How did we get here?

When we made the decision of wanting to "start a family" at the beginning of 2011, we were ignorantly optimistic that pregnancy would happen about when we wanted. We spent the first year and a half of our marriage trying to avoid it to have more "us" time.
So, after about 6 months of trying I felt like something was wrong. I was especially concerned that there might be issues because of my health history and having had thyroid cancer about 5 years ago. After a lot of testing on both of us, doctors couldn't find anything really wrong and so we are categorized as "unexplained infertility" which just means they have no idea what is wrong, so they just start treating.

By November of 2011, we started with clomid (a drug that helps with ovulation but also gives you horrible side effects like hot flashes) and IUI (intrauterine insemination). In this process, you take the oral drug, they monitor your follicle growth and then at the right time, you give yourself a shot to trigger ovulation. The doctor centrifuges the sperm, puts it in a syringe with a long catheter and places the sperm directly into the uterus so there's no question that they egg and sperm were in the same place at the same time.

For us, it didn't work. I hated the side effects of clomid so much, I swore each time I wouldn't do it again. But, each time there was a negative pregnancy test, I agreed to do it again. We did that four times. We sat down with the doctor in March of 2012 who told after 4 failed IUIs, IVF would be our best chance. It was a lot to digest. At that point, I had just turned 32 and we'd been trying to get pregnant for a little over a year. Both my husband and I had trouble accepting a fate of IVF, which meant injections and hormones and pain and money. I understand all the reasons people don't want to and choose not to do IVF. Going through such an extreme fertility treatment also makes you really re-evaluate your want of having children. But, after really evaluating the situation,  we decided that it was worth it to us.

IVF means fertilization outside of the body. It's more successful because you are cutting out more things in the process that can go wrong. Essentially, they hijack a women's body via injectable hormones and you produces a lot of growing follicles on each ovary. They take a needle through the vaginal wall and drain the fluid from each large follicle in hopes that it contains a mature egg. In the lab, they either put the egg with sperm in a petri dish or they take individual sperm and inject it into the egg (a process abbreviated ICSI). They hope all the eggs fertilize and start to divide and grow. They continue to watch them each day in the lab, and at either 3 days after fertilization or 5 days after (depending on how the embryos are looking), they will transfer the embryos back into the uterus via a long catheter that is guided by ultrasound to ensure correct placement.

We decided (after much discussion) we'd start the process in October. So, early in October I started birth control as the first part of  my cycle. By end of October, I was on injections. They lasted for 12 days. After egg retrieval we had 10 eggs, 8 were mature, and 6 fertilized.  We transferred 2 embryos back (they are pictured above in the banner of this blog), understanding the 30% risk of twins. No other embryos survived, so had nothing to freeze for later use. By Thanksgiving day I had a positive pregnancy test. We were so happy when it was confirmed by blood work the following Monday. But we remained cautious. At 5 weeks we saw 1 sac (no twins), at 6 weeks I saw the heartbeat on the ultrasound and at 7 weeks I heard it. Our chance of miscarriage was low (less than 10%) because the embryo had a heartbeat. Our hopes were high.
So, we were shocked and devastated when I went back for 8 week check up on the day after Christmas. The embryo had stopped growing and there was no more heartbeat. I don't think I will ever forget the horror of that day.

I will spare the details but say that it's been an incredibly hard 6 weeks.  I know that miscarriage isn't all that uncommon. Most people know someone that's had a miscarriage. But what we went through to get there was so grueling, a lot of tears were shed just thinking about having to go through the process again. But, here we are. I am trying very hard to take it day by day and not think about the fact that this cycle could easily fail. We were given about a 60% chance of getting pregnant in a cycle. The fact that I was pregnant once is generally a good sign but no guarantee of future success.

So, wish us luck.