What Does Motherhood Mean When It Never Comes and the Insight that Crystal Gained

We talk with Crystal about infertility, a miscarriage that changed her marriage, and the medical choices that followed. She shares how fertility meds led to a rare blood clot in her eye, how faith carried her through losing vision, and why she still believes she is worthy without biological children. 

• meeting, marrying, and waiting a few years to start a family 
• getting pregnant quickly then losing the pregnancy and grieving together 
• learning what infertility means after years of trying 
• finding fibroids, getting a procedure, and starting fertility medication 
• noticing severe headache and vision changes then getting an urgent diagnosis 
• connecting letrozole to a rare blood clot and stopping meds immediately 
• living through eye injections, laser surgery, and permanent vision loss 
• weighing IVF, donor eggs, and adoption then choosing peace with their life 
• leaning on prayer, church support, and long-term perspective 
• naming the hidden impact on husbands and partners 
• the reminder to read side effects and make informed decisions 

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:53

Welcome back to another episode of Beyond Existing. Today I'm joined by my guest, Crystal. We're going to be talking about uh infertility issues. In the U.S., the CDC conducted a survey in 2022 and 2023. And 4.5% of American women have used fertility drugs. Over the last 10 years, several million women have used these. Crystal is one of those women. She has volunteered to come on and share her experience. Crystal, welcome, and it's so good to have you join us.

SPEAKER_01 1:31

Well, hey, thank you for having me on. I'm so excited to be a part of your podcast. I've been looking forward to this.

Marriage And Trying For A Baby

SPEAKER_00 1:39

I know, me too. It's so good to have you. Uh Crystal's husband and I, we work together at a landscape company, and he just talks about her often and and speaks so highly of her. And he started uh sharing a little bit of of their story with us, and uh Crystal is is a woman of faith. Her faith got her through this, and uh she is going to share that with us today. So Crystal, in 2004, uh you and David were married, is that correct? Sure is.

SPEAKER_01 2:12

We were older when we got married. We had both never been married before, didn't have any children with anyone. We were really waiting on God to lead us to each other. We met uh through a mutual friend of ours. She worked at the place that he worked at, and she also went to church with me, and uh so she had a um uh they were having a company picnic at their workplace, and she called me up and invited me to go as her guest. And right before she hung up the phone, David had come to a singles event at the church, so I had met him, but right before she hung up the phone when she invited me to the company picnic, she said, Yeah, and that guy you met at church, he's gonna be there too. Okay, bye. And hung up, and so I knew uh oh, this was a setup. So we went out to the company picnic, it was at a same part. We had a really good time, and so David asked for my phone number after that, and our first date was in August of 2004, and uh he asked me to marry him in October of 2004. Wait, so what was the month again when y'all first started dating? August. August, and he asked you when in October of 2004, and we were married in December of 2004. Yes, ma'am.

SPEAKER_00 3:30

Oh my gosh, so you got Joe and I beat. We dated eight months before he proposed. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 3:36

Well, I'm telling you, on the second date that we had, I knew I knew he was the one, and he felt the same way about me. And so here we are. Uh, we'll be celebrating 22 years uh in December of this year. So it worked.

SPEAKER_00 3:52

Oh my god. Yeah, I told Joe what I said, you've taken longer to look at cars and make a decision over a card buy than you did proposing marriage to me. He knew, he must have known too.

