Antigen I am sorry for what you are going through. I have BTDT. When married to my ex H his swimmers were awful and I had great insurance so we started interventions right away. We did get pregnant on our own when we first got married but I had an early mc. So after realizing one day that we had not been using any protection and had not gotten pregnant again we went to the RE. We did 4 IUIs with 3 negatives and another mc. Then we did 3 IVF and 2 FET cycles with a result of 2 chemical pregnancies. We divorced a few years later unrelated to our infertility issues.
Because I had 4 MCs (2 before marriage) under my belt, I was tested for all kinds of things and got misdiagnosed. Anyway, I ended up meeting my current SO and wonderful, I was pregnant naturally 7 months after meeting him! Sadly, another MC around 8 weeks. I was emotionally DONE. I still had some little glimmer of hope but as a few years passed, I resigned to the fact that I would never be a mother. At this point I was in my late 30’s. I got the shock of my life when at 39 I got a BFP. Only reason I knew was that I FINALLY got a proper diagnosis of my clotting disorder which was believed to have played a part in my losses. Anyway, I was about to be put on coumadin, a strong blood thinner that is toxic to a fetus and my hematologist said “you absolutely cannot be pregnant on this medication”. I assured her that there was just no way. Before I took that first pill though, something in me said go buy a HPT. I wasn’t even late and that second line showed up immediately. I was 39 and considered high risk. I think I held my breath the entire 39 weeks but I had a healthy baby boy at age 40. And damn it, I am 44 now and still TTC #2! We have a deadline of another 12-18 months of trying and may even use donor eggs but that is my story. I am so grateful for my kid and I heard every bit of bullshit there is.
I think the absolute worst thing said to me by multiple people was “oh if my husband just LOOKS at me I get pregnant”. Well fuck you very much for making me feel like shit. Why the hell anyone thinks those types of comments are helpful is beyond me. It can be maddening, I know and sometimes I just got blunt with people. That shuts them right up.
So that is my story, started TTC around age 28 and ended up with my miracle at age 40. Long, long time and I hope your journey is much shorter. Many hugs to you!
If it helps, we went through quite a bit of fertility treatment over years and felt the same way. I am currently waiting for the babysitter to show up so we can leave these two kids for one night of peace and drinking. So, stick with it. Even if it sucks, there are huge numbers of success stories out there.
And even if you don’t have “success” in the form of a biochild, or an adopted child, you can still have a fulfilling and wonderful life. I wish you every success, but I also want to remind you there is more than one path to happiness and fulfillment.
My intent was to offer hope. Nothing more, nothing less.
If a couple has a 3% chance of conceiving each month, they have a better than even chance of conceiving over two years. During that time, shouldn’t they be loving and enjoy each other for reasons beyond conception?
In this instance relaxation is like chicken soup for a cold. It can’t hurt and it might help. Good luck to the OP.
Except that by telling anyone with infertility to ‘relax’, you’re transferring the blame for the problem to the individual. If only they could ‘relax’, they’d get pregnant. If only the cancer patient wasn’t so stressed out all the time, the chemo would have worked. :rolleyes:
No, it can hurt when it prevents people from moving on to medical intervention (everyone says to just relax and has stories of how that worked) and after a couple years, conceiving with medical intervention goes from simple to complicated or even impossible: fertility can drop suddenly. Waiting a few years because of some misguided idea that it’s somehow better for it to happen naturally can be a terrible mistake.
Hugs Antigen! I had three MCs in a fourteen month period. Two we lost around the twelve week point, and one blighted ovum. The worst part was that my husband and I are both lawyers in a tight knit legal community. I had to tell my boss and the judge for the first one because the DnC interfered with a scheduled trial. After that, our fertility issues became the town issues. Literally. And I heard it all. And it’s all awful. I couldn’t avoid the “pearls of wisdom, ala just relax” from the judges, nor the stares of pity from the bevy of pregnant ladies and mothers I work with. Every OB appt, every miss, every step was shared.
But there was something cathartic in my forced openness… sooo many people had been through this and really just needed to share their own stories. It is amazing how we women will suffer in silence. And I kind of released this dam in my little legal community. You really NEED to talk to more people about this. If only to vent. And I second the suggestion of avoiding the intrawebz.
Interestingly, because we got pregnant three times in a year, my OBs response was of the “suck it up, it will work eventually” variety. Turns out, I have a blood clotting disorder. This was discovered after genetic testing, and confirmed through old routine blood labs. I’m now on a baby aspirin regimen, and will be for life. We did have a successful pregnancy the fourth time around. And all the judges have a picture of Jake on their benches. It really is a tight community.
Good luck, Antigen. And PM me if you want to chat, or vent, etc…
I would like to add a bit to the adopt and relax crap advice. It IS really hurtful to the adopted child, my husband spent some time trying to live that down.
