We started “trying again” as soon as we could after the disaster of the miscarriage. We had become pregnant the first month we tried last time so surely it would be fast again this time right? I remember typing into Google “chances of two miscarriages in a row”. The stats were in our favour so I thought well if we can get pregnant again then surely we can’t have any more miscarriages. It’s meant to be rare, having more than one in a row. By month four of trying I was totally obsessed. Ovulation tests, cervical mucous checks, back pain, headaches, two or three different apps tracking things and the monthly panic attack which were progressively getting worse. Every announcement of everyone else having children was devastating. The looming deadline of my niece being born was ever pressing. Pregnant women for me were getting harder and harder to be around. I remember thinking why do they deserve it and I don’t? We are building a house for our children, we are researching and watching our friends, we are babysitting and picking up all the habits and development of everyone else’s children, so why can’t we have ours? It was getting all encompassing and we decided it was time to book a trip and have a really good reset.
Travel is my number one hobby. I love researching everything I can do, learning about history, culture, art and seeing new things. I find it helps me understand people and then I can see things from different perspectives. It throws so many challenges as you and you have to rise to them or else you are stuck, not safe or heaven forbid, you miss out on something. It’s an amazing way of leaving your life at home behind and becoming a nobody somewhere else rather than the constant grind of daily life at home. I have to make so many decisions in my job that sometimes I get decisioned out and need to just go with it for a bit. Travel also helps with knowledge in pub quizzes which I’m rather partial to. We decided we wanted a long haul flight but only one and we wanted to take ideally less than two weeks off work. We are both self employed and holidays have the double whammy of the cost of the holiday plus no annual leave pay. We looked at flights from New Zealand (which are never cheap and always take a long time) and decided on Japan. We both hadn’t been before and we really like Japanese food (in NZ anyway). We thought it was a good mix of culture, history and cuisine. We also watch a lot of documentaries on the Second World War so Hiroshima was a draw for us. I haven’t done much of Asia. I went to India for a month during my final year of university and it really wasn’t my thing. A bit too dirty, corrupt, smelly and full of mystery food that might make you sick. Japan seemed like a good starting point as I feel like I’m missing out a large part of the world in my travel history because I started Asia with hard travel before I had done any travel. I’m a lot more experienced now and I feel I would enjoy it more and have less culture shock than the first time. Everything was booked and we were excited to be going. It didn’t happen.
We found out I was pregnant three weeks before we were due to fly out. I remember thinking I will get the dating scan to make sure everything is fine and then as long as my midwife gave us the all clear we could still go. When she called we talked about being careful of food especially seafood as part of the safe pregnancy diet and I asked if I could still go on the rollercoasters at Legoland and Disneyland like we had planned. She said it was fine in the first trimester (now knowing what I’m like in the first trimester going on a rollercoaster at 7-8 weeks pregnant seems so silly, vomit central!). I took a digital pregnancy test the Monday before we were due to fly out and it said 1-2 weeks pregnant. That was my first indication something was wrong. I remember thinking that’s weird, it should say 2-3 or 3 plus weeks. I wondered if it was a chemical pregnancy and our scan on Wednesday would show nothing and it was all just a dream / nightmare again. When we went in for our scan there was nothing there. Well, nothing in my uterus. The lovely sonographer who we have ended up seeing a few times over the last few years said she would have a look around. What she found was known as the “ball of crap” firmly stuck in my left fallopian tube. Ectopic pregnancy. I remember thinking, seriously? We were then referred to our local hospital and my midwife messaged to say “well shit”. We were referred up to the gynaecological assessment unit with thankfully a short wait. One thing I have to say is they really need to address waiting rooms in these situations. Half of the waiting room was losing babies while the other half had their babies there and were having assessments post birth. The last thing you want to be around when your “baby” is dead or dying is either a perfectly healthy pregnant women or a newborn baby. In Australia they now have legislation to separate people. We should be doing this everywhere. It just adds to the trauma.
