Babies Wanted: Our journey through infertility

Wednesday, February 10Th, 2009

Our Story

Well, after sneaking around other women's fertility blogs and drawing so much strength, comfort, and the much needed laugh, I have decided to take this story- our story- and put it out there in the hopes that I may do the same for someone else...

Buckle in, it's a long one.

Here goes: boy (we'll call him G.) meets girl (I'll be H.) in dog park.
Boy and girl and dogs fall madly in love instantly and soon shack up.
Out of the blue, six months later I can't drink my usual gallon of coffee in the morning and the sight of meat turns my stomach.

To appease my mother, we buy (my first ever) pee stick and, to our utter shock and amazement, it says we are: "pregnant".

"Pregnant" was a foreign concept to us. I had never been pregnant before and even though I was 33 years of age, I had never even really contemplated the usual life route: marriage, house children.

As an ex-model-turned-actress i guess my career was always my "baby".

Until G. Until now. Until two lines on a pee stick.

We were thrilled!!!! Our families were shocked, and thrilled.

A few weeks in I went to the doctor to let her know I wasn't feeling "right" and she said, matter-of-factly: "well, if you are still pregnant in 3 weeks we will do an ultrasound.
This was my intro into the comforting world of doctors with the bedside manner of robots.

Two weeks later G. came home from work at 12 o'clock at night to find an ambulance at our door, the paramedics trying to break down our door and me passed out inside.

I woke up after a life saving surgery to learn a new phrase: Ruptured Ectopic Pregnancy.
I spent two weeks (and my 34th bday) in the hospital (on the maternity ward to top things off) and this started our journey into the world of fertility.

We did the usual: lap and dye tests to check one remaining tube;
chlomid and charting: nothing.

On to fertility specialist and iui. 2nd iui: bingo! bfp, 2nd beta rises, early ultrasound shows embryo in uterus and then: at 5 weeks 4th beta does not double, in to find out that they did not check the remaining tube which would have told them it was twins and one was in the tube.

After a d&c I get to learn a new phrase: Hetrotopic pregnancy.

Break Please!!!! We switch clinics and move straight to ivf. After 3 fresh, 2 FET's and only one chemical pregnancy I insist (after a year of asking politely) that they do a lap to check my tube, and, sure enough, last september (my 38th bday) they discover that the tube I have is a large hydrosalpinx (another phrase for the vocabulary) and the tube we thought was removed was half there and also infected.

This meant that the last 3.5 years, and all the $ and tears were probably for nothing.

Moral of the story: listen to your body and find a doctor who will listen to you.

So here we are now.
G. & I have decided that want to give this our all, but that we want to turn the page on this chapter as soon as we can, and that is why we have switched clinics and are beginning to bring another womb into the picture.

Surrogacy: I had heard of this word before, but just never expected it would apply to my life.

I will log our journey here.

I hope you come along for the ride and share your strength and wisdom as we go
H.