Infertility is a hard concept to understand or wrap your head around until you actually experience it yourself. It really feels like you’re fighting a war, whether that war is with yourself, your body, some higher power — who the heck knows? But it feels like a war, a battle of some sort, and you have no freaking idea when it will ever end.

We still don’t know whether our remaining embryo is genetically “normal” or not, but regardless of its status, I still feel defeated. Having only one embryo make it to blastocyst seems like a failure after all the injections and medications, all the ultrasounds, all the bloodwork… everything. This whole process is really a mind fuck (and frankly, a body fuck if you have bad side effects from all these treatments) when it ends, and you have little to nothing to show for it at the end.

It’s why in many fertility/infertility groups, they call women who go through IVF “IVF warriors.” There’s even a non profit I found on Instagram founded by a couple who were on an 8-year infertility journey (they are expecting their first child in a few weeks, fingers crossed) called Cozy Warriors, which raises infertility awareness and also funds for couples who need fertility treatments but cannot afford them/have no insurance coverage. To raise money, they make socks… because according to ancient Chinese medicine, a woman must keep her uterus warm (and thus her feet warm…?) to ensure an embryo successfully implants and grows into a healthy baby.

So what does that mean — I’m an IVF warrior now? I don’t really know what I am. I feel like a fallen warrior if that is the case.