I wanted to start a place where I could chronicle our journey to parenthood. I’ve had a lot of questions, concerns and general excitement for the process we’re beginning for the third time so why not do what I do best and write about it? We’ve met a lot of new friends in the time since we’ve thrown around the idea of having children so lets start with our story from the beginning.
I always knew that I wanted to be a young mother. I loved the fact that my mom and my grandmother were so young. I wanted to have a baby by my early 20’s and never once thought that wasn’t going to be possible. Yet, here I am – almost 28 – and still no small, medium or large children running around the house. No bun in the oven either.
When I was 22 and we ceased to use any sort of birth control anymore, I knew I had a problem. I had always experienced missed periods or 6 month long periods and immense pain but it never hit me that these signs and symptoms could be pointing to something really wrong with me.
The first doctor in Denver that we saw about the issue that officially diagnosed me with PCOS put me on birth control to regulate me and said we would try to work on the baby part once I was back to “normal”. This failed miserably. Within a month, I was in more pain than I had ever been in my life. I was young, scared and didn’t trust a doctor who put me on birth control when I had gone in for a consultation about why I was not getting pregnant, so I quit taking my pills and forgot about it.
Fast forward 3 years, a move across the country and a new city later… Still no baby. We decided to take it a little more seriously this time and found place that seemed to handle people who were more like me. People who had troubles with getting pregnant the good old fashioned way. We started the process for the second time. I was excited that I finally had a plan of attack and that the doctor didn’t put me on birth control. They wanted to run all sorts of tests, check my ovaries, do blood work, give me medication… it all seemed so real.
We were in a better place in our lives. We had a home, we both had great jobs, we both had insurance, we had a great and supportive family around and I felt more emotionally mature than I had been at the ripe age of 22. Plus, everyone around me started having children. It just felt like the right thing to do at the time.
This is the first time I really remember getting emotional about the process. Everyone kept asking us when we were going to start trying and little did they know, we had never really stopped. Every time I talked to my mother, my mother in law or my grandmother, I was asked if I was pregnant yet. I started realizing that not everyone understood that it wasn’t always as easy as having sex. I started to break down emotionally. I started to look at the doctors appointments as a chore instead of an exciting experience. I started to stress at every negative pregnancy test. I cried every time someone announced on Facebook that they were expecting. I felt like I was a failure at being a woman because no one should have to try this hard. I was a wreck.
The doctor eventually told us that there wasn’t much they could do for me until I lost weight. I already knew that my weight was a factor. I heard this at every gynecologist appointment I’ve ever had. I didn’t feel that it was fair that I was looked at as unhelpable until I reached a certain number on the scale. Overweight people became pregnant all the time and most on their own with no help from any medication or procedure. Why did I have to be any different?
I started taking the medication that the doctor prescribed as well as prenatal vitamins and started dieting and exercising regularly. What a lot of people don’t understand about PCOS is that us who are living with the condition can eat well, exercise every day and still never lose a pound. I started to see the scale move and then it stopped. It became a vicious cycle of trying so hard to lose weight and not seeing results, so I would say “screw it” and stop. I would begin to feel bad about quitting and the cycle would start all over again.
Eventually, we stopped seeing the doctor again. I was too exhausted to try anymore. After the night of another negative pregnancy test turned possibly positive and going to Walgreens at 1AM to get another one to only have it show negative again, I was done. I could not mentally handle another round of tests. I couldn’t try anymore.
Looking back, I’m glad we gave it a break. We took the time to work on us, living our life how we wanted to. We quit our jobs shortly after that and traveled the country for a few months. We lived in New York City for a brief period of time. We went on weekend vacations with little notice. We still travel when we can and frequently stay up late and sleep in late. All things we would not have been able to do if we had children at any point in the last 6 years of marriage. I’m grateful for the experiences I’ve been able to share with Varin and continue to enjoy our “us” time.
I made myself a promise that I would have a child by the age of 30. A promise I never should have made because it still could be broken but a promise nonetheless… With me turning 28 in two months, we talked about it and decided that we should try again. We still have so many things that we want to do but we’re willing to put that in the backseat in order to have our own bundle of joy.
Fast forward to the present. I’m on a hormone pill to “restart” my body’s cycle. On day 3 of the new cycle, I’ll begin taking Clomid to help my body do what it should be doing to begin with – ovulation. We all know from sex ed that without ovulation, there is no baby. Once get back from our vacation to Denver at the end of the month, we both have some more tests to be ran but I believe that we’re on the right track. The doctor we are seeing didn’t look at me as just another patient. He looked at me as a person suffering from infertility and was willing to listen to my questions and concerns and only then offer a plan he thought would work for me. He didn’t tell me that I had to lose weight, he didn’t tell me that I needed to schedule 3 months of tests before he would help me – he just sent me on my way with two prescriptions and a whole lot of hope.
The journey this time is different. I’m not stressed. I have hope – and sometimes that’s what you need. It’s just the beginning and hopefully this blog will be a short lived one (or maybe it’ll morph into a pregnancy blog in a few months :)).
If you’re reading this and made it this far, thank you for your support in this. You, the people who listen, give advice and the few ladies I know who are going through this with me, keep me going. I love each and every one of you.
This is our year.
A Day at a Time 