Larisa and Jason
My name is Larisa, my husband is Jason. We are high school sweethearts, and we've been married for 8 years. I'm 30 now, and he'll be 31 in a couple of weeks. We've been trying to have a baby since June of 2004. When we started trying, I was determined it would happen right away. I charted, used OPKs, everything. Fortunately for me, my ob/gyn doesn't even dabble in infertility, so he referred me to the local RE's office after one year of trying.
We sat down with the RE for the first time in June of 2005. He quickly discovered that my breasts were producing milk, and prescribed medication for that. I ovulate, my uterine cavity was normal, and everything else with me seemed fine. Jason's semen analysis revealed normal counts, low to normal motility, and very low normal morphology (2%). We set a plan for Clomid/IUIs - our first was in September of 2006.
We were so excited to start something. Our doctor seemed confident that this little "boost" was all we would need. Little did we know. I am lucky - I respond extraordinarily well to the medication. In fact, we ended up only needing to use half the "normal" dose of Clomid to get 2 or 3 good sized follicles. I went for the first IUI - I'd read about them on the web and knew they were supposed to be quick and easy. Not for me. That first IUI took 25 minutes of my doctor wrestling with my cervix before he was finally able to get the catheter through. That cycle failed, as did the next two cycles, and my cervix was a problem during all of the IUIs.
So we opted to do a hysteroscopy so my doctor could dilate my cervix and see if there was anything to fix. We also did a laparoscopy at that time. The hysteroscopy was also extraordinarily difficult for my doctor to perform. He ended up having to use a smaller diameter camera because he simply couldn't dilate my cervix enough to use the standard camera. The laparoscopy revealed "barely" Stage III endometriosis. I didn't have a lot of the disease throughout my pelvis, but my ovaries were completely adhered to my peritoneal wall and encased in tissue.
We then did a cycle of injectable drugs / IUI. The IUIs for that cycle proved as difficult as the prior IUIs, and I was in pain for one of them. The cycle failed. My husband and I decided to stop spending money on IUIs, and move to IVF.
In March of 2006, we did our first IVF/ICSI cycle. We did a cervical dilation during my retrieval to make transfer easier. We got a positive blood test; however, my hCG was very low. Surprisingly, it doubled appropriately for about a week and a half, though it was still very, very low. Then it dropped and we waited for me to miscarry. Then it went back up. So it became a "presumed ectopic" pregnancy. I did one round of methotrexate shots to dissolve the remaining pregnancy tissue, but that wasn't enough. I had to do a second round. It was months before everything got back to "normal".
We did another fresh cycle in July of 2006 and it failed. The transfer went terribly that cycle, so we began a series of experiments that I can only call torture trying to figure out how to deal with my cervix. We then did a frozen cycle in September of 2006. It failed. We did our third fresh IVF/ICSI cycle in February of 2007 and it also failed. We changed our approach to my cervix for the fourth IVF/ICSI cycle, and my beta is in about one week. We can only hope that this is the one.
It's been a long journey that's not over yet - a marathon of unknown distance without mile markers. But I don't regret for a second doing any of the cycles. These are our chance at a pregnancy and a family.