When you have an ectopic pregnancy it is considered to be a medical emergency. If a fallopian tube “blows” then a woman can lose an incredible amount of blood and death is a real possibility although these days the mortality rate is coming down but it remains the most common cause of first trimester maternal death globally. I got put in a room with a young doctor and a rather large IV line in my arm just in case they needed quick venous access. In case it blew in other words. The registrar came and examined me for bleeding and any abdominal pain and deemed that I was stable. They then took bloods. Lots of them. And then we waited. And waited. We waited until almost 9pm until the consultant came and saw us to say the blood hormone levels were low and I appeared stable therefore we would try “conservative management”, also known as do nothing. They would repeat the blood tests in two days to see if the hormone levels were coming down and if they were then they would keep checking until it was back to zero. We asked about Japan and the doctor said oh no, you can’t fly. We went home with a medical “do not travel” and cancelled our holiday which was meant to make us feel better. The next day I woke up to blood and a sore left shoulder. The symptoms they told us to be careful about. We called the hospital who advised us to return and they would do more testing. I can’t remember much of that day. I was nil by mouth in case I needed emergency surgery and we spent 7 hours waiting for blood test results. I remember there was a stupid picture on the wall of my room that had an oriental looking teapot on it and I remember thinking well that’s ugly. My amazing husband sat there playing on his phone sitting on an ever increasingly uncomfortable chair while I got a bed. When the doctors finally came in we were laughing. My husband had just said “imagine if after all this we finally have a kid and they’re a cunt and we don’t like them”. The doctors advised us the hormone levels had gone up and we now needed to consider treatment options. Our options were 1) methotrexate – a highly potent drug that essentially depletes folic acid levels and I describe it as “dissolving the baby” or 2) surgery – removing the fallopian tube and whatever was in it. I remember being really upset about losing the tube. I had become pregnant twice off the left side. That side has always had issues. It’s the ovary that just keeps fighting. It’s been stuck to my pelvic wall three times, its had a precancerous cyst removed from it and its been cut in half and is still alive and clearly kicking. When I got upset one of the lovely older nurses explained to me that just because you’re missing the fallopian tube, it doesn’t meant the ovary becomes redundant. The tubes move to capture whichever egg is being released and it doesn’t have to be the tube associated with that side that captures the egg. Um what? The diagrams always show the tubes firmly attached to one ovary and one side of the uterus. Mind blown! We chose the methotrexate. In hindsight surgery may have been the better option but we were steered towards medical management and I personally don’t think there were any good options so we chose the lesser of two evils. Imagine if the right tube was stuffed and the left one was gone. I remember my husband trying to ask questions and advocate for me but the doctors weren’t really having a bar of it. I know they see a lot of abusive relationships but it also good to realise when someone is advocating rather than being controlling. I hadn’t eaten properly for two days, I was stressed and considered unwell. I needed someone to help me make a decision who knew me and I felt like we didn’t really get that support. After choosing the methotrexate we were then told the hospital pharmacy was closed for the night and we needed to come back in the morning. We haven’t accessed public hospital care much but we found the nurses were great, the doctors were overworked and often quite junior with the top layer of consultants being too thin and due to all of this, incredibly inefficient. We were also told that if we went for the surgical route I would be put on the elective surgery list for the following week meaning any incoming traumas would take precedence. So much for a medical emergency. The system really is quite strangled. If you are dying, its great. If you aren’t dying then it falls down.
I still don’t know if the methotrexate was the right choice. Did it work? Yes. Did I have side effects? Yes. Methotrexate is an interesting drug. They give it to you as a jab in the bum which sounds simple enough. What isn’t simple is that it can only be given by a nurse who is past childbearing age and for the first 48 hours you need to consider all of your bodily fluids to be toxic to anyone else. I had to ideally have my own bathroom, double flush toilet paper and double bag any sanitary products or tissues I used. This all sounds fine but what you don’t think of is that when you have an ectopic pregnancy and for me my second loss in a row, you cry a lot. My tears were toxic. This meant that cuddles when I was crying weren’t allowed. Even from my husband. And there were tears alright. I remember vividly him going out for a morning of work and sitting on the floor of the lounge crying hysterically. I don’t remember ever crying that hard and I don’t think I have since. Two in a row was just too much. One good thing that did come from the methotrexate was that we had a forced break. We had a three month period where we weren’t allowed to try because it would result in a foetus with severe birth defects and we would be losing another baby. Even at the time, those three months felt like a blessing. It gave us time to process what had happened, time to find ourselves as a couple again and maybe even the chance to go away although it would be kept local this time. We had no more worrying about cycles, trying windows, periods and symptoms of them and trying to predict whether or not it was on its way or not. We were tired. Our mental health was shot. Unlike the miscarriage though, the “ball of crap” had never been a thing. We weren’t attached to it like we were the last one. It was easier. The hard part was what the methotrexate did to me. That was the hard part of this one and it makes me question my choices. It also reminded me that at that time, we had two choices, both were poor and both had drawbacks. I remember thinking while I was in my mess on the lounge floor that I didn’t want anything. I didn’t want the house we were building, I didn’t want plane tickets, I didn’t want nice things. I just wanted a child. One of my own. One that was as least a little bit like me. And right now, for the second time, it was literally going down the toilet.
