Infertility: The Toddler Years (3 and 4)

OK -- we now join our regularly scheduled journal entry, the ongoing one about me and my fertility woes. If you didn’t catch the previous entry, and you’re interested, you can go back two days to read about our first two years of trying to get pregnant. At this point in the story (imagine me saying that in my very best movie announcer voice) we had just moved to a new base, new city, and were hopeful things would start to happen. We were still optimistic, but starting to feel a little weathered. And annoyed. And cranky. What the hell ... I mean, we had been trying for TWO YEARS!

So, our third military move in two years (granted, the moves slowed us down every time) and once again, a new doctor …. Which meant, if you haven’t guessed by now, a new semen analysis test {Blaine: sigh}, more exams and tests for me. It seems all reproductive endocrinologists want you to gather all old records for their review, then they take new patients back to square one and just start fresh. Thoroughness = good. Starting over for the third time for an impatient anal control freak like myself = very, very frustrating.

So, more bloodwork, more ultrasounds. Again, nothing concrete was wrong, so they started looking at other tests. This was about the time of the infamous cervical mucous test. If you don’t know what this is, and you have a weak stomach, skip ahead. Otherwise, I’ll share with you what had to be the most humiliating moment of my life up until that point.

Bloodwork indicated my hormone levels were fine; although my cycle indicated I was perhaps a “sluggish and irregular” ovulator, meaning my ovaries didn’t release eggs on a regular schedule. Not knowing exactly when you are ovulating makes it hard to “peg that egg” each month. But Clomid, the fertility drug I was taking, takes care of that because you know exactly when you *should* be ovulating and when you should have sex to take advantage. We knew my tubes weren’t blocked, and my lining was good. Those had been tested several times. A laparoscopy had shown normal internal structure, and whatever else laparoscopies test for. I didn’t have poly-cystic ovarian disease, or endometriosis, we’d tested for those as well. And Blaine was fine … so what the heck was the problem?

It was actually very exasperating for test after test after test to come back with normal results. How can you fix a problem, if you can’t find it? This doctor decided it might have something to do with the quality of my cervical mucous. You’ve got an egg *here* (picture me, holding up my left hand) and the sperm *here* (now picture me holding up my right hand) and in between, is the cervical mucous the sperm has to get through. The doctor needed to determine if my mucous was “hospitable” and easy for the sperm to traverse en route to the egg. So, the way they determine that is something called a post-coital test. “Post”, meaning “after” and “coital” meaning “horizontal mambo” So, what you do is ………….. wait for it …. wait for it ……………. You and your husband have sex, then you immediately jump out of bed, into the car, drive to the doctor’s office, get up on a table, put your legs in stirrups and let him take a sample of the love potion to examine under a microscope, to see if the sperm are able to move about with relative ease.

I did not think it was possible to feel any more self-conscious than I did when I lost my 5th grade spelling bee, but laying on that table, with the doctor, a relative stranger, DOWN THERE, knowing what had just gone on IN THERE, was mortifying. And Blaine didn’t help matters any, with his, “You need me to take a long lunch and come home from the base for WHAT? And then you’re going to do WHAT!?!?!”

The results? I had cervical mucous the consistency of rubber cement.

YEAH!!!! YIPPEE!!! Rubber cement!!! At last, now, we had a problem we could focus on ….. something we could actually fix, that would then allow us to finally get pregnant! The magical, high-tech solution for this problem? Over-the-counter decongestant. By the bucket-load. By now, I was on the highest dosage of Clomid (fertility drug) allowed, so I had hot flashes and mood swings and weight gain, pretty much non-stop. "Moody" does not begin to touch it. Blaine gently suggested I was perhaps a tad overly sensitive and defensive, at which point I threw a shoe at him and told him he was a jackass who could keep his opinions to himself. Add in the bucket loads of decongestant, and I also had total insomnia and started pinging off the walls. You can imagine the calm, soothing, loving, attractive wife I had become, and how the idea of rushing home to have sex with my sweaty, bloated carcass on days 9, 11, 13, 15, 17, 19, and 21 would certainly appeal to Blaine.

Then, something happened. I had gone back to the doctor’s office for an appointment one afternoon, to discuss some other humiliating bodily function, I don’t even remember which one at this point, and he walked in, smiled at me in my flimsy paper gown, and said, “Hi ….. sorry, I forgot your name. Oh, here it is, on your chart … hi, Kristie.”

