My husband (R) and I were married November of 2002, after meeting through my college room mate 2 years prior, and enduring a year and a half long distance relationship between Philadelphia and Washington, DC. Four months before our wedding my mother lost her 4 year battle with breast cancer. Watching my mother slip away was the most devestating thing that I had been through, and those memories of her lying in the hospital, semi-conscious, still haunt me. My mother had been well enough to help with the majority of the wedding plans, and was even with me when I found my wedding dress. It seemed impossible to go through with the wedding after losing her, but R and I agreed that Mom would have wanted us to move forward with our plans, espeically since had been so involved with them. In the end, we couldn't have asked for a more wonderful wedding, we were surrounded by our closest friends and family, all supporting us on our special, yet incredibly emotional day. I felt my mother's presence around me throughout the entire night, from ceremony to reception.
Flash forward to April 2005. My mother had left behind a very broken family. My father and my 16 year old brother were very lost, and went down some not so great paths. R and I were left to help clean up the messes that they made, and after several years of putting everyone else's interests before ours, we decided it was time to take charge of our lives and focus on building our own family. We kicked off our TTC journey by taking a 10 day vacation to Hawaii, what a perfect back drop for starting the next chapter of our lives.
Unfortunatley, we learned very quickly that things were not going to be so simple for us. Month after month, of that first year TTC, my period came. My Ob/gyn at the time told me to "relax" (the first of many to give that evil advice) and there was likely no real problem. It would happen. I experienced my first early MC 10 months after we started trying, and then again 2 months later. I switched OB's when he told me that they did not do a MC work up on patients until they had their 3rd MC. That did not sit well with us. My new OB (who I've sinced changed from) did a full work up, and found nothing wrong - he suggested we give a few cycles of clomid a try, to get things going quickly. When 3 cycles of clomid resulted in all BFN's, we decided it was time to visit an RE.
I don't want to bore you with all of the minute details of the years that would follow, you can feel free to check out my TTC timeline for that. I can share that we endured 3 IUI's, 5 IVF cycles and 4 MC's in 4 years. Through all of my IVF cycles, I yielded many eggs, however once they were fertalized, my embryo quality was pretty poor, and many would not even make it to transfer. We switched RE's after my 4th cycle, and even though I wouldn't have a truely successful cycle (even though our 5th IVF resulted in a BFP, we lost the baby at 9 weeks...we even had done PGD!!), I truly believe that I was meant to move to that clinic, and to meet that RE, because she was the one who discovered that I was pregnant, when I presented with bleeding between periods in February of 2009, right as we were preparing to do a mock DE cycle.
I went on to carry and deliver a beautiful baby girl 10/27/09. My pregnancy was smooth after the 1st trimester; what caused the bleeding was a subchorionic hemorrage, it resolved itself, thank goodness, but kept me bleeding and spotting until just shy of 12 weeks. I was never a care free, breezy pregnant woman, I was a nervous wreck until about 32 weeks...but I know how lucky and truly blessed I am to have been able to experience the miracle of my daughter's birth, when so many woman continue to struggle and suffer from IF and RPL.
We knew it would not be an easy feat for us to conceive again, so we started trying pretty early on, after my daughter was born. When we continued to have no success trying on our own, we visited my RE 11/10, and decided to give IVF another go. We had planned to start a cycle after the 1st of the year. 12/17 I ended up in emergency surgery with a ruptured ectopic. Unfortunately I lost my left fallopian tube. IVF seemed to be the best option at this point, now that I only had one tube. We started a cycle in February of 2011, and unfortunately, this cycle led to a BFN.
So here we are, trying to decide what our next step should be. My husband is an only child. I have one brother. We each have only one living parent. Our families our small. We cherrish our daughter more than anything in the world, and feel that she should have a sibling, we don't want her to ever be alone. I just don't know how we can make it happen, given our history.
