I always dreamed of having a family and never imagined struggles with pregnancy, but my irregular cycles and health issues made conceiving difficult. After seeing multiple doctors and being told to wait or manage my health I realized starting a family would require much more efforts and planning than I expected.
I started on Clomid in May of 2016, and when that cycle didn’t work, we did a cycle at the end of June, and when that cycle didn’t work, we did a cycle in August of 2016. It wasn’t until the August cycle my OB decided to do a blood test and ultrasound to see if I was even ovulating. Let me just stop here for a second and say Clomid was hell. There is no way to sugarcoat it or make it sound any better. It was awful. I would go from SCREAMING at my husband because he looked at me in a way I perceived as wrong to SOBBING on the floor because I felt like a broken woman. The entire time we were going through this; my husband had been such a rock. So, when we found out we had never even ovulated on Clomid, it was such a blow. I think it was then I started to realize maybe having a baby was not in the cards for us.
My OB gave us two options at this point: we could try another round of Clomid, or she could refer us to the Fertility Clinic and let them take it from here. Considering how rough Clomid had been on my mental health and our marriage, and we couldn’t get a guarantee another round was going to even work, we decided we were going to move on to the Center. I was lucky. When I called, they had just had a cancellation and were able to get us in for our very long and very intense new patient visit on September 1, 2017 just a few short weeks after the failure of our third round of Clomid. When you start at the Center, you go in and do close to a two-hour visit, where they get a very detailed history and family history, a physical exam, and a complete round of blood work which included roughly twelve vials of blood. When we finished all of this, we were told our chances of an IUI working were good. We jumped in with two feet right away.
Again, my only thought process was, ‘Okay, here we go, this is going to give us our baby!’ I started to once again think we weren’t going to have a baby when we were on day 28 of our 10-day IUI protocol. I was simply not responding to the medication the way they expected or wanted, and it wasn’t looking like I was going to even ovulate. On day 22 of our protocol, I pulled my doctor aside for a conversation during a very busy morning monitoring session. I basically looked him dead in the eyes and said, ‘Listen, this isn’t supposed to take this long. Is it even going to work?’ This was the first, and only, time in our entire process he seemed to not be as confident about our chances to get pregnant. We decided to continue with the IUI, since we were so far in it at this point, and there was a slim chance we might get pregnant but it was still a chance.
We were scheduled to go to Cape Cod for our fourth wedding anniversary right as we were finishing our medication and having our IUI. Do we cancel the trip? Do my parents go? Do we just go, because the IUI probably won’t work anyway, so we don’t even go through with the IUI? We ended up going and going through with the IUI. We took all our stimulation medication most of which had to be kept on ice, and, of course, our room didn’t include a mini fridge.
We used a cooler with ice to keep medication cold, went to an ultrasound and blood draw as we were leaving for vacation, and tried to not think about how it felt like we weren’t any closer to having a baby than we were 4 years ago. We came back from the Cape and headed straight to the Center for our IUI. I tried so hard in the following 10 days to stay as positive as possible. I was hoping I could the universe to defy the odds and we would end up pregnant. It didn’t work.
After many failed fertility treatments I felt deeply broken and depressed so we paused IVF to focus on my mental health and therapy. Later IVF worked and after a long painful journey we welcomed our baby boy and leaned the importance of support rest and hope.
