From the Very Beginning

I got married for the first time right before my 19th birthday. Now I realize I was WAY TOO YOUNG and did not even really know who I was. I had always wanted to be a mother and he was eager to have kids, so I got off birth control six months later and we started hoping for a pregnancy. I did not know very much about ovulation and fertility at that point. We tried for over a year before I started tracking my basal body temperature. Even with careful timing we had no luck.

The next step was to talk to a doctor. The doctor we saw was a family friend of my ex-husband's. He put me on Clomid to see if that would help. We tried Clomid for a few months with no success then stopped when the refills on my prescription ran out. Thankfully, I had no idea what I was doing and so I did not waste money on doctors, procedures or medications at that point. From there we just left it to chance and good timing and hoped for the best. Once we got divorced after just over four years of marriage, I found myself grateful that I never achieved a pregnancy with him. I won't put him down publicly, but he was definitely not the person for me. Without a child we were able to sever all ties and I hoped I would never see him again (unfortunately I have had a couple run-ins with him over the years).

Shortly after the divorce, I went to the doctor for painful periods and pain in between periods. They found that I had cysts on both ovaries and told me the pain in between periods was likely due to ovulation. This is when I first became familiar with ovulation kits; I was told to buy one because they wanted to make sure I was ovulating (which I was). They put me on birth control to help make my periods lighter and it was years before I would learn anything else. Without insurance I did not stay on the birth control for long, but it did seem to help when I was on it. Several years later I went back to the doctor and had an ultrasound where they again said I had cysts. They started monitoring them, having me come in for ultrasounds every few weeks (for MONTHS), until the cysts got to the point that they needed to be removed.

In the middle of that mess, in November 2008 I met the man who would become my forever husband. Ryan and I met the Sunday before Thanksgiving watching football in a bar. He was there with some coworkers and I was there with a friend. His coworker (neither of us can remember his name) was trying to talk football with me (I was wearing a 49ers jersey), but he clearly knew nothing about the sport. Ryan walked up to get after him for being rude to an employee earlier whom was a friend of Ryan's (and whom, coincidentally, had been my roommate until about six months before). He was waiting for the guy to finish his conversation, but when he heard me talking about football he ended up joining in the conversation. We got so into the conversation with each other that his coworker gave up and walked away. We talked all night and he asked me out on a date (I know...rare these days). The following Tuesday we went to dinner and a movie (he got stuck at work late so we actually just had an appetizer.) We talked for so long that we were late for the movie. I can't remember everything we talked about, but I do remember we talked about kids and our family goals for the future. It was perfect and he was a perfect gentleman the whole night. He even gave me a quick kiss on my porch after a long goodbye.

In December, on New Year's Eve, I went in for a laparoscopy to have the cysts on my ovaries removed. Ryan, who I had been dating for barely more than a month took me in for the procedure. Once they got in with the camera so they could see, they realized that I didn't actually just have cysts, I had severe endometriosis. What they saw on the ultrasound was actually endometrium tissue. It was so bad that one of my ovaries was twisted and stuck to the side of my uterus. They cleaned me all out and put me on birth control to slow down the growth of the endometriosis in the future, but told me that when I did want to get pregnant I would likely have to come in for another laparoscopy.

Ryan and I were married in October 2010 and I quit taking the birth control in April 2011. This time I was more savvy. I started tracking my cycles from the very beginning on an infertility app on my phone. I quit smoking, I started drinking only occasionally and I cut back on caffeine (which I quit altogether in November 2012). I tracked the dates and time of day every time we had sex (talk about a romance buzz kill) and even recorded every little twinge of anything I felt in my body, from breast tenderness to pelvic pain. In March 2012 I started using ovulation predictor kits (I peed on a stick every day, for those who aren't familiar with them) and tracking the days I got a positive for the LH surge that happens just before ovulation. In May that same year I went in to see my doctor loaded with all of this information. He referred me to another OB/GYN who could do a laparoscopy, which he thought should be the first step due to my history.

When we first met with this doctor he said he did not think we needed the procedure. He claimed that he had helped many women with endometriosis get pregnant over the years without doing a laparoscopy to clear up some of the endometriosis first. He put me on a double dose of Clomid (which stimulates ovulation) and had us keep timing everything and trying on our own for a few months, then upped me to a triple dose, which still didn't work. Next he sent Ryan in for a semen analysis and scheduled us for an Intruterine Insemination (IUI), which is a procedure where the doctor injects the sperm directly into the uterus right around the time of ovulation. By this point it was December.

Just after Christmas I got my period. I think that was the most devastating period (and mind numbing cramps...probably worse because I was so upset) in my entire history of devastating periods! We were in St. George visiting Ryan's parents for Christmas and I had not even brought tampons with me because I was so sure I was pregnant. I left to go buy tampons and spent 20 minutes crying in the truck in a golf course parking lot before I made it to Walmart, where I also bought tissues and mascara so I could clean myself up! By the time I got back Ryan had told his parents and grandmother (who was also there) and texted our sisters, my parents and my best friend giving them the news and also asking them not to talk to me about it-at my request.

The next six months are kind of a blur...it was a lot of tracking cycles and intercourse and pains. At some point the side effects of the Clomid got so bad (especially the hot flashes)-and I didn't think it was helping anyway-that I quit taking it. I did some research and decided that we needed a more personalized plan than what we were getting. The doctor we were seeing always talked about all his successes with other patients and shuffled us through a routine-we felt like cattle. I decided a Reproductive Endocrinologist would be better to see than an OB/GYN, so I started doing more research.

The doctor we decided on was Dr. Andrew Moore with the University of Utah Center for Reproductive Medicine. We chose the clinic because it is a research hospital so they always have the newest treatments and technologies and because their entire team of doctors sounded excellent. We chose the doctor because he specialized in infertility and pelvic pain, had EXCELLENT patient reviews and because he was young. We liked that he had only been an official doctor for a few years-that meant he was fresh out of trainig so he would be up on all of the newest research and he would still be excited about his work. Once we met with him we knew we had made the right choice. We left our first appointment feeling hopeful, a little relieved and actually excited about our plan of care. That is a story for another day though...