The Road to Beachbody..... (My story part 2)

After barely surviving high school with any sense of self worth. I moved away to college, continued running, even in the cold of Ohio determined to keep up my new healthy life. Stayed with my vegetarian lifestyle, that is until I met Mr. Mancave.  Possibly the original meat and potatoes man!  He  humored me during our courtship (why does that word sound so funny). Fast forward to marriage and our first pregnancy with the now teenage one.  We worked ward hard to stay active,  beautiful trails near our apartment we walked, I paid attention to nutrition and Mr mancave actually lost weight as I was gaining.

The pregnancy was relatively uneventful until the delivery and  postpartum. Complications occurred because of  missed diagnosis of toxemia and I ended back in the hospital with a 10 day old baby fighting for me life. This left me so puffy and swollen from all the water retention its difficult for me to look at old pictures from our baby shower because I look so terrible and sick.

We started rollerblading , running, hiking and just generally being healthy.  Health issues started popping up for me here and there but I was young and didn't pay much attention to them. They were "girl issues " I was certain everyone had them....   Plus we were young and had time.... nothing but time....  Forgetting that the last thing the Doctor said to us as I finally went home to our baby girl was that it may be difficult for us to become pregnant again because of all the complications.

Two years later however we were ready. Ready to expand our family ready to face our fears, which ended up being more real then we knew what to do with. I was eventually Diagnosed with Asherman's Syndrome and The next 6 years were spent in doctors offices,  surgery (7 in 5years) and reading about or attempting every diet or pill or homeopathic remedy (before it was the thing to do that it is now) that had even the smallest percentage of success in achieving pregnancy.

Nothing worked.

The cycle of hating my body continued. I felt like less of a woman, less of a wife, even yes less of a mother. The number of times people said to me oh it must be so easy, or oh you just have one? everytime I heard those words I questioned my value.

So decided to start crossing things off of my bucket list, and train to run a marathon. My body could not have babies, so I was going to do something that all my friends that were having babies could not do. Run, slowly, for a very, very long time. I started training in August to run the Florida Disney Marathon that January 2007.  The day I did my first 20 mile run and finished, very very slowly. I cried, no bawled hysterically. It was the first time in years I felt like my body was doing something I wanted it to do.  I completed Disney that January and Cleveland in May I finally felt like I had a little bit of control and maybe even just a little hope returned.

We decided to try and see what else the doctors had in store for us, just one more time and we were pregnant that July.

This is probably where the story really begins.....