Ayden's Journey



My name is Fallon, but most people call me Ayden.

I was barely sixteen months old when my little sister was born... too young to remember how I felt when my parents brought her home. But my mom loves to tell me how excited I was to have a new little sister to play with. Come time to breastfeed her, mom says I would run to my room, grab a baby doll, and mimic her every move.

I can't say that I wanted to be a mother even then, but for as far back as I can remember, I've known I wanted kids of my own some day. In fact, I had my future all figured out by the time I was in middle school. I'd graduate from high school, go to college (or become a hippy), and marry my childhood sweetheart. We'd then have six kids and live in bliss.

Most of my dreams have come true. But the six kids part hasn't been nearly as easy to make reality.

At fourteen, I began experiencing severe migraines. After numerous tests and hospitalizations we learned I had a lesion behind my right eye. No one seemed to know what caused the lesion, or what we might expect from it.

My neurologist put me on a regimen of different medications in the hopes of easing the migraines and various other symptoms. Shortly after we seemed to get a handle on those, we began to notice that my menstrual cycles were becoming increasingly irregular. When my period came at all, I'd be in so much pain, I couldn't move. So my mom dragged me back to the doctor.

My PAP-smear was abnormal. They thought I had uterine cancer. Within days, I underwent my first surgery. We found out later that I didn't have cancer, but the rest of my teen years were a blur of neurology visits, gyno visits, migraines, irregular periods, and a slew of medications to help with both.

At eighteen, I underwent my second surgery. This time, I had a cyst the size of a softball on my ovary. At that point, my gynecologist informed me that I had PCOS and cautioned that getting pregnant might be a challenge. I didn't plan to have kids right then, so he put me on the Depo-Provera shot to help ease the menstrual pain.

Two years later, my childhood sweetheart (SS) and I were married. I stopped taking the Depo shot in preparation for the day we decided we were ready. A year later, we decided it was time to start working on bringing home Baby #1. We visited with a new gynecologist who reviewed my history. After more tests, he diagnosed me with PID of unknown origin.

Even though the brain lesion was gone, the neurologist refused to clear me for IVF because of the stroke risk, so they put me on Metformin and Clomid.

After the first round, by some miracle, I became pregnant.

SS and I were over the moon, making plans. Our first baby was growing in my belly and we were going to be the best parents ever.

A month later, I miscarried.

Our hearts were absolutely shattered.

They shattered again when, eight short days after my gynecologist confirmed the miscarriage, my little sister gave birth to her second son. He was three and a half months early and had very serious medical complications. We spent months by his side at the hospital while he fought for his life.

At that point, my husband and I decided to take a break from fertility treatment. I couldn't take any more heart break, not while my sister and my sweet nephew needed me.

For the next four years, we devoted our time and energy to helping my sister care for her tiny little miracle as he battled for his life. You can read his story here.

I went to college and then to grad school. I volunteered faithfully.

My husband worked his way up the totem pole at work.

We never used protection, and we never became pregnant.

In late 2009, we decided we were ready to try fertility treatment again. We researched everything we could about IVF, and were making plans to visit a Reproductive Endocrinologist (RE) when I got sick.

The migraines were more intense than ever before, and they wouldn't go away. For days on end, my head hurt nonstop. When I fell in the living room one day, my husband had enough and dragged me to the emergency room. They called the staff neurosurgeon to discuss my history, and he informed them he wanted to see me first thing the next morning.

He was waiting for us when his clinic opened. By the time I left his office two hours later, he'd scheduled me for a battery of tests he wanted done before the week was out.

After a lumbar puncture and a MRI/MRV, he called me back into his office to inform me they'd found another brain lesion, in the corpus callosum this time. He warned me that they thought I might have Multiple Sclerosis.

We spent days waiting for further test results. When they came, we learned that I, thankfully, didn't have MS. But once again, they didn't know why I got lesions like this, what to do to prevent another one from forming, or what to expect in the future.

They had no choice but to treat me symptomatically. We had to get the migraines under control before they caused me to have a stroke or caused brain damage in and of themselves. And my life was being seriously impacted by the other neuro issues.

I began an entirely new regimen of medications.

My heart broke all over again when my neurosurgeon told me the risk for IVF was just too high for him to clear me. We'd had so much hope, and suddenly it was gone.

On top of that, the side effects from the medications were incredibly difficult to handle. I was so confused, I parked in the middle of the road the first time I drove. My husband took my keys. I hallucinated the strangest things. My nightmares were worse than ever. I had allergic reactions left and right. I was depressed. Angry. Devastated.

I pulled away from my friends, unwilling to burden them with my grief. And I did grieve. I felt like all the medication had killed the person I was, and I didn't know how to get her back with my mind clouded with drugs that wreaked havoc on my cognitive function.

