Our TTC History

Okay, first things first: after another (less contentious) discussion with my RE, I am going to meet with the nurse coordinator at my clinic on Friday to discuss my concerns about the egg retrieval procedure. I get the sense that they all think I’m a crazy person and that I’m just a being a total weenie about the pain, which I would politely dispute, but at least we’re moving forward.

So – I want to give a little more background on our experience TTC in the hopes that it will make my post a few days ago seem a little less like it came out of nowhere. All the crying over the past week has made me think about how closely I associate TTC with illness, and why I’ve approached every step in this process with such crippling dread.

I mentioned that my mother had cancer recently, and it was actually her diagnosis that kicked off the entire endeavor. The night that she called to say the biopsy was positive, I turned to Harry and said, “We need to have a baby as soon as possible.” I said this because I wanted kids (I do want kids) and I couldn’t imagine our children not knowing their grandmother. And my parents want us to have kids so badly! I could just picture their faces when I would tell them, mid-chemo infusion, that I had some happy news to distract us all.

Well, Mom was diagnosed in July, I had to finish up a course of medication that would have been dangerous to a developing fetus, and I had to make an appointment with my Ob-Gyn to end our current method of birth control. Once all that was done, our first cycle officially “trying” was October 2010. Nothing happened, of course, and by January 2011 my mother was (thankfully) in remission. That month I told Harry that maybe this wasn’t the perfect time to have a child after all, and we made a tentative plan to hold off for a little while. The next month was February… Valentine’s Day was right in the middle of my cycle… and when I woke up the next morning the first thing I said to Harry was, “Well, I guess we’re back to trying for a baby!” Of course, that month was another negative.

In March, my mom had a scan that revealed the cancer might have come back, and naturally we all freaked out again. Back to Plan A, except this time with more technology: I went out and bought a basal-body thermometer and a bunch of ovulation predictor kits and joined Fertility Friend to track my cycles. When nothing had happened by June, I began to get suspicious. We had hit the nail on the head three times in a row (so to speak) and none of that carefully timed “activity” had had the slightest result. I happened to have an appointment with my regular GP, and mentioned that we were having difficulty conceiving. She reiterated the statistics about healthy couples taking 12 months on average, said that we were probably fine and should just keep doing what we were doing, but recommended that I make an appointment with my Ob-Gyn to discuss it just in case. September (!) was the earliest date the Ob-Gyn was available, although in the meantime my mother went back into remission, so that was a major relief.

The appointment with my Ob-Gyn was routine until the bimanual exam. If I may be so blunt: he had his hands in me for about 5 seconds before he said, “Hmmm…” and my blood just froze. There was a mass in my abdomen, an ultrasound revealed that I had endometriomas on both ovaries, I needed to have laparoscopic surgery, I had to find a surgeon, we set the date for late October, I watched almost disbelieving as my feet walked me towards an operating room, I lay down on the table, I put my arm out to the side for them to start the drugs in my IV, and as I felt the anesthesia start to flow I had one clear thought: This is the first time since my diagnosis that I don’t feel upset about it.

Yeah, well, when I woke up that good feeling was gone. My surgeon said that although he had taken them out, the endometriomas were likely to recur any time I had a normal menstrual cycle, so I had basically three choices for treatment going forward:
1. Pregnancy, achievable only through IVF due to my blocked Fallopian tubes
2. Long-term hormone therapy, which could be as routine as the birth control pill or could take the form of Lupron Depot
3. Do nothing, monitor me closely with routine transvaginal ultrasounds, and accept that the endometriomas will recur but might do so very slowly so an additional surgery wouldn’t be necessary for a while.

After some serious discussion with Harry, I elected to move forward with IVF. It was the only option that offered any kind of happy outcome (people love babies, right?) and even going back on the pill was likely to be a stopgap measure while we geared up for IVF. We wanted children someday, and the stars seemed to be aligning that this was our someday, so when I had recovered a bit from my surgery I made an appointment with my new RE to find out when we could start.

I have so much to be grateful for, including but not limited to access to excellent medical care, a loving partner and family, financial stability, being born in the age of assisted reproductive technologies, and four (four!) IVF cycles covered by my insurance plan. And I give thanks daily for these blessings, I really do. But when it comes to the unpleasant details of IVF, this is all I ask: please don’t expect me to be enthusiastic, excited, or knitting little baby booties while I’m waiting for yet another horrible thing to be done to my body. I mean, I've never had a giggly conversation with my husband about how much fun it would be to have a little mini-us running around. It has been a very long time since any thought I had about having children wasn’t tied in with serious illness and mortality. This is sad, and unfair, but no more unfair than anyone else’s path to infertility – and for that matter, it’s no more unfair than finding out that you’re having an unplanned pregnancy, which a huge number of people have to deal with. If we are lucky enough for this cycle to work, I will love our child fiercely and do everything in my power to give him or her the best life I can. If it doesn’t, we’ll regroup somehow, even if things seem dark at times. I know I’m not in this alone, and I am really grateful for everyone’s support – thank you for your positive comments, and in return, I’ll try to keep the positive posts coming.