Where have I been for the last year?

I started writing this blog within days after losing our 8th (or 9th) pregnancy. I was writing it because quite frankly, it felt good to talk about it. Dare I say it was almost as good as a cold beer on a hot day.

So I imagine you're wondering what changed. Well as I was reading thru my blog one day it brought back some painful memories and I could not contain myself. I made a knee-jerk decision and went the route of sticking my head in the sand. For a while, pretending that everything was fine was working. Since this blog brought on those feelings, ignoring it seemed logical, Spock logical.

Unfortunately, I still had reality to contend with, and after a few more losses, I realized that once again I was being an idiot (idjit as my wife calls me sometimes) and needed to get back to reality. I *KNOW* I can't run away from it, yet I tried anyway.

So yes! I will be writing again very shortly. I've decided to change a few things - firstly I originally thought remaining nameless would protect me but I realize that's stupid. I am open about this around my friends and family.

So a little about me: my name is Minh Tran. If you're one of those Facebook creepers and if you can find me on Facebook please feel free to friend me (make sure you mention this blog or I won't add you). Warning though: Minh Tran is the Vietnamese equivalent to John Smith. My wife's name is April, and yes, my wife is white (I married the whitest white girl as her mom said once). I may include a few details about my life in future posts, but I think i'm a fairly boring person so I don't see the need to write a bio or anything (yet).

My next post will be about the most horrific (yet very awesome) thing i've ever witnessed in my life: the birth of my son. I sometimes refer to him as our miracle child because that's what it felt like to finally see him come into the world.

Comment From Reader

I'm still working on Part 4 of my experience and hopefully will post it tomorrow. What surprised me about this blog was when I started receiving comments from people about what they had gone through and their experiences.

Talking about loss does not change or diminish the losses we've had - it helps us grieve and renews hope.

The individual will remain annoymous to respect privacy. I would like to thank this person for giving me permission to post it.

Thank you so much for posting this up. I know I'm not a dad and I would never understand what you have been through. Your story reminded me of my cousin. I keep on telling my newly married friends to not take things for granted.

My Cousin has been married for years and been trying for a long time. It just didn't work out. She went IVF. She went from working a great job to changing in becoming a retail office manager just so she can take the time off to go to the clinics to get IVF done. We're not talking about once, twice ...

Their family went through years of IVF, to a point where the husband sold his company to finance IVF. It's how much he loved his wife.

For a good 8+ years with no results, she just couldn't bear it no more. Having a women sit in those hospital 'aprons' and having to walk on the cold tiles was something she could never forget.

They finally gave up after 8+ years. Next thing you know, the firstborn of her baby girl was born. Followed by a boy and now her 3rd child just turned 2. She's turning 40 this year.

Thank you for posting up your stories, it's a huge wake up call for a lot of those out there who takes this baby thing for granted.

RPL - A Father's Experience (Part 3)

So now, we're into my experiences from 2007. Most of us remember events like - the Writers Guild Strike, death of Boris Yelstin, Calgary Flames not making it passed round 1 of the playoffs, and Chris Benoit killing his family. To me, the start of the year was with a painful reminder - the due date for our first pregnancy was Jan 1, 2007.

That Chris Benoit incident stirs up a painful reminder, for those of us that suffer from recurrent pregnancy loss, it is painful to watch someone else take their children for granted. On one extreme you have watching the news and hearing about someone who has murdered their own children while on the other end, you may be out at the grocery store and you see a parent yelling at their children.

Guys, think about it like this - you long for the Ferrari you think you will never have. You can close your eyes and feel the wind blowing in your hair and the sound of the engine at red line before you shift. Then you see someone who has one that clearly doesn't give a damn about it - the car has scratches on it, the owner has let it get dirty or you see a picture of a car cruasher destroying one.

That's sort of how it feels to watch when a parent loses patience with their children in public, or hearing about a parent who murders his children. The envy for people who can have kids with the anger that someone would do something so heinous to what you can't have overwhelms and even now can bring me to tears.

Anyway, back to the Regional Fertility Program of Calgary (RFP). The appointment for the RFP did not take nearly as long as they said it did. I remember a few details leading up to our appointment. The anxiety was almost overwhelming for me. Finally, someone is actually going to do something. Someone is going to understand. We're going to know why this is happening and plan so we can make sure it doesn't happen to us again.

