I've recently started a new book called Rocking the Life Unexpected, about a woman in her late 40s who never had children. The book is a combination of her personal story and self-help/therapeutic activities that she uses in group settings with infertile women. I will share some of these. The first 'suggested assignment' is to share your story. Most people know OF my story but few actually know it.
First, we've gotta go back...way back..11 years. Daniel and I got married in June, 2002. I got on the pill a couple months prior to our wedding because I was told my body needed time to adjust to the hormones and I needed to know my cycle so we could plan the wedding date accordingly (bow chicka wow wow..). Huge mistake! My body never adjusted and instead, I had to deal with puking, depression and constant crazy mood swings. We decided it wasn't worth it and I got off the pill before we ever even got married. From then on, birth control scared me and I refused to try anything else. We did use traditional contraceptives for a bit. After about 4-5 months we decided to stop trying to prevent pregnancy. We got pregnant after about 5 months but miscarried at 9 weeks. I was almost 21 at the time. It was a tough blow and I tried to get over it too fast, resulting in years of repressed feelings that surfaced in crazy ways. However, we opted out of the doctor's suggestion of birth control (again) and decided to let nature run its course.
The timing is a bit hazy but if I remember right, it was about another year before I visited my OB/GYN. They ran some hormone tests to test my ovulation and thyroid, and a semen analysis on the hubby (which all came back normal) but were hesitant to do much more due to my age (22), saying I had plenty of time. Over the next couple years, we continued to try to conceive naturally, although I did begin marking the calendar to time things right and charting my basil body temperature to watch for signs of ovulation. And I feverishly watched for signs of pregnancy and would take pregnancy tests after only a day or two of being 'late'. I was obsessed!!
I decided to get a second opinion and started seeing a new doctor, who was wonderful and took me seriously. She administered a 3-month supply of Clomid, a mild fertility pill intended to stimulate ovulation, even though I was already ovulating. I was actually afraid I was going to get pregnant with 4 or 5 babies - yikes! She then tried a progesterone supplement for 3 months, because early miscarriages like mine can be a symptom of Leutal Phase Defect, where the body is deficient of enough progesterone to line the uterus for the embryo to implant and live in. When that didn't get us anywhere, we scheduled an HSG (pelvic x-ray) which showed my tubes to be unblocked and my uterus, ovaries and fallopian tubes to be aligned perfectly. Lovely - so I'm broken and we have no idea how! But the doctor encouraged us, "many women become pregnant after an HSG because of how it 'cleans out the pipes'".....well, those women had more luck than I did, apparently. All I got was cramps and a neat look at what I'd only seen in anatomy books. Yes, these things intrigue me! :)
This pretty much exhausted our normal doctor's resources and expertise, and she referred us to a specialist. We immediately begun other tests and found out that our next option would be intrauterine insemination to bypass all possible 'road blocks', even though none had been found. We were a little unsure of this because we still preferred that it happen naturally - that, and this option reminded my husband of something they do on cows. And if that failed, IVF was completely out of the question, due to both financial and moral reasons - a belief I've since changed my mind about but the financial aspect remains the same. It is VERY costly - $12,000-$15,000 a pop and nothing is guaranteed. We had reached a place where the only thing left to do wasn't something we were comfortable with. By the time we might've been ready, we had no insurance and were in a different, busier place in life, and the months and years have seemed to fly by.
And that's pretty much it...granted, I didn't include all the crazy emotional aspects..that will come later. The last time we saw a fertility doctor was in 2007, which sounds like such a long time now! We've continued to give nature and God a chance to impregnate us. Haha :) We are now 30 and 31 years old, have dealt with infertility for 10 1/2 years and still have no idea how our story ends. But we've grown so much along the way and are becoming increasingly open to however things play out.
And on that note, since we have no kiddos to buy for again this Christmas, we are traveling instead :) Hey, it has its perks!
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