Growing up as the youngest in my family, I didn’t get to spend nearly as many years with healthy grandparents as I would have liked. With that in mind, we knew wanted to have kids shortly after we got married to give our kids as much time with grandparents as possible.
The thing about planning and timing your life, is that things rarely go as planned.
I thought I was doing everything right. “It can take 6 months for birth control to work its way out of your system”, they say. So I went off the pill a few months before the wedding to give it time to “work out”. “Make sure you start your prenatal vitamins at least 90 days before you start trying”, they say. So I started the vitamins even before I went off the pill. A wedding, honeymoon, many boxes of ovulation prediction kits and negative pregnancy tests later, they were all still negative. All of them.
I called the doctor and was told I needed to try for a year before they would see me. Defeated, I went out and bought my next $35 box of OPKs, all of which would again be negative. After a year of frustration, tears and exactly 28 day cycles, my doctor did a simple blood draw and determined I wasn’t ovulating. It didn’t make any sense, because you could literally set your clock by my cycles, but when she offered me some meds, I didn’t even care about the root cause.
My first cycle of Clomid I finally got a positive pregnancy test! I seriously couldn’t even believe it. I called my sister-in-law and ultimate bestie and had her bring me another test to work so I could double check. Yes, I totally peed on a stick in the public restroom at work and then had to try to focus the rest of the day without shouting “I’M PREGNANT” from the rooftops before I could even tell my husband.
I try not to get frustrated the doctors wouldn’t just draw my blood the first time I called, but I’m reminded that God’s timing is always perfect! Just one simple and super cheap round of Clomid and we have our sweet Jackiboy!
Fast-forward 2 ½ years and once again, we were thinking about timing our family out in what WE thought would be the perfect way. I started my prenatal vitamins 90 days before we were going to start trying and had my IUD removed. This was supposed to give me an immediate return to fertility – the main reason I chose that birth control option after we had Jackson.
Naturally, the doctor who I loved and seen for years and who was able to get me Jackson, was no longer working for the OB office I use. Figures! I met with a new Nurse Practitioner there and told her about how I needed Clomid the first time… “Why don’t you try naturally for a few months and call me if it isn’t working and we can do some blood work”, she says.
Umm… I’m sorry, what? Do you understand how much work that is, lady?! I insisted on a blood draw our first month, which once again showed a very low day 21 progesterone level, indicating I must not be ovulating. I was beyond defeated (and incredibly frustrated that the doctor would have made me try for a few months only to get that result later, but that’s a whole different story).
All that aside, I cried… Then whined—a lot. And about 3 days later, I was finally able to put my frustration aside, put on my big girl pants and prepare to take my Clomid. I mean, it would only be one month before I would get pregnant again just like last time, right?? HA—there I go planning again. Little did I know, this round of Clomid would only going to be the beginning of a rough journey.
I took my Clomid and on day 29 had no period and no positive pregnancy test. How confusing… this was new territory for me. Another box of pregnancy tests later (I should seriously buy stock in ClearBlue) and on day 32 my test turned positive! I was ecstatic!!
This is exactly what I thought would happen!
Several days later I went in for blood work to make sure all my levels were rising appropriately. Nothing can prepare a person for the emotions that come flooding in the moment you hear the doctors voice on the other end of the phone and know something isn’t right. Over 48 hours, my HCG levels had only increased by 4 when they should have doubled. I was told to prepare myself for a miscarriage. I was confused, lost and could not stop crying.
There was life inside me. LIFE. A tiny baby that I loved the moment I saw the word “pregnant” appear on the stick. A baby I had pictured myself holding and rocking and pushing on the swing. A baby that was still growing—HCG levels still increasing, but not in a way that is compatible with life. The heartache and devastation is unexplainable.
Over the next two weeks, I had to go in for several blood draws as they followed my HCG levels back down to 0 and until the baby “passed”. As if the wound of losing a child wasn’t fresh enough, it just kept getting deeper with every blood draw that still showed HCG in my blood – the sign of human life – and then to experience the physical pain of a miscarriage on top of the emotional pain. With every excruciating cramp and over-soaked pad, I was reminded that I was losing my sweet baby. It was awful.
