Wednesday, August 12, 2009

Backstory

I was first married right out of college (11 days before my 22nd birthday). Because we were young, we decided to wait five years before trying to get pregnant. When the five years were up, he wasn't ready, so we decided to wait one more year. Throughout our marriage, I was always planning around and referring to our future children. Examples: When he was shopping for a car, he wanted to get a two-door. I told him that once we have kids, that would be a huge pain, so he got the four-door. When we first moved in to our house, we spent time trying to decide which of the bedrooms should be his music studio and which should be the future kids' room (the one closest to our bedroom, or the one closest to the bathroom). We had names picked out.When the "waiting for him to get ready" year was over, he told me he wasn't sure he wanted kids at all anymore. I told him he needed to figure it out. A month or so later, we saw a cute baby dressed up as a pea pod for Halloween. He decided he could handle it, so we set a date to start trying. As it approached, he started becoming more and more distant. I had bought a book called "Do I Want to Be a Mom?" that helped solidify my desire to have kids. He read it too, and all it did was reinforce how much kids change your life. He told me that he didn't want to have to make room for a child. I didn't want to have to give up the life that was promised to me and that I still wanted. We talked about various "compromises," such as we have a baby, but I am the one mainly responsible for it, but ultimately decided that that would not be fair to the child.In the end, we divorced fairly amicably, sold our house (neither of us could afford it on our own), and moved to separate apartments. I was 29.

After my divorce, I dated a couple guys who were totally wrong for me. Then I met D. And he was perfect. We dated for a little over a year before he proposed, then had our wedding about 10 months later. He knew the reason for my divorce, and when we first talked about when to start trying for a baby, I suggested the fall because the baby would be due at the beginning of the school year (I'm a teacher) when I had gotten a pay raise for earning my master's degree. D suggested we get started in July so that the baby would be due in the spring and I could have four months with it (eight weeks maternity leave, then the summer off) before going back to school. I was so excited to be with a guy who wanted to start trying for a baby SOONER than I wanted to, instead of postponing. :)We had stopped preventing pregnancy about a year before our wedding, but still trying a little to avoid our most fertile times, although the closer to the wedding we got, the less careful we were.After the wedding, we started aiming for the "correct" days, but no luck. Throughout the school year, more and more of my friends got pregnant, and I was hoping the next one would be me. In January, I made an appointment with my gyno to get tested because I was 33, and wanted to make sure everything was OK. All the blood tests that she ran came back normal, so we scheduled a hysterosalpingogram (HSG). This showed that my tubes are, in fact, open. The test is painful for some people, but for me, it was mostly just uncomfortable. When the dye was first injected it hurt pretty bad, but as soon as I remembered to breathe, the pain went away. Since everything looked good, the doctor prescribed Clomid at 50mg just to make sure my body was producing the best eggs possible. D was tested shortly after, and the doctor told me everything was normal except his motility was "a little low." But she didn't sound worried about it, so we didn't worry either. The next month we tried Clomid at 100mg, and again the next month. That month my period was late, and we thought we had finally hit the jackpot. But the home test was negative, so I went in for a blood test...also negative. A week later, still no period, so they ran another blood test...still negative. So they prescribed Prometrium to bring on my period. It finally came, three and a half weeks late. Then they bumped me up to Clomid at 150mg. At the pelvic exam to make sure I was responding well to the Clomid, the nurse practitioner again mentioned D's motility being "a little low." So I asked exactly how low is a little low, and she said "well, the normal range starts at 69%, and his was 5%." I said "that's not a LITTLE low." And then I was pissed that I had taken fertility drugs for four months at ever increasing dosages, when the problem probably isn't with my body. So we had D tested again, and this time everything was normal except the motility was 2%.That was when we decided that I wouldn't take Clomid again to give my body a break, and we made an appointment with a fertility specialist, and shortly after making the call, I turned 34. D is about to turn 32. The appointment is in two days. I'm worried that they will tell us that IVF is our only option for getting pregnant. I'm hoping that they can either find some reason for the low motility and fix it, or tell us that an IUI had a good chance of being successful.Well, that is the short version of what we have been dealing with in the past year. I didn't get into the emotional stuff at all; that might come later.

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