Hoping For Babby: September 2013

Monday, September 30, 2013

Game over. Uterus - 1, Jacky - 0

Well, that's all folks. Sorry to anyone who actually still reads this for the delay in updates. I'm sure you were on pins and needles but it's all over now. The doctor has officially cut me loose. There's nothing more she can do for me. Since she's a doctor that specializes in tough cases, I've got no choice but believe and accept that.

I'm not even going to begin to try to explain how it feels other than it feels bad, man. And it probably will for a long time.

So, what's next?

If you've followed this blog you know that we were never in the position for my girlfriend to try instead. Her job before simply didn't allow it. But fortunately now she has a new, much better job and we are thinking that we might be able to turn the tables now. We are meeting with the doctor next week to talk about that.

It will be strange to be on the other side of the stirrups...

Anyway, this blog was about my journey and now that is over. I considered archiving it, but I think I'm going to leave it for now. Someone may come across it in a Google search about fertility and might read about my experiences. Or maybe there is some doctor that is Googling tough fertility issues and wants to study me. Whatever. But I don't know if I'll be updating anymore. My girlfriend doesn't enjoy writing like I do so I don't think blogging would be her thing. We'll just have to wait and see.

So, thanks for reading for all these past months and allowing me to share my thoughts and feelings. To anyone reading this and going through the same thing, I wish you nothing but good luck. And to everyone else, see you around the Internet!

-Jacky

The Backstory

When you're doing fertility treatments, you have to get blood drawn - - a lot. And at my doctor's office there was a poster that said "Hoping for baby?" It was a flyer for a support group and it was right across from the bloodwork chair. So I stared at each time and it started to remind me of the meme from Yahoo Questions "how is babby formed?" I combined the two into what you see here.

Neither my girlfriend or I ever thought we'd be interested in being parents. But then the late 20's set in and both of our biological clocks started ticking. Considering neither of us make sperm, this turned out to be a problem.

It wasn't an option for us to just ask a male friend to help us out and adoption wasn't really an alternative either in our situation. So we figured if we're going to start a family, we would have to go the artificial insemination route. I wanted to carry the baby and she didn't, so it worked out perfectly.

We did some research and picked a doctor. She is the best in our area. We went to her clinic's fertility seminar and signed up for a 2-cycle IUI package with Clomid. The cheapest route, obviously, and we didn't think there would be any problems. I'm basically healthy and my family doesn't have any fertility issues that we know of. But there were problems.

My eggs didn't respond to Clomid well so we switched to an injections. We inseminated and nothing happened. For the second cycle we started with stronger injections from the beginning and it looked promising. But still nothing.

By this time we were getting desperate and poor. The third cycle might not have happened at all if it wasn't for my mom footing most of the bill. But it didn't work either.

We were heartbroken and not sure what we wanted to do next. I knew whatever we decided I wanted to wait. I was emotionally wrecked from the hormones, the disappointment and the stress. Christmas was coming up and I didn't want to ruin my favorite holiday either. We took those months to really assess our situation. The doctor suggested that it might not be wise sinking any more money into IUI and we agreed. But we had no idea how we would pay for IVF.

We're both teachers, so we are by no stretch of the imagination rich. We both come from middle-class families too, so no hidden trust funds or anything like that either. So after Christmas we started exploring our loan options. We thought we might apply for a home equity loan, but it turns out we had no equity so that was out.

But what we did have was a very helpful loan officer that helped us get the money together for a 3-cycle IVF package. We went forward only to be stopped again by my defective uterus after two failed transfers.

So the next step was to try a new uterus and luckily we happened to have another one handy and it worked much better than mine did. Now we've got not one, but two babies on the way and this story just keeps getting more and more interesting.

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About Me

Monday, September 30, 2013