Facing Infertility: Our Journey to Parenthood
No one likes to talk about infertility.
It’s one of those awkward health topics that make people terribly uncomfortable. In the case of my husband and I, not only did we struggle with infertility, but last year, my husband was diagnosed with testicular cancer. We had the double-whammy of awkward health conditions. Lucky us.
If you want a fun parlor trick, start talking about your reproductive system at a party and see how quickly people clam up and find a way out of the conversation. Or even worse, you end up with people convinced they have the “cure” for your infertility. There’s nothing like random people giving you advice on how to get pregnant. Trust me.
That’s why I didn’t talk about infertility — for years. Although I’m sure people had their assumptions.
In fact, just the other night, someone said this to me:
“When I see an older couple without kids, I always wonder if they chose to wait or if they have had trouble getting pregnant.”
I’m confident she’s not alone. We all make snap judgments and assumptions about people — especially when it comes to kids, or lack thereof.
That’s why my husband and I, both 37, had become experts at answering questions about whether we have children.
While most people are smart enough not to ask follow-up questions, there’s always some idiot who does. Honestly, it’s a small miracle I never punched those people in the face or snapped back with a hurtful remark. Instead, I learned how to bite my tongue and force an answer about how “we’ll get around to having kids eventually” or that “it will all happen in God’s time.”
But even when people didn’t ask why we don’t have kids, I can assure you that many were wondering, “do they not want kids or do they have a problem?” It’s as if you can see the wheels turning in people’s heads trying to determine why we had not yet procreated.
In our case, my husband, Garth, and I did have a problem. It’s one we ignored for years.
This is our story of our eight-year journey with infertility.
The Journey Begins
In 2009, Garth and I decided we were ready to have kids. Like most people, I thought I would quit taking birth control pills and within a few months, I would be pregnant.
That didn’t happen.
In fact, that first year, I only had two or three periods. Clearly, something was off. As a result, my doctor put me on a fertility drug to help me ovulate and recommended we focus on timing our efforts accordingly.
People like to joke that making a baby is lots of fun. But when you add medication and timing to the mix, the romance is replaced with immense pressure and stress.
After four months of failed attempts while on medication, we decided to take a break. I thought that maybe if we didn’t focus on it so much, things would fall into place.
A Detour: A Different Kind of Baby
Weeks after giving up on trying to get pregnant, I launched my marketing company. It was the summer of 2010 and my business became my new baby that consumed all of my time and attention. It was the perfect distraction.
During this time, we didn’t think much about trying to get pregnant. All of my efforts were focused on growing the business. I believed that I needed to grow my business to a certain point before I could have a baby.
But, that day never came. It was never the right time. There was always more work to do.
And yet, each month I felt a twinge of disappointment when my period came. Although we weren’t focused on getting pregnant at the time, I kept hoping it would happen naturally.
It never did.
Arriving at the Fertility Clinic
In 2015, as my 35th birthday approached, I realized I couldn’t keep pretending that everything was okay.
My doctor ordered a battery of tests. Blood work. X-rays. Sperm samples. All turned out to be normal. We finally reached a point where we needed to be referred to the fertility clinic. But, we stalled. We let the holidays and our fear get in the way.
That is, until our hand was forced.
In the spring of 2016, we discovered a tumor on Garth’s testicle. So, at long last, we ended up at the fertility clinic to explore our options.
Beginning Fertility Treatment
After another round of testing at the fertility clinic, we were diagnosed with “unexplained infertility.” Although we were thrilled nothing was wrong (other than Garth’s tumor), it left us wondering why things weren’t working for us.
After consulting with our amazing doctor, we decided to freeze Garth’s sperm and wait for the outcome of his surgery. Once we discovered his tumor was cancerous, we decided to use his frozen sperm to proceed with intrauterine insemination (IUI), or what I like to call the turkey baster method.
With IUI, they give you more fertility drugs, monitor your cycle with multiple ultrasounds, give you a shot to trigger the release of the egg and at just the right time, you go to the clinic and they use a catheter to deploy the soldiers. When the egg timer dings after 15 minutes, you’re all done.
