First Blog!

I've been addicted to reading blogs for several months now and have been thinking about joining the band wagon but not knowing where to start!  Well, here goes!

My fertility, or should I say INfertility journey started about....12 years ago?  Hubby and I have been married for 15 years and together for 20!  Which brings me to my title of Old Lady and No Baby.  I'm not really old, only 38, but in the baby making business that IS OLD!  And to top that off, I have low ovarian reserve - or in other words, I have (or will have) premature menopause.

Everyone in the infertility blogging world seems to have EXACT dates for EVERYTHING along their journey and have such wonderful timelines.  I honestly can't do that.  I can only give rough dates to when we started everything.  It will take me a long long time to catch everyone up with our story, but I will do my best over the course of what will take many posts, I'm sure.  I don't even know if anyone will be interested in reading my story.  All I know is that I have been living on the computer looking up everyone else's stories.

Here is a VERY quick update to our infertility journey, which I will try to fill in the blanks later:

roughly about 12-13 years ago, I went off birth control pills.  We weren't going to actively try getting pregnant, but weren't going to prevent it either.  About a year later, I talked with my ob/gyn about TTC (trying to conceive) and my hubby had a semen analysis done.  Turns out, he has a low sperm count and his little swimmers are low in mobility as well.  Sometime in there, it was discovered that I had a cyst on one of my ovaries.  Dr. said it would need to be removed either now or later and I thought I should just get it over with since it would need to be done sometime anyway.  Was told I have a bit of endometriosis.  I spent several months charting my temperature and what not, but turns out it was just a big waste of time.  We were told that it wasn't IMPOSSIBLE to get pregnant, but highly unlikely. 

So....we went on about our lives.  Doing IUI's or IVF at that time was not feasible for us and our finances so we just put it off.  We both coach high school softball, which is really what defines us.  It's just what we do.  We coach.  Softball.  The girls we coach and the game has been our passion.  I have been coaching for going on 20 years now.

Fast forward to October 2011 - I turned 37 and 3 days after my birthday, I had the honor of watching my sister give birth to her 3rd child.  I got to watch both of my nephews being born (her 2nd and 3rd babies).  Pregnancy, birth....it is such a miracle really.  My sister (and her husband) let me be there for the births of my nephews (would have been there for my niece too, but...our softball team qualified to go to Nationals!  Which would have been fine, but baby decided to come early).  They let me be there because, well, I'm her sister but also because she knew that may be the closest I come to experiencing a baby being born.  Both of those events, me turning 37 and watching 2nd nephew being born, prompted me to thinking.  I did NOT want to get into my 40's/50's and look back and regret that we didn't try absolutely EVERYTHING within our power to TTC.  I talked to my husband and he said "let's do it!"  So we made an appointment to see a reproductive specialist.

November 2011 was our first consultation.  We did one IUI, which was a BFN.  Nobody really expected it to work because there just was not very many swimmers to work with.  We did our first IVF at the beginning of the year in 2012.  Got 5 eggs at retrieval, 3 of them barely made it.  All 3 were used.  On the morning of beta #1, I started spotting and knew I was starting my period.  Hubby asked me why I was still planning to make the hour drive for my beta appointment if AF was visiting.  I told him I was going because that is what I was supposed to do.  At the clinic, they said spotting sometimes happens so keep your fingers crossed.  That afternoon I was called and told I was pregnant!  I was in shock!  Called my husband and he started crying, took off from work early (which I didn't know), stopped and got me flowers.  This was on a Friday.  On Monday, I went back in again for another blood draw.  Called that afternoon to tell me I was NOT pregnant.  Sigh...that hurt, going through the emotions of not thinking I was pregnant, and then I was, and 3 days later I wasn't again.  Chemical pregnancy.

I went through the woe is me and why doesn't God answer our prayers and all that stuff.  Then I realized, maybe God IS in fact answering our prayers.  We had been praying for a HEALTHY baby.  Chemical pregnancies are usually a result of something not being quite right with the embryo.  Sigh...

Then 2 cycles later, we were on our IVF #2 attempt.  I did not even make it to retrieval.  At my suppression check, I had 8 little follies in there.  After the injections, I only had one that decided to start the race.  So it turned into an IUI, which, we all knew wouldn't really work.  And it didn't.

So fast forward to today...I will have to continue this story later....