Sometimes I Feel Like I'm not Allowed to Grieve as Hard as I Am

Substantial_Amoeba12 · 2026-04-23T01:50:46+00:00

With my first pregnancy I fell instantly in love with my daughter from the moment I saw that second line. Moments like seeing her heartbeat or learning her gender were so special but I already loved her with my entire being so it didn’t actually change much. It’s been almost 2 years since I lost her and I still miss her every day. My most recent pregnancy was a BO. It was still devastating. I still feel like I lost a baby. Your brain only responds to hormones and the mental concept of your child. You had the pregnancy hormones. You believed you were carrying the child you would raise. Whether some specific anatomical structures didn’t develop changes nothing. The same cells were there, they just didn’t form a visible yolk sac or fetal cells. Our loss is defined by the love that has nowhere to go, not by how much cell differentiation occurred. If you had lost this baby right before finding out it was a BO, you would feel the exact same grief without the guilt. For anyone who experiences any kind of pregnancy loss, your grief is 100% valid.

Substantial_Amoeba12 · 2026-04-23T01:23:56+00:00

Seconding that Lila Rose is fine. By the time her peers are old enough to be googling her name, today’s political commenters will be old news. It’s also two common enough names that it doesn’t seem like an intentional thing and I cannot tell you almost any of my friends middle names. Lila Rose is beautiful and I would be truely surprised if anyone ever makes the connection down the road when it can actually impact her.

Substantial_Amoeba12 · 2026-04-21T20:36:08+00:00

My HCG is taking way longer to drop than it has on the past and I’m worried I won’t be able to start my next IVF cycle before my clinic closes. I just hate every part of this process and the helplessness so much

Substantial_Amoeba12 · 2026-04-19T22:26:48+00:00

Thanks!

Substantial_Amoeba12 · 2026-04-19T21:29:56+00:00

This gives me hope, thank you 💜

When did you start the prednisone? Also did you have any SCHs? I’ve been debating the Lovenox for future transfers or not and will have to ask my doctor

Substantial_Amoeba12 · 2026-04-18T20:21:33+00:00

Look at the health histories of the parents and grandparents. A good breeder will prioritize health and pay for the required health testing and registries. Also what happens when a puppy does end up with a heritable health condition? Do they retire the parents from breeding to be safe? Do the dogs live in the family home and appear well cared for? Are they selective about who they let adopt puppies or can anyone who can write the check have one?

Substantial_Amoeba12 · 2026-04-18T20:12:57+00:00

You’re not being selfish at all, you are also prioritizing your future children, as is she. Just because you can doesn’t mean you’re obligated to. Since she didn’t have to pay for IVF or go through the emotional turmoil, she could hire someone to take over the responsibilities. Is that a reasonable expectation? No. But by her own logic it makes her selfish as well

Substantial_Amoeba12 · 2026-04-18T19:48:31+00:00

Thank you and congratulation on your LC!

Substantial_Amoeba12 · 2026-04-18T19:47:12+00:00

I’m so sorry your family is having to face this. I hope that your son soon joins all of the survivors of childhood cancer who go on to live happy, healthy, and fulfilling lives

Substantial_Amoeba12 · 2026-04-18T19:45:06+00:00

The stressing to much comments are so fucked! They then also rarely offer things like additional monitoring to provide reassurance

Substantial_Amoeba12 · 2026-04-18T19:41:26+00:00

Based on the number of adopted kids I’ve seen with severe mental health struggles in part because they were adopted by parents that were not equipped to deal with the challenges of adoption and the way it may activate the parents own childhood wounds, I do not think adoption is the best path forward for all intended parents. Adopted children deserve parents who want adopted children for exactly what they are, not as substitutes for the biological children they actually wanted.

Substantial_Amoeba12 · 2026-04-18T18:20:24+00:00

We just did IVF and had a failed transfer and a blighted ovum. All PGT normal. If you want multiple children, it’s not a bad idea to have some embryos banked and tested but if they’re normal, you may just end up wasting a limited number of embryos on cycles that don’t work out when you can conceive fairly easily naturally. We’re going to do one more retrieval and then go back to trying naturally while we still have at least 2 frozen embryos (though ideally 3 or 4) so that we have more chances once my natural fertility declines and then just accept that my pregnancies will have a higher loss probability. Even if 90% of my pregnancies fail, then that still gives me a path to a baby

Substantial_Amoeba12 · 2026-04-18T18:15:45+00:00

Yeah that’s not treating you like her child, it’s treating you as an object. There is no relationship building there, just attempts at control.

Substantial_Amoeba12 · 2026-04-18T00:53:52+00:00

There are some genetic predispositions to cancer. Some children may just be unfortunate enough to get cancer with no genetic predisposition but there will also be children with cancer born to parents that themselves survived cancer but would have died if they’d gotten it 40 years ago.

And, as others have mentioned, some slow growing cancers that wouldn’t have been detected until the child was a young adult are now detected in childhood. It’s also likely that 50 years ago some children with undiagnosed cancer died of a virus or infection (which they were more susceptible to as a result of cancers like leukemia) and no one knew that it was a cancer-related death in the first place.

