Our Story
by futurehuber
After being together 11 ½ years and married for just over
six years, we finally decided it was time for a baby! I had actually been ready for a little while,
but the mister needed some time! Well he
got way more time than he bargained for!
I went off of birth control and we started “trying but not trying” in September of 2011. The first few months I didn’t worry about temping, ovulation kits, etc. and I had no idea what cervical mucus was or what it meant (nor did I care to)! We were in the la-la stages of baby making and I just tried to make sure we “had relations” around the textbook 14th day of my cycle.
The first cycle after I went off birth control, I actually thought I was pregnant! I even went out and bought hubby a “we’re pregnant” gift, devised a grand plan for telling him, and also got gifts for the future grandparents. So as you can imagine, those gifts have probably gathered about 10 inches of dust sitting up on a shelf in my closet.
The first few cycles I didn’t notice anything unusual, my periods were pretty normal for the most part. As months passed, I started to notice my periods getting funkier and longer. Sometimes even super short. They were all over the place! This on top of negative pregnancy test after negative pregnancy test, I started to realize something was wrong.
However…even though I knew something was wrong…nope, no going to the doctor! We hadn’t been trying the lovely minimum of one year yet! Silly me for thinking I could go see a doctor for something that I knew was wrong with me.
Meanwhile I had already started to buy all of the infertility
books, download all the apps, taking my temp, charting, and loaded up on
ovulation kits. I kept that up until I
finally got to see my doctor at the one-year mark, and not a day later!
Before I knew it, I was making an ultrasound appointment,
getting blood work done, being referred to a reproductive endocrinologist (RE),
etc. And at the same time, I was seeing
dollar signs “cha-chinging” in my head as I booked each appointment and did
each test. While I was happy to have
some coverage on testing/diagnosis as I know some women do not, my 50% copays
were definitely starting to add up! And
this was just finding out why, not helping us to actually make a baby (which
would be 100% copays!).
Soon came the diagnosis of PCOS. I of course bawled my eyes out the second I
got off the phone with the nurse. I
thought my life was over, read horribly scary things online (that I now know
aren’t true or are at least rare), etc.
Little did I know this was the least of our worries.
Soon after my diagnosis, I scheduled an HSG. It went pretty smoothly and wasn’t too
painful like I had heard. The doctor
doing the HSG said at the end that my tubes looked good and they were all
clear! I embarrassingly burst into happy
tears right when she said this as it was so great to get some good news for
once!
Fast forward about 30 hours later when I get a call from my
regular doctor (at 8pm at night mind you??).
It went something like this: “I got the results from your HSG and now I
know why you’re not getting pregnant!
You have a bicornuate uterus.” And then I heard various words such as
heart-shaped, surgery, miscarriage, etc. as I tried to hold back the
tears. (And note that having a
bicornuate uterus has nothing to do with conceiving, it has to do with being
able to carry the baby. Nice one doc!)
Hang up the phone…straight to Google. Oh my gosh, my life is seriously over!! Now do I not only have the inability to get
pregnant on my own, I also have problems carrying a baby once I do?? Massive amounts of crying ensues. I’ve got my mom crying on the phone with me
that night. This is just unfair.
I discuss this diagnosis with my RE and she says my uterus
can be bicornuate or septate and there is only one way to know for sure and
that’s by doing a surgery called a laparoscopy (meanwhile I read about other,
less-invasive alternatives to this surgery and wondered why we wouldn’t start
there first?). Again, dollar signs start
flashing as I consider the cost of 50% of a surgery?? Yikes!
I schedule the surgery appointment and just start feeling
really uneasy about this decision.
Luckily thanks to the lovely ladies in The Bump community, I got the
idea and the courage to ask my RE for a saline ultrasound. Supposedly they can tell the difference
between a bicornuate and septate uterus by doing this simple, in-office
procedure that is similar to an HSG, but a lot less painful. Plus it was only going to be about $150 OOP for
us versus who knows what amount for the surgery!
I go in for the ultrasound and within like 10 seconds, my RE
says “Well it looks good, you don’t have either one!” What??
Are you kidding me?? I just
stressed and bawled my eyes out for a month and almost had surgery for
nothing?? But of course I am ecstatic to
get this great news! Now I am just back
to dealing with PCOS. RE gives me a
prescription right then and there for Clomid (perfect timing in my cycle) and I
am on my way to my first medicated cycle and I’m filled with hope and
excitement!
Then the next day happened.
The most dreaded call of all.
Hubby’s semen analysis results are in.
Low everything. We, ourselves,
hit an all time low. This happened at
the beginning of the weekend and we barely spoke to each other all
weekend. We just didn’t know what to do
with all of this bad news, all of the ups and downs. It was exhausting.
I will say one thing though, the timing of these results
could not have been any better because just two days before (when I thought we
were still dealing with the uterus issue), my thoughts were if anything else
was wrong with us, that was it, I wasn’t going to do anything more. I would have accepted that having a baby was
not in the cards for us. No more testing,
no extreme measures to get pregnant, etc.
If I couldn’t ovulate and my husband didn’t have the proper sperm to get
me pregnant and I didn’t have the ability to properly carry a baby, or most
likely lose the baby once pregnant, this just had to mean something! It was just not meant to be. So I am thankful I was cleared of my possible
uterine issue the day before as I would have thrown in the towel right then and
there once we got the semen analysis results.
Eventually we do an IUI (artificial insemination), change
RE’s, have hubby see a urologist, gave a shot at working on his swimmers via
vitamins and antibiotics (per the uro), then try two more IUIs. All of this resulted in negative pregnancy
tests, slightly better swimmers (but not good enough), more tears and
frustration, and an onslaught of medical bills.
After three failed IUIs and the fact that we are dealing
with male infertility, we knew it was time to move on to IVF. We just didn’t want to waste the time and
money anymore. It was time to pull out
the big guns…and the checkbook (again)!
IVF is a lot of money but we truly believe it is worth it
and are willing to do whatever we can to make our dream come true. We are so thankful for the OOP Med program
for helping us make this dream a reality.
It is a wonderful program and stems from such an exceptional online
community of women. I honestly don’t
know what I would do without this support during our struggle. I look forward to “paying it forward” and
donating any leftover meds I might have in order to help out other women in
need.
Thank you for reading my story and may all of your stories have a happy ending!