Pregnancy Joy And Miscarriage Loss

SPEAKER_01 4:05

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So it's been a good good marriage, but yeah, we got married in December of 2004, and um, we wanted to spend time together as a couple. I was 30 and he was 34, and you know, because we'd never been married before, we wanted to spend time together as a couple, and so we did that. We'd been married about three years, and we talked about hey, we'd like to try to see if we could start a family. And we knew that we were, you know, older, but we had never no no one in our family had really ever suffered from any type of fertility issues that we knew about at the time, and so we didn't think anything about it. We just said, hey, we'd like to start trying, and so we did. That was in October of 2007, is when we had the conversation. I got pregnant right away, like sometime around the first of December uh 2007. I was so excited because I'm the oldest child and I have a brother and a sister, and my sister already had kids. David's sister had children, so we were really excited to have our own. I went to I I wasn't sure how to tell him. I had gone into the doctor for just a regular checkup, and she said something to me, like, I'm gonna give you a pregnancy test. And I'm like, Well, okay, I don't know why. You know, even though we'd been talking about trying, I didn't think it had happened. And uh she gave me the pregnancy test and she was like, Honey, you are pregnant. I said, What? She said, That pregnancy stick turned pink, just bright pink. So she said, It's just happened, but you're pregnant. And I'm like, Yeah! I was so excited, and so then I was trying to figure out now how am I gonna tell David about it? Because he's gonna be shocked too. And so I decided to go over to Walmart. I bought a baby blanket and like a little teddy bear, and I thought, well, I'll ease up on him when he comes home and sort of tell him about it. And he was shocked just like I was. Uh, he couldn't believe it. We were just so excited. Like I said, we'd never had any issues with any fertility problems in our family, and so we did what the doctors tell you not to do, which is we told everybody because we were so excited about it. I uh made an appointment with an OBGYN, but a lot of times they won't see you until like seven, eight weeks or so. I had gone in for like an initial visit, and so everything looked okay. I was about uh nine weeks pregnant, and I had been having some just feeling tired and like night sickness. I some women get sick at night rather than in the morning, and so I just wasn't feeling well, but I was at work and it was on Valentine's Day that year, February 14th, 2008. I gone to the restroom and I was bleeding, and it was bright red blood, and so I was like, uh-oh, this isn't good. So I called the OBGYN and they got me in immediately, and I had David come, so we were together whenever they did the scan and told us that I had miscarried. It happened probably around week seven, so that might have been why I had not been feeling so good, you know, around the the last couple weeks. Two weeks. That's what the OBGYN told me at the time, yeah. He did the scan, and he said it looks like probably about week seven is when the miscarriage actually happened. But I didn't feel the effects of it until the nine nine-week mark. We were devastated. I just cried like a baby. I just remember that day uh sitting in his in the doctor's office, and of course David didn't know what to do, you know. But we again we're we're people of faith, and we know that everything happens for a reason, and and God had a reason for that, and you know what didn't feel good at the time, but you know, afterwards we said, well, you know what, we're just gonna keep trying. And I don't know if this has happened to other women, but when you start telling people about what happened, you find out that miscarriages are very common. I don't know what the studies are, but you know, uh to make a baby is just a whole big miracle. There's just so many things that have to happen just right, and we felt like the Lord was protecting that child, you know, who knows what could have been upset or wrong with it. But uh anyway, that's what we said is okay, well, we'll just keep trying.

SPEAKER_00 8:27

My mom, she actually had a miscarriage between my brother and I, and she said she was only like six weeks along or eight weeks, but I think she was a little bit further because she actually passed the little baby, the little embryo. She picked it up out of the toilet. And she said, like she had a pick little tissue, you know, and like she said you could make out its features.

