My TTC story - part one

I stopped using birth control practically the day I met my husband. It was 1998 and I was 30 years old. We just knew we wanted to have children together and we both kind of figured it would happen right away. Six months later in January of 2000 I had a late period and found myself staring down into a glass full of urine at a beautiful, pink line. It scared me to death but I was very happy. We were going to have a baby

...or not.

At roughly ten weeks I miscarried. I wasn't pregnant anymore. I had no idea it could be taken away so quickly. We read the statistics for miscarriage. It happens a lot. We'd try again.

One year later it still hadn't worked so I started reading about charting and taking my temperature. It was an eye opener to see how my body actually did all this fertility stuff. There was no way it couldn't work now. We followed my cycle and I woke up each morning with a detailed report of what my body was thinking. It was like a daily board meeting. We continued trying for another year. Unfortunately it wasn't working.

In 2001 we went to our first infertility doctor, a woman. We had all the tests, postcoital, semen analysis, FSH, and HSG. The doctor recommended Clomid and we were optimistic it would work. It didn't work. Clomid was a beast and I suffered two cycles of headaches, mood swings and cysts. No problem we'd start injectables. First a test round to see how I'd react. I was terrified and hired a nurse to do the injections for me. I reacted well and we started a new cycle of the same drug, this time with a relase of the egg and timed intercourse. This sounded promising. This would work. Two cycles later it wasn't working. My husband's semen analysys came back with red alert status and we were told we'd be starting IUI with injectables.

The next two years were a blur of ultrasounds, semen fetching, cervix clamps, and crying in toilet stalls. After five failed IUI's we could finally be recommended for IVF. We would also be changing doctors because we were moving. That part was a little scary. We were afraid he'd make us wait a year by redoing all of the test. It was late 2002 and I was 34 years old.

Our new doctor required a three month wait to see but he was a spark of light. He examined our files. He stared disbelieving at the sememn analysis. "I can't believe this doctor did not recommend you for IVF after such bad results" he said. This is terrible. Why did she put you through all these IUI's? We shook our heads. Two years of pain for nothing. He immediately recommended IVF.

The first IVF cycle we were terribly optimistic. It had to work. I hired a nurse again to do the injections and we started on the long and difficult road that leads up to egg retrieval. Six days into stimulants I ran out of Gonal-f and ordered my new prescription from the pharmacy. Meanwhile the pharmaceutical company had come out with a new format, a 900 IU amp prefilled with Gonal-F, the forerunner to the easy to use pen. The nurse who came that night didn't read the instructions and I didn't bother to either. I trusted her to know what she was doing. She injected me with the entire 900 IUs. My normal dosage was only 150IUs. The cycle was a bust. I felt like I was going to die. It was the first time I had ever given up hope completely. I don't know why it chose that moment. In retrospect that cancelled cycle was really no big deal. At the time though it seemed like everything went black. I couldn't pick myself up off the floor.

One month later we started again. I asked my husband to start doing my injections for me. I didn't want any more nurses. The doctor referred to me now as the overdose lady. He often joked about it with me. He pointed me out to the other doctors jokingly saying "...and she survived!" I started all over and stimmed well, probably a little too well thanks to all that leftover Gonal-F in my system. I made it to retrieval and hyperstimulated with 27 eggs. Of those 11 fertilized but only six were deemed fair quality. In the end only three seemed relatively fragment free and the lab assistant who read our fertility report before the transfer informed us that maybe we'd talk to the doctor about the fragmentation problems next time. We went into the transfer with a heavy heart. This one probably wouldn't work either.

In my two week wait as I made lists of questions for the doctor. I did research on fragmentation, bad egg quality, ISCI and everything imaginable. Before my beta I started spotting a little. I was sure it would be a negative because I was very ill from the hyperstimulation. I had vomited for three days straight. I couldn't stand up. I was in a lot of pain. I should have gone to the hospital. I remember saying "there's no way anything could survive this!" But the test wasn't negative. It was positive. I was pregant! My beta was pretty low. It was 53 at 17dpo and I think if I'd known at the time I would have been more skeptical. But we were happy and the beta rose slowly, not always doubling but nearly. Again I didn't know enough to be scared. Ignorance is bliss.

I started miscarrying in the supermarket checkout line. Miscarriage is not a pretty thing let me tell you. I quickly left the line and barely made it to my car before my jeans were soaked. I had to sit on an old towel so I wouldn't destroy my car seats. It looked like a murder scene. By the time I got home the towel was drenched in blood. The worst had happened.

At the ER the doctor on duty looked at the ultrasound and said "Well, there is no baby so apparently you already miscarried or else there never was a baby." And then he added, "you're going to bleed a lot but don't worry it's just nature's way of elimination." We both cried the whole night. It was a nightmare. The next morning I was waiting outside my doctor's door when he opened his office. He took me into the ultrasound room and we were ready for the confirmation of our worst nightmare. Instead though he smiled. There's a baby in there. It has a nice heartbeat, listen. I felt like jumping up and screaming like a game show contestant. It was the happiest day of my life. I saw my son for the first time. What an amazing moment! I'll never forget that feeling. It was as if the last five years of greif and hardships had been magically transformed into a pocket sized, very manageable raisinette.

The report was not without bad news. The baby was fine, but his twin who had miscarried had left an empty sac which was encroaching on his sac. One of two things might happen. Either the twin sac would stay and suck the life out of the living baby's sac and he would die or the empty sac would simply disappear on it's own. There was a fifty-fifty chance either way. We'd just have to wait out the next ten days and see. We weren't sure how to react over the next few days. We were hinged between fear and joy. I talked with my mom though and we did some visual exercises together. She's very good at that kind of thing. She suggested we'd send in a mental uterus diver and get him to clean out the other sac. I concentrated on this image a lot over the ten days. It worked. Ten days later the other sac was gone and our baby boy was thriving.

I had a wonderful pregnancy and my beautiful boy was born in October 2004. We knew we wanted another one before he was even in our arms. This much bliss was worth any amount of pain.

Continue reading part two of my ttc journey.