My husband and I started TTC, or rather "not preventing, not trying" over two years ago. I had been charting my temps and observing other cycle signs for a while (maybe 6 months), so we started paying a little more attention to all those "signs". After about a month of that (memory is fuzzy here) I was a week late for AF and took a HPT. Faint Positive. Very faint. So I waited a day or two and took another one. Negative. And that night AF did something she's never, ever done. She woke me up with cramps and her arrival. Usually, if she comes when I'm asleep, I stay that way and she tends to sneak in the back door. Since then, the doctors have decided that was probably a very early miscarriage. DH and I were sad, but since it was so early and we hadn't been trying long, we didn't let it keep us down.
Six months later, I went to see my GYN. After telling him how long we'd been trying, he told me to stop the temp charting ("it doesn't work") and come back in a year if I wasn't pregnant.
A year later, still not pregnant, I went back to GYN. He did an ultrasound, and after telling me there was nothing wrong with me, he told me to use an OPK, wrote a referral for an analysis for DH, and scheduled an appointment for a month and a half later. At that appointment, he looked at my notes from the OPK and the SA, and informed me that I could stop using the OPK since it was obvious that I ovulate on day 16 (of a 27 day cycle) and that the low motility from the SA was probably just due to the sample sitting out too long. Oh, and the next step was laproscopy = SURGERY!
We decided to get a second opinion. I scheduled a appointment with my family doctor, re-started the temp charting, and continued to use the OPK, just in case. Sure enough, the month after I saw GYN, I didn't get a positive OPK at all. Tested days 10 through 20. Nothing. And AF was right on time. When I saw the family doctor, she looked at my charting she said, "you don't need surgery, you need to ovulate!" We tried Clomid for 5 months; 3 months of 50mg, and 2 months of 100mg. I also started acupuncture, which has turned out to help the most with annovulation. From the OPK and the charting, she realized the Clomid wasn't doing much, so she sent me and DH to a fertility clinic to see an RE.
The RE looked over what we had done and what we were doing and recommended that DH have another SA to verify the results and to do a morphology. I was to take a cycle of Femara and have an HSG done my next cycle. The Femara wasn't bad and didn't make me feel nearly as awful as the Clomid, and the doctor who did the HSG said that it looked "textbook normal." But last Wednesday when we met with the RE about the SA...
We learned that not only is the motility 50% of what it should be, the morphology is 1%, meaning that 1% are normally shaped. The good news is that I'm normal, so IVF would be a good option for us. The RE did tell us that plenty of men with bad morphology get their wives pregnant and that it could still happen on it's own.
For right now, we are taking a break from medicines and just doing the acupuncture and charting and trying to chill, while we think about IVF and save up the money for it.
And now you know...the rest of the story!
