Over the past year, there have been many things going on behind the scenes that I haven't been able to post about. Chief among those is E and I's unsuccessful attempt to start our family. E and I have kept things quiet mostly to preserve our privacy, but I think I'm ready to share a bit anonymously here to help process everything going through my mind. We have chosen to keep these issues private from our family in particular, since we want to surround ourselves with entirely supportive people now that we know we are going to be facing issues.
E and I have been trying to have a baby for a little over a year now. Remember
this post so long ago? Yeah, apparently it's coming true Naively, we thought it would be pretty easy. We have heard all our lives how we were each "first attempt" babies, so we had better be absolutely 100% sure we were ready before trying since it would happen immediately. We tried casually in the beginning, since after all, this baby making stuff is supposed to be fun! We relaxed, went on vacation and didn't think about it too hard. When that didn't seem to work, we progressed to taking things a bit more seriously. I started charting my BBT, we tried to plan better, and I thought for sure this would do the trick. Six months came and went, the national average time it takes most people to conceive, so we stepped things up again and I joined the gym and began taking fertility supplements to try and get healthier. Nine months passed, I added more supplements for both E and myself, and I confess I thought for sure we'd at least be preggo by now if we didn't already have a baby.
Finally, we hit twelve months and it was time to make an appointment with my Ob/Gyn. I added OPKs (ovulation predictor kits - there's a lot of peeing on sticks in this TTC business) to my routine so I could bring her the most information possible and I went in for my first round of CD3 labs. Surprisingly, or not surprisingly, those labs came back with pretty discouraging results. It looked like there might be something wrong, but really, at only 26 years old, it had to be a fluke. My Ob/Gyn put me on Metformin, a diabetes drug that has the somewhat baffling side effect of improving your fertility, and assured me that I'd be knocked up in no time. Then she ordered another set of CD3 labs to contradict the flukey labs and, now in our 13th month, I went in again. Unfortunately, these results were even worse than the first set, and instead of calling to ease my mind, I got a call that my doctor is now officially "concerned".
I was hoping that all this testing would come back normal, and I'd get the usual "just relax" talks that everyone gives you when you reveal that you're having trouble getting pregnant. I really believed that if we could just de-stress, take a vacation and stop thinking about getting pregnant, that things would just "happen". Instead, my doctor is now throwing around phrases like Cortisol Disorder, Atypical Cushing's Disease and Premature Ovarian Failure. They're really not sure what is going on with me, but it's officially not something that I can relax away :(
