Nerve wrecking. I think there is no better way to describe the day we are expected to get the first pregnancy results. We had three positives and what seem to be too many negatives. The feeling of a negative result is horrible. There is no way to describe the emotions that you go through when you get such results… All the planning and expectation, all the emotional, physical and financial stresses we have been going through finally come to an abrupt and undesirable end.

And it’s an end without explanation. A pregnancy has a certain statistical percentage of success, but we were not there. That’s the best explanation we were given. We are both healthy and capable of producing high quality embryos. My wife responds spectacularly well to the hormonal treatment and yet, we were not there…

And the question is, why? Why do we have to be on the wrong side of the probability charts? Why do we have deal with the unbearable pain of not knowing why? Why us? Why, why, why… And the worst part is that, in our case, there is no easy medical answer to that.

But then, what to do with the void? That void that you have been so eagerly trying to fill, investing all your energy on it? That void that will be automatically filed with joy with a simple “yes, it’s positive” response. That void that seems to have grown bigger with each and every “no” we’ve got…

Finally, what about the inevitable “now what?” For a guy like me, that has the tendency to always look at the bright side and plow forward, blindly believing that you learn from each experience in life, this is a particularly painful question. I feel static, incapable of any movement, stuck! So can I know what comes next?

Anyway, I do consider myself a very calm, optimistic and pragmatic person. But no matter what your personality type is, nothing prepares you for the “no”. I simply don’t know why, I don’t know how to fill the void and for sure I don’t know what’s next… My heart drops so deep with every negative result and with every tear coming from my wife’s eyes that I can’t even hear when it hits the bottom.  I just want the pain to go away…

But the pain never goes away. You learn how to live with it, how to respect it and, more importantly, how to embrace it (Yes, embrace it. I have learned, thanks to my wife, that it is OK for me to embrace the pain…) but it never goes away.

There is nothing we could have done to prevent any of the negative results. I am convinced of that. At every attempt, with whatever treatment or physician, we definitely did everything possible, at that time, to make it right… We’ve done it all: Do not move at all. Move a bit. Eat light. Eat well. Sleep well. No sex. Don’t take coffee. Don’t drink. Reduce sugars. Take the medication as prescribed. Don’t take Advil. Think positively. Don’t exercise. Yes, we have done it all…

But we still don’t know why we always fall on the wrong side of the charts…

And I don’t know if we ever will know. What I know is that knowing how to live with the unknown and with the uncontrollable is perhaps my biggest learning of it all. Too much knowing for something that seemed so dangerously easy when we were in our early 20s…

But somehow, I have learned how to cope with the pain as we try, and try, and try again.