Hellobee

My journey toward parenthood began long before I even knew that I wanted to be a mother. Without going into drastic detail, I got my first period at a very young age and it was excruciatingly painful. I was on the birth control pill by the time I was 14 in order to control the pain and to help regulate my wildly irregular cycles.  My pain was so severe, and not always associated with a period. I missed a lot of school and saw a lot of doctors.  I was tested for PID (it was negative) and had many ultrasounds that always proved inconclusive.

I saw a specialist when I was around 16, who diagnosed me with endometriosis based on symptoms alone. I was started on a mono-cyclic pill and told to skip my period, and only allow myself to have a period every 4 months.  This helped considerably with the pain factor, but certainly wasn’t a cure. She started me on a three month cycle of Lupron injections when I was 19.  This was the only three months that I was completely pain free, but Lupron isn’t a long-term use treatment plan.  I later learned, when I started seeing a gynecologist who specialized in endometriosis, that the only true way to diagnose endo is through laproscopic surgery.  We scheduled a surgery when I was 20 years old, but I chickened out and canceled the surgery the night before I was scheduled to go in.

I can’t speak highly enough of this particular gynecologist.  I was nervous since he was a male, and I’d never been to a male doctor before.  He was kind, gentle, and took his time to answer questions and explain everything to me. He too, worried that I had endometriosis, and we talked at length how this would affect my trying to conceive when I was older.

My mom has three sisters, and genetics was not on my side:  All three of her sisters had difficulty conceiving.  One has endometriosis and two have PCOS.  All three went through cycles of IVF to conceive, although I have one aunt who was never able to have children of her own.  My mom has never been affected by infertility or had troublesome periods, so it was always difficult for her to relate to me — especially when I was much younger, having irregular periods and extreme pain.  This was completely foreign territory to her.

I met my husband in spring of 2006, shortly after we had both graduated from college.  We instantly fell in love and have been inseparable ever since.  We were engaged in spring 2007 and married in the summer of 2008.  We knew we wanted to have kids right away, so the plan was for me to go off of my birth control pills and see what happened.  I discussed this with my gynecologist, who told me that if we had trouble conceiving that he’d refer me to a fertility specialist.  I learned through our insurance company that we had to TTC for one year without success and have this unsuccessful year documented with my doctor.  And so began our journey toward parenthood!

our first picture together.. summer 2006

I quit taking my BCP a few months before we were married.  I was so busy with last minute details of our wedding, the wedding itself, and life as a newlywed that I didn’t realize until Christmas time that I hadn’t had a period since I’d stopped taking the pill.  A gigantic red flag went off, and I saw my doctor right away. I wasn’t pregnant, I knew that much, but I was back to square one:  without BCP, I didn’t have regular periods.  My doctor explained that you can ovulate without a period, or have a period without ovulation.

We were left wondering if I was even ovulating so I was sent for blood-work.  Six months of an unexplained missing period isn’t a good thing.  My blood work came back normal, so we were stumped.  We’d been TTC for about six months at this point, and we needed to have a year of documentation before my insurance would cover infertility treatments.  A wrench was thrown into our plan in December 2008, though.  Papa Jumper had an accident that landed him three surgeries and a two month long stay in the hospital.  He subsequently lost his job and was home on disability for six months.  We didn’t get back on our feet until summer of 2009.  We were determined to move on and start our family, though.  Papa Jumper found an amazing new job, and we bought a house at the end of that summer.  We started our TTC journey once again.

married, summer 2008

We were two years “behind schedule,” but in Spring 2010, I was referred to a reproductive endocrinologist.  I had no idea, but this woman was about to change my life.

Stay tuned for Part Two!