I had to wait 2 months before we could start trying again. Three unsuccessful rounds of Clomid were followed by another pregnancy excitement, that ended in a horrifying Mother’s Day miscarriage. The cruel irony of that still makes me cringe. And with miscarriage number two and months of unsuccess, we were sent to the infertility clinic.
We tried three months of IUI (Intrauterine Insemination), where the doctors would insert RJs “sample” directly into my uterus using a catheter– a whopping 20%-25% chance of success. All failed. I was a disaster.
I had been tracking and documenting every single day, every symptom, every bodily change on an app and every day seemed to come with an extra 12 hours. I could feel myself becoming depressed and knew something had to change—my fertility (or lack there of) was completely controlling my life.
At this point with our history of unexplained infertility and miscarriage, our doctor offered moving to injectable drugs with another IUI or moving to IVF (in-vetro fertilization) which would increase our odds some, but not significantly. We had grown to seriously despise the IUI procedure and as soon as the doctor said we would have an 80% chance of success with IVF, we didn’t need to hear anything more. We would start our journey of IVF as soon as they would allow.
We had to start with three weeks of birth control. Yes—birth control. A requirement that while I understood they needed to “reset” my body in order to have total control of the upcoming hormonal manipulation, made the entire process and potential baby seem even farther away. I mean, we were trying to get pregnant, not avoid it! But it was the protocol, so I did it, but did not have a happy heart.
After some debate, we decided we would do ICSI (a process where the lab injects a single sperm into the egg for fertilization) and forego the genetic screening—despite the doctor’s recommendation to do so—in order to avoid the additional cost and the added couple months wait.
The day all my medicine and syringes for the injections arrived in the mail was overwhelming. There were so. many. needles!!!! We received this crazy schedule that I was trying not to allow to completely run my life as I had done in the past. I didn’t look at the calendar every day and deleted the life-sucking app off my phone. My new strategy was to try not to think about it all the time and just focus on what I needed to start next and on what day that would start. It was still stressful, but definitely made time pass more quickly.
I went through two rounds of preventative and “just in case” antibiotics (seriously the worst part of the ENTIRE process), many injections in my belly and finally had my egg retrieval. I was terrified, but the day had finally come!
We had 13 eggs retrieved and eight were able to be fertilized. I was ecstatic! Statistically, I was expecting about 4-5 to make it to the blastocyst phase, two of which would be transferred back just 5 days later.
After the egg retrieval, the calendar stopped and they gave me a paper with new dates and instructions on it. I woke up the morning I was supposed to start my progesterone injections and checked my paper for the first time since the retrieval, looking for any more specific instructions. My heart sunk to the deepest pit of my stomach. I was supposed to start the progesterone the previous day. I couldn’t believe it. I couldn’t breathe. I was in total panic mode.
It was a Saturday, so I called the 24-hour fertility pharmacy instead of the on-call doctor and was told it wasn’t a big deal and to just go ahead and do the injection. OUCH!! Let me tell you, those shots are not fun. Later that day I was feeling some cramping and figured I better call the on-call line just to make sure everything was going to be okay. When they returned my call, I could tell by the tone of voice of the nurse we had grown to love that I was not going to like what she had to say.
Apparently the progesterone is essentially the only medicine in the IVF process that you can’t start a day late. They can work with almost any other medication, but with the progesterone, there is only about a 12-hour window and I had missed it. I MISSED IT!! My strategy to regain my life was now the very reason they were going to freeze all of my embryos and I was going to have to wait and do a frozen embryo transfer several weeks later.
Through my tears and sobs, I was able to mutter off the instructions to send all of my blastocysts for genetic screening. If we were going to have to wait, I desperately needed to have the 80%+ odds of success by transferring the highest quality embryos. I needed the wait to be for something. I was so mad at myself and so, so sad. It had been so long already, I couldn’t fathom waiting another 6 weeks.
