Cancer Ever After

We started out as your modern day love story.  Boy meets girl online.  Boy and girl go on a first date with friends on speed dial just in case internet date is creepy. Boy and girl are thrilled to find out neither one is creepy, fall in love, get married and try to have babies.

This is where the journey begins and that neat little path of love, marriage and then a baby carriage would turn into years of trying for a baby and medical treatments to get and stay pregnant. You, see this boy and this girl happen to be infertile. My husband and I went through countless years of treatments and loss before before we managed to bring home our beautiful twin girls. Naively, before infertility, we expected to have a big family like the ones we both grew up in and dreamed of building a family together.

We lost our first child through an ectopic pregnancy and when we finally managed to get pregnant again, ended up losing identical twin girls. It turns out, that it was tough for us to get pregnant, to stay pregnant or to carry the babies to term. After more treatments and waiting, we were finally pregnant again – and with twin girls again (this time fraternal). We were blessed with our beautiful daughters after 20 weeks of strict bedrest, a myriad of complications and a liver that quit working while I was pregnant. Through the years, the tears and the treatments we’ve tried to reconcile ourselves to a small family and know that we are so lucky to have two children.

But still. We had that yearning that tells us our family is not complete.  We had room for one more.

On November 5, 2014 we received a text out of the blue that changed everything. “Would you be interested in adopting a baby?”

For both of us, our answer to that text was a resounding yes. We were thrilled to  to complete our family. Like most pregnancies, the path was a little unexpected, it happened a little sooner than we were ready for, and we couldn’t have be more excited.

Our son joined our family on March 25, 2015.

This blog started out about his adoption. Then on January 18, 2016, the bottom fell out of our world.

 I was diagnosed with cancer. My children were 2.5, 2.5 and 10m old.

That makes this a blog about life with all of it’s twits and turns. An unexpected twist, was our son’s bio brother showing up on our doorstep like an amazon package courtesy of DCF. We said yes to fostering him.

The infertility, the cancer, as well as the life that came before love and marriage shaped us, and in the end, took their toll.

Depression and PTSD took my husband from us on February 2, 2019.

When I started this blog it was about hope and the wish for another child, right now it’s about struggle and despair. This is about life. Beautiful, messy, complicated life. The joy, the rage and everything in between.