My wife and I have been married a year and a half and are trying to have a baby. If you’re on our site, you probably are, too! On a whim, I’ve decided to start a blog about it and hope it might help another woman (or women).
I’ll start by saying all of those teen/early twenties years I spent terrified I was pregnant because a condom *might have slipped off* or things got a *little too hot and heavy, a little too fast* are making me feel really silly, in retrospect. Turns out it’s not that easy to get pregnant (well, not for me).
I will call my wife “N” from here on out. N let me take the lead on finding the right sperm donor, which spared her a lot of time researching but led to a lot of obsessing on my part. “Is this guy 6’1″ or taller? What was his high school GPA? Is his voice pleasant? Is he CMV negative?” (Pretty sure even with my past serious boyfriends that last one never came up). Long story short, we found the PERFECT guy!
The problem with said perfect guy? The sperm bank advertised him as having plenty of samples, but he actually had none. Well, he had one, in Canada at some satellite site. And it was a sample taken in 2002. So the sperm count was 2 million, which I now know makes you about as likely to get pregnant as a straight couple doing the deed in their jeans would be…
Still, we went ahead and did unmedicated IUI #1–that resulted in a BFN. The disappointment was there, but I was prepared enough to know the odds weren’t in our favor. Plus, during the 2ww I found an even better candidate.
The next month we went ahead with unmedicated IUI#2 with the new donor and a healthy 9 million sperm count. BFN again. I hardly remember how I felt about that…because my feelings about IUI #3 eclipse everything.
I went in for an ultrasound and blood work, and my doctor put me on Clomid to stimulate my eggs and maybe up my odds of getting a BFP. N gave me the trigger shot to induce ovulation, and you can imagine my excitement to learn I had 6 ripe follicles hanging out in my ovaries. Now I was busy imagining N and I walking down the street with a tandem stroller and smiling as neighbors cooed at how adorable baby Avery and Naomi or Dominic and James (or were we more interested in Wesley?) were. I could imagine my aunt passing the pumpkin pie to my father as N would proudly stand up and say, “O and I have an announcement to make–we’re having twins!”
So when N and I took the pregnancy test just this past Saturday and we saw a BFN, my heart sank. Sure, 6 follicles didn’t guarantee multiples, but not even one baby? I couldn’t imagine why the clinic sat me down and made me feel like at least one baby was guaranteed. Actually, working for a public school system I do know a little bit about CYA, so I suppose my question is answered. But what about my late period? Oh, I guess those progesterone supplements I have been putting up my hoo-hah every twelve hours explain my missed period. Who knew?
So here I am, typing away at my laptop while my Husky waits for me to feed her. N is in New York for work ’til Friday. I have a volunteer thing in two hours. It’s this kind of time in the day–after work but before the next thing–that I find myself struggling to keep my mind of all things baby and TTC.
In the meantime, I will wait for AF. I will try not to obsessively Google things like “pineapple core and IUI success.” I will try to remember that God is in control and will ultimately decide when and if a pregnancy is in the cards for N and me.
But since I know I have trouble quieting my mind during what could be a longer journey than anticipated, I hope writing about it will bring comfort and support to other women out there who are feeling the same way.
sproutandmamas 