TTC - Getting a family the hard way...

Waiting and Thinking

2010-07-10T15:33:00.000-07:00

I realized this week that I hadn't posted in weeks, which is forever in the blog world. Time to get myself in blogging gear!

There isn't much to report - the RE said we should wait 2 months to retest my husband, so we're continuing the male fertility supplement and we've added acupuncture and a Chinese herbal prescription. We're hoping that when he is retested, we'll be able to find out if any of these things have been helping him and if not, stop them and save some money.

On my end, I'm continuing acupuncture. Jill, our acupuncturist, had me take a week and a half off (mostly to save money) and when I went back last week, it hurt! Every point that is associated with stress or worry was painful plus, AF was back to sneaking in the back door again. Jill and I decided that skipping weeks was not a good idea for me.

Since it's mostly male infertility we're dealing with, we're not too hopeful about the acupuncture and we're thinking ahead to the next step. I'm ready to go for IVF. Since the RE thinks we are good candidates and since I won't need some of the really painful hip injections following the transfer, I think I can get up my nerve to give myself SC injections. After all, as a vet tech I used to give them to dogs and cats all the time, I should be able to handle this! My husband just has a few philosophical/moral concerns, the biggest being that all the embryos that are created end up "in a woman" (as he puts it), either me or adopted out. I think we both know that will not be a problem, but we'll both feel better hearing it from the doctor. And then we both wonder, once we harvest (what a weird term for that!), fertilize, and transfer some of the embryos, will I have to go through the same set of drugs and injections before transferring more when we want more children, or can we just cut to the transfer?

But for now, we sit and wait and think and pray.

Our TTC story

2010-06-02T13:16:00.000-07:00

So soon took a little longer than I thought! Busy weekend, two family birthdays since the last post, plus a meeting with our fertility doctor. As I promised, here is our story, so far...

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!

Obligatory Introduction

2010-05-25T13:19:00.000-07:00

Hi Ladies (and any gentlemen brave enough to read this blog!),

Thanks for reading!

I feel like this post should start with the standard AA greeting: My name is Rachel and I am infertile. While both are true, there is more to me than that.

I am a private music teacher in voice and flute with a home studio by day and a Mary Kay Consultant by night. Or afternoon. Or whenever I'm not teaching. My husband and I just bought our first house and are enjoying the space with our two dogs, Laddie, a border collie mix; and Tessa, a maltipoo puppy mill mother/rescue.(Ha! Even she can reproduce!!!) DH, an IT consultant, and I have been married for 2 1/2 years, after knowing each other for 15 years. We met in 6th grade orchestra. I thought he was funny, he ignored me. Eventually I developed a crush which lasted through college, but it wasn't until I was in grad school and teaching full time at a private school that he took an interest and asked me out. Since we had grown up together and knew each other quite well, it wasn't long after the wedding that we decided to start trying to conceive.

Wow. Trying to conceive. That phrase used to make me excited, like Christmas might be coming. Now it just reminds me that it won't. Ugh.

Soooo...having discovered through Twitter that contrary to what I feel, I am not alone! There are other women like me, thinking and feeling the same way, all over the country! I've been looking for an emotional outlet for this frustration, as well as a chance to voice my thoughts on IF, so I've started this blog.

In the posts to come, I can promise you will see frustration, venting, hope, disappointment, etc. I'll share my experiences, the decisions that DH and I make, the emotions we go through. I am a Christian, so you will occasionally see a reference to God and church, but I promise not to make this a devotional or shove it down your throat. It's just a part of my life, so it will come up. Please don't be offended if it does.

There, now you know who I am, roughly. In the next post, when I have just a bit more time, I'll give you my fertility back story.