This is a story that I hoped one day to not be writing. It is far different to what I thought it would be five years ago but here it is nonetheless. I thought the story I would be writing would be about my endometriosis and infertility and the dream of becoming a parent. This version of reality is not what I thought it would be. We have been trying to have a child for almost three years now. I have always been told for I would have trouble getting pregnant and getting on the IVF waitlist as soon as I could would be our best chance of conceiving. Our first month of “trying” I had a meltdown because I wanted something, just for once in my life, to be easy. Funnily enough that month we became pregnant for the first time. I couldn’t believe my eyes when the test came up positive. I remember thinking to myself all the worry, heartache and monthly panic attacks about my fertility were just the doctors being dramatic and overly cautious. I remember feeling overtly frustrated that I had been told to be so worried. I had spent most of my 20’s fretting that I couldn’t find a partner left alone get pregnant. Dating was never my thing. The man I married, I told him before our first date that he would need to be direct with me as I just don’t pick up on these things. A guy at university asked me out for coffee three times in a week and I responded each time with but I don’t like coffee not realising it was the causal way of asking someone out. I swiftly progressed from the nickname of Powerchuck (referencing my horrible alcohol tolerance and my affinity for a toilet bowl after only a few drinks) to Flakey, the girl who attracted many admirers and noticed barely any of them until someone was physically too close then suddenly everything would click and I’d run for the hills. Knowing I had this ever ticking fertility clock, I was worried I would never find anyone. I met my husband (turns out for the second time) when we were 29. He is my cousin’s best mate and the three of us were feeling the need for adventure for our 30th birthdays and we headed away to Las Vegas to celebrate. What happens in America didn’t really stay in America and four years later we were married (no, not to my cousin, the best friend). We held off on trying to have children as we wanted to get our ducks in a row. Build a house, buy the car we would need, get a bit more financially stable. So, by the age of 35 I was feeling my “geriatric pregnancy” self and worried it would never happen for us. But then the two little lines came up and I thought wow, this is really a possibility.
I now know that miscarriages are common. We had our 6 week scan, everything was fine, then we had our first obstetrician appointment. My husband and I vividly remember sitting in the waiting room discussing the middle name options as we already had our first name choices picked out. We had a scan, it was 8 weeks, everything was going to be fine right? The obstetrician said in the most eloquent way of putting it, “I’m sorry but this is not a happy pregnancy”. My first question was “How do I get this thing out of me?”. The thing in me had died a week prior with no symptoms and I was still being sick right up until that morning. I felt like I had a parasite in me. The thing we had been thinking up names for less than half an hour ago was now a foreign body in me and I wanted it out asap.