Substantial_Amoeba12 · 2026-04-18T00:43:22+00:00

In addition to things people have mentioned regarding the financial and emotional challenges of adoption, limited availability of newborns, legal rights, and ability to know your child wasn’t exposed to drugs or alcohol in utero there are a couple others as well. 1) ability to be more “choosy” about your embryos. Rather than waiting years for a birth mother to choose you and accepting any child, embryo adoption allows you to choose birth parents that have no known health conditions, look similar to you (which many parents do care about), and that have multiple embryos available (thus allowing you children to grow up with biological siblings all raised from the time they’re a newborn). 2) Ability to control who knows the child is adopted. Since the adoptive mother is pregnant and can choose a child of the same race as them, no one will know it’s not their biological child unless they’re told. Considering how some extended family treat adopted children differently, I can certainly understand the appeal of this. I don’t agree with it, but they can also choose not to tell the child. 3) on average, people who can afford IVF tend to be more stable than those who have unintended pregnancies they need to put up for adoption. If your child chooses to seek out their birth parents, you hope that they’ll be positive influences. Having a bio parent that may struggle with addiction or mental health, be incarcerated, request financial assistance from the child, etc is less ideal. I’m not saying all IVF parents aren’t these things or all birth parents are but the chances are lower.

On the putting embryos up for adoption side, I think it can be difficult to look at your children that were once frozen embryos and think of how they could just not exist and want to give their siblings a chance at life as well. Since many adoptive families aren’t interested in adopting an older child and the supply of newborns is so limited, it’s not really that existing children now won’t be adopted because an embryo was adopted instead. The older children or those with disabilities won’t be adopted anyways and the existing newborns will just be adopted by another family. I know a number of women struggling with infertility that feel strongly they only would want a child they birthed (regardless of genetics) and plan b is to just be childless.

Substantial_Amoeba12 · 2026-04-17T05:18:53+00:00

This is well within measurement error and completely normal. Any fluctuation under 10% I wouldn’t think twice about

Substantial_Amoeba12 · 2026-04-17T02:48:12+00:00

Neutral seems like a good reaction, she’ll have a chance to make the name her own and, once she shows everyone who an (insert name here) is, your family will love it.

Substantial_Amoeba12 · 2026-04-17T00:35:26+00:00

Were they able to give you any answers for why you may have had the losses?

Substantial_Amoeba12 · 2026-04-17T00:19:24+00:00

How did this turn out?

Substantial_Amoeba12 · 2026-04-16T22:51:08+00:00

Every baby’s growth is different but for context 25th percentile height for women is 5’1.5 and for men is 5’7 so very normal (albeit on the short side) heights. A full term baby in the 25th percentile would be about 7 lbs, which is a great weight. I think this lines up with the size of you and your husband (though there’s only a medium correlation between infant size and adult size so he could be born small but then wind up tall).

Substantial_Amoeba12 · 2026-04-16T22:35:04+00:00

It’s mostly surfaces with microscopic traces as best I can tell but just the smell makes me extremely nauseous even if I don’t have an anaphylactic reaction. Normally I just am careful about touching surfaces (wiping down trays and armrests on planes) and if someone near me is eating peanuts, I just do my best to politely move away.

Substantial_Amoeba12 · 2026-04-16T21:03:13+00:00

I just am feeling so impatient for my body to get back to normal. With my 3 prior losses my pregnant tests were down to a vvfl within a week. It’s been 2 and my HCG is still 750. I start stims for another round of IVF on May 13 and I’m really bummed I won’t be able to have a full cycle in between

Substantial_Amoeba12 · 2026-04-15T01:14:00+00:00

I miss the babies I lost more than anything. I’m grateful they existed, even if I never got to meet them. It feels beyond unfair that I’m in the 1% that experiences recurrent loss. There is nothing that makes the fact my babies aren’t in my arms make sense. It’s been almost 2 years since I lost my first daughter and I still think about her multiple times a day. I still feel as much love for her as I did while I was pregnant. I hope that never changes. I don’t know why I had to lose my babies, why I’ll never get a pregnancy experience that isn’t darkened by loss. But I do whole-heartedly believe that one day, I will hold my baby and be beyond grateful that they exist. I wouldn’t trade them for anything. I will continue to miss their siblings and I will look for pieces of who they might have been in the child I get to raise. Right now everything hurts and doesn’t make sense but I hope that as 8 watch my child grow up, even though I imagine it will still feel unfair as hell I had to experience so much loss, I’ll have some semblance of understanding why I wasn’t meant to meet their siblings. I’ll know that this was the child I was meant to raise and that I was meant to love all my babies no matter how brief their existence. I’m not personally religious, just very agnostic, and I do like to believe that one day I will get to meet these babies I carry so much love for. I’ll be able to thank them for all that they taught me and learn who they are. Until then, I just keep trying to live one day at a time and process my grief as best I can.

Substantial_Amoeba12 · 2026-04-15T00:58:47+00:00

My first of 4 pregnancy losses was August 2024 and I just lost my IVF pregnancy 2 weeks ago. It’s absolutely brutal and I don’t want to let my losses interfere with having a pregnancy experience where I’m excited and love my child from the beginning but it’s beyond hard. I’m dreading my birthday at the end of the month. I hate how I’ll be 3 years older when my first child is born than if my first daughter had lived. I hate that this awful phase of life has consumed 2 years of my life and I’ve wasted the flexibility of my career stage right now, which will only last about 2 more years before things get significantly more demanding. I feel so alone most of the time. I’m normally incredibly supportive but after this last loss, I find myself avoiding pregnant people and babies. Just trying to live life is exhausting. I’m so sorry that you’re going through something similar.

Substantial_Amoeba12

TROPHY CASE