History

My husband and I decided "the time was right" to start our family back in the fall of 2007.  We tried on our own for nearly a year, and when nothing happened, we made an appointment to see a reproductive endocrinologist at the university hospital in our town.  We had screening and blood work and all that fun stuff.  Turns out my husband has extremely low sperm count coupled with low motility.  It was and remains totally unexplained...we did genetic testing, hormone testing, and more.  There is just no explanation.  Right off the bat we were told that IVF was our only option.  It was so hard to hear that news.  As a Christian (and knowing very little about IVF at the time), I wasn't even sure that God was "okay" with IVF.  After much thought, lots of prayer, and receiving counsel from people we trusted, we made the decision that God was leading us toward IVF.  Summarizing it in one sentence doesn't do justice to what we went through emotionally and spiritually over the course of many months to get to that decision. 

As we approached the time to try our first IVF cycle, I had tests and scopes and did all the prep.  We hit another bump in the road.  During my hysteroscopy, my doctor found a uterine fibroid.  It was giving me no trouble at all (and if I had gotten pregnant on my own, it probably wouldn't have been an issue since that kind of thing happens all the time), but my doctor felt that if we were going to go forward with IVF, it would really give us the best chances to conceive if I had the fibroid removed first.  So I went under the knife.  Afterward we had to wait 3 months before moving forward with IVF.  I remember feeling discouraged that so much time was passing us by.  Finally, we were ready to start our cycle.  Our doctor did an ultrasound, and discovered that a partial wall had formed in my uterus (my uterus looked "heart-shaped" instead of nice and round).  It was unclear whether that was a result of the first surgery, or if it had always been there but merely hidden by the fibroid.  But in any case, it was decided that I needed a second surgery to resection my uterus.  That was done in January of 2009.  We had to wait again for me to fully heal before starting IVF. 

Finally in April of 2009, we did our first IVF cycle.  I went through all the shots and meds and ultrasounds and appointments.  Our doctor felt things were progressing well and believed that this process was going to be successful for us.  The follicles were measuring where they were supposed to, and we were told that we could be expecting as many as 10-20 eggs to be retrieved.  They went ahead and triggered me, but unfortunately the retrieval was nearly a complete failure.  Out of all my follicles, there were only 4 eggs total.  Only three of them were big enough to even attempt fertilizing.  In the end, there was only one embryo to transfer.  We were shocked and devastated, but we still held out hope for that one embryo.  Two weeks later I had a pregnancy test.  The nurse told me I was pregnant, but that things didn't look good.  My numbers just weren't very high.  Sure enough, I started my period a few days later. 

At this point, my husband and I were thinking that IVF just wasn't for us.  The first cycle had been such a failure, and there was no way we could afford to go through the university again.  We began to mourn the loss of being able to have our own biological children and thinking about other options to grow our family.  But my mom just didn't have peace about it, and she had heard about this wonderful Christian fertility specialist near my hometown.  She encouraged us to at least go and talk to this new doctor.  In my heart of hearts, I still wanted to try again, but we were fearful and worried about it too.  In June of 2009 we met with the new RE  and he advised us to try IVF a second time.  We agreed, and in August of that year we went through the IVF process again. 

Our new RE was able to use the information from our first IVF attempt to tweak it the second time around.  At the time of our retrieval, we were thrilled to hear that 7 of my eggs had fertilized.  We transferred 2 of them and had the rest cryopreserved.  Two weeks later, I had a positive pregnancy test.  My follow-up test two days later showed that my numbers were increasing, but not doubling the way they should.  I had 4 more pregnancy tests over the course of a week and a half, and each time the numbers increased, but they were still not going up the way they needed to.  Finally, on the last test, my numbers made a huge jump and were good.  My beautiful son was born in April of 2010.    It took three long years before I could hold my child, and I would go through it all again if I had to. 

In August of 2011 we decided that we wanted to try for a second child.  We did a frozen embryo transfer and thawed three embryos.  One survived the thaw.  I got pregnant but miscarried at 6 weeks due to nonviable embryo.  Knowing we had two embryos left, we decided to try again in November.  Unfortunately, that fall my gall bladder decided to completely freak out, so in October I had surgery number 3.  We could have put off the gall bladder removal, but at the time we did not want to run the risk of possibly getting pregnant and then potentially needing to have my gall bladder out during pregnancy.  So...then we waited while I healed, then came the holidays, and finally we did another transfer at the beginning of January, 2012.  Out of the two embryos left, one survived the thaw and was transferred.  Sadly, on Valentine's Day, 2012 my pregnancy test came back negative.

In April of 2012, we went forward with our 3rd fresh cycle of IVF.  Unfortunately, we had very similar results to our first cycle, and it resulted in only one embryo.  We transferred that one and spent the next 12 days hoping and praying that God would give us a miracle.  The day before our pregnancy test I began bleeding, and I knew that we wouldn't be receiving good news the next day.  I was right.

Do you sense a theme here?  Our journey through infertility has been full of waiting.  And here we are at the beginning of May.  We've decided to take a break from fertility treatments for the summer, and we plan to make decisions regarding our next steps in the fall.  As of now, we still feel that God is calling us to grow our family, but we aren't exactly sure what that might look like.  Right now we are leaning toward the idea of doing a 4th round of IVF, as our RE is very confident that by making some changes in protocol, we can really improve our chances.  Our doctor is amazingly competent and someone that we trust fully, for which we are so thankful.  However, we want to use the summer to heal emotionally, get healthier physically to give us our best chances of success, and most of all to wait on the Lord and listen for His guidance and direction for our family.