Oh, what a beautiful morning...

What a day! What a relief! I could not have imagined going to see our reproductive endocrinologist turning out any better! It was seriously amazing. We got there and we met with our doctor and he talked to us about everything, starting at the very beginning. We started out with how babies are made, literally, and went on from there. Then he took an extremely precise medical history from both of us and then we began to discuss what our potential problems may be.

He told us that my husband has a sperm count and quality good enough to populate the entire continent of Africa which made us laugh and instantly feel more comfortable, especially my husband as he can now officially relax and no longer worry that he's got any issues whatsoever. We really already knew that but it was still nice to get a confirmation.

Once we got the male infertility off the table we moved on to me and began talking about my cycles and how they are long, somewhat irregular, painful and etc. Then the most amazing thing happened, our doctor asked me when the first day of my last period was and I said, "June 23rd," and he said, "Oh good you are on day 14 so you should be ovulating, let's do an ultrasound and see." Then he jumps up and says, "No time like the present!" We walked across the hall and he did a trans-vaginal ultrasound and saw that I didn't have any follicles ready to pop an egg and either I had already ovulated or I will soon. Then he sent me across the hall again to have some blood work done to confirm whether or not I had ovulated. Everything was done right then and there! No prescriptions written, no referrals needed, no appointments made with other doctors in other buildings, just immediate action with results coming in tomorrow. It was fantastic!

He even told us that the phone should be our best friend and we should call him whenever we feel like it. We have NEVER had a doctor say that to us before! He said we could call him 10 times a day if we wanted to, and he would even answer the phone! No calling and having to talk to the nurse on call or leaving a message and never being called back. He even discussed, without being asked, the ethics on the fertility business and he just made us feel so reassured that their practice wasn't going to treat us like lab rats so that they could charge us and our insurance as much as they could get away with. We are going to identify the problem in the quickest and most cost effective way and then (hopefully) remedy the problem in the quickest and most cost effective way. We are a team with a plan now!

Today was just a really a good day, and hopefully this feeling will stay with me for a while because I haven't felt this good in 11 months.

PS: While I was proof reading this post I got a call with my blood work results showing that I had not ovulated yet. I got that done like 2 hours ago! AMAZING!

Tomorrow, tomorrow...

So tomorrow is the big day! I cannot express how nervous and excited I am for our appointment with our local superstar reproductive endocrinologist. I have really high expectations and so does my husband and after so much let down I don't know what we are going to do if this group of doctors doesn't meet them. I know I've said before about how bounced around we were feeling about our earlier experience and we are just so ready for someone to take us and coddle us and just make everything all better. Ah, wishful thinking.

It does sound kind of funny, but it is like we are looking for a fertility fairy godmother. Not only do we want results, and quickly too of course, but we want to be handled with care as well. I just want someone to be nice to me and treat me as if they were treating a friend with fertility problems. I don't want to be just another statistic for the specialist group. This may be too much to ask, but it doesn't hurt! The whole process of assisted fertility seems to becoming such a lucrative business to be in; if people have the means they will pay anything to have children. I just hope that they recognize that yes, we'll pay as much as we can but we are still people with feelings at the end of the day.

Too much TV...

I cannot stop watching every show that I can get my hands on about pregnant women on TV. The discovery health channel is punishing me with it's line up of "I Didn't Know I was Pregnant," "A Baby Story," and "Bringing Home Baby," plus specials on people who have had multiples or just crazy things that happen like this 75 year-old middle eastern woman who had a 45 year-old calcified fetus in her abdomen and I am the freak who can't get enough!

I said to my husband yesterday, "I've got to stop watching this stuff!" And he just looked at me like, DUH! I can't help it though! Plus I can get such an emotional reaction to some of the stories, case in point there is a show called "Pregnant and Addicted." I would highly recommend NOT watching that if you are struggling with fertility issues because all it did was piss me off. This poor woman who was previously addicted to heroin, found herself pregnant (with her SECOND child) while in the beginning stages of her methadone treatment and doctors recommended staying on the methadone as withdraw symptoms can cause spontaneous abortion and other just as terrible things. But staying on the methadone is only the lesser of the two evils and the baby could still be born with some pretty serious developmental problems and most likely addicted to the methadone like the mother so the baby would have to go through terrible withdraw symptoms that can last up to a month. And all I did was sit there and think to myself how unfair the world is. I just want one baby that I could provide a great home for and this woman has two children unintentionally and is struggling to care for either of them. Sitting there full of jealousy, anger at the world and anger at my body just made me disgusted with myself for feeling that way. I know I am only human and I know I am doing my best with our situation but sometimes my best is pretty embarrassing.

Soy and estrogen...

