Hoppy Easter

Wish you all a wonderful Easter. I am busy spending time with my 2 favorite people, enjoying this rainy day together. Tomorrow is April 1st which begins Infertility Awareness Month so check back tomorrow for a special blog! Love you all!!

Where do I belong?

So in an effort to find support aside my own circle of friends and family I have joined several groups on Facebook. I joined a couple groups of women experiencing secondary infertility, a military infertility group and more recently a group for endo. I thought maybe if I could find others who were going through the same things I was, I would find a sense of belonging.
I don't really fit into the typical mold of a military wife, I don't really enjoy gossiping and I certainly do not like being at the other end of what seems like the relentless cattiness and backstabbing. I spend a lot of time inside my house for fear that if I go out, I will be brought back into the drama that was my life about a year ago. I also find it hard to see all of these women get  pregnant with ease and actually have the ability to "plan" their children around  deployments, school, jobs etc. I am so envious of them, that they have the ability to do so, while for almost 2 years I feel like I have held on to some hope that I too will magically become pregnant so I shouldn't get a job and put Emma in preschool, or go to school because I don't want to start and then have to take a block of time out to be home again.
So back to where do I belong in all of this, when people think of infertility they assume I don't really "count" because Emma was conceived naturally without being planned. When people Endo they usually have a lot of pain and we are talking not able to move and being on high doses of pain medication pain, and I don't have that, not yet at least but that could change down the road. I obviously don't fit in with the fertile myrtles because I can't just look at my husband and get pregnant, and I don't really fit into the secondary category as well as you would think because of my age.
Research is showing that women who suffer from secondary infertility are more likely in this category because women in general are waiting till they are older to start families. I didn't have Emma till I was 25, and now being 28 I am not sure when or if I will have another one. There is still the unknown factors as well as to what is causing my infertility. If you read my first post I told you that my RE (reproductive endocrinology)  told me that he thinks that all of the issues they found are the reason why I haven't conceived, but he also has mentioned that I didn't respond "as well as I should have" to the super ovulation drugs which could indicate an issue with my egg quality. There really isn't a test they can do to check the "quality" aside from when you do IVF they are able to examine your eggs when they harvest them prior to your "planting". The idea that I have bad eggs scares the crap out of me! Other than quantity, quality is not something they can fix. Now I don't have 20 grand to find out  either way, and I am not sure if that would be something that we want to do.  As of right now our plan is to let my body heal from the surgery, let all these different drugs I have pumped into my body get out, get back into shape and just let the next few months roll. If nothing happens in a few months then we will try one more round of super ovulation, and if that doesn't work, well.... well let's just hope it does! Positive thinking, I will get pregnant! I will get knocked up! I will not lose my ever loving mind! I will be happy!
In all seriousness, at the end of each and every day I thank God for what I have now. I thank him for blessing me with an amazing child who makes me laugh everyday and keeps me on my toes. There is nothing more profound to me then watching my daughter learn something new, have an experience, or make a memory. I hope that someday that she will know just how grateful I am for her. I thank God for giving me a husband who loves me unconditionally. No matter which level of bat shit crazy I am acting, he just smiles at me. I love watching him and Emma play together, grow together and make memories together. I hope one day she finds a man just like her daddy, and he loves her as much as we do.
There are days I feel sorry for myself and not being able to have control in this whole thing. There are nights I long and dream of having a house full of children and hearing them laugh and play together brings tears to my eyes. I wonder if Emma will be angry she never had a sibling to grow up with and that we will place the burden of us getting older on her alone. For now though, I relish in the fact that she is 3 and she doesn't know any different. I can't let my thoughts run wild and I have to remind myself that its the here and now that matter. What we do today, is what counts and that's is how I am going to keep living.