I myself am in a medical field and sometimes things we have to do and say is so clinical. It’s like being a pilot. We have check-lists, we follow them, we try and fluff them up to make them sound like the options are individualised by at the end of the day, there are only so many options and a choice does need to be made. Our options were 1) natural – wait for a miscarriage to occur naturally, 2) medical whereby you take some tablets and it stimulates the body to expel what is in there, or 3) surgical, also known as a D&C when they literally suck the pregnancy out of you. Looking back, I wish I’d gone for option 3 but we didn’t know. We chose option 2, medical. It sounded the least invasive, had the fewest potential complications yet we could control when it would happen. What I wasn’t prepared for is the psychological impact it had on me and how painful it would be. It also didn’t fully work for me. We went in the next morning and I took the tablets. I immediately started shaking and the nurse explained that I would likely feel very cold but was running a fever. It didn’t bother me much but by the time we got home I had vomiting and diarrhoea (yes at the same time) and I was bleeding. Once the initial dose had kicked in, I settled down in bed and ate the entire box of chocolates I had been given from work to try and make myself feel better. They came back up soon after, no calories right? The majority of the tissue passed that afternoon. They were the most intense cramps I had felt and I wasn’t quite prepared for it. I have endo. I know pain. What I didn’t bank on was how much worse pain is when you’re mentally distressed as well as physically going through something really tough. I remember thinking to myself if I can’t handle this then how on earth am I going to ever have a baby? Maybe this has happened because I can’t handle it. Maybe this was the universe and my body telling me that yes you can get pregnant but you can’t handle it so we’ve taken it away. I remember people saying to me that this wasn’t my fault and honestly, I never felt like it was. I felt like it was a sign and that as much as I wanted children, maybe they weren’t actually in my plan. I did some research and found out that what I had was actually called a missed miscarriage. My body hadn’t recognised that whatever was growing in me was dead and oh did it want to hold onto it. Most miscarriages at this stage are caused by chromosomal anomalies and it felt reassuring that whatever or whoever this thing was had died before we had found it it was severely malformed foetus that we were having to chose if we wanted or not or we had a severely disabled child with a poor quality of life that you wouldn’t wish on anyone. Nature had made the decision for us and I felt reassured in that. People write miscarriages off as common, most women have them. That normalises them. But what those comments also do it belittle each individual situation. A miscarriage isn’t just the loss of a foetus or a baby, it’s the loss of a future. It’s what you thought your life was going to be. It’s the loss of what could have been. Who was this person you were waiting to meet? Who would they look like? Who’s personality would they have? What would they grow up to be? It’s so much more than a lost heartbeat and an afternoon of pain. I found it to be the loss of innocence. I have had grandparents, friends, people I have known die but this was different. It was the honest to God truth that bad things do happen to good people. It was the notion that no matter how good you try and be as a person, how healthy you are, how much you want something, bad things do happen and with no rhyme or reason. I lost some of my ability to care that day. I became less nice. I didn’t want to look after my body anymore. I didn’t want to look nice anymore. I finally could open my eyes to what the world was really like. A place that maybe I didn’t want to be in anymore.
I remember wanting to try again as soon as we could. The doctors said we needed a negative pregnancy test. Eight weeks later I still didn’t have one and a scan showed some retained placenta. Thankfully a course of antibiotics and a bloody mess in my pjs and a hotel bed in Auckland and it was finally gone. I thought to myself well you have been pregnant before and so it’ll be easy to get pregnant again. We had become pregnant the first month trying last time so this time it was surely going to happen again easily. We also had a looming deadline in my mind. My sister in law was pregnant with her first child which as the ironic and sometimes cynical universe had decided would be the day before my one had been due. All I wanted was to be pregnant again by the time their baby arrived so I had something to make it easier for all of us. I’ll admit, I found her pregnancy really hard. She was reaching all the milestones I should have been. She was having a girl which is what I desperately dreamed for. My parents were really excited and we got almost daily updates as to how she was going. I was spiralling downhill and my panic attacks were getting worse. I was becoming more and more obsessed. I thought if I could just be pregnant then I would be able to handle this. Looking back on those six months, I really don’t like who I was. I wished I could’ve been excited her for and my brother. My first blood niece was going to be born and all I could think about was myself and my own grief. I put pressure on my husband to “try on demand” and got upset every time he “didn’t feel like it”. Things weren’t going well. We decided before my niece was born that we needed a holiday. Something needed to change and we thought a break from our lives would help. We thought it would be a good reset and we were starting to get this idea in our head of maybe we need to look at what our lives would be like if we didn’t have children and come to terms with that. Who did we want to be if we weren’t parents? What did we want to do in our lives? Could our lives still be meaningful if we didn’t have children? I started to realise, although not fully until later on, that actually the most important person in my life is my husband. He is the best person I know and I had forgotten that he was going through this too. Not just me. We are a team and putting an “I” in it is the perfect way to destroy it.
We started “trying again” as soon as we could after the disaster of the miscarriage. We had become pregnant the first month we tried last time so surely it would be fast again this time right? I remember typing into Google “chances of two miscarriages in a row”. The stats were in our favour so I thought well if we can get pregnant again then surely we can’t have any more miscarriages. It’s meant to be rare, having more than one in a row. By month four of trying I was totally obsessed. Ovulation tests, cervical mucous checks, back pain, headaches, two or three different apps tracking things and the monthly panic attack which were progressively getting worse. Every announcement of everyone else having children was devastating. The looming deadline of my niece being born was ever pressing. Pregnant women for me were getting harder and harder to be around. I remember thinking why do they deserve it and I don’t? We are building a house for our children, we are researching and watching our friends, we are babysitting and picking up all the habits and development of everyone else’s children, so why can’t we have ours? It was getting all encompassing and we decided it was time to book a trip and have a really good reset.
