I had a very difficult time getting pregnant and overall the process was traumatic. It took a few years for my first positive pregnancy test that occurred in November of 2019, but that was immediately followed by a chemical miscarriage within a week. This initially was a devastation; however, I still had hope that a baby would come.
The following year in August 2020 I was excited to be pregnant again and was awaiting my 8 week visit to the doctor when a miscarriage occurred around 7 weeks. This was incredibly hard because we were in the middle of Covid, and I felt alone with no support from others around me. This loss did cause me and my husband to seek advice from a fertility doctor.
Within a month of meeting this doctor in November of 2020 before we even began treatments, we were happy to be pregnant again. Immediately we had labs drawn to make sure this was a viable pregnancy. They noticed my progesterone was low, and I had to take injections daily to keep the pregnancy going. From the start, this was not a good outlook and by 7 weeks again the pregnancy resulted in a miscarriage.
At the same time my father passed away from a combination of Covid and dementia making the process of losing another baby and my father at the same time incredibly painful. I have always been a daddy’s girl and would have loved to have named my child David after him. The ordeal of having a funeral during Covid and closing out my father’s accounts took a toll on me, putting the fertility process on hold for the next year.
By the winter of 2021, I was in a better space mentally to officially begin fertility treatments. For the next few months, the doctors completed a barrage of tests on me and my husband. The results came back with unexplained infertility. According to the doctor, there was no medical reasoning to explain why the miscarriages and fertility issues were happening. She suggested that we should go the route of having an IUI done so she could control how the pregnancy happened. This process was one of the most frustrating times in my life because of how helpless I felt. Everyday my husband would inject me with hormone shots in hopes of a miracle baby. My life was on hold during this time because the shots were not only uncomfortable causing weight gain and severe bloating, but had to be done at the same time everyday so turning down plans became common. I am very extroverted and love keeping myself busy, so this was hard to not be able to hang out with my friends and family, especially just as things were getting back to normal post Covid. Also, I am a high school history teacher who loves spending time with my students and attending their games, events or activities, so having to turn them down was saddening to me.
Three rounds of IUI unfortunately did not work so my doctor decided to try one more time but with increasing hormones. In June of 2022, we got pregnant one last time, but this time with triplets. My husband and I were overjoyed, and I started thinking of names for three children. Besides David, my husband’s name is Alberto so it would have been fun to continue the tradition of naming children with “O” as the last letter. We thought of names like Fernando, meaning adventurer, or Alejandro, meaning defender. As for girls, we loved the name Estrella, meaning star in Spanish. We had a party to tell all of our friends and family that the treatment was successful since we had been sharing the process with everybody the whole time. That is one of things about fertility that can be harmful- everybody wants to know how the process is going. They are praying for you, which is nice, but it puts you out in the open for a lot of questioning and inquiries about how the process is going. If it doesn’t go well, people sometimes do not know how to react.
However, I remember the party so vividly because it was one of the happiest days of my life. I got the joy of being a mother-to-be for just one day. The next day at our ultrasound we got the devastating news that the triplets stopped growing and that I was going to miscarry again. This was the most painful and drawn out process ever. For the next two weeks, I went in daily for ultrasounds waiting to see when I would miscarry. When it eventually happened at 11 weeks, I felt like it would never end because the actual miscarriage was prolonged due to it being triplets. It is something that I would never wish on anybody because the pain was so intense and horrible. With the help of my friends and family, I was able to get love and support during this traumatic time. I credit specifically the love of my husband and the overwhelming encouragement from my students to get through this time.
We stopped fertility treatment after that because it was too costly and emotionally I could not do it anymore. The biggest thing I want people to know about loss is that you have to find your own rainbow at the end of this journey. For some, it is an actual miracle rainbow baby. For others, it might be adoption or fostering. Yet for some the journey ends with a “no” and your rainbow are the people who never left your side during the process.
Four years later, I have realized that my students are my rainbow children. I pour a lot of unconditional love to my students. They love to call me “Mama Rios,” and know that I am always there for them. I have come to realize that even though I have not had a biological child, I have had 1000s of my “adopted” children that have been affected by me and will have 1000s more to know my love. The times that were the hardest is when I got the most amazing support from them and those around me. If I dwell on what I did not get in life, I will look past the biggest “yes” I received which are my students.
Photos taken by Roberto Correa Damian.
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