Episode 204: Healing Through Song: Nelly Joy’s Journey Through Endometriosis, IVF, and Grief

Songwriting gave me a really safe and beautiful place to tell my stories. Next thing you know, I’m out on tour with, you know, Jason Aldean, Brad Paisley, Blake Shelton, and so then it becomes my job, which is amazing and a beautiful gift, but also with that comes a lot of stress.

While I was out on the road, touring with all of these amazing musicians, I was extremely sick for a lot of it. You know, I had kidney problems. I became anemic. And I blacked out one time on the tour bus before a show. IBS was a terrible battle that would kind of come and go with endometriosis, and anyway, long story short, I’ve had several surgeries.

I had told a doctor a year before everything got really bad. I had said, hey, I think I have endometriosis, like my symptoms are spot on. And she just basically, kind of chuckled. And was like, all girls have hard periods, you know, my daughters, it’s the same way, like, here’s some birth control. So, you know, after that, doctor completely dismissed me. I thought I was crazy. I thought, well, I know I went in there so confident that this was what was going on, and she dismissed me to the point of like, making me feel like an idiot for even bringing it up. So, I just kind of put it my back pocket. And then over the next two years, I had so many UTIs and kidney infections.

I’ve never been on birth control, you know, we’ve never been careful, and, like, there was never a pregnancy scare or anything. And we’ve been married 12 years, so it’s kind of like, what’s going on here? Something’s not right, you know? I went to the fertility doctors, and they suggested IVF, which we did. Our first round of IVF, we got eight eggs and three fertilized, but one only made it to blastocyst. And those are, you know, those are normal numbers, and I didn’t know that like for a woman my age, and I wish someone had kind of prepped me a little bit more just for the fact that you can do IVF and it won’t work. That can happen.

I got pregnant naturally, and I just remember I didn’t believe it. I literally was in disbelief I was pregnant, so I told my husband, I’m like, here we go. And about seven weeks in, I fell to my knees in excruciating pain, and it was mostly on one side. On the right side, the pain radiated down through my hips and my legs. I’m like, basically in tears, and I’m starting to vomit, and I’m like, okay, this is another level of pain. And I just remember looking at them and I said, I feel like this is an ectopic pregnancy. They confirmed it was ectopic. I was internally bleeding. And luckily my tube hadn’t ruptured.

Experiencing that grief together has made us so much stronger, like it’s just added to our story and our love. I look at him and I as hard as it is that we haven’t had a baby yet, like I have my partner, I have my person, and I know that I can go through anything in life with him. The hardest day of our life, the darkest moment. We got through it, and we’re stronger for it.

When am I going to run out of tears? At what point does my body just be like, That’s it. That’s all you got. There’s no more grief left. But that’s just not how grief works. It comes in waves, and I’m learning just to give myself permission to cry when I want to cry, and if that means I’m out at a party with friends, or I’m talking with you, and I start to tear up, I don’t hold it in. I just excuse myself, and I’ll let it run, because tears are a healing mechanism. They allow us one way to help get that grief out. And if you don’t get grief out, it stays in and it’ll eat you up from the inside out, and that’s why I’m a musician and I make art. That’s another way I get my grief out – is by putting pen to paper, finding a melody, and even if I write a song that no one ever hears and I don’t release it, that was just me processing through my emotions.