Sandi and Craig
Infertility seems to take on a life of its own. Your perspective on everything changes, and one day you wake up asking yourself how you got to this point.
My husband and I married in our mid 20s. We both worked in very stressful jobs when we married and I was finishing my master’s degree. After a couple of years, I was done with school and it was time to make a change. I changed careers and eventually we decided that I would work part-time. That was the best decision we have ever made. We agreed it was time to start a family and felt as though we were in the best possible place in our lives to do so. We waited until we were sure we were both ready to have children, both mentally and financially. We then started to actively “try”, and the funny thing is that when I went off birth control, I kept secretly wishing that I wouldn’t get pregnant for a couple of months so I could deliver during the summer, when I am off from work. After all, other people seemed to be able to time their pregnancies, so I thought that was the way it worked. I was only 27 years old (Craig was 28) with no known problems.
After 6 months, I started to have a feeling that things were not right even though we weren’t “trying hard”, no charting, temperature, or any of that. We figured people just have sex around the time that they expect to ovulate and bam, they get pregnant. My cycle was very regular, so we didn’t think we needed to do anything extraordinary. Around 8 months, I started having painful periods and complained to my ob/gyn. I will never forget the response from him: “Welcome to being a woman!” After I continued to complain, they found a large polyp in my uterus and removed it. I thought that would do the trick, but after another few months went by, I started to use ovulation predictor kits so that we could time things better. That was the point where we really started to question our fertility. As soon as we passed the year mark, our physician sent my husband for a sperm analysis. We found out that his count and motility were very low and were then referred to an RE. Our first appointment was overwhelming- test this, test that, and we’ll talk from there. Basically, they didn’t find anything else with either of us, and we were told that I should have a couple of tests and then move forward from there. We waited about 6 months for some of the tests, since the state we live in had just passed a fertility mandate and we had to wait for it to kick in on our policy. Every month that passed, we waited for a miracle. Each period came with a wave of sadness. I had a hysterosalpingogram, the last test before moving forward with treatment, which indicated that I had one blocked tube. The RE told us to move forward with IVF, since we had little chance of anything else working. Because our known conditions would all be bypassed by IVF and we were young, we had over a 50% chance of it working.
That first cycle seemed like it would be the answer to our dream, until the day of the pregnancy test. A couple of hours before the call came with the results, my period started and I just knew it was over. That was one of the worst days of my life and I could see how much it hurt my husband to see my pain. During our second fresh cycle, I wasn’t nearly as optimistic. I couldn’t believe I had to go through it again. Our RE changed the protocol since I hadn’t responded well the first time, but we still only ended up retrieving 4 mature eggs. Even worse, my uterine lining was terrible. They transferred the worst two embryos because of the lining issue and froze the best two. The negative from the 2nd cycle was expected, but still another gut-wrenching moment. After that, the RE told me that my FSH had been high for my age during the first cycle, and that given my response during the cycles, my ovaries seemed like those of a 40 year old. So much for that 50% chance. We now feel like that hope has been ripped out from under us.