I just read that soy affects a women's body similar to estrogen and can make it difficult for sperm to swim to the egg. Of course I got this off the internet from something a non-doctor wrote so who knows if it is true but I am certainly finding it interesting.

Because of the hair loss issue that I am having, I decided to do a little adding and subtracting to my diet to help stimulate my thyroid and soy was one of the things that you should cut out. I just find it so fascinating because soy is in EVERYTHING! "They" use it as a filler to replace actual food substances in human food and dog food, and probably cat food but I don't know since I'm not a cat person.

When our dog got cancer, soy was one of the things we cut out of her diet as well. Her brand name dog food that she was eating was mostly soy! Our vet recommended that we chose a food in which the first two ingredients are meat and we did. And she was much healthier for it. I just want to eat fresh, non-genetically altered, pesticide, preservative, and hormone free healthy food, and I need it to not be so damn expensive! I get it that it is cheaper to make food that has been is altered to grow bigger, be resistant to disease, and last longer on the shelves but I am having trouble getting pregnant over here people! I need my body to be as healthy as it possible can be and I need to be saving money so we can afford pay for our visits to the specialists!

Hoping for smooth sailing...

Now that we are on the fast track for fertility treatments, I of course have been doing all the online research I can about our different options. I'm hoping that with a little medication we'll get pregnant but judging by the way our conceiving process has been going so far I'm preparing myself for something more invasive. I do just keep thinking how fabulous (and much cheaper!!!) it would be if all we needed was a little magic pill to get us pregnant. I have a friend who had PCOS and got pregnant after only one month of medication. There are so many stories like that out there, I am so hopeful that our story can be one of them too!

I want our story to have a happy ending, but I want the journey to be an easy one too. That may be asking too much, but we have already been through so much. No one talks about how the months before you go to seek fertility treatment are rough and then once you see the specialists and decide upon your treatment, there is no guarantee that they will work and so the months following could be just as rough as the previous ones. Perhaps after seeking treatment it could actually get more stressful, now we are going to be spending money (a lot of money) for procedures that may or may not work with our future hinging upon the outcome.

I know my husband and I are prepared to do everything that we can to have a child of our own, I just hope we can weather it well. We are so in love with each other, and we are committed partners in this life that we are trying to carve out for ourselves and I don't want anything to get in the way of that. Fertility problems just drain you and I know that nothing could ever end our marriage but I don't want us to even have a bad week with each other. My husband handles stress much better than I do, I get snappy and can kind of freak out a little but I want to be tough and strong for him so that we can deal with this together and sanely. He already works so hard and has a pretty stressful work life and I just didn't want his home life to stressful as well. I just wanted everything to be perfect. Well, it is way too late for the perfect conception but I would settle for a bump free ride to an imperfect one.

Trying to stay positive...

I am feeling anxious, excited and scared about going to see the reproductive endocrinologist. I was googling the doctor that we have our appointment with and he was actually named our area's top fertility specialist this year so I am feeling pretty confident in the choice of doctor that my OB referred us to so that is good. I am just scared to death that I have endometriosis, but I keep thinking that my OB who has checked me out like 3 or 4 times in the past 6 months would have said something by now. It is really highly unlikely that I have it, I of course just keep thinking the worst.

In a situation such as infertility it is so important to stay optimistic, and I feel like I am having an ongoing battle with myself to stay positive. It comes naturally to my husband, being positive, and of course I find that annoying! I want to be like that too so I get annoyed at him because he is what I'm not and I get annoyed at myself because it shouldn't be so difficult to be positive like him. Then I'm just sitting there feeling like we are never going to have a baby and just generally being miserable to be around and smoke is pouring out my ears because I'm trying so hard to stay positive... Yes, last night was just a hoot, let's hope I can pull myself together so we can have a better one tonight.

Another miracle...

Okay, I have a feel good story for all you women in my boat out there! I had one of my good friends over for lunch the other day and she brought lunch, her gorgeous new baby boy and an amazing story. Thank god she came with food and a good story otherwise I would have kept her baby and kicked her out.

So anyway she and her husband are friends with a couple who had been trying to have a baby for the past two years and for almost the entire second year were doing one round of IVF after another and it just wasn't working. So they gave up, assuming that they could not have children, and low and behold she was pregnant the next month.

My first thought is that we could still have a baby if someone that did IVF for a year suddenly got pregnant naturally but then I think about the odds of that happening and I get cynical. So my second thought is that my friend is just making the whole thing up and is trying to get me to spill the beans about what is going on over here as to why I am not pregnant yet, but I know the couple she was telling me about and I know that they've been doing IVF for the past year so the whole thing does seem plausible. Then my third thought is that I need to say something and stop sitting here silently deciding what I think about the whole thing before I get found out. So I say, "Oh I'm so happy for them!" (lie) "I just knew they would get pregnant!" (lie) and "Of course she got pregnant after they gave up on the fertility treatments, she was probably just so much more relaxed!" (HUGE lie!)

