Photo: H. Armstrong Roberts/ClassicStoc/Getty Images Rebecca was in high school when she met the man she eventually married. They fell in love quickly, and stayed together while she finished college, then grad school, always assuming they’d have kids together someday. But it was a medical diagnosis that led them to get married at City Hall, then to take concrete steps toward family planning.
From there, they sent us to an oncologist. He got the final diagnosis — a blood cancer — on March 15, 2007. That’s the same day we got married. We’d decided to get married while we were going through the process of being diagnosed; it just seemed like a good idea, with everything that was going on. But it was never the plan we would get married the same day the official diagnosis came in.
I think we knew each other so well that we didn’t need to talk about worst-case scenarios. We kept doing all the things we liked doing: traveling, seeing family, hanging out with friends. We bought a weekend house upstate. There was always the subtext that he might not be around, eventually. But we didn’t live our lives with that always hanging over our heads.
Making the final decision wasn’t something that either of us wanted to put on the other person, I think. Which was a problem, because someone had to make the decision. I knew I’d throw all my concerns out the window if this was really important to him. But I think he didn’t want to put any pressure on me — he didn’t want me to do it just because it was important to him. I had a hard time gauging how strongly he felt about it.
It was exciting; I was excited to get started. I didn’t feel too bad, just a bit bloated. I minored in chemistry and do a lot of science-adjacent work at my job, so mixing and measuring the medications was not a problem for me. But I kind of marveled at the fact that they send those medications home with just anyone, though. They don’t seem that easy to figure out, and it’s a lot of responsibility, to get it right. The stakes are high.
I didn’t feel that great, however. I was nauseous until about 20 weeks. I had really bad hip pain, especially when I was trying to sleep. I was dizzy because I had to take progesterone after having some bleeding early on. I stopped running, because I just felt like the stakes were too high — I know it’s fine to exercise while you’re pregnant, but after doing IVF, I didn’t want to do anything that could jeopardize it. I just did not love being pregnant.
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