You wouldn't have thought it, but ever since I was a nerdy little tomboy girl, I dreamed of the day that I would have my own little one on the way. I would even stuff my Barbie's dress with toilet paper to make her look pregnant. Not even kidding.
Early on in our courtship, my husband of almost two years and I talked marriage and children - He was recently widowed, and his first wife of over seven years never had luck having children of their own. That's a story for another post someday, perhaps, but suffice it to say that by the time we were married, we had no intentions of waiting to have children. We never even considered contraception of any kind.
But as I'm sure anyone who's stumbled across this story will probably be able to guess, things didn't quite go according to plan. (Dun-dun-DUN!)
Many women dealing with infertility are able to conceive, but have early miscarriages. I feel for these women, but that wasn't the case for us. I wasn't conceiving at all.
I saw my OB/GYN about it, and he thought I might have PCOS (poly-cystic ovary syndrome) purely based in physical characteristics, but just to cover all our bases he had my husband go down to a local renowned fertility center to have a semen analysis done. My husband wasn't too thrilled about the idea, but if we wanted babies, we had to make sure we did our due diligence.
Very soon after that we found out why we weren't having success: No sperm.
Zip.
Zilch.
We both took this very hard, but we didn't have time to wallow. My husband was referred to a urologist who seemed to be confident that a procedure going... uh... straight to the source... could produce the sperm we needed, but just in case, we needed to select and purchase donor sperm as a backup. I have more to say about donor selection, but I'll save that for another post.
Of course it was now obvious that our last shot at having a child of our own, short of adoption, would be to go through in vitro fertilization.
Because my husband's sperm retrieval procedure would have to directly coincide with my egg retrieval in order to do a fresh transfer, I had to get on all the medications for follicle stimulation (including multiple nightly belly and thigh shots) without knowing if there was even going to be any sperm of his to work with (hence the ordering backup donor sperm). I kept my hopes up having faith in the urologist that he would be able to get something. Anything.
Little did I know that my husband had made this a matter of personal prayer. He prayed very hard for weeks for the outcome that he wanted - to be able to have children using his genes - but he didn't feel peace until at last he prayed for God's will to be done.
After his initial semen analysis results, we looked up possible causes, and found that in rare cases type 1 diabetes can cause sterility in men (my husband was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes when he was five years old), so we knew that using a donor could end up being our only option to have children with at least one of us contributing DNA (and as I mentioned at the beginning, I have always wanted to be pregnant. Call me strange, but I think pregnant bodies are beautiful). Adoption, of course, is always on the table, but we want to make sure we exhaust all our other options first.
Low and behold, the retrieval day came, and there was nothing. I'll admit I cried, and was surprised my husband was so calm when he told me. That's when he told me he had already made his peace with God about it, no matter the result. The urologist had one more option to try, but (this is a little graphic, so skip to the next paragraph if you are squeemish) it would involve literally flaying his testicles, and we both felt like the chances were next to impossible that there would be anything there. We resigned to using our backup donor sperm.
My egg retrieval went better than expected - 20 eggs total retrieved. Of course not all of them were viable. After extraction we had a week-ish to wait for our doctor to inseminate them with the sperm and observe their development before transferring them back into me.
There were 20 eggs, but only 14 were mature. Of those 14, only 9 fertilized successfully. After watching their growth for a week, only 4 ended up developing enough to be considered viable. We had hoped for a fresh transfer, but due to issues you can read more about in my "Surprise! More Meds!" post, we ended up having to freeze our embryos to use a month later.
And that brings us to today. We are scheduled for transfer tomorrow, and we plan on transferring two, count 'em, TWO embryos. Yes, we are opting for twins by choice. That doesn't mean both will take, but that is what we are hoping for. We want to start our family, and we are ready. We have friends currently expecting who did IVF and transferred two but only one stuck, so we figure better safe than sorry!
So much is up to chance, but we are hoping for the best! Prayers are welcome, and as always, send good vibes our way!
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