My husband is adopted. His parents had a daughter by natural conception, then adopted six years later when they had no more children. This was a French Canadian Roman Catholic pillar of the community type family, in the 1960s in rural northern Ontario. Not having a child a year was unusual, and hurtful things were said to his parents. (ie suspicions of birth control usage) They adopted him, then had another son a year later. Then about 6 years after that another child. My husband first heard that “relax” story when he was a teen and it messed him up for a few years. (They only adopted me so they could have more children?Screw them, i dont need anything from them. He got his first job at age 11.) He was the first of his siblings to complete post secondary, move away from home, own a house, etc, and has been without doubt an excellent parent to my son. His youngest brother is raising 3 kids who are not his biological kids and one that is his own. His sister also struggled with infertility. Their family are the most amazing accepting people, adopted children, step children, half sisters, everyone is welcome and treated equally.
But he spent time as a young boy, and a teen with a whole lot of hurt because of careless stupid insensitive comments like that.
Dude, regular medical often doesn’t cover any part of dental or vision, and those things are usually way, way cheaper than fertility interventions. If they won’t shell out for a cleaning every now and again to keep you from getting abscesses or a pair of glasses so you don’t walk into walls, what on earth makes you think they’re going to shell out 20x that much so you can have a baby?
Sure but it’s a lot harder to blame the lack of dental or vision coverage on racism, sexism, homophobia, or any other bugaboo.
That said, I do think that the government should step in and lean on insurance companies to cover fertility treatment. I like the Israeli model where the government pays for essentially unlimited fertility treatments until you have 2 children. If Israel can afford it than surely the US can afford it.
At the same time, the government should also warn people that if you wait until your 30s to start a family, you are substantially increasing your chances of having fertility problems. Particularly if you are female.
Insurance coverage of IVF can help save money by reducing number of multiple births. Since IVF is so expensive people often oft to transfer more embryos than necessary or wise thus increasing their chances of costly multiple births:
But when happens when you’re in school till you’re in your early-to-mid 20s so you can get a decent job, and then you start a career that you don’t dare jeopardize by getting pregnant right away? What if you see just how shitty and expensive your childcare options are, and realize you need to be making more money if you’re going to be able to put a kid into daycare? The fact is, more people are waiting to get married and waiting to have kids. Many women feel like they can’t manage both a career and kids unless they’ve got enough money, so the kid thing gets pushed back. Make life easier for parents, and maybe more people would do it younger.
It’s not always a matter of choosing to wait. I didn’t meet my husband until I was in my mid-20s. I finished school and moved here. We dated a while. We got married. We bought a house. And we started trying to have kids. I don’t see how I could have accelerated things very much except by deciding to get married sooner, but we don’t take that commitment lightly and wanted to be sure before we went ahead.
On an individual level, you make choices. For a lot of people, that means having children crammed into a little apartment because you can’t afford to buy a nice house on the husband’s salary; it means the wife’s career will be off-track for years; it means foregoing nice vacations for years.
On a broader level, society needs to make family formation more affordable and convenient. There are different ways this might be accomplished. Probably we should copy Scandinavian countries with their generous maternity leaves for working mothers. At the same time, there needs to be more of a focus on creating good-paying jobs for young married men so they can support their families.
I totally agree with this. But at the same time, a lot of girls spend their 20s living a “Sex and the City” lifestyle, i.e. blowing their money on shoes and clothing; having sex with a lot of different men; and thinking that they will get married and have children down the road. None of these things are good for fertility and these girls need to be made aware of it in no uncertain terms.
Early marriage needs to be more financially attractive and at the same time, people – especially girls – need to be made aware of the downside of late marriage.
(By the way, I’m not saying that you slutted it up in your 20s, I’m just talking about society in general.)
Antigen, I am so sorry. I’ve been there with the peeing on sticks and the IUI and and and. It’s not fun, and I wouldn’t wish it on ANYONE. :hug:
I never had PCOS, but I had 40-dayish cycles and was diagnosed with unexplained ovulatory dysfunction. Clomid was a total bust for me, but now they’re using the breast cancer drug Femara to induce ovulation, and it worked for me the first cycle.
Would your doctor be willing to prescribe Clomid and/or Femara without you having to do the IUI with it? Very rarely does it result in multiple births-- I mean, there’s a slight chance of twinning, but high-order multiples don’t really become an issue unless you’re on injectables.
And, if your doctor WON’T, I know this is the world’s least advisable idea, but there are theoretically forums out there that can walk you through obtaining the medicine from, say, Canada, and doing it yourself. Again, this would be REALLY, REALLY harmful with injectibles, but with just Clomid or Femara, not so much. Not that I would know. Not that it happens. :hide:
For the same reason the government warns people about the negative effects of cigarette smoking and alcohol consumption while pregnant, i.e. to promote general health, safety, and/or welfare.
Well how would that work? A childless 25-year old girl goes to her gynecologist for a checkup and the doctor tells her that if she wants to have children, better that she should start sooner rather than later? I guess it’s okay but that sort of unsolicited advice has the potential to undermine the doctor/patient relationship.