Beth and Dwayne
I had always wanted to be a mom from the time I was tiny (my mom says from birth) so following the natural progression of things, a year after Dwayne and I married I went off the pill and we started trying to get pregnant. This was in September of 1999. I remember the date because it was labor day weekend and the weekend our friends got married and I was about to turn 23 years old so still a spring chicken according to most.
We met with no success at all, month after month of failures and the stress began to mount. The questions of why is this happening, and the timing and monitoring of everything really put a damper on our life in the bedroom that truly has yet to recover.
In August of 2000 we bought our first house hoping that we would soon be able to fill it with the laughter of children but still no luck. In September I saw my ob/gyn and mentioned that we had been TTC for 12 months. His response was that I had just turned 24 and to give it six more months then we’d test. However, over the next few months the stress became so unbearable it was affecting our relationship, my job, and every other aspect of our lives. In December I went back to the doctor asking for testing and we did.
2001 arrived and what a horrible year it was. Not just in our country but our lives seemed to go right with that track. Since I was about mid-cycle when I went in, the doctor scheduled a post coital for me and a semen analysis for Dwayne. Both bore horrible news. The post coital came first and the doctor found no sperm. He questioned the validity of the test, did we do everything as he had said, etc. He said that in his 30+ years of practice he had only seen one man with zero sperm and that something must have gone wrong with the test. The semen analysis came back with the same results. After visiting a urologist, it was found that a birth defect had caused Dwayne to be born without the vas deferens. While this can be correctable in some, it was not in Dwayne. Our meeting with my ob/gyn for a referral to an infertility specialist went great. He was very understanding and totally open about our options. We discussed the option of doing ICSI & IVF (which was our only hope of having both of our biological children), adoption, and then he dropped in the option of artificial insemination using donor sperm. Of all of our options he mentioned that due to Dwayne’s condition (which is hereditary) our chances of having a baby with cystic fibrosis was pretty high especially if we used ICSI for fertilization as the sperm would be underdeveloped.
In March we met with the infertility specialist and got pretty much the same options. He flat out refused to do ICSI without major genetic testing on both of us due to the cystic fibrosis risks. So after some discussion (although not much as Dwayne is so wonderful about all of this) we decided that the donor inseminations were the route to go. At this point there was no testing completed on me. The doctors determined that they were unnecessary since I had no previous symptoms to make them believe that I had any problems. So we started on our cycles. I was to use over the counter ovulation predictor kits and call the office when I got a positive, then go in the next day for my IUI. So we did that in April and met with failure, then May, June, July, August and September came and went. By now the stress was getting to me again. The specialist decided to send me for a hysterosalpinkogram (HSG for short) to rule out problems with me. So in November I went in and had the procedure done. The results couldn’t have been better. Everything was clear and great, so what was the problem?
We were now entering our 7th cycle of IUI with this specialist and he determined that I should go on Clomid to help with our timing, but I was limited to 3 cycles on Clomid before we discussed other options. In December 2001, we had the first Clomid IUI and again a failure. At this point I was starting to wonder on the timing of things, my cycles while never irregular, had always been long and through research and charting I thought that I might be ovulating 2 days after my positive ovulation test but I continued to go the next day as the doctor had ordered. January came and went with another failure. Dwayne and I determined that February’s cycle was it. We were going to move on to adoption from there.