Jumping the Infertility Hurdle

The next time you think about telling someone who is trying to get pregnant "not to worry, it will happen"...choose your words wisely! No one understands what it is like to deal with infertility until it happens to them.  I always thought that I would get pregnant quickly.  In fact, my grandmother had eight kids in nine years, my mother never struggled to get pregnant and I had been warned my whole life to be careful; it is so easy to conceive a child! So why was it so difficult for me? 

Damian and I had been together for seven years before we got engaged and were married for two years before we began trying to get pregnant.  After two and a half years of unsuccessfully trying to conceive, we finally sought the help of a fertility specialist.  They ran a series of tests and asked us several questions about our healthy history. Fortunately, they couldn't find anything wrong with either of us and we just happened to fall into the fifteen percent of people who have "unexplained fertility." We opted to try IUI before moving on to IVF and it was unsuccessful, so we decided to go ahead with IVF.  I wasn't really sure what to expect.  I had read that the medication could make you crazy and the shots were painful, but I didn't have a reaction to the medication and after I got over my fear of needles, the shots really weren't bad at all!  

My body responded very well to the medication and on the day of retrieval they were able to get twenty-four eggs, nineteen of which were mature and seventeen of them fertilized.  We decided to put two embryos in on the day of transfer.  Eight days later I found out that we were pregnant! I couldn't believe it!  I had asked the nurse to leave me a message on my cell phone with the results of the pregnancy test because I would be at work and wasn't sure how I would respond to another disappointing "not pregnant." When I listened to the message, I had to call the nurse to confirm what she had said...was I really pregnant?  How was I going to tell Damian?  I purchased a pair of baby girl shoes and baby boy shoes and put them into a gift bag.  Since Damian's birthday was just two days away, he thought it was an early birthday gift. Little did he know that it was the best gift he would ever receive!