Hi everyone! Thanks for visiting my blog!

I thought I’d start my first post with my story so far; how we got started with fertility treatments, why I have to do this, and what I’ve done so far. So, here we go!

My husband and I got married in May 2016. I was 26, about to turn 27, and my husband was 28. We both wanted to start trying have to children right away. Both of our parents had us young (22!) and we have loved growing up with “young” parents. So we knew that we wanted to be “young” parents too.

I always had this gut feeling that getting pregnant and having children would be difficult for me. I’m not even sure why, but I remember thinking when we first started that I needed to be prepared for a miscarriage. I think I was prepping myself because I know that 1 in 4 pregnancies end in miscarriage, so I knew how common it was.

However, I didn’t realize just HOW difficult this was all going to be.

In November 2016, I still wasn’t pregnant (I wasn’t that shocked by that, some couples take several months to conceive); but I also hadn’t had a period at all since coming off my birth control pills in May.

Now, at this time, I pretty much only went to my primary care doctor once a year for a physical because she could also do a PAP for me then and I pretty much hated the gyno I had been to before. However, I knew that not having a period for 6 months was not normal. So, after several recommendations from friends, I got set up with a new OB-gyn office.

This doctor’s office is AMAZING! As soon as I went in, I told the doctor that I wasn’t immediately convinced that I was infertile, but I wanted to know why I wasn’t getting a regular period. We did lots of tests and blood work, and eventually it was determined that I have PCOS. (This basically means I don’t ovulate every month). So in (I believe) November or December 2016, I started taking Clomid. I was taking ovulation tests, and finding out that I was ovulating! This was exciting to me, because I hadn’t gotten any positive ovulation tests in the months prior. However, after about 4 months of Clomid, taking ovulation tests, and timing everything perfectly; we still weren’t pregnant! This is when my OB office referred me to a fertility specialist office.

Around June 2017, I met with the fertility doctors. Basically, my husband and I found out we had to do a TON more testing. This obviously took a while, but we did find out some good stuff! My husband checked out as being totally fertile and normal (I’ll definitely talk about this more in other posts). However, they found out that my right Fallopian tube was damaged. It was causing fluid to leak into my uterus, making it IMPOSSIBLE for any embryo to ever “stick” in there. So then in September 2017, I had surgery to remove my right tube.

By this time, we were already tired of waiting for a baby, because it had been over a year and basically everything we had done was pointless. (Not that we knew that at the time, of course). Anyway, needless to say we were ready to start the next step ASAP! The fertility doctors told us that because of my PCOS and only having one tube, the best place to start would be IUI. For those who aren’t familiar, IUI is essentially artificial insemination.

I felt so hopeful and excited – we were finally getting somewhere! However, five rounds later (aka about five months later), we had five more negative pregnancy tests and nothing else to show for this.

Finally, in late February 2018, my husband and I met with the fertility doctor again to discuss starting IVF. To save this post from being too long, I am going to be super brief here. However, I will make a whole post dedicated to that first round of IVF for those who want the details. For the sake of the crazy length of this post, though, I will tell you that my first round (a fresh transfer) did work! We were over the moon excited! I found out that I was due December 20, 2018. I tried not to get too excited until I got past that 12 week mark (end of first trimester, when everyone says you are safe). But we sadly found out that in a pregnancy, there is no real safe zone.

We lost our daughter at nearly 23 weeks, as a result of my body going into pre-term labor/I was also diagnosed with “incompetent cervix.” (Which, by the way sounds awful and there should totally be a nicer name for this!)

Anyway, now that it is almost January 2019 as I type this, we are still going through IVF and I’m still not pregnant! As I mentioned before, I’ll make a whole post dedicated to my IVF cycle that worked and all about my precious baby girl.

I’ll probably also make a post specifically about my experiences with IUI, and about the IVF cycles we have done so far since losing our daughter.

If you made it to the bottom, thank you! I will be updating this as I go throughout my journey. Please do not hesitate to reach out to me if you are going through fertility treatments too! You can’t do this alone!