So While in the final month of nursing school Ry and I decided to venture into being parents!!! I know crazy, but we were so ready and so excited... I decided to tell MY STORY :)
My mom is so happy and goes around telling everyone our story, mine and Ry's, about getting pregnant, so I decided it is important for me to write it down and tell all :)... I'll try to keep it short, but the ending is truly the miracle.. And so begins Our Story...
So many may know that Ry and I married in 2006... a year after being married we decided to try to have a family, so begins 2007... The year of 2007 was pretty uneventful... I stopped taking birth control that year and Ry and I tried the "natural way" to get pregnant, with obviously no success... So after a year of trying I ventured back to my OB...
and so begins 2008... My OB decided to inform me that they don't handle infertile cases.. I was shocked.. Infertile??? it's only been a year... how are we already infertile??? Well so began the search for a new OB, one who deals with "infertile couples"... the search ended and I found a great OB who started right away with testing us...The year of 2008 was full of tests and more tests... that year we found out that Ry's little swimmers weren't champion swimmers :) actually they didn't swim at all... so we were referred to a specialist where they found the problem... Ry had a varicocele, varicose veins in his testicular sac, well thses little veins were heating up all those little swimmers and killing them off, so he had a surgery that fixed those varicose veins and the wait began to watch those numbers rise... it took about 7months or so before we saw a rise in his counts but they were rising, we were so excited... but that year had come to an end so..
begins 2009....This year we still had no success... My OB decided to do a laporoscopy on me, it's where they go through my belly button to view my uterus and tubes... they were making sure everything was ok... well it wasn't, they found extensive endometriosis that covered my tubes, uterus, and bladder, the dr lasered it out and also put dye through my tubes to make sure that they were open and patent, the dye turned out to be good, my tubes were open and working... After my surgery the dr said that this was my most fertile time, so we decided to do some more ovulation tests and artificial insemination...My dr also put me on clomid to increase our chances...Artificial insemination is an expencience little procedure, it includes the spinning down of sperm to get the best ones you can find :) and then they inject them into my uterus, so that they hopefully find my egg and fertilize it, just like a turkey baster... well we did this three times, with no success, it is crazy how the timing had to be perfert for this.. we had to make sure I was ovulating and the sperm had to me injecteced within an hour to survive.. we did all we could...Some may be asking what my mental health was like at this time... well the struggle to get pregnant tore at me.. it challenged my strength, my courage and most of all my faith... I had crumbled, I was angry, at everyone.. no one can ever understand the heart ache that you have when all you want is to be a mom, and you can't... the mind games I had struggled through, I knew I was being crazy, irrational and I couldn't do anything to change it... This challenged our marriage... but it only made it stronger.. the suffering was always welcomed by my husbands loving arms, what an incredible man...this year I also started to take anti depressants... that was a huge step to admit, I was not ok.
So after no success through all the years, I felt like I gave up.. I started 2010 with nursing school so we laid off on the "trying to have a baby" I focused on school, but it was hard... I felt like I was not a nice person, I was jealous and envious of all the women out there who could get pregnant by just talking about getting pregnant, I hated them for not ever understanding the heart ache, but I wanted to be them, so bad... It hurt. The summer of 2010 we broke down and met with the reproductive endocrinologist, what this means is in vitro... it was our final step to having a family... We met with them and they went over all our records and gave us our options... it was so discouraging.. the money, the time and the fact that it might not work... We decided to try to get all our finances in order and get things paid off and get a savings... We were drained... It took a year, but we paid off everything but our house and car payment and had a savings... still not enough to do the in vitro, but after a year of my husbands prayers and mine, we knew this was what we had to do... I had to try it, or I would always regret it... I wanted so bad to be able to go through the process of being pregnant to feel that little one inside moving, to nourish it and to go through the process of delivery, some take this for granted, others pray daily for the experience, I prayed daily...
All this brings us to 2011... My final semesters of nursing school and the final months of deciding what to do... I had such a strong feeling that we had to do in vitro to bring a family here to earth...there was no other way...so in the final months of nursing school.. I endured another surgery, where they again went into my uterus and lasered out my endometriosis and removed my cysts and endometriomas that had formed through the last two years since my last surg... we knew that we had to do in vitro within two months of this surg, so again... timing is everything... I started more testing, blood work, ultrasounds, saline sonograms in June of 2011, then came July when I started the injections... I'm not gonna lie, I wanted to give up, was it really all worth it??? the injections were horrible, the blood test every other day, the drive one hour each way, the money, the uncomfortable feeling in my body, the aches, the bloating... was it worth it???
I still don't know.. but what I do Know is a miracle happened... Four in a half years later... WE WERE PREGNANT!!!! What a joyous day... I cried, the test was positive, it had never been positive before...
No one will ever understand the endurance that Ry and I had to go through to have a baby.. the heartache, the pain, the struggle... but we did it, we made it, and YES... It was ALL WORTH IT!!!