My husband, Matthew, and I met sometime in elementary school, we started dating my senior year of high, and got married while I was in college. We had always talked about having children and becoming parents.
Shortly after we got married, I graduated college, we moved, got new jobs, and we thought this would be a good time to start our family. We were young but stable and in a happy relationship. What could be better than adding to our family? If only it were that easy.
After 3 years of marriage, I decided to get some testing done to see why we hadn’t conceived yet. We got no conclusive answers. We tried so many things that are suggested on google. We did acupuncture, and special diets, supplements and weight loss, we tried not to stress (because that is the number one thing every person tells you).
Three more years passed and still nothing. By this point, we were so discouraged. I felt like everywhere I turned, I saw pregnant women. Many of my friends during this time had gotten married, started their families, and a few were planning kid number 2.
After 6 years, we felt like it would never happen. We are both Christians, and we really struggled with our faith during this time. We felt like we were being punished and like we did something wrong. People told us maybe we weren’t supposed to be parents, and we should just move on. I truly can’t put into words the emotions that were felt when people told us that. It was past the point of heartbreak, feeling like we would never see a child who resembled us, we would never hear the pitter patter of little feet in our home, we would never be called mommy or daddy, and I would never feel a baby move inside of me.
We grieved, we processed, and we decided to fight. After 6 years of infertility, we finally got to the point where we could go see a fertility doctor (this leads to a whole other discussion on the frustration that fertility treatment is not covered by insurance).We got every test in the book done, and we were so looking forward to having answers. We finally got all the results back, and low and behold, we are part of the 10% of couples that struggle with infertility that have no reason for our infertility.
We got an unexplained infertility diagnosis. This led to round after round of IUI and medicated cycles. It wasn’t working, but we couldn’t afford IVF. Then covid hit, clinics closed down, and treatments stopped. Everything seemed to be working against us, but, as impossibly hard as covid has been, I will be forever grateful for how it worked out for us, because it gave us our shot at IVF. We were able to use our stimulus payments toward IVF treatment, and finally, we felt like for the first time in 8 years, we had hope.
In May of 2021, we were able to do an egg retrieval and got 5 beautiful little embryos. We transferred 1 embryo five days after the retrieval, and waited. 10 days later, we got the call that my HCG was positive and I was pregnant. We were overjoyed. My husband left for military training that same week, and I kept him updated while he was gone. My HCG was rising appropriately, I had 2 ultrasounds and I was able to see the heartbeat at 7 weeks. Everything looked perfect.
My husband returned just before my 8 week ultrasound, and we were so excited to be able to go together and hear the heartbeat for the first time. While we were there though, we heard the words that will forever be burned into my brain “I’m so sorry, there isn’t a heartbeat.” We had lost our little miracle. It took months to process and recover from it, and still now almost a year later, I have times where I struggle with the pain of losing our first baby. My due date, seeing babies that are around the age our little one would have been, is still hard to deal with sometimes.
After my body healed from the miscarriage, we decided to try another transfer, and in October of 2021, we transferred another perfect little 4AA embryo. This time we waited, but it was different. With everything that has gone wrong for us, we couldn’t believe that something would go right. 10 days after the transfer, we got the call that I was pregnant again.
We were again overjoyed, but so nervous this time. Each step of this pregnancy, we have waited for something to go wrong, but she has been perfect at each and every test. NIPT, fetal echo, anatomy scan, each and every ultrasound, we continually expect to hear bad news, and every time we are greeted with good news. We are now preparing to welcome our baby girl in just a few months in July, and we can’t wait to meet her.
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