Have you ever been overwhelmed by something after the fact? You go through something, and it’s over, but when it’s afterwards and you really start thinking about it, it becomes overwhelming?

In the words of Tony Stark…

My life feels like that right now. It’s 3:30 am and I can’t sleep. I’m dead tired because I’ve been dead tired since the surgery last week. But sleep seems so far away at the moment. Plus we have a thunderstorm about to roll through, so I just had to run around shutting all the windows.

I feel overwhelmed by what I’ve been through. David and I were talking about it a little bit tonight when I suddenly got a craving for pizza at midnight. Thankfully we had a frozen one in the freezer. Now that I can taste a lot more, I’m craving a lot of things. Anyway, David was reminiscing about all the crap I’ve been through with my health over the past four years, starting with the celiac disease diagnosis in 2012. But now it’s over and I’m better and everything will return to normal.

But will it?

This has been a traumatizing year. That’s the only accurate word I can think of to describe it. That may sound overly dramatic to some of you, but it’s really not. To go through as much as I did is nothing short of traumatizing, if not at the very least scarring. I remember thinking at the end of last year that 2016 was going to be great since, fertility aside, 2015 had gone really well. My health care folder would remain mostly empty except for receipts from my usual prescriptions and visits to my OB/GYN. We would have a baby. We would be a family. And for once, my own life could sit down on the back burner.

Instead, I wound up with infertility. Depression. A hernia causing intermittent ovarian torsion. A brain tumor. And an aneurysm.

Really?

I’ve missed most of the year of work. I’ve had countless doctor’s appointments. I’ve been put on enough medications that my pill box makes me look like I’m 80 instead of 30. I’ve had two surgeries, one in Atlanta and one at home. And one of them was a brain surgery, for heaven’s sake. Not exactly the most routine stuff to deal with.

Now, of all those issues, I’m still childless. Still depressed. And I still have the aneurysm.

Even though both of my surgeries were a success (at least so far), it’s still hard to think about them. It’s really difficult to explain what I mean. I’m glad they’re over. I’m glad they were successful, especially considering the things that could have gone wrong. I’m glad my brain surgery even happened, since there was a chance for a few days there of it being cancelled due to the discovery of the aneurysm. The recovery is rough, but I’m still glad I went through with it after the medications failed. It’s the only chance I have of a return to normalcy and the chance to have a baby naturally, which we’ve been trying to do for almost three years now.

I know I should be optimistic. But with everything that’s happened, how can I be? Look where being optimistic has gotten me before. I thought 2014 was going to be the year of the baby. Instead, I was diagnosed with endometriosis, which causes infertility in 30-50% of women who have endo. Two and a half years later, I’m not any closer to being pregnant than I was then. I’m really going to need a miracle for this to happen. And I have no reason anatomically to not be able to conceive. So it comes back to the tumor. If this doesn’t work now…I don’t want to think about it. We can’t afford fertility treatments thanks to my pay cut from being on disability (when I even get a paycheck- absence management has lost my paperwork so many times I haven’t gotten paid in over a month.)

I don’t even know where I’m going with this. I just feel like everything is supposed to be over and fixed and I’m worried about what will happen if it’s not. What if my aneurysm needs to be fixed? That’s another risky procedure. Will it make a pregnancy high risk? Can I even have a natural delivery or is the risk of a stroke too high?

This is all far from over. I may be over the biggest hurdles but there are still many chapters left in the book. Anything can happen.

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