I poured myself into writing, my books becoming the babies I felt I wasn't allowed to have. I churned out completed manuscript after complete manuscript, refusing to let the brain lesion and medication take writing from me too. My family convinced me to seek publication.

When they wouldn't stop pushing, I reluctantly agreed. Three months later, I had my first contract offer. Things started looking up.

My teenage cousin came to live with us for a while. I focused on being her mom.

When she left and my heart broke all over again, I stood facing that same dark hole I'd been wallowing in since falling ill. I hated that I'd kept myself there for so long, so I began pulling myself out, determined not to be the person that just gives up when things get tough.

I finished my graduate degree. I began working as a social worker. I forged new friendships. Published two novels. We moved into our dream home. I bought my dream car. We adopted a cat and a dog to join our little family. Took vacations when we wanted.

We were in a good place after years of uncertainty.

And then my husband fell ill.

He had a horrible cough and began losing weight rapidly. Despite my badgering, he refused to see a doctor. And then he started coughing up blood. His doctor told him to go straight to the emergency room. When we got there, they did an X-Ray, and then a parade of people entered the room, each asking a thousand different questions.

Had he traveled out of the country? Been exposed to asbestos? Done this? Been here? Traveled there?

No, no, no no, and no, we told them.

They told us they'd found a mass in his right lung.

My world tilted on its axis. I was terrified. I was angry. We'd gotten to a good place finally, and suddenly, the rug was pulled from beneath us. Worse, my best friend was sick and I couldn't help him as he underwent test after test. His doctor began preparing us for the worst. And then it came.

Non-Hodgkin's lymphoma in his lung and the lymph nodes in his chest.

We were discharged from the hospital in a cloud of fear just a few short hours after his doctors delivered that diagnosis. There was nothing they could do for him inpatient. He needed to see an oncologist and a pulmonologist.

We waited for our appointments for both. And when we got there, the world tilted again. The mass in his lung had doubled in size in two weeks. There was no way this was lymphoma. Once again, they began preparing us for the worse. Small cell lung cancer.

They sent us to see more specialists, who ordered more tests. All the while, he continued to get worse. He couldn't walk more than a few steps without gasping for air. He was pale all the time, gaunt. He barely ate. In a matter of months, he'd lost seventy-five pounds.

His medical team grew to include eight different specialists and his primary care doctor. While they debated what to do next, he became too sick to stay home.

We rushed him to the ER and they admitted him for the second time. His doctor decided to take him into the operating room the next day to remove several pieces of the mass to figure out what it was, and to try to prevent it from strangling the top of his lung. The mass covered the entire upper portion of his lung, killing it little by little. If they didn't figure out how to treat him soon, they weren't sure they'd be able to save his life.

He spent the next ten days in intensive care, slowly dying while his team did everything they could to figure out what was wrong. Finally, finally, they had a diagnosis. Pulmonary blastomycosis. A rare, severe fungal infection not indigenous to this area of the United States.

They began treating him, but the medication caused a severe allergic reaction. His doctor came in to talk to us, and told us they didn't have another option. Without that medication, he would die. So, we agreed to let him pump him full of various other medications to continue treatment. His kidneys began failing. But the mass in his lung began to shrink, too.

We made the decision to continue treatment.

His kidney function began to increase. He stabilized. His medical team slowly began to believe he'd survive this horrible infection.

He became well enough to come home with home health to continue treatment. Two weeks later, he switched medications. His kidney function returned to normal. He stopped losing weight, began eating more. The cough disappeared, and so did the blood.

As I write this, it's been four months since we almost lost him, and his health has continued to improve day by day. In less than a week, we go in for a check up to find out where we go from here.

We've had a lot of time to talk in the last four months. A lot of time to think, to evaluate, and to realize that we've walked through the fire, and we've both come out the other side a little healthier, and a little wiser.

We've also had a lot of time to discuss the future, and just as it always has, our vision of our future involves children. We don't want to keep waiting to bring our baby home, not when we both know intimately that the future isn't guaranteed for any of us.

We're both doing better health wise. We've completed our educations and settled into our careers. I will be 30 in 3 weeks and he is 33. Our home is ready for a baby. We're financially stable. There's no reason to keep waiting for the perfect time when, in reality, there is no such thing. We both know that intimately now, too.

So we've committed to getting pregnant in 2014. After SS's check up, we'll begin talking to an RE to evaluate our options. We both very much want to be pregnant and experience the entire crazy, beautiful journey. But if the risk is still deemed to be too great, we're prepared to begin the adoption process.

I'll be sharing our journey to parenthood here, alongside one of my oldest and dearest friends, Jayme, who is taking that same journey herself. Our lives have taken us in different directions, but our hopes and dreams and love for one another have never changed. And I can't think of anyone I'd rather share this journey with than her. Infertility unites us, hope binds us, and motherhood waits for both of us.

xoxo,

Ayden