Years Of Trying And Getting Help

Fibroids, Surgery, And Fertility Meds

SPEAKER_01 8:56

I mean, it's just amazing, it's just a a miracle. And anybody that says that babies are not real or they don't have life until that is such a lie. That is such a lie from the enemy. God knew you before you were formed. And I exactly, yeah, yeah, yeah. So I they took it whenever the miscarriage happened because he I was getting ready to pass it when I went in. They took it, and so we never had a funeral or anything like that. And I mean, I just didn't even think about that at the time. Like, do you do that? You know, some people do, but we I didn't even ask about it. We were just so devastated about what what was happening. And I have to say that the OBGYN was so compassionate. He's from the area here that I'm from, and he was really sad to tell us the news. I mean, he just he really cares about children. He was very compassionate and kind with us. I went back in a couple of weeks just for checkup and things, and it it I was fine, you know, everything was fine. So he said, Y'all just need to start trying again. And so that's what we did. We tried for a long time. We did not realize that when you go, and I don't know when these kind of statistics or rules came into play, but but now if you go like for a year or more and you can't get pregnant, it's considered infertility. Well, we didn't know that then, and we just kept trying. Um, but nothing was happening. I was getting closer. I was 33 when I had the miscarriage, and so we tried that was 2008, so we tried till 2015, and I was getting closer to 40, and I really wanted to have a child before I turned 40 because I did I knew it would be harder to get pregnant after 40, it would be harder on your body. We hadn't been able to. You know, I prayed about that and I talked to my family members, and they were like, if you just keep trying and nothing's happening, and you don't seek additional help, you might one day look back and wonder, was there something else I could have done to get pregnant? And I thought, well, that makes good sense. So let me let me talk to my gynecologist and see if I can go maybe to a fertility clinic or whatever they recommend. She referred me, I talked to her to my to my OBGYN then. She referred me over to a fertility clinic, and David and I did some testing at the clinic, and they determined that it was me that that could be potentially causing the problem. I have these, what they're called, they're called fibroid tumors, and a lot of women have them. They're not cancerous, but they're you know inside the uterus. It could be that they're viewed as foreign bodies, and so when you know, we were trying to get pregnant, the sperm doesn't know where to go because of all these foreign bodies that are in there looking for that egg, and so it never makes it in time. They recommended a procedure, and it's just where they go in and sort of shave those down, and then he said, uh, you'll come back after the procedure and we'll check you, make sure you're healing, everything's going well. So I did that. The procedure lasted longer than they thought it would. It was an outpatient procedure, but it was supposed to take, I think, like an hour, and it took about an hour and a half. And the fertility doc came out afterwards to debrief us, and he told David and I that he'd been practicing reproductive medicine for twenty-three years, and he'd only seen maybe two or three other women in his life that had as many fibroid tumors as I did. How many did you have? I have no idea. He didn't tell me, he just said they're they're little, small, everywhere. They're all inside the uterus. And so he was trying to shave them down as much as he could, you know, if they were big enough to take out, he was trying to remove them, and so he didn't want to end the procedure early. He was just trying to get as many as he could to increase our chances of fertility. That's you know what he said. Anyway, I had the procedure, I went back in a couple weeks, he checked me, everything was fine, and that's when he suggested fertility meds. And uh he said, you know, you're you're relatively young, you're healthy. At that time, I wasn't taking any other medicines at all. I think these fertility meds could work for you.

SPEAKER_00 13:13

And we were so What were they supposed to do?