This man had seen my nether regions on many occasions, and believe me, I don't just show those things to everybody, but couldn’t remember my first name. I actually didn’t care that he couldn’t remember my first name, but I was appalled that he couldn’t take two seconds to look at the chart before walking in the room and at least PRETEND like he knew my name!!! I was putting my entire reproductive life in his hands, and entrusting him with our dreams and hopes for the future, and that arrogant dick-weed couldn’t even PRETEND he knew my name??? (Before anyone comments about how "But OB's don't ever look at your FACE! Ha-Ha!" I just want to say that isn't the point. It would have taken him two seconds to look at my damn name on the damn chart ..... it's called bedside manner and this guy didn't have any.)

So, on to doctor #4!

Now, I had managed to keep my pre-occupation with getting pregnant pretty quiet up until this point. We didn’t really tell anyone in North Dakota, it was all so new, and we didn’t know anyone in Kansas to tell. But at this point, we had gotten orders back to our hometown in Oklahoma. Our friends and family started figuring out that something was going on. My co-workers certainly knew, because I was taking off constantly to go in for appointments and bloodwork and ultrasounds. In one way this public knowledge of your fertility struggles can be good, because friends and family can offer a lot of support and encouragement, **IF** you’re the sort of person who likes that thing. Suffice it to say, I am not. I hated people knowing that I couldn’t get pregnant. I hated having to admit something was wrong. I hated having to admit, even to myself, that we didn’t know *what* was wrong. Most of all, I hated, with every fiber of my being, all the asinine comments that were made to me. **More on this later.

Getting offended and changing to doctor #4 was actually a blessing in disguise, as we finally started making some progress. Oh, don’t get me wrong, he started at Square One, all over again, just like the others. {Blaine, “I know, I know, where’s the cup?” --even bigger sigh }*** But he brought us in for a consult and basically told us it was time to quit pussy-footing around and wasting everyone’s time with the amateur stuff. So we moved on to bigger and better things.

Stronger, injectable fertility drugs. Complete with more bloodwork, more ultrasounds, and trigger shots, so you know you will ovulate exactly eighteen hours after the trigger. So you have sex twelve hours after the shot, and thirty-six hours after. Or whatever their instructions are, because Lord knows you will follow every instruction to the letter if you think it will work. And because nothing says, “Hey, big boy, you wanna get frisky?” quite like your cranky, hormonal wife screaming at you to “Get in here, it’s 11:23 pm and you have to impregnate me NOW!” Ahhhh, romance. Hallmark can’t keep up, that’s for sure.

Then, when that didn’t work after six months or so, we moved on to the field of ART. Artificial reproductive technology. Meaning, “Damn, Sam, *nothing* is working and we need some serious help!” We did five rounds of intrauterine inseminations, also called IUI, where I took fertility shots, then the trigger shot, but instead of having sex, Blaine gave a semen sample which they inserted directly into my uterus. In theory, the sperm will have a shorter distance to travel, bypassing that pesky cervical mucous issue. Since your ovaries are being stimulated by the high-dose fertility drugs, you have to give them a rest cycle in between each month. After the first try, Blaine didn’t even bother coming to the insemination appointments with me. Believe me when I say the whole process quickly becomes very, very impersonal. I would leave work, drive across town on my lunch break, have the insemination, and go right back to work. Not exactly flowers and candlelight and boxes of chocolate, was it? But I figured if all those teenagers could get pregnant in the back seats of cars, this should be good enough for me. We also tried one ITI, intratubal insemination, which means the sperm was placed directly into my fallopian tubes, but in the end, a year had gone by and none of the six procedures had worked. The thought of actually getting pregnant laying on a table in my doctor’s office, wearing a hideous paper gown, while my cervix was clamped open with a speculum, while my husband wasn't even present, was so NOT how I ever thought we would wind up, but I didn’t even care. I just wanted this to work … YESTERDAY! At this point, we had been trying for almost four years, with nothing to show for it.

To be continued …… (Seriously, am I, like, the windiest person you have ever met? And I mean “windy” as in talkative …. NOT the other kind of “windy”)

***And for the record, you people who have signed in the comments section and talked about your husband having to do the same thing, but doing it at home and YOU having to take it to the office .... that was NEVER an option for us. Not one of our doctors would allow him to collect the sample anywhere but right there in their office. When they said "fresh", they weren't kidding. Although it certainly wasn't something he looked forward to, Blaine said it wasn't terribly horrible when the doctor's office had a nice private area with comfy couches and good porn. But, the place we wound up at the end, where he did the majority of his collections, sent him to The. Public. Restroom. Down. The. Hall. That's right. And not a single-person bathroom, either, with a lock on the door, but a four-staller. So I would stand guard outside the door and keep men from going in, in an attempt to give him a little more privacy. Like my best friend Kim said in the comments section, afterwards, I liked to joke that Blaine could have been on the Olympic Masturbating Team. Probably the only thing worse for him than actually experiencing it, is me discussing it in such public detail now. I'm sure he'll be thrilled. Um, probably not.