My story

I thought I'd give a go at this, I love to read everyone else's blogs, I thought I would start my own.

So I'm 32, soon to be 33 and as my title implies very reproductively challenged. It all started in in June, 2001, we were married but were not in a big hurry to have kids, we had bought an old house we were remodeling, which took a couple years, we weren’t making much money, had big student loans, etc….Thanksgiving 2003 we decided to give it a try…we were so excited...4 months went by, then 9 months and I was starting to get worried something was wrong and then in August of 2004 we got a surprising beautiful BFP, everything was going well, I was feeling good, we were SO excited I had started telling people, I told my family at 8 weeks, the very next day I started spotting on a Saturday went to my Dr first thing Monday morning, she did an exam and sent me for an u/s, by this time I was bleeding a little more and was sure it was all over, did the u/s and there was our little bean, heart beating away, but measuring 6wks instead of 8wks, they were optimistic, I was completely clueless, but I knew despite the heartbeat, it was not good, the bleeding and cramping got worse as the day went on, they wanted to me to wait 2 days to come back, but I insisted on an u/s the next morning and my little bean wasn’t there any more.

We were so devastated, but still hopeful, so we waited one cycle and tried again, and the very 1st month we got a very faint positive, so faint I wasn’t sure it was real …I kept testing waiting for the line to get darker and at 6 wks finally tested with a digital which popped up “Pregnant”, the next morning before I could even make a dr. appt. I started cramping and bleeding heavily, went in and they took blood, I was pg, but the numbers were on their way down, again devastation but this time with panic – why did this happen again!! My dr. set up an appt. with an RE to do some testing for recurrent m/c, they tested me for everything under the sun and then I had a consultation with my RE, the only things that came back abnormal was that I have MTHFR – which is a gene mutation that can cause blood clotting issues and the way your body absorbs folic acid and they suspected I had PCOS, so we did more testing and u/s and they found a gigantic 8cm cyst on my ovary, they started me on glucophage for the PCOS and baby aspirin and folic acid for the MTHFR and birth control pills to see if we could shrink the cyst, they also did an HSG which was completely clear and normal, the cyst did not budge so they wanted to do lap surgery to remove it, I had to wait until tax season was over and had the surgery in May of 2005, they removed the cyst and also found some mild spots of endo which they removed, at my follow up appt the dr. was sure with all the “cleaning up” they did and the glucophage, that I would get pg easily.

So we tried and tried, 6 months went by and I was getting impatient, the RE suggested Clomid, so with great optimism we tried it for 3 cycles, with u/s and trigger shots, but nothing, took a little break and did two more higher dose cycles, at my last u/s which was by this time October 2006, they told me that I had another large cyst and would probably need surgery again and they would want to move on to injectibles…..I went out to my vehicle and bawled and bawled, I knew we couldn’t afford injectibles, my insurance does not cover fertility drugs and will not allow IUI or IVF, and I did NOT want to go through surgery again.

So two years passed and I hoped, and cried and prayed and started posting on community message boards for other girls like me. A very kind woman that I met offered me a very generous gift - she had suffered numerous miscarriages and was giving ttc up for good and had tons of injectible meds leftover, I of course took her up on this generous offer and set up a long overdue appointment with my RE. I had to start testing all over again since it had been so long, everything turned out normal and we were off and running. My first injectible cycle went great, I had 4 large follicles on CD 10 and triggered, but unfortunately it didn't work and we tried a second cycle.

The second cycle was frustrating to say the least, I took the injections til CD 21 and finally had some follicles big enough to trigger but sadly again, no pregnancy. So I am at another crossroad in my journey, do I try to scrape the money up for IVF, do I give up altogether? I have also thought of seeing A NaPro doctor, I think this will most likely be my next step.....you'll just have to stay tuned to find out:)