Headache, Vision Changes, Eye Emergency

Eye Injections And Losing Vision

SPEAKER_01 13:16

Were they supposed to help shrink the tumors or they were supposed to help improve your um ovulation cycle, balance your hormones out, and the tumors pretty much he had shaved those back, so he's thinking no barriers there, and if it helps you kind of have a good ovulation, then you'll you know be able to get pregnant faster. One of the medicines was named letrazol, L-E-T-R-O-Z-O-L-E, I believe, and it it was two medicines, that one coupled with testosterone, and he said, you know, this will help balance things out for you. And he said, I don't, you know, again, you're healthy, I don't see any issues. I think you should think about trying these to aid in in getting pregnant. And we were so really wanting to have a child, you know, I didn't read through the pamphlets like I should have, you know. I just wanted to have I I always told David, I want a little baby, I don't care if it's a girl or a boy, but I want them to have your pretty blue eyes and my brown hair, and I don't care how we get it, you know. And so we were just sort of thinking from that perspective, thinking with our heart really. And so I started taking the meds. This was in uh September of 2015, and I had uh been I I remember it because I had gone to a ladies' retreat with our church that happened at the middle of September, and I had gotten the prescription filled before I went to the ladies' retreat. It was like a weekend Friday, Saturday, Sunday, and I prayed about it while I was at the retreat, and I started taking the medicine Monday after I got back. It was the middle of September, and so I was on the meds for about a month, weren't having any issues, you know, just taking them every day with food, and then you weren't feeling bad or no, I had no side effects whatsoever, nothing. And then I'd all been on them about a month, so this time it was about the middle of October, and one night I was we were going to bed and I had gone to sleep, and I woke up out of a sleep with just a terrible headache, and I had suffered from migraines uh on and off with my cycles, so I thought that's what this was. It felt like that, and so I did the things I normally do. I take a hot shower and I put, you know, muscle rub on my neck and drink some peppermint tea, you know, all the things that people have to try to get rid of migraines, and it just would not go away. And it just kept continuing to hurt to the point that I was writhing in the bed in pain. And David was laying on the other side of the bed, he hadn't gone to sleep yet, and then I, you know, woke up and so he was kind of keeping an eye on me, and he came around and he's like, Something's wrong. I I think I need to take you to the emergency room. And I said, No, it's just a real bad migraine, it'll go away. And this went on probably for about, I don't know, a couple hours, two and a half hours, and then it started to ease away. So that's what I thought. Just a really bad migraine, never had one that bad before, but who hope I don't have any more. And then shortly after that, I would say probably probably another three weeks or so, I just kept feeling like I had something in my right eye, like a gnat that you know, it flown in my eye, or like makeup or something like that, and I kept couldn't get it out. And one night David and I were just watching TV and it just dawned on me, and I believe this was the Lord putting this in my brain, to close one eye and look at the TV with just one eye. And so when I did that, or put my hand over my left eye and just looked out of my right eye, I could see the TV screen, but there were just black blobs just kind of all around the outside of the screen, kind of like those uh ink test things that they do, you know, for psych psychological testing. That's what it looked like. And so then I closed my right eye and looked out of my left eye and I could see it just fine, no problems. So I said something to David, and you know, David, he's uh he don't say a lot sometimes, but when he does, you're just like, hmm. And so I said, uh, do you see black blobs on that TV screen? And he's like, No. What what's the matter with you? And I said, I'm seeing these black, like ink spots. And he goes, Honey, that ain't normal. He said, You need to get to the eye doctor quick. That was like on a Saturday night. I called them on Monday and told them what had happened. And I figured, you know, oh, it'll be a couple days or so before they can get me in. You know, the eye doctor's always busy. When I told the receptionist at the front end what was going on, she said, Let me put you on hold for one minute. She comes back in a couple minutes and she said, Uh, we need you to get in here uh quick. Can you come at two o'clock? And I was like, Oh, this is bad. You know, this is bad. None nothing, you know, nothing registered to me that any of this had anything to do with anything. I just had a problem with my eye, I didn't know what it was. I went in, they started their examination and looking at the back of my eye, and my eye doctor at the time said, I don't know how to tell you this, but you've got a blood clot, and the blood clot has lodged in your central vein, and that's why you're seeing these spots, and we've got to get you to a specialist immediately. And she said, and I mean like right now, like we're calling to get an emergency appointment for you, and you've got to drive to get there. And so it was about 30-minute drive uh from from here where I live in Statesville to Hickory. And I didn't know anything really about Hickory, like I didn't drive to Hickory that much. And what she how she explained it to me is when you have a blood clot in your eye, it's like having a stroke in the back of your eye, not not in your body, but in the back of your eye. I called David to tell him to say, I need you to meet me there. At that time, he was working at another landscape supply company that's up there in Catawba County, and so he was closer to Hickory actually than I was, and all he heard was the word stroke, and he beat me to the eye center. He was so upset about it. My blood pressure was through the roof by the time I got there because they dilated my eyes. Again, I wasn't familiar with Hickory. I actually got lost on the way there, and David's calling me, like, Where are you? You know, he he kind of heightened my nervousness a little bit. But, anyways, when I got there, they did another x-ray or whatever it is that exam that they do of the back of your eye. And the specialist that I had um at that eye office was fantastic, and I would recommend him to anyone. He said, Have you changed? Let's go through a list of things. Have you changed any medicines recently? And I said, Well, as a matter of fact, I have. And he said, Well, do you happen to have the pamphlets on the medicines with you? And I had them in my purse. And I said, Actually I do. And so I gave them to him and he read over this the rare side effects of letrozole. And he said, Well, right here it is. It they there's a rare side effect of a blood clot. And he said, This is what's caused your problem. And he said, You've got to stop taking these medicines immediately. You need to call your fertility doctor and talk to him, you know, but but you we've got to deal with this because if we don't, you could end up losing your eye, your eye pressure could go out the roof. And I didn't know all this about blood clots in the eye, but they can happen to people over 60. They do happen actually more than you think. Um, and the only way to treat a blood clot to the eye, you can't give it medicine like you would in your body, you have to get use an eye injection.

SPEAKER_00 21:22

So you can't just take a blood thinner and it dissolves it. No.

