Step Three: Educating Yourself

My first OBGYN was labeled a "fertility specialist." He was a nice man, not overly young or terribly old. He had a decent bedside manner. He wasn't insulting to me, acting as if I were just a stupid patient. He seemed to understand that I really wanted to get pregnant and wanted to help. To a certain extent.

He did run the usual, "Well, we like you to wait a year before we really get worried; it can take a normal, healthy couple a full year to get pregnant" bit past me. But I wasn't having that. I was already 30, for Pete's sake. My primary child-bearing years were long gone, and I was facing the iffy ones, with the "good luck with that" ones only 5 years away.

So at my insistence, he agreed to start diagnostics after only six months of TTC. First were several rounds of blood tests. They wanted to check all my hormone levels. And they wanted to be sure that I was actually ovulating, though I've always had regular cycles and been able to feel a twang of pain when I ovulated. Blood tests are no fun. The needles are no fun, especially when you have tiny, deep, squirrelly veins like I do. But I got so many tests done that within a few months, I was over my fear of them. And I even figured out where my one or two good gushers were.

Next came Big Daddy's turn. His was the "leave a deposit in this cup" type of test. We both had visions of "Forget Paris" as he drove the cup over to the doctor's office with it tucked in his coat pocket.

Then came the HSG. This procedure, where they check to see if a woman's tubes are open is the ultimate in the joke, "this may feel a little uncomfortable." First they have you lay spread eagle on an xray table, which is always very relaxation inducing. Next they insert a balloon into your cervix and blow it up to make the hole bigger. Imagine sticking a carrot up your nose and you'll get roughly the same feeling of comfort. Then they shoot contrast dye through your uterus and up your tubes and see if it comes out the other end of the tubes.

After the HSG came back completely normal, both tubes open, and Big Daddy's test came back with flying colors, and my hormone levels all looked good aside from low progesterone, they didn't really know what else to test. It did appear that I was ovulating, though it couldn't be determined if the ovulations were good quality because of the low progesterone. So the next thing my OBGYN did was what every OBGYN does if they can't explain why you're not getting pregnant--they put you on Clomid, a fertility drug.

And it was about this time that I realized that fertility science is still in the dark ages. No one knows anything. If you don't happen to come up with one of the big two or three female issues liked blocked tubes, endometriosis, or PCOS, and your man doesn't come back with serious sperm issues, they just kind of shrug their shoulders, prescribe you some drugs, and send you on your way telling you to "relax more" and to "be more patient."

Thanks, doc. Thanks a lot. So I decided to start being my own doctor, my own fertility specialist. If no one was really interested or able to help me figure things out, I guess I was going to have to do it on my own.