Travel is my number one hobby. I love researching everything I can do, learning about history, culture, art and seeing new things. I find it helps me understand people and then I can see things from different perspectives. It throws so many challenges as you and you have to rise to them or else you are stuck, not safe or heaven forbid, you miss out on something. It’s an amazing way of leaving your life at home behind and becoming a nobody somewhere else rather than the constant grind of daily life at home. I have to make so many decisions in my job that sometimes I get decisioned out and need to just go with it for a bit. Travel also helps with knowledge in pub quizzes which I’m rather partial to. We decided we wanted a long haul flight but only one and we wanted to take ideally less than two weeks off work. We are both self employed and holidays have the double whammy of the cost of the holiday plus no annual leave pay. We looked at flights from New Zealand (which are never cheap and always take a long time) and decided on Japan. We both hadn’t been before and we really like Japanese food (in NZ anyway). We thought it was a good mix of culture, history and cuisine. We also watch a lot of documentaries on the Second World War so Hiroshima was a draw for us. I haven’t done much of Asia. I went to India for a month during my final year of university and it really wasn’t my thing. A bit too dirty, corrupt, smelly and full of mystery food that might make you sick. Japan seemed like a good starting point as I feel like I’m missing out a large part of the world in my travel history because I started Asia with hard travel before I had done any travel. I’m a lot more experienced now and I feel I would enjoy it more and have less culture shock than the first time. Everything was booked and we were excited to be going. It didn’t happen.
We found out I was pregnant three weeks before we were due to fly out. I remember thinking I will get the dating scan to make sure everything is fine and then as long as my midwife gave us the all clear we could still go. When she called we talked about being careful of food especially seafood as part of the safe pregnancy diet and I asked if I could still go on the rollercoasters at Legoland and Disneyland like we had planned. She said it was fine in the first trimester (now knowing what I’m like in the first trimester going on a rollercoaster at 7-8 weeks pregnant seems so silly, vomit central!). I took a digital pregnancy test the Monday before we were due to fly out and it said 1-2 weeks pregnant. That was my first indication something was wrong. I remember thinking that’s weird, it should say 2-3 or 3 plus weeks. I wondered if it was a chemical pregnancy and our scan on Wednesday would show nothing and it was all just a dream / nightmare again. When we went in for our scan there was nothing there. Well, nothing in my uterus. The lovely sonographer who we have ended up seeing a few times over the last few years said she would have a look around. What she found was known as the “ball of crap” firmly stuck in my left fallopian tube. Ectopic pregnancy. I remember thinking, seriously? We were then referred to our local hospital and my midwife messaged to say “well shit”. We were referred up to the gynaecological assessment unit with thankfully a short wait. One thing I have to say is they really need to address waiting rooms in these situations. Half of the waiting room was losing babies while the other half had their babies there and were having assessments post birth. The last thing you want to be around when your “baby” is dead or dying is either a perfectly healthy pregnant women or a newborn baby. In Australia they now have legislation to separate people. We should be doing this everywhere. It just adds to the trauma.