SPEAKER_01 21:28

And I said, So let me get this straight. What are my options again? And he said, Well, you can do nothing and you're probably gonna be in trouble because the blood clot is not gonna go away. I mean, eventually it reabsorbs back into the body, but you're st you're not gonna be able to see good, and we've got to manage your eye pressure, you could lose your eye. He said, The other option is blood clots are treated with an injection of medicine into the eye. So, you know that old nursery rhyme, what is it across my Heart hope to die, stick a needle in my eye. That's what we're talking about. I really did. And the needle isn't too big, but just the thought of a needle in your eye. But for me, I was like watching it, you know, just seeing it come to your eyeball. Exactly. Yep. Uh he said, I'll give you a minute to think about it. There was nothing for me to think about. I'm like, lose my eye or take an injection and it can clear up. And that's what we thought at the time. He said, most of his patients within two to three eye injections, he said, No, you'll never see 100% out of that eye, but it will break up the blood clot and you will regain vision and we'll just have to monitor it. But you know, typically after two to three injections, you're fine. So I said, give it to me. I'm sitting there and David's in the room and he's, you know, across from me. He's watching the whole thing. He does it, he's able to watch it. Well, the eye when the eye doctor put it in, you know, so he they have to numb you first with these little drops, and then he kind of makes you hold your head back a little bit. Because I'm like, is there a certain place I need to look? You know, what and he's like, nope, you just relax, I'll take care of it. Um, but he he put it in, he you know, put the eye injection in it, and he kind of leaned into me, didn't want David to hear him, but he said, I'm pretty sure I saw your husband wince. And I'm like, Well, I probably would too, you know, if it were me. Uh, but so yeah, I took it like a champ. And he said, you know, the only real downside to getting eye injections is that sometimes they can hit a a a blood vessel, and then your eye fills up with blood, and you look like, you know, Satan's spawn for a little while, which that did happen to me one time, and it was awful. That's what you look like with Satan's phone. Pretty much in the one eye. It did happen to me. Um, but anyway, so we started down that path, and that was in um November of 2015, is when I got the diagnosis and he started the eye injections. The eye injections had what's called an anti-growth hormone, which pres prevents blood vessels from growing places that they should not grow while you're being treated for the blood clot.

SPEAKER_00 24:14

So your body is trying to heal itself, it's just kind of an overdrive. Exactly.

SPEAKER_01 24:20

And the brain just says, Oh, there's a blockage in that vein. I need to get fluid off and blood in, so hey, eyeball, just grow some more vessels. And but this medicine tells the brain to not do that. Those vessels don't grow like in your behind your pupil or in your drainage system, so that the medicine can really dissolve the clot. The first shot that he gave me broke up the clot over my eye, and so I couldn't see anything out of the eye at that point. But I thought it would, you know, absorb back in and clear up. But unfortunately, it didn't work. Like the fourth eye injection, he said it's like we're not putting medicine in there at all. It's not doing anything. But he said sometimes it can be like blood pressure medicine. We just have to cycle through and find the right one that works for your eye. So he was trying to give me hope.

SPEAKER_00 25:20

Are there several medicines they can use to do this?

SPEAKER_01 25:23

Yeah, different varieties, different brands. And so we did that for um another probably five or six rounds. So at this point, one eye injection a month, no change. I'm still, and now I'm blind, I can't see anything out of that right eye. The last resort was to inject what they're like steroid rods, so they look like little pencil leads to me, but they're clear, and he could inject those in with the needle to go directly to the blood clot there and see if that did anything, and that didn't do it either. And we did that two times, two different times. So at that point, after about a year or so on treatment, he said, Unfortunately, Crystal, we've run out of options and there's nothing working for your blood clot. And I said, Okay, well, what do we do now? And he said, Well, I'm gonna take you, we're gonna stop the eye injections, and then I'll just need to monitor you to make sure that your blood vessels don't grow in places they should not grow, because you're not that anti-growth hormone, you're not gonna get that anymore, so we'll just see. And he said, Sometimes they grow anyway, sometimes they don't.

SPEAKER_00 26:39

So the dangers of these veins growing is that they could grow over your pupil. Exactly. Is that what you're saying?

SPEAKER_01 26:47

Yeah, and he said, into your drainage system where like your tear duct is. Oh and he said, if that happens, Crystal, it's very painful, and you'll know what's happening. But I want to tell you that this whole journey, I never had pain in my eye. Never had pain in my eye. I would take an ibuprofen before I was.

SPEAKER_00 27:08

What about the feeling that you had of something being in your eye? Was that still there or had that cleared up? That was gone.

SPEAKER_01 27:14

It was gone, yeah. Because uh uh I guess I don't know, maybe mentally now that since I knew what it was, it was gone. So yeah, I would take an ibuprofen before the eye injection itself, and sometimes it would be like a little sore maybe to touch, but that wouldn't last very long. And the thing is, is that it's not like a muscle problem. When you looked at me, you couldn't tell that I was blind, you know. I just look like I've got two normal eyes, but I couldn't couldn't see it all.

