Support

Round about the time my doctor sort of wrote me off, I joined Fertility Friend, a website designed to help women trying to concieve. It offered free charting (measuring your basal body temperature every day to determine if/when you ovulate) as well as tons of information on fertility, and it had message boards and buddy groups you could join to get feedback, answers, and support from other women going through the same thing as you.

If you haven't gone through fertility or know someone closely who has, you won't know that NO ONE knows (and most don't care) how hard it is to want a baby and not be able to have one except someone who has been there. As soon as you get married, people start asking you, "So, when are you two going to start a family?" A seemingly innocent question, but after months and months of negative pregnancy tests (BFNs), it's a question that stings. And some people think they're being funny when they say more pointedly, "So what's the deal? Where are the babies?" And then there are the people who think they are offering you great advice when they say, "Stop worrying about it so much and it will happen," or "You guys just need to practice more, hahaha." But those comments just make you feel more inadequate and more stressed. But probably the worst is the glazed look in your friends' and family memebers' eyes when you start talking about fertility stuff again, like they just can't bear to hear it anymore. Sigh...

So when you find a site like Fertility Friend, where you can complain and cry and vent and people not only listen but actually understand, it is a GOD SEND.

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.

Step Two: Badgering the OBGYN

If you don't know this about the medical world yet, let me let you in on a little secret: It's run by MEN. Most of the doctors are men. Most of the clinicians are men. Most of the researchers are men. Most of the people who own the pharmaceutical companies and insurance companies are men. And so bajillions of dollars have been spent making sure that 90 year old men can still have erections while fertility-challenged women of child-bearing ages are left to fend for themselves in producing a child.

At least that's how it shakes down most of the time.

The medical advances that have graced every field under the sun seem to have evaded the field of fertility. Most insurance plans don't cover basic infertility procedures, even diagnostic ones. They don't even cover birth control. They cover viagara, you can bet your sweet life. But comparitively little attention is given to issues of producing more offspring should trouble arise.

This is what I found out when I visited with my OB.

I will tell you something else about the medical world: If you are a man and you want a better erection, you only have to wait 15 minutes for your drug to kick in. If you are a woman wanting to concieve a child, you have to wait a year before a doctor will consider helping you out. I'm not joking. It's standard medical practice to have a woman wait an entire year of trying to get pregnant before doctors will even take steps to diagnose any problems. Considering that it may take several cycles to diagnose the problems, it will likely be closer to a year and a half before the woman can hope to recieve any treatment. If her case is more dire and she has to see a Reproductive Endocrinologist, this woman will have to schedule an appointment a minimum of SIX MONTHS OUT to get in to see him.

And then she'll have to pay exorbitant amounts of money for any diagnostics and treatment because, well, the insurance companies are, say it with me, run by men. And men don't care if women can get pregnant as long as they themselves can get errections.

You should also know that fertility time is more like dog years for women. 1 day for an actively attempting to concieve woman is like a week to most people. A week for an actively attempting to conieve woman is like a month for most people. The 2 weeks between her period and ovulation is like months to an actively trying to concieve woman. And the 2 week wait between ovulation and taking a pregnancy test is an ETERNITY to an actively trying to concieve woman.

So all of this is why, when I met with my OBGYN after six months of TTC, I began to be very glad I am a very assertive, persuasive, persistant and well-read woman.

Step One: Mild Surprise

I have to admit, I was pretty surprised when, two weeks after our first attempt at getting pregnant, I held negative pregnancy test in my hand. I wasn't upset. I was mostly just honestly surprised.

The next month I was surprised again, but a bit more so. Close to shocked this time, really. I had had every expectation that having kids would be a simple matter of boy meets girl, boy marries girl, girl stops taking the pill, girl gets pregnant. Never in my wildest imagination did I guess I'd have to try more than a month or two. After all, I came from a fertile family. My grandmother had produced 10 kids. My own mother had given birth to three kids, but with half a dozen other pregnancies. My own sister had easily conceived four children by this point. It was in my blood to be a child bearer. And my wide hips had always supported this assumption.

And yet here I was, month after month, getting negative pregnancy test after negative pregnancy test. Baffling.

But up to this point, I still maintained the firm belief that children were imminent. I was just too impatient to wait. So after the six month of trying with no luck, but increasing shock and concern, I broke down and made an appointment with the doctor.

Why

Today I decided to start a new blog. This blog is mostly for myself, to document my story of fertiliy, or, as it turns out, infertility. I thought my days of TTC (Trying To Concieve) were long in my past, but that ugly monster just grew a new head and decided to rear them both in my face. So here it is, the story of how I got here, struggling to have kids. And hopefully, from here, my journey to another child.

How It All Began

When I was a girl growing up, I always imagined myself with a big family. Six, eight kids, I thought. Five, MINIMUM. Those were just fantasies, of course. Dreams based on some romanticized version of parenthood that didn't involve whining, barfing, or keeping track of 1/4" Polly Pocket shoes.

I also knew by the time I was very little that I wanted to start young. I wanted to be a young, hip mom, one that wore cool clothes and had long hair. One that my kids could be proud of when I showed up for school functions. I hoped that I could be married by 18 and have my first child by 19.

Life, however, had different plans for me. Instead of having a baby at 19, I was living in a village in India, studying Buddhism and Baha'i, reading the Koran and the Upanishads. I spent the next few years living in various countries, on various continents. I graduated from college with a degree in Anthropology and a minor in teaching English. I became a teacher. I was thrilled with the way my life had turned out. Except, deep inside, I still wanted the husband, and the kids too.

Only by now, I had spent quite a bit of time around my married sister and her (then four, now six) small children. And I had amended my ideal family down to five MAXIMUM, three or four more likely.

And finally, the long-awaited husband did arrive. After what must be the longest Mormon courtship of all time (2 1/2 years), we married. And guess what? Neither of us was terribly young. I was just a few weeks shy of 28 and he was 30. My dream of being a young mom was gone. I'd be in my mid-40's when my first child graduated from college, if all turned out as planned (which, you already must suspect, it wouldn't). So we knew we didn't have a ton of time to wait before starting a family. We thought we'd wait a year--travel, get to know each other, sleep in a lot--and then focus on having kids. They'd come quickly, of course. And then we'd have to figure out what method of birth control to use so that we didn't end up like my grandmother, 10 kids deep.

(Insert huge laugh here.)

We waited nearly our requisite year. Then 1 month shy of that goal, in a hotel on the banks of the Arno we decided to give it a go. "Let's make a baby!" we said, overcome by springtime in Florence. And that, we thought, would be that. Our "single" life of leisure would soon fade into pregnancy and children.

(Insert another guffaw here).

As it turns out, life had a few more twists and turns for us...