My husband and I wanted to be young parents, so when we got married in February 2008, we decided to stop using birth control and see what would happen. If I got pregnant right away- great, if not, that was fine too. A year passed by and we weren't too concerned, but I started to do a little research. This is when I stumbled across a little website called The Bump. I learned so much from this community. It was amazing how little I actually knew about how my body worked. This is when I started charting - temping every morning, tracking my cycles, etc. It appeared that I was ovulating regularly and on my own.
A year and a half later and STILL no pregnancy, we started to get a little concerned. I consulted with my ob/gyn who referred me to a reproductive endocrinologist. My husband and I went through all of the necessary testing and everything appeared normal. It was somewhat frustrating to have no explanation. So we proceeded with doing a few cycles of clomid and then added IUIs (intrauterine inseminations). Three of these and still no baby. I was feeling physically and emotionally drained so decided to take a break from treatments for the summer. My RE suggested that before we moved on to any other treatments, I should have a laparoscopy. I kept putting this off because I had already had a test performed which showed my tubes were clear and functioning, and I had no signs of endometriosis. Well, I decided to have the surgery in August of this year and it turned out that I did have mild endometriosis and one of my tubes was completely destroyed. Who knew??
Dr. A said that we could try another IUI using a stronger injectable drug (Follistim) and hope that my good ovary would produce a follie or two, or we could move straight to IVF. IVF was not an option financially at this time, but using Follistim was quite a gamble as well. This drug (along with all of the monitoring you need while on it) is NOT cheap either and it wouldn't even guarantee that I would produce eggs from my good side. On the flip side, sometimes it produces multiple eggs and you could have the chance of ending up with twins or more. Eeek! We decided to just go for it and I'm sure glad we did!
My life changed forever on November 2nd. I had the standard beta test in the morning but thought that there was absolutely no chance that I was pregnant. I had taken an hpt a few days earlier (totally negative) and had every sign that my period was about to start. Imagine my surprise when I listened to the voicemail from my nurse that afternoon and she said "You ARE pregnant." I kept saying to myself "huh?" outloud, over and over again. I was convinced that they had mixed up my result with someone elses.
Well, three blood tests and 4 ultrasounds later, it's starting to sink in that I'm pregnant:) We couldn't be happier or more excited. Here's a picture of our little bean from the 7 week ultrasound:
