Monday, May 21, 2012

4 Weeks 4 Days

I woke up this morning feeling decidedly less "pregnant", which honestly scared me a little bit. That was, until I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror before getting into the shower. My entire torso looked like a road map of blue veins! I've read that it's normal because of the increased blood supply, but it was a little scary to look at! I'm so scared that something is going to happen to this pregnancy. Obviously I've been reading too many blogs! Dear Baby, you are so loved! Mommy and Daddy love you so much and can't wait to hear your heartbeat in just two weeks. I'm hoping that the time flies by!

Sunday, May 20, 2012

IT WORKED!!

Our very first IUI cycle was successful! Just last week I found out that I am actually pregnant. I'm still in a bit of shock, and of course worried too that something will happen to this little life that we've worked so hard to create. As to how I found out, it all started last Monday. The hcg trigger shot that I had to give myself before the IUI to induce ovulation has the nasty side effect of causing false positive pregnancy tests, so the nurse recommended that I wait exactly two weeks to test after the IUI. Being the impatient person that I am, and having done a trigger shot before and tested it out of my body, I completed disregarded her instructions and began testing a few days after the IUI. The point of testing so soon was not to hope for a positive, but to see when the tests finally turned negative so that if on the off chance that I was pregnant, I would know that the test was truly positive. I tested for a few days and the second pink line got lighter and lighter, until last weekend it was completely gone. I was feeling so hopeless, like the IUI hadn't worked and I would soon be going under the knife. Not to mention that there had been several more pregnancy announcements on Facebook that week, which put me in a completely depressed state. After getting through my second Mother's Day not being a mother, I decided to take a test that following Monday morning. I took the test, set it on the counter, and then completely forgot about it when I didn't see a line pop up right away. An hour or so later, I went back to check the test again and there was the faintest of a line! Honestly, it was barely visible to the naked eye, so I had some fun playing around on iPhoto trying to get that second line to pop more.

I freaked out for a while, but then realized that it could possibly still be the hcg shot, so I decided to wait and take another test the next morning. After not being able to sleep, I ended up taking it at about 2am. The line was decidedly darker!!

It was then that I started to get really, really excited. Could I actually be pregnant?!? Could the IUI have actually worked? I tried to sleep for a few more hours, before going out to buy a different brand of test just to make sure the ones I had weren't somehow giving me false positives. Here is what my First Response Early Response test looked like at 11 days past IUI.

The line was faint, but hey, a line is a line!! I started to believe that I really was pregnant. It was this day that I also started noticing that my breasts were extremely tender. I called the RE's office immediately and asked for a blood test to confirm. The nurse told me that normally they don't do blood tests that early, but because I tested out the trigger shot and seemed to know what was going on with my body, she would agree to a blood test. I went in early the next morning and they called that afternoon with the results. I WAS PREGNANT!! As I said, I'm honestly still in a little bit of shock. I've had a little morning sickness, but nothing extreme yet. I definitely feel "pregnant" though, if that's even possible. I continued testing over the next few days to make sure my tests were getting darker and that the line wouldn't suddenly go away.

The line was definitely getting darker! I went back for a second blood test to confirm that my hcg levels were rising appropriately, and everything looked good. We go for our first ultrasound to hopefully hear the heartbeat on June 4th. I am SO EXCITED that our wish of becoming parents is finally coming true!




Getting Pregnant

My husband and I have been married a little over three years. We met through a common internet dating site, and it was honestly "love at first site", as cliche as that sounds. We had so much in common that we just clicked instantly. One thing that we were both very sure of is that when the time felt right, we wanted to start a family. We decided to wait until just before our second wedding anniversary to start trying to conceive. I have a medical condition called Polycystic Ovarian Syndrome, or PCOS, so we knew that we might face challenges in getting pregnant. After stopping birth control, my regular cycles failed to return, so I sought the help of my ob/gyn almost immediately. She suggested trying a few cycles of Clomid, a common fertility drug that aids in ovulation. We tried four rounds of Clomid with no success, and from there my Dr. referred us to a Reproductive Endocrinologist. The RE that we were referred to was a little over an hour away, but I was very confident that he would be able to help fulfill our dream of becoming parents. First, he wanted to run several tests to make sure that both myself and my husband didn't have any more serious conditions affecting our fertility. After checking out ok (other than my PCOS), he too suggested a few more rounds of Clomid, but this time with an injection to trigger ovulation, along with ultrasounds to monitor my egg follicles. We did three monitored, medicated rounds, again with no success. At this point I was starting to feel very frustrated, and I hated being on the medication that screwed with my hormones to the point where I was absolutely miserable. My husband and I decided at that point to take a few months off from western medicine to give acupuncture and herbs a try. Three months of acupuncture seemed to do almost nothing (although I was calmer and more relaxed, so maybe that's something), so we took one cycle off from absolutely everything to go on a vacation while we waited to get back in to see our RE. When we were finally able to get in to have another consultation with our RE, he told me that he thought our best route would be for me to have a surgery called a laparoscopy. He thought that the reason we were not getting pregnant was because of the ruptured appendix and emergency appendectomy that I had when I was 18. The Dr. told us that he would like to go in and see what was really going on, and hopefully he would be able to remove any scar tissue or endometriosis that was present. I was terrified of having what I thought could be an unnecessary surgery, but I was even more scared of having the surgery and being told that there was no hope for us to conceive without IVF, which we just could not afford. I asked if we could possibly do an Intrauterine Insemination (IUI) first instead, and he agreed to do one medicated IUI cycle. I just wanted to have the peace of mind that we had tried everything we could before agreeing to have the surgery, and I have a couple of friends who were able to get pregnant through IUI. So, the next cycle, we went ahead and did the IUI, and lo and behold, IT WORKED!! More about that in my next post...

Welcome to The Main Page

Welcome the The Main Page! This blog will be dedicated to the journey my husband and I have gone through to become parents, and will later hopefully document the lives of our family.