It took about 3 months - our first appointment at the clinic was an eye opener.
1) There is hope - the wall of the clinic is lined with photos of the babies that their patients have had.
2) This happens to a lot of people. The clinic was incredibly full. There were well over 10 couples in the clinic at the same time as us.

Aside from that, the first appointment was a let down for me. The waiting room and exam room had posters and brochures for IVF like it was the equivalent to GM's "employee pricing event". There were unattended children's toys, parenting magazines, pregnancy tests in a kiosk for sale, and a sign that said "ABUSE WILL NOT BE TOLERATED". Apparently, recurrent pregnancy loss people like us lose their patience and abuse the staff. I had mixed feelings about the environment - they were trying to give us a sense of hope, however they could also be giving false hope to some couples. It was a sobering thought.

We met with a nice doctor - one of the first questions I had was "Do you have children?" to which the doctor replied no. Well, there goes the 'someone finally cares' idea was how I felt.
The doctor really didn't tell us anything the internet had not already did - this happens to a lot of people, we're going to have to get blood tests, April would need more tests than me and they're going to need to do an SA. I had no idea what an SA was and it was quite clear. My wife leaned over and whispered "Sperm Analysis" to me. For anyone that knows me, they know my verbal filter is almost always set to ZERO. I remember saying "Awesome! I get to jerk off into a cup!" to which the doctor replied curtly, "yes".

We received our lab requisitions and made another appointment to come back, paid the ridiculous $10 parking and went home. At this point, I was hopeful but did not want to set myself up for what could easily be the biggest fall of my life.

... to be continued in Part 4

Recurrent Pregnancy Loss - A Father's Experience

My wife just said a quote to me, "Real loss only occurs when you lose something you love more than yourself". My reply was, "To me, real loss is something you lose that you can never get back again." Lets face it, most of the times when we "lose" something, we end up finding it or replacing it and never thinking back about what we had.

I wanted to talk about something that has been very hard for me to talk about. I originally was going to post some Facebook notes about this but my wife and a friend convinced me to post it as a blog instead. I wanted to write about my experience, what I was thinking, what I remember about it, how I felt, and how I handled it.

I needed to set a few things straight before I got into my experiences:
- I am not looking for pity
- I am not looking for people to tell me they are 'sorry' about what we went through

What I am looking for is:
- People to think twice before saying, "when are you going to have children?"
- Awareness that this happens to a lot of people.
- Men are affected and hurt by loss too. Sorry ladies, we are not robots.

I married my wife on March 25th, 2006. One of the many reasons we got married was we wanted to have kids. I'll admit it, I was really looking forward to being a dad. What I was looking forward to the most was a son or daughter to come running to the door when you get home from work screaming 'DADDY'!

Less than 1 month later (around the 3rd week of April 2006) I was woken up by my wife.

There are moments in one's life that you'll never forget - this was one of them. She woke me up at 6am on a Saturday morning shoving a stick in my face and screaming "DO YOU SEE A LINE?? DO YOU SEE A LINE??". Naturally being a guy and having no idea what to look for, I said yes and pointed to the control line. After being corrected (angrily), I found out that there was a very faint line next to it. I learned to tell how if a pregnancy a test was positive or not.

For those that have found out their significant other was pregnant, and assuming you were looking forward to having kids and being happy about it - you'd probably agree with me that it's very hard to describe how you feel. The typical guy answer is "HAPPY" and in my case it was "VERY HAPPY". The words / phrases that describe how I felt were:

- Happy, hope, joy (variants of "VERY HAPPY")
- Pride, proud (I don't know how you can not feel pride or be proud to be a parent)
- Concern (ie: do we make enough money?)
- Fear (do we have to get a minivan now? Am I going to have to drive it?)
- Boy or girl? Should we find out? What if my wife doesn't agree with me?
- How can I change the world to give my child a better world to live in than what I grew up in?

I promptly called my friends and family to tell them I was going to be a dad! It was on my MSN title and my facebook status. Seriously, if I had thought about buying a newspaper ad for it, I probably would've done it. I was ontop of the world!

After that, it was kind of a mixture of letting people know and busy at work for the next few weeks. The days after the first one that stood out for me were:

May 10th, 2006 - I asked my wife if sex while she was pregnant was bad. She said no, I wasn't sure if it was safe so we didn't. No birthday sex for me.
May 11th 2006 - I was at work and was planning for an afternoon meeting with a Samsung rep. I got a call from my wife - she was crying. We had lost our baby.

... to be continued in Part 2.