**WARNING GRAPHIC PICTURES**

So I am debating putting my pictures up of my belly after my surgery. They aren't pretty pictures but I did do daily pics just to show what it looked like, not only for myself but if anyone else wanted to see out of curiosity. When I got pregnant with Emma I gained almost 70lbs, I was 150lbs when I got pregnant and was a size 3 thanks to a healthy diet and working as a manager at LA Fitness and I loved working out!! I didn't really even gain that much weight at the beginning of my pregnancy but somewhere around the 5th or 6th month it my belly just kept growing and growing super fast. I was 215 when I delivered Emma. A lot of it was water weight and well extra blood and my giant child! I was 38 weeks when I delivered Emma via c-section and she was 8lbs 6oz and had a 14in head and was 20 inches long. She was a big girl and had I not been induced I wonder what she would have ended up being. I got blessed with a massive amount of stretch marks not only across my entire stomach but my poor boobs went from B's to DD's during my pregnancy as well. I used to feel really self conscious about the stretch marks, Ryan has never said anything about them and neither has anyone else, but to me I just hated them. About 2 months ago I was in the bath tub and Emma came up and started looking me over, and she pointed to them and asked what they were. I told her that when she was a baby she lived inside my belly and grew big and strong and my skin had to stretch to allow her to grow. She looked at me, back down at my belly and then touched them and told me that she thought they were beautiful. It made me cry just thinking that my 3 year old didn't see this as disgusting marks  but as beautiful marks that I earned while I carried her in my belly. It changed my whole outlook on my body after that. The scars that we have because we are women who carry our children are earned and they aren't something to be ashamed of, they are something we can be proud of. I may never wear a bikini in public but it isn't because I am ashamed of my scars. So if you are still reading this I will assume that you are wanting to see these pictures. The first one is before I started my fertility treatments, back in December 2012

Day of Surgery, Getting ready to go back!

 This is right after I got home. As you can see my stomach is really swollen because as I mentioned they fill you up with gas to be able to navigate around the organs. There are 4 incisions (one being inside my belly button and the one on the bottom they cut along my c-section.

Here is Day 2, still pretty swollen but it had gone quite a bit from the prior day. I still was having a lot of chest pains and pretty much was sore everywhere.

Day 3, I was actually feeling good enough to stand up for short periods of time without feeling dizzy or nauseous, I was still really swollen and the bruising started to come out.

Another side shot of Day 3

This was Day 4, I was feeling a lot better the swelling had gone  and I obviously wearing my favorite stretchy pants since they ride low enough not to  rub on the incisions.

It has been almost 2 weeks since my surgery and I would be lying if I told you I felt like myself, because to be honest I don't. I still have my moments where I look down and see these new scars and I wonder if I will ever have another child. I wonder if I will be able to show them and tell them that I went through all of this to bring them into the world. I wonder if these will be reminders to me that I can't have anymore more children. I really just spend a lot of time wondering about the what-if's. What I do know is that I am strong enough to handle it no matter what it ends of being. Infertility isn't a joke, and neither are going through the treatments. Putting yourself and your body through this is not something I think anyone would choose to do for shits and giggles. Putting the stress of infertility on your relationships, friendships, marriage and family is really hard. I say over and over again how lucky I am to have an amazing husband because he truly is an amazing  husband and father to be able to endure this storm. I hope one day I will be able to carry another child for him, and give my daughter a sibling. If I can't though it will be okay, I will be okay and we as a family will be okay. I am grateful for what I have here and now and can only look forward to what the future holds.

Let's start at the beginning...