Then you wait two painfully long weeks to see if it worked.
And after all that, there’s only a six to 10 percent chance that you will get pregnant.
That’s it.
While the odds aren’t that great, it’s still an improvement over the two to three percent chance you naturally have each cycle.
With odds that low, I often wondered how on earth does anyone get pregnant?!?
We tried IUI three times in the fall of 2016. The third IUI cycle was especially hard. At first, I wasn’t responding to the meds and I wasn’t producing any follicles. They upped my dosage and then I had too many (seven!) and ran the risk of multiples. It took five ultrasounds that month to get the timing right. And after all of that, it still didn’t work.
We were devastated.
The Rollercoaster of Infertility
I have a friend who characterizes infertility as a rollercoaster ride. There’s the eternal hope that each fertility treatment will produce a baby. There’s excitement and anxiety as you climb up the hill to the tippy top. And then, you come crashing down when your worst fears are realized and yet another attempt fails.
Each ride on the rollercoaster gets harder. You want to be excited. You want to be hopeful. But, in an effort to protect yourself from the crushing disappointment, you hedge your bets. You try to play it cool. Or, maybe you become angry or frustrated. That way, when your body fails you yet again, the fall isn’t so hard and devastating.
With each IUI attempt, I became more frustrated, downtrodden and angry. All of the effort felt worthless — especially with such a small percentage of success.
I would often ask myself, “Why are we going through this for only a six to 10 percent chance that it will work?”
I felt the numbers were stacked against us. And they were.
We knew the next step was in vitro fertilization, or IVF. But with the medical bills from fertility treatments and Garth’s cancer surgery and treatments, we were cash-strapped. We were in so much medical debt already, that we felt like we had hit a brick wall. How were we going to do this?
Thankfully, our prayers were answered when Garth’s parents stepped in with the money we needed to make IVF possible. I felt like for the first time we had a fighting chance.
With IVF, you remove more of the barriers that can inhibit pregnancy. As a result, your odds of success are much higher. At my age, IVF gave us roughly a 30 percent chance of a baby. If you add in chromosomal testing of the embryos, the success rate went up to 60 percent.
For the first time in a long time, we had hope.
The Challenges of IVF
IVF is a much longer process that IUI. From start to finish, it takes roughly five to six months to complete. It’s also a lot more costly and a lot more stressful.
Here’s the gist of how it works:
You take drugs to stimulate the ovaries to grow as many eggs as possible. The eggs are surgically removed and then fertilized by injecting the sperm into the eggs. The eggs are allowed to grow for five days to blastocyst stage.
At this point, you can test the surviving embryos to determine which are chromosomally normal and mostly likely compatible with life. After all of that, if you have a healthy embryo, you transfer it to your uterus and pray that it implants.
We started the IVF process in January 2017.
Even after going through two classes about the process, I don’t think I truly understood the gravity of what we were about to go through.
There were the countless doctors appointments.
I visited the fertility clinic roughly 15 to 20 times during the five-month IVF process. Thankfully, I work for myself and set my own schedule. I can only imagine how much harder this would be if you have to take leave from a job.
There were shots.
Lots of them. Between my husband and I, we administered more than 100 shots to my abdomen and rear end. My sore butt was peppered with tiny marks and bruises from all the needles.
Although we became pros at our nightly shot regimen, it wasn’t without stress. The first time, we spent 45 minutes in my in-laws bathroom watching videos and reading all the instructions. And still, I messed up mixing the drugs and spilled one of the vials. And there were times I cried in pain as Garth stuck the one-and-a-half inch needle in my back side. As awful as the shots could be, I’m confident it was even harder for him knowing he was the one causing the pain.
There were frustrating side effects.
During the egg retrieval stage, the medicine caused constant headaches, bloating and abdominal cramps. Plus, the medicine made me feel like my brain was in a dense fog. I felt like a zombie trudging my way through each day.
There were restrictions.
Maybe the stress and side effects would have been more manageable if I could have relied on my typical crutches like coffee, alcohol, ibuprofen and exercise. But, all of those options are eliminated during this process. I clung to my one cup of coffee daily like a lifeline.