SPEAKER_00 27:46

I would never know.

Laser Surgery And Living One Eyed

Faith, Meaning, And Worth Without Kids

IVF, Adoption, And Choosing Peace

SPEAKER_01 27:47

Exactly, and it's funny because it messes with your depth perception. If somebody was handing me a piece of paper or something, sometimes I'll go underneath the paper or I'll drop the paper because I think I got it, and I don't because my depth perception's off, or I'll turn a corner too sharp and like run into the wall. And so I would tell people at work, I promise I am not drunk, I'm just a little off balance, and you it takes a while. And like if you're walking and like the street has like a steep grade, like it uh goes down a little bit, it just narrows from like a sidewalk to where like somebody can come up with a wheelchair or something. If I'm not careful, I'll trip and fall because I can't tell the depth perception, the depth has changed, so I have to really pay attention to that. Your eyes do for you all the time that you just don't think about. But, anyways, he uh stopped the eye injections and he monitored me for three months and no blood vessels had grown where they weren't supposed to. So he said, Well, I'm gonna monitor you for another three months, and then we'll talk about next steps. Well, the next three months, the blood vessels were growing where they weren't supposed to. And again, I had no pain, I had no idea that that was what was happening, and so I said, Well, okay, that's not good, right? And he said, No, it's not good. And he said, What we have to do from here is we have to do laser eye surgery, and basically we have to go in, and everywhere that those blood vessels are growing, we have to zap them with the laser, and it basically kills those blood vessels, and they will die, and they will stop growing, and then we won't have any more concern about them going places they shouldn't go. My problem was is that my brain had told my eye to grow a bunch, and so those blood vessels were everywhere, and so when you look at the picture of the back of my eye, honest to goodness, it looks like uh looking up at the stars at night and like planets and stuff. That's what it looks like. Exactly, because there's so many of them. That procedure, laser eye surgery, was an even bigger needle to your eye to numb it. And in this one, this surgery, you have to he sits you in a chair and he makes you lean back against the wall so that you don't jerk when he puts the needle in because it's big, it's a big one, and you just feel like your eyes kind of filling up with fluid, is how it felt to me. And then he wheels you right in front of this machine and you kind of look into it like how you would at an eye doctor's office, but he's on the other side. The one where they blow the puff of air into your eye. Exactly. You're looking that's it. Yep, you're looking right into that machine, and he's on the other side with the laser. And to me, it sounded like a um the pedal on a sewing machine. That's what it sounded like that he was like zip zip zip zip zip. That's what it sounds like. And he can only do it though for about five minutes because your eye starts to swell, obviously, because it knows, hey, I'm getting zapped here with lasers. Then you have to put a patch over your eye, and I had to wear it like for the rest of the night. So I didn't, you know, obviously I took time off of work so that I didn't have to, you know, explain to people why I'm I've got a patch over my eye, you know, look like Blackbeard or something. Uh but we had to do that a total of three times in order to kill all the blood vessels. And so now we're in uh January, February of 2017, and that's when he released me back to my regular eye doctor, and so I have to live with this my entire life, and uh I have to have checkups every six months with my regular eye doctor just because of that to make sure that nothing's changed, because there's scar tissue there now, so the blood clot absorbed back into the body, but it's all scar tissue, and I will I will never see out of that eye again. All of that because of that fertility medicine, and so you know, you asked me when we were kind of prepping for today's podcast, you know, what's the one message I want women to know? And it's that it's you know, and and maybe most women are not like me and they do the research, right? But I was just so excited to want to have a child with David that I just said, hey, I'm I'm gonna do whatever it takes. And I didn't read about those side effects. And you know, maybe if I had, I might have done it anyways, but I don't know. I I might have been a little more cautious, and so that's I just want other women who might be in that same boat that I felt like not necessarily that I wasn't whole because I didn't have a child, but I felt like I just wanted at least one, something to share with David, and something that we could, you know, be parents together. That's a that's a true bonding experience. But um, after all this happened, we said to ourselves, look, God's allowed this for a reason. And I never the whole time I never asked him why did it happen to me. I just said, I know God that you have the power to heal me and you can touch my eye, you can say the word, and I would really like it if you would do that. But if you don't want to do that, then help me figure this out, help me live, and also I'm kind of feisty at times, and I'm just like, just don't let it get in the way of my work, okay, God. I got I got another eye. But you know, when I when I think back about that, and this is powerful, you know, blood clots can go anywhere, they can go to your lungs. I mean, that's so close to your brain. Exactly. It could have gone to my heart, stopped my heart, it could have gone to my legs that that stopped my heart. I could have died that night. I could have died, but God put it in my eye because I've got another eye that I can see with, and there's a reason. I don't know what that reason is, but I I've been asking him, tell me what you want me to do with it. And then I've been praying about that for a long time, and then you called about the podcast, and I'm like, hey, if we can get that message out somehow to people that there's hope, and just because you don't have biological children does not mean that you're not worthy in the eyes of God. And it took me a little time to kind of work through that too. And we talked about adoption, but you know, at this point I'm like 42, and David's older than me, you know, he's four years older than me, and he's like, Crystal, there was a time in our life when we wanted to have kids more than we do now, and we've got a great life, and hey, it's all right, you know, we'll be okay. We did talk about um in vitro because the fertility doctor talked to us about that. We just felt like that was not for us, and the other issue for me is that my egg supply was very small, and I didn't know this, but every woman is born with a certain number of eggs, and you'll never get any more, and that's what you got. And I had a very low supply, and so the fertility doctor told me if you wanted to do in vitro, we wanted to do in vitro, we would have to find a donor, a female donor to donate her eggs. So I said, So what you're telling me is my husband's going to fertilize some other woman's eggs, and we're gonna try to plant them in me, but it's not really going to be my child, you know. I just could I couldn't work my mind around that and be if we were younger, maybe, but and it would cost five thousand dollars for the to find the donor and another five thousand dollars for the procedure. So it was ten thousand dollars, and you have no idea if it's gonna work or not. Uh, and they're gonna plant two, three, four eggs, you could end up with nothing, triplets, quadruplets, and we're just like this is too much for us at this age in our life. Yeah. So we didn't go that route, but that doesn't mean it's not for other people, you know. There's plenty of people that have done that, but yeah, we didn't go that route. Yeah, yeah. And then we thought about adoption as well, because there's a lot of you know, um, children who need to be adopted. But again, we were older in our life, and and David also told me, he said, Um, I want to be able to play ball with my boy in the yard and not, you know, pull my back out. And so we were we were like, yeah. So we just decided adoption wasn't for us either. So we were just pleased with with our life the way it was and just happy to serve God however we could, and and that's that's where we ended up.