A couple days later, I got a call from the lab at the fertility clinic letting me know that all 8 of my embryos had made it to the blastocyst phase and were able to be biopsied and sent for PGS (pre-genetic screening). 100% of the embryos! A statistical anomaly. A glimmer of hope. A little light in the darkness. A reminder that God was in charge and it is His timing that is always perfect, not mine.
About a week later, we received the results of the PGS screening and we had 5 embryos that were the highest quality. It gave us such mixed emotions to find that 3 of our little embryos were not compatible with life, but we chose instead to focus (without becoming totally overwhelmed) on the fact that we had 5 perfect little embryos. We wanted the genders to be a surprise and didn’t want the pressure of choosing what to transfer, so we decided not to find out the genders of the embryos. We now had five sweet embryos numbered 1-5 and we already loved them all.
Somehow I got through the next few weeks and absolutely did not screw up my progesterone start date! We checked my hormone levels and got the green light to do the embryo transfer on December 23—the greatest Christmas gift we could have asked for. I would be on bed rest until Christmas morning, which certainly wasn’t ideal and wasn’t easy to explain to our toddler.
I got all my shopping and wrapping done early and on December 23, 2015, we showed up and got to see the two sweet little embryos that were transferred. It was so cool! Most people don’t see pictures of their babies until they’re at least 6 weeks pregnant… we got to see ours as just a tiny little ball of cells. We had front row seats to the miracle of life.
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I was no stranger to the dreaded two-week-wait, but this one was different. For the first time in a long time I felt confident we were going to get to take a baby home at the end of this pregnancy.
It only took about 10 days for my very first pregnancy symptom to show up – waking up in the night to pee. This gets me every time. It was the most glorious overnight annoyance I’d had since Jackson was a newborn, waking every 2 hours to nurse. I knew at that moment, I was pregnant.
RJ was in California for the Rose Bowl game and I tried my hardest to hold off on taking a home pregnancy test until he was home, but with an unopened box of ClearBlue pregnancy tests starring me in the face, the suspense got the best of me. Twelve days post frozen embryo transfer I took a pregnancy test and instantly started crying when it was positive.
We had done it. All the waiting, all the tears, all the injections and stress, all the money… it suddenly seemed like nothing. Just the turn of a page in our book of life – one that I knew in my heart was going to be followed by **at least one** sweet baby.
My blood work was scheduled just a few days later and I had my first blood draw to verify pregnancy. The doctors want to see it over 100… mine came in at 880!! I was thrilled!! Thoughts of twins immediately started swirling around in my mind. Terror… joy… excitement… stress. Just about every emotion you can think of, I experienced it. But I didn’t want to get my hopes up; it was still so early.
My HCG levels needed to double within 48 hours to provide early indication of a healthy pregnancy. My next milestone. After experiencing a little spotting (that totally sent me into panic mode) between my two blood draws, I was relieved and again overwhelmed to hear my HCG came in at 3070 – nearly a 250% increase! After 48 hours of thinking about twins, I was now so hopeful that we would take TWO babies home at the end of this, not just one.
As excruciating as I thought the two-week-wait between transfer and pregnancy confirmation was, the next two weeks before my ultrasound were even worse! My morning sickness set in just a few days later (2.5 weeks earlier than it set in with Jackson), which, despite the uncontrollable vomiting, gave me hope that I had at least one healthy baby growing inside me.
Before the ultrasound, RJ and I prayed that God’s will be done and that we find comfort in whatever we would see that day. I was terrified. I loved both of those tiny little embryos so much and didn’t know how I’d handle not seeing them both up on the screen.
Fortunately, I didn’t have to find out, because without any difficulty, we saw two tiny little beans with two strong little flickers!
Two heartbeats.
Life.
After the nurse left, RJ and I just sat in silence for a moment. There was a little bit of shock and whole lot of relief happening in that room that day.
A small room in the corner of an infertility clinic that has seen so many tears and sadness, unfavorable outcomes and bad news, was now overflowing with tears and joy from two parents that could not wait to take on the next chapter of our lives.