with things is to choose not to. If things get too hard, for the first time in my life I just put them on the back burner.

This may be a by-product of IF, I’m not sure?

As previously mentioned in ‘The City’ I have had many struggles with one of my sisters. Nothing is ever simple in life and if for the first time in our relationship I had problems with her after I had a miscarriage, well things would have most likely gotten back on track. But that’s not the case, and I have a huge history of problems with her, and following my miscarriage and subsequent ‘issues’ with her (bombarding me with talk of her baby), I took a time out. As anyone who has read my previous posts will know, since then I have twice had a mix up at my IVF clinic where they accidentally brought her records up.

So the background to that being that she has put it about the family how uber-fertile she – ‘Competitive Sibling Fertility’ if you will.

Now here’s the overwhelming part. Five months ago she sent a breathless email to everyone in the family with the news that she was pregnant with her second. Two months later she sent a follow up with the news that a heart defect had been detected – the baby’s heart rate was at 70 bpm – where it should be at 160 bpm. Medication was taken, this didn’t have the desired effect. At the time she and her husband were living overseas. We got occasional updates – that everything was holding, they were being closely monitored. They were hoping to get to 38 weeks, then she would have a caesarean delivery.

So we have reached a point where we email each other about ‘nothing’. [I mean I have sent many supportive emails with regards to the baby]. It’s progress.

They have since moved back to Australia.

Yesterday we got an email that the heart rate had dropped again – so at 36 ½ weeks she would be delivering. That is today. We haven’t heard anything yet.

[More background: part of our punishment was not to tell us when her baby daughter was born - we found out a day later. I have still not ever met my niece]

We have still never resolved anything.

I struggled with how to bring her back into my life, but couldn’t sleep at night. The thought of even sitting down face to face was too unbearable to imagine. I have struggled with this moral dilemma, and my course of action has been to do nothing.

It wasn’t an appropriate time to be mending fences – while she was dealing with this problematic pregnancy – and the issues were too important to ignore.

Like many of the difficulties (more to come), I’ve dealt with them in bite sized pieces as I’ve needed to.

Now I have reached a time where I’m not sure what to do.

I have been waiting all day on word from the hospital on how things have gone.

Wouldn’t you just love to be me at this point in time?

UPDATE: Baby boy has been born. At the moment mother and baby are doing well. I have spoken to them, and everything is good. Baby will need an operation, decision on when that is, is yet to be made.