SPEAKER_00 36:22

Well, it sounded like your pregnancy was was a kind of a miracle in itself. Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 36:30

Yeah, it was. I think about that too, just to be able to get pregnant that one time, because then we couldn't again after that. And uh that again, I mean I I believe that I will see that baby in heaven when I get there. You will and know that about it, you know. Yeah, and so that's exciting to know that you know it's taken care of. Yeah. Whichever it is, boy or girl, I don't care.

SPEAKER_00 36:56

Yeah, that's how I feel, I think, with my mom. I think, oh, I've got a little brother or sister in heaven that I can't wait to eat.

SPEAKER_01 37:02

Yeah, and and we found out that too. Um, my mother never had any miscarriages, but um, my husband's mother did. She had a miscarriage before he was born, actually. And so he's the oldest, so he would have had an older sibling, and he thinks about that sometimes. He's like, Man, now that would have been neat. And then my sister, well, I'd say probably uh maybe another five years after I had mine, she had a miscarriage in between her first and second child. Um so again, it it's more common than you realize, and as bad as that sounds, it was uh kind of comforting to know that there were other women who had experienced that. And they the women that I worked with and people at my church just loved on me during that time, and I'm so thankful for that and our family.

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SPEAKER_00 37:48

Mm-hmm. Yeah, that's so important. Something I wanted to ask you though is uh how did this transform your prayer life and talking with God? Because I know when you go through something so dramatic, it yeah changes you forever.

