March 8, 2006, my alarm went off to remind me to take my birth control pill. We had just finished our last pack and had decided that we were not going to refill it for at least nine months or so. I had done all of the research and knew how to tell when our most fertile times were. I followed all of the do’s and don’t(s) of trying to conceive. I didn’t drink, or smoke, I ate healthy. My husband and I had been married two years and did everything by the book. We got married, had secure jobs, bought a house and it was now time to bring in a new addition to the family.
Because I had done my studying I knew that it was not uncommon for a couple to try to conceive for up to a year. This made no difference in the amount of emotion that went into trying each month. I remember each holiday hoping I would find out in time to let everyone know at the family get togethers. In the last three months of our first year I had began to wish for a miscarriage or anything that would tell us it was even possible to conceive. Nothing happened. I knew that after a year of trying without any barriers we were considered to be infertile.
We set an appointment with our primary care physician, who quickly sent us to a local OB/GYN doctor. With each visit I would hope they would perform a pregnancy test, and let me know that fertility treatment was unnecessary for me because I was pregnant. This never happened. The OB/GYN did an internal ultrasound and found that I had cyst on my left ovary. He had also found that my husband’s sperm count was low (lab error). The doctor found that there was nothing he could do for me and sent me to a specialist in another city.
I told myself that it was good they found a problem, because problems could be fixed. We started seeing the doctor in the other city, who sent me for countless tests. From May to September we had been prodded and probed so many times the bruising from the lab work had no time to heal before the next time. I had two surgeries, with the final result of only having a 5 percent chance of my husband and I conceiving on our own. The doctor said I needed to consider artificial insemination, or IVF to increase our odds.
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