Heartbroken

My phone rang just minutes ago, and it was an 800 number. I don't usually pick up unless I know who will be on the other end, but for some reason I thought maybe I should pick this call up.

Maybe it was because I just placed a whole boatload of Christmas shopping orders and I worried something was wrong.

Well, something WAS wrong, it just had nothing to do with the holiday purchases.

It was my contact at Snowflakes, who was calling with an unexpected update.

At first when she said that I thought that maybe the woman in the couple was unexpectedly, spontaneously pregnant, and I braced myself for this news, because that would be wonderful for them but I didn't know how I would feel about it.

I never in a million years expected that they decided to do a transfer and didn't call with an update until all was said and done (which I totally understand, my goodness the pressure of updating people on your cycle doings). And that when they went to thaw the 2PN embryos that were Bryce's sperm and donor eggs... NOT ONE OF THEM SURVIVED THAW.

None.

And just like that, the last dream of hope has died.

The hope that we held that our embryos could survive and become children to be raised by another family.

The hope that another uterus was the answer to our fertility woes.

The hope of any answer at all.

The hope for this couple, who was beyond sweet and we felt a strange long-distance kinship with and exchanged words of hope and condolences with over the past two years.

I feel like all my hard-won scar tissue has been ripped open and I'm raw and bleeding all over again.

I am devastated. I am devastated first for this couple, who took a chance on embryos that came from a couple who were unsuccessful at EVERYTHING related to family-building, who believed in our embryos and wanted to give them the chance we couldn't. I am devastated that NONE of our embryos worked for them. I can't imagine how it must feel (well, maybe I can, actually) to thaw 6 one-day embryos in hopes of maybe 2-3 survivors and be left with NONE, right before Christmas. To have fought for a transfer day over a period of years, and have it end with a fizzle.

I know what it's like to have an anticlimactic end to an era of cycles. I don't know what their plans are, but if they continue on they'll need to match up with another family looking to place their embryos and go through all this all over again, or start a brand new process, or make peace with a life without children. But to have things end with this loss of all hope instilled in those 6 tiny cells... how awful.

And of course I am heartbroken for us. There were no second chances. There won't be a strange, grafted family tree. We won't get to see any of our genetics play out in other children raised halfway across the country. That dream is dead. The hope that some part of us could live on and we could have some kind of relationship in the future is dead. And for the love of all that's holy, we couldn't catch a break with ANYTHING?

I am also heartbroken because I feel somehow responsible for this couple's misfortune, for their grief. I know it's not logical. I know that they chose us knowing that our material was "unproven." But we still feel like we set them up for failure somehow. That anything related to us and our journey was somehow tainted by whatever dark and noxious cloud sat on everything reproductive for us.

The odd thing is that yesterday I was unbearably sad. I can't explain it. I literally just felt like curling up in a ball and pretending to hibernate. I told Bryce I felt like a pillbug (or a roly-poly, or an armadilla bug, depends on where you're from). I just sat in my chair downstairs and cried silent tears. I sincerely wonder if the thaw failed yesterday. If somehow I knew that something was not quite right in the universe, that there was something to cry for, something big to mourn. I chalked it up to the holiday blues, but now I wonder if it was some sort of in-tune-with-the-cosmos mourning.

There's just so many layers to this loss.