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Challenge: Infertility

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I am now the age of a grandmother (60s), but when I watched Dylan's story this morning on the Today Show, I cried for her and myself over thirty years ago. I am still amazed that we continue to deal with this "stigma" of having a miscarriage, whether it be for our first pregnancy or later ones. When I had my miscarriage, my doctor brushed it off saying, "One in four pregnancies end in miscarriage. It's nature's way." I have colleagues now who are struggling with repeated miscarriages, and my heart goes out to them as I say, "Keep on trying . . . it's going to happen!" But, of course, it may not. When I went through my painful miscarriage in my late 20s, the fetus was deemed nonviable, and I had to endure a month of carrying it around--at around twelve weeks, or the end of the first trimester. THAT was hard. The doctor wanted me to extinguish it naturally. My husband and I felt guilty, and he even said, "What did we do wrong?" Fast forward about five years later, we had finished our masters' degrees, and were ready to try again. But for months, we had no luck--each month a failure and a tear. We also felt the sting of not being able to have a baby with our second pregnancy; and I had assumed, miscarriage or not, at LEAST I had gotten pregnant--what was up with my body? We hadn't quite reached the need for any outside assistance, and I'm not quite sure what was available back then. Suddenly, after six months, we were pregnant. It's as if once our stresses wore off, my body worked. And it continued to do so for two more babies, with my last a month shy of my 40th birthday. So, I tell the struggling mothers, who I know, that these babies come when we stop worrying (which is HARD to do) and our stress levels are down. TRUST your body, if you don't have any medical problems, your natural instincts will come through. I even had a friend who went through the adoption process and by the time their baby was coming, she was naturally pregnant! She basically raised "twins"!! We all have so many personal pregnancy stories to share, and I agree that this stigma of miscarriage has got to stop! It is not our fault--it is the body's way of regrouping to work on developing one of the most complex, intricate beings of nature.

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