Not to mention, through much of the process, sex is off-limits. Not that I felt up for that most of the time. But, I find it incredibly ironic that the one thing you normally do to make a baby is eliminated when you’re making a baby with the help of science.
There was the management of it all.
After every appointment, I had to call into a special voicemail to find out the results from my tests and get updated dosage information. Based on my results, I would adjust the doses of medicine accordingly. I had to deal with a mail order pharmacy to overnight the drugs I needed if I ran out. The IVF process felt like an all-consuming job. It’s the elephant in the room that you just can’t ignore.
There was isolation.
Because there’s so much misunderstanding about infertility and IVF, it’s difficult to talk about. People don’t understand. Not really, anyway. And as much as we wanted to tell people about what we were going through, we also didn’t want to the pain of telling people if the treatment didn’t work. We experienced that during our IUIs. With each subsequent IUI, we told fewer and fewer people so we wouldn’t have the pain of letting people know that, once again, it didn’t work.
That’s why the IVF process was terribly lonely for us. Even though we’re social people, we hibernated and largely kept to ourselves to avoid having to talk about it. And all the while, we faced almost daily announcements on social media about pregnancy, gender reveals and birth of children. It was death by a thousand cuts. Each announcement inflicting a tiny wound that collectively seared deep in the heart.
And then there was the all the waiting.
Waiting for appointments. Waiting for results. Waiting for your treatment regimen. Waiting for your drugs to arrive. Waiting for the next step in the process. Waiting to see how many eggs were retrieved. Waiting to see how many fertilized. Waiting to see how many embryos survived to day five. Waiting to see how many embryos were chromosomally normal. Waiting for your period to arrive so you can schedule your embryo transfer. And worst of all, waiting to find out if this time, finally, you are pregnant.
I’m not terribly patient and waiting has never been a strong suit of mine. There’s nothing like IVF and infertility to teach you a whole lot about learning to wait.
My egg retrieval was on March 1, 2017. The doctors were able to retrieve 24 eggs and 20 of them were successfully fertilized. After five days, we had six blastocysts or embryos.
By mid-March, we learned we had four chromosomally normal embryos. That meant, these embryos were healthy and had the greatest chance of success. This was great news.
In May, we transferred one beautiful little embryo. And on May 22, 11 days after the transfer, I went into the fertility clinic for blood work to determine if I was pregnant.
We waited six excruciating hours to get the result. My hands shook as we dialed into our voicemail box. My heart was pounding so loudly, it reverberated throughout my whole body.
And in that moment, we heard the news that we had been waiting eight years to receive….
I was pregnant!
I was in such disbelief, I couldn’t hear what my nurse was saying. Her words faded into the background as the news sunk in. In eight years of trying, we never once had a positive pregnancy test result. This was the very first one.
In the coming days, I went in for more blood tests to confirm the results. And a couple weeks later, we had our first ultrasound and heard that beautiful heartbeat.
Today, I am 23 weeks pregnant and our little Bean should arrive in late January. Sometimes, I still have to pinch myself that the child we have hoped for is finally on the way. It has been a long road to get to this point. And we are so grateful to be here. We can’t wait to meet our precious little one in four short months!
As difficult as our journey has been, there are others who have struggled harder and for longer than we have. I know women who have miscarried, women who have painful conditions that have required surgery and women who have endured years of fertility treatments without successful outcomes. I also know women who are just starting treatments and are hoping that maybe, just maybe, this will work.
I’m sharing our story now because I believe infertility should not be a topic that hides in the shadows. And maybe our story can offer some hope.
Infertility is truly gut-wrenching. And for the many, many people who are impacted by this painful condition, I want you to know that you are not alone.
You are brave. You are strong. You are beautiful.
And most importantly, you are a warrior.
I hope and pray that your fight with infertility ends with a positive outcome and that one day, you will hold your beautiful, healthy baby in your arms.
As my grandmother used say to me, “I’m rooting for you, kiddo.”
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