SPEAKER_01 38:03

Yeah, that's a great question. Um, it certainly increased it. I talk to God all the time, but I would certainly talk to him in the car out loud on the way to the appointments, on the way back. Like I said, I I really wish you'd just reach down here and touch this. Could could you hear me? Can you hear me up there? You know. That's what it feels like at times for sure. It does. It does. You know, our church, we've gone to the same church. We got married at that church. It's um Western Avenue Baptist Church in Statesville, and it we love that church, and our our family there prayed for us, and I I didn't really, I don't think I did any like Bible studies at the time. I just kept talking to God. Like I just talked to him more and just said, you know, you got big shoulders, you know, you can take it. And there were some times when I was driving home from my appointments, I was mad. Hey, are you hearing me? Just touch me, okay? Just say the word. He can take that. God can take that when you cry out to him. And and I did shed, you know, tears, of course, about it. And he knows all of that too. So my favorite verse in the Bible is Psalm 37:7, which is rest in the Lord and wait patiently for him. That's the first part of it. And that verse just kept coming to me over and over again. That's what I would say. Okay, I'm resting in you. I know you've got a plan for this. I still don't exactly understand it. And I won't probably till I get to heaven. But I know that um, you know, two years ago our nephew, disabled nephew, came to live with us, and if we had had a child at 40, it would be a teenager now, uh, maybe getting ready to drive. And I don't know that I could have handled that plus this. And so maybe God was preparing us for this because he knew it was going to be a hard haul for us. But anyway, he'll tell me uh one day, I guess. I got a few questions when I get there.

SPEAKER_00 40:09

Or you may be enamored by heaven and glory that don't care. That's right. And that's probably really what it's gonna be. Yeah. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 40:21

That's right. I appreciate the opportunity to talk to you about it. Hope that anyone, other women, can identify with that. Um, I will say probably the one thing I pray about more now than I did is that because you can't have children, when you meet new women or you go to an event and you make new friends, you know, what do they ask you? Well, you know, who you married to? What's your job? Oh, how many kids do you have? And when you say, Oh, I couldn't have any, you know, you can see sort of the room be, oh, you know what I mean? And so you have to be able to get used to that and be okay with saying that. But so I'll say, Well, but we've got our fur babies, or we've got a nephew that lives with us, or something like that. And so sometimes that gets hard because you you know, you meet we've missed some things if we'd we'd had that, but although my nephew's really making up for a lot of that right now, and that's another podcast, probably. So that's another episode. That's another episode. Definitely grew closer to God in that season and still going through that season, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 41:22

Yeah. Definitely. Well, Crystal, I thank you so much for coming on and I know gosh, you went through such a hard time and you know, losing your eyesight, and then you don't have a baby to show for it. I think that would be just one of the hardest things to deal with.

SPEAKER_01 41:41

But um Yeah, but we know God has a plan, and uh, like you said, we'll see that baby in heaven when we get there. Yeah. And um, we just try to put a positive spin on it. I'm so thankful that God gave me an attitude of positivity. Uh both David and I are glass half full kind of people, and so it got us down for a little while, but we got through it and God's helping us, and and you know, we just hope that we can help other people with that story. David doesn't like to talk about it as much, you know. Men don't like to talk about that, but I did not realize the impact that it had on him until right after the miscarriage happened. So this was kind of before all the the treatments and all. For some reason, we were at home and we were watching something on TV and it was some crazy soap opera or something. I don't even remember what it was, and it was a uh lady on there telling her boyfriend that she was pregnant and she was so excited or whatever. And out of the blue, David just looked at the TV and he said, Don't count your chickens before they hatch. And and that's when it dawned on me that this has not only impacted me and my body and the whole healing process of the miscarriage, but it's impacting him too. And sometimes women forget that that the husband is involved in this process and it hurt him just as bad as it did me. And I didn't really realize that until that moment. And so we he don't like to talk about it with people unless they ask, but if they do, he'll tell them things. But again, I would just say read everything before you before you go down that fertility road of of medicine, read read everything. Exactly, and make an educated decision. Don't don't feel pressured because you think your life's gonna be less than if you don't have a kid, because I'm here to tell you my life is crazy, and I don't know that I'd want a kid in the middle of it, honestly, sometimes. That's not true, that's not true, but you know, still worthy in God's eyes for sure.

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SPEAKER_00 43:42

Well, that's a good way to end this program that you are worthy. That is correct. Crystal, I thank you so much for coming on today. Thank you too. Appreciate you so much. Thank you. Hey, listener, before you go, would you please open your podcast? Scroll to Beyond Existing Beyond the Small Talk and tap follow and leave a five-star rating or a quick review to help this podcast grow. Also, you can go to the episode's description to send me a text if you would like to share how this episode impacted you, or if you would like me to share a message with my guest. Thank you for listening.