***
I wasn't one of those girls who grew up nurturing their baby dolls and who dreamed of becoming a mother one day. In fact, I distinctly remember ripping the heads out of my Barbie dolls (eek, what does that say about me?
).
It wasn't something that I consciously didn't want but rather that I
never gave it much thought, so you could imagine my surprise one day
when I was 27 when out of the blue, BAM, it hit me. I wanted a child. I had been dating my boyfriend (now husband) for some time at that point, and one night, I smoothly brought it up to him. It went something like this.
Him: What do you think we should watch tonight.. House?
Me: I want a baby!
... yeah. Once it was out there, I started laughing, because I could not think of any other reaction, and then I peered at him, and to my relief, he looked rather pleased (though he wasn't ready yet at the time).
We were married in 2010 when I was 29 and I thought for sure that I would have a child by the time I was 30 (pregnant at least). I remember being crushed the first month. What I didn't realize was that it was the beginning of a long string of disappointments. Month after month passed, and as much as I tried not to get my hopes up, every month I was convinced that that would be THE month, and this usually resulted in me curled up in bed crying for days at a time. We didn't know what was wrong. His SA had come back perfectly normal. I have always had very regular cycles.
We went to an RE in early 2010 and she was confident that she could get us pregnant in no time (towards the end of the year, she confessed that she thought we would be a very easy case when she met us). We decided to try Clomid, but that thinned out my lining. We did Follistim for a few cycles. I responded well every time. All of these we did with IUI, and month after month came back negative and I sunk even further into despair. Not only was I rapidly losing hope, but we were also spending so much money on these treatments that I was swimming in bills. Plus, DH was extremely worried about my mental state.
When I look back on my first six months of TTC, I think about all the hope I had then, and how it has faltered. I still remember the one year mark of us TTC and how I laid in bed thinking about how I'm such a failure. It is now 18 months since that time and some days I wonder if this is the universe's way of saying that it just isn't meant to be.
My RE could not find out what was wrong. I have had a lap, HSG, had a bunch of tests ran, and it all came back negative. Halfway through 2010, my husband and I decided that we may have to do IVF.
This terrified and excited me, because I always saw IVF as the thing we would do if everything else failed. By doing IVF, that would mean that everything else had failed. What if IVF failed as well? That was always my end all solution. If it didn't work, where would that leave me? I don't have an answer to that question, and it's still something that weighs on my mind all the time.
IVF shocked me with all the questions. ICSI? We said no, and my RE looked surprised, and she even said, "Can I ask why not?" That made me second guess myself (to this day I'm still wondering about it). I had always thought that ICSI was for people with low sperm count, and my husband has never had an issue in that department so I was surprised she brought it up multiple times. I think it's because she doesn't want me to have a cycle with no fertilized eggs. We said no to assisted hatching as well. We said we wanted to put back in 2 embies if we could (prefer blastocysts). When we were looking at IVF clinics, this one clinic said that they would only let me transfer back one blastocyst and that was the main reason we did not choose that clinic.
We began to save up for IVF and I took the last quarter of 2010 to do no fertility treatments. I secretly hoped that I would be one of those people who would "oops" get pregnant when I was planning for IVF, but that didn't happen. When December rolled around, I felt surprisingly numb to the whole thing. I think it was because I had looked forward to this moment for so long that I don't even know what to do with it now that I am actually here.
I wish I had more of a support group in real life, but most of my friends are male, and the one girl friend I'm close to has no idea how to relate to me. She knows of all the heartache we have been through and how badly we want this. She would constantly ask me in front of other people if I'm pregnant yet (thanks a lot! In fact she made me cry once when she asked me in front of all her relatives at her son's birthday party), and when I mentioned IVF, the first thing she said was, "If that fails, are you going to ask your sister for her eggs?" ... So.. I don't talk to her about anything TTC related anymore. She has a beautiful three year old boy and I know she's going to start TTC again in January, and I know it would kill me a bit inside if it just happened quickly for her. I even said as much over lunch one day, that I hope that she never has any difficulty conceiving because it has been a nightmare for me and she said, "I hope not either. That would be awful."
Wow thanks, you ******* ***** !
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