When you have an ectopic pregnancy it is considered to be a medical emergency. If a fallopian tube “blows” then a woman can lose an incredible amount of blood and death is a real possibility although these days the mortality rate is coming down but it remains the most common cause of first trimester maternal death globally. I got put in a room with a young doctor and a rather large IV line in my arm just in case they needed quick venous access. In case it blew in other words. The registrar came and examined me for bleeding and any abdominal pain and deemed that I was stable. They then took bloods. Lots of them. And then we waited. And waited. We waited until almost 9pm until the consultant came and saw us to say the blood hormone levels were low and I appeared stable therefore we would try “conservative management”, also known as do nothing. They would repeat the blood tests in two days to see if the hormone levels were coming down and if they were then they would keep checking until it was back to zero. We asked about Japan and the doctor said oh no, you can’t fly. We went home with a medical “do not travel” and cancelled our holiday which was meant to make us feel better. The next day I woke up to blood and a sore left shoulder. The symptoms they told us to be careful about. We called the hospital who advised us to return and they would do more testing. I can’t remember much of that day. I was nil by mouth in case I needed emergency surgery and we spent 7 hours waiting for blood test results. I remember there was a stupid picture on the wall of my room that had an oriental looking teapot on it and I remember thinking well that’s ugly. My amazing husband sat there playing on his phone sitting on an ever increasingly uncomfortable chair while I got a bed. When the doctors finally came in we were laughing. My husband had just said “imagine if after all this we finally have a kid and they’re a cunt and we don’t like them”. The doctors advised us the hormone levels had gone up and we now needed to consider treatment options. Our options were 1) methotrexate – a highly potent drug that essentially depletes folic acid levels and I describe it as “dissolving the baby” or 2) surgery – removing the fallopian tube and whatever was in it. I remember being really upset about losing the tube. I had become pregnant twice off the left side. That side has always had issues. It’s the ovary that just keeps fighting. It’s been stuck to my pelvic wall three times, its had a precancerous cyst removed from it and its been cut in half and is still alive and clearly kicking. When I got upset one of the lovely older nurses explained to me that just because you’re missing the fallopian tube, it doesn’t meant the ovary becomes redundant. The tubes move to capture whichever egg is being released and it doesn’t have to be the tube associated with that side that captures the egg. Um what? The diagrams always show the tubes firmly attached to one ovary and one side of the uterus. Mind blown! We chose the methotrexate. In hindsight surgery may have been the better option but we were steered towards medical management and I personally don’t think there were any good options so we chose the lesser of two evils. Imagine if the right tube was stuffed and the left one was gone. I remember my husband trying to ask questions and advocate for me but the doctors weren’t really having a bar of it. I know they see a lot of abusive relationships but it also good to realise when someone is advocating rather than being controlling. I hadn’t eaten properly for two days, I was stressed and considered unwell. I needed someone to help me make a decision who knew me and I felt like we didn’t really get that support. After choosing the methotrexate we were then told the hospital pharmacy was closed for the night and we needed to come back in the morning. We haven’t accessed public hospital care much but we found the nurses were great, the doctors were overworked and often quite junior with the top layer of consultants being too thin and due to all of this, incredibly inefficient. We were also told that if we went for the surgical route I would be put on the elective surgery list for the following week meaning any incoming traumas would take precedence. So much for a medical emergency. The system really is quite strangled. If you are dying, its great. If you aren’t dying then it falls down.
I still don’t know if the methotrexate was the right choice. Did it work? Yes. Did I have side effects? Yes. Methotrexate is an interesting drug. They give it to you as a jab in the bum which sounds simple enough. What isn’t simple is that it can only be given by a nurse who is past childbearing age and for the first 48 hours you need to consider all of your bodily fluids to be toxic to anyone else. I had to ideally have my own bathroom, double flush toilet paper and double bag any sanitary products or tissues I used. This all sounds fine but what you don’t think of is that when you have an ectopic pregnancy and for me my second loss in a row, you cry a lot. My tears were toxic. This meant that cuddles when I was crying weren’t allowed. Even from my husband. And there were tears alright. I remember vividly him going out for a morning of work and sitting on the floor of the lounge crying hysterically. I don’t remember ever crying that hard and I don’t think I have since. Two in a row was just too much. One good thing that did come from the methotrexate was that we had a forced break. We had a three month period where we weren’t allowed to try because it would result in a foetus with severe birth defects and we would be losing another baby. Even at the time, those three months felt like a blessing. It gave us time to process what had happened, time to find ourselves as a couple again and maybe even the chance to go away although it would be kept local this time. We had no more worrying about cycles, trying windows, periods and symptoms of them and trying to predict whether or not it was on its way or not. We were tired. Our mental health was shot. Unlike the miscarriage though, the “ball of crap” had never been a thing. We weren’t attached to it like we were the last one. It was easier. The hard part was what the methotrexate did to me. That was the hard part of this one and it makes me question my choices. It also reminded me that at that time, we had two choices, both were poor and both had drawbacks. I remember thinking while I was in my mess on the lounge floor that I didn’t want anything. I didn’t want the house we were building, I didn’t want plane tickets, I didn’t want nice things. I just wanted a child. One of my own. One that was as least a little bit like me. And right now, for the second time, it was literally going down the toilet.
Empty cribs and plane tickets 