I haven't really been very open with a lot of people about what has been going on for the last year and a half. I have not really discussed the issues that have been going on with fertility mostly because I didn't really have any answers to give. I felt that if I was to mention the issue of fertility we were having that I would be bombarded with a million questions and would be given  millions of little of pieces of advice that at the point I was at, would not have been received very well. By that I mean, I may have told you to "screw off and mind your own business"
When Ryan got home from his deployment in October 2011, we started actively trying to have another baby. I would have started sooner however without him being here that posed an obvious issue. I figured that since Emma was not really planned and we had such ease getting pregnant with her that getting pregnant again would be very easy. I have never been so wrong in my life
The first 6 months were pretty stressful and I didn't really get much support from family and friends because it had only been 6 months and it had taken people almost a year to get pregnant with their kids. After the first 6 months I started using tracking apps on my phone and ovulation kits. I became a POAS (pee on a stick) addict and I thought every ache and twinge for sure was me getting pregnant.
Then we hit a year... and I knew something was wrong. I wasn't sure what it was but I knew that this wasn't normal, so I scheduled an appointment with the doctor. He ran his tests and called and told me that all of my blood work checked out and that  I was fine. I asked him if he could refer me to a specialist so that they could do more extensive testing, and he agreed.
We went and saw a doctor at a very well respected Reproductive Endocrinology Practice in Delaware in November. They gave us a check list of tests that would need to be completed and then after everything was done we would make our game plan. Ryan and I both had blood work again, I had several days of my cycle that I needed to come in on so they could check for specific levels of hormones to make sure I was ovulating, they checked my AMH which is ovarian reserves, FSH, progesterone etc. Ryan had has swimmers checked and I had ultrasounds done to check for any issues. I also had a Sonography and HSG done.
We met with the doctor at the beginning of December and he told us that the good news was that all of our test came back normal. However, when dealing with infertility issues this isn't really "good" news, because this meant we were unexplained secondary infertility. He then gave us two options, we could try a cycle of what is called super ovulation or I could undergo a laparoscopy (. http://www.ivf.com/laprscpy.html)
We decided that we would try one round of super ovulation (http://www.ivf1.com/superovulation/) and timed intercourse and if that didn't work we would agree that something else was being missed so I would do the lap surgery. My body had other plans for us that month and when I went in to do my baseline ultrasound before beginning injections I had a huge cyst on my ovary and was forced to wait until the following month.
We tried our first round of injections in January after my cyst went away, I did 75 iui of Follistim for 10 days while going to the doctor pretty much every other day for a ultrasound and blood work to check the growth of the follicles. At first I had quite a few growing and they were doing pretty good, but then all of a sudden they disappeared and I ended up having one follicle that was 20mm on the day that I "triggered" with Ovidril.
Triggering drugs force your body to ovulate outside your bodies normal time. I then did progesterone suppositories for 2 weeks until my BETA (blood test checking for HSG) which happen to fall on Ryan and I's 4th Wedding Anniversary and also was exactly 4 years and 4 days after we found out we were pregnant with Emma. Mother Nature decided to save me the grief of waiting for my BETA tests though and had my period show up that morning.
After all of this, we were ready to go ahead with the lap, it was the only thing that made sense. I was really scared and reluctant to do it because other than a c-section with Emma that I was awake for I had never had any surgeries and aside from that I had never been put under. I also was not looking forward to the recovery process and not being able to do stuff I was used to doing,I and was scared of what they might find.
We called my mother in law who came in to help keep Emma distracted and visit with her and Ryan while I recovered and on March 7th we headed to the surgery center. Emma had been diagnosed with RSV a few days before my surgery and we had informed not only the surgery center but my doctors as well. They told us as long as when I came in I didn't have a fever or cough that I would be good to go. That didn't go as planned as we waited in the back hooked up to IV's for 3 hours before they decided that because of the risk I posed being exposed to RSV that I would be sent home and would need to come back the following week. Talk about mad I was piping steaming hot and I gave them an ear full! Fast forward to the following week and my amazing friend Jessica graciously accepted my request to take me to my surgery while Ryan stayed home with Emma. The surgery itself wasn't bad, because I don't remember it lol. I guess I was under for about an hour and a half and I awoke up with 4 incisions instead of the originally planned 3 I was told I would have. I have put some links up throughout this post since I am not really going into much detail about everything. If you really are interested you can click on them and they will give you better descriptions of everything. The first few days after the surgery were pretty rough for me, they fill you up with gas to maneuver around and as that gas comes out it shifts around in your body causing all kinds of aches and pains. For the most part I just stayed in bed and took my pain meds and slept because I had a hard time moving too fast or too far. Lucky for me I have one of the most amazing husbands in the world and he took stellar care of not only me but of Emma and the house and everything else.
Last Tuesday we had our follow up and this is where we are right now. During my surgery they found mild Endometriosis http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endometriosis in my pelvis and my ovary. They found benign polyps inside one of my tubes and on one of my ovaries. They also found some adhesion's and apparently one of ovaries and my tube had attached themselves to my colon. Everything was removed or burned off during the lap.
There is good news and bad news with all of this, we still don't know if this is what is causing my infertility. We don't know if this means I will be able to get pregnant again without the use of drugs like super ovulation or if I conceive again naturally. I am trying to learn as much as I can about endometriosis because there isn't a cure for it, there isn't even a specific reason that some women get it and some women don't. There are a lot of uncertainties right now as far as my fertility goes. My goals right now are to continue recovering from this surgery and get my body healthy again. I want to be more open about this journey and I want to be able to support other's like myself who aren't sure where they fit into the whole infertility thing. So stay tuned because there is more to come... also for more information about infertility check out http://www.resolve.org/