At the end of the day, I am happy for them, will I truly be able to share in their joy? Absolutely not, I'm too focused on my own situation right now but I do believe their story. I feel like I have to believe, otherwise the stork might pass me right on by.

Pay attention to us...

After receiving another fabulous comment from my lovely commenter with a great tip on doctors visits: write down questions before you go, it really got me thinking about doctors in general. Writing down all your questions before you go and then just reading off the list when you get there really does help and so does writing down the answers. It ensures that you don't forget something and also I always felt like I was being rude if I was asking too many questions so now I can just blame it on the list. "Sorry doctor, I have to ask it, it's on the list!" Plus, this is our our ability to have a baby we're talking about so lately my politeness has gone out the window with the doctors that we've been seeing.

I just have been feeling so passed around by my OB. I actually went to her because I was having really painful periods and she was asking me all about what is going on and I said, "Well my husband and I have been trying for about 6 or 7 months now and I'm just having trouble dealing with my cramps." Then we talked about how much sex we were having and when, and if we were using OPK strips and what else we were doing and from that she decided that we needed to go ahead and start testing for infertility. So she sent us here, she sent us there, doctors for me and doctors for him. Now that was all well and good but we never covered what I can do to help myself get through these cramps which was why I originally went in there! She is totally right in pushing us to see the specialists, especially with the possibility of endometriosis looming over our heads and I know that there is not some miracle remedy for women that get cramps like mine but I just would've liked it if we had tried to solve that problem first and then went on to the infertility stuff because I'm still suffering every month! Hopefully this will be the last month I have to deal with them, of course I say this every month to myself!

It is just hard going from doctor to doctor to doctor, and I'm hoping that when we get to the fertility specialists they will treat us with care. I actually signed over copies of my medical records from the past year to myself from my OB just so I could have copies of everything to take with me to all these different doctors and I would highly recommend doing that. Plus you can take all your test results and google them to learn more and honestly to double check what your doctor is telling you. Sometimes it is just nice to get a confirmation. I just want to be paid attention to, not passed around like a tray of hors d’oeuvres. I'm hoping we'll get that with the specialists, I mean really they had better, we're going to have to pay for most of it out of pocket!

We're going in...

So, all my big talk about waiting until September to see the fertility specialists was just that, big talk because we caved and I made an appointment for next Tuesday. Honestly, we were really going to wait but now another potential problem with me that would need to be addressed sooner rather than later has popped up. When we were at the urologist for my husband to get his physical and the doctor mentioned that I should discuss endometriosis with my doctor. This was a while ago and I didn't really think about it but I got my period yesterday (did not need my sad little cup of pee!) and I checked out the symptoms of endometriosis and I found that I have quite of few of them. So, now that we haven't been able to get pregnant, I have a lot of these symptoms and endometriosis gets worse with every passing month I figured I'd better see my doctor.

When I called to try and make an appointment, I swear it was like a black flagged pooped up next to my name because the receptionist made me talk to one of the nurses and then that nurse talked to my doctor and then called me back and the consensus was all the same, you need to see the specialists. It was like there was a little star next to my name with "is refusing to see the specialists and there is nothing else we can do for her here!" So we bit the bullet and we're going in so much sooner that we thought, but we're still going to play it safe. We've decided to keep moving forward with trying to find the root of our problem, but we aren't ready to do any assisted fertility treatments. It is hard to stay always hopeful, but I don't want to think of the sadness if I admitted to myself that we might never figure out what the problem is.

Insanity...

You know, I think that I may have officially lost my mind. I'm sitting here, having a snack and typing away while a little cup of my pee is sitting on the counter in my bathroom. I'm due for my period today, but it very often comes a day or two or three late so I really have no expectations of being pregnant but on the chance that I don't get my period today and I decide that I want to test, I didn't want to waste my first morning urine because we all know that has the highest concentration of hCG. How nuts is that, I'm saving my pee for later. This is not half a hoagie that I might want later if I can't finish it, this is a cup of pee!


The saddest thing is that I am STILL hopeful that I'm going to get a positive result! I know that I'm getting my period, I'm having the same symptoms that I do every month but I am still just so darn hopeful. I am driving myself crazy. I suppose that is part of the human condition, the thing that enables us to keep going when all other signs are pointing to stop. Although Einstein has a different opinion, he said that insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result. So, I guess according to Einstein I'm crazy and something has got to change in order for us to conceive. Then this crazy lady will just have to figure out what that something is.