Our Adventures

January 27th
Today was the start of many injections that I will have to take night and day in hopes that they will create good and numerous eggs for IVF. Seeing as how these drugs cost just as much as the actual procedure I am really hoping they do their job. We feel like this is the right step to take after so many different ups and downs but it is still nerve wracking not knowing if it will work. It is supposed to work. For my age it is around a 70% chance that it will but I'm still nervous. What if it works and I miscarry and I don't have enough extra eggs that are frozen to try again? Then what? I know a lot of this process is based on science but there is still a lot of faith and hope I am putting in God to use this technology to help us out.  I know that ultimately God could just bless us, that would be what I would hope for and have hoped for but it seems like with us there needs to be an extra little push for it to work properly. I'm not sure why and that's the frustrating part, having "unexplained infertility " is almost worse than knowing why it's not working. It seems like it shouldn't be this hard but for some reason this is our struggle. I think it is good for me to write this stuff down now so I can look back on it and see what God was doing and try to understand it better. Because right now it's not making a whole lot of sense. It's not making sense that I would be pregnant two years ago and lose that baby at the same time as my dad, thinking that that baby would perhaps be a light in our time of darkness. It doesn't make sense that no matter how much we schedule, how many tests we take, how many doctors, opinions and prayers we get that it just doesn't happen. It doesn't make sense that everyone else around us seems to get pregnant without much of a thought, it just happens the way it should for them. So I just have to trust that this is the step we have to take for it to work. I don't know what else there is to do. I don't know if we aren't being patient enough, how long is long enough? I feel like I have waited. I feel like I have given it to God so many times. He knows our desire to have children and I know one day we will but I hope this wait is over soon.

February 3
Frustration. I don't know what else to say about today. First off, we had to wake up at 6am on a Sunday morning to drive into Vancouver by 7:30 so I could get my second blood test and ultrasound. I would normally get this in Abbotsford but my doctor was at a conference this weekend so I had to go to Vancouver this time. I went to get my blood taken and was poked and prodded for a while, the nurses could not find my veins for the life of them. I was not told beforehand to eat breakfaat because it would make your veins easier to find. That would have been nice to know. Instead I had to sit with a hot pack on my arm for 15 minutes and then after getting stabbed in the hand and getting no blood (I'm pretty sure the nurse wasn't even in my vein) I then had to run my hands under hot water. They got a tiny bit of blood out of me and would see if it was enough while I got my ultrasound. My ultrasound did not go well. There were about 4-5 follicles on each side which wouldn't be bad but only 2 on each side were a decent size. The doctor said he would have liked to see them all a bit bigger and to see more of them at this point. He didn't want to say for sure that it wasn't looking good but wanted us to have the heads up that this cycle might not be a good one to go ahead with IVF. That is the last thing I wanted to hear. I was not planning on doing more than one cycle. I thought this would work. I go back for another ultrasound in Abbotsford on Tuesday to see if they are growing but if not I don't know if I will want to pay more for drugs if there's only a small chance of it being worth it. I feel like we've already spent so much that I don't want to throw more money away. I need to know for sure if it will work but I know that's not possible. I just don't want to do all this for nothing. I feel stuck, don't know what to think or do. I just pray that tonight and tomorrow these follicles will grow like crazy and there will be no doubt that it will work. Or I don't know what we're going to do. It just shouldn't be this hard. It seems like no matter what we do, no matter what we try it just is not coming easy. This is supposed to work. Please work for us.

February 16
Well, it didn't work. It's been almost two weeks since we found out that our IVF cycle was cancelled. My doctor in Abbotsford told me the day after my last blood test that there was no point of going on further because if we tried to get my follicles to the size they should be they would be poor quality eggs by that point. Technically, I shouldn't have been sold more drugs the day before so they're going to try fight the clinic in Vancouver so I can return the ones I didn't use yet. My initial response to the news was that we just wasted a ton of money for nothing. Then I started doubting if anything will ever work for us. This seemed to be our last option as far as getting pregnant was. Now I don't know if I want to take that risk again and potentially waste even more money for nothing. We are going to be meeting with another doctor for a second opinion because my doctor is very confused as to why I didn't respond to such a high dose while when I did IUI's I responded well to a much lower dose. I was reading on some fertility websites though that a first cycle gets cancelled quite often because it's hard to know what drugs will work best to make a person respond. But who says it will be better the second time? I just don't know at this point what direction we will go. I don't want to regret not trying again in a few years but I also really don't want it to not work again. Even though it's frustrating and confusing and painful to always get our hopes up and have them slammed down we have had peace with it. We haven't been overly worried about it or stressed and I think that has to do with all the people praying for us. There has to be some good that will come of all this.

March 3
Some answers. Last week I went to get my second opinion from another fertility specialist. I was told that from looking at my blood tests and the amount of follicles I had on my last ultrasound he could tell that I have what's called Premature Ovarian Aging (POA). Basically my ovaries are aging faster than they should be and so I don't have as many eggs or as good of quality of eggs as most people my age. This was kind of bitter sweet to hear. Bitter because it's not great news but sweet because I finally have some sort of answer as to why it has been so hard for us. He didn't say that there was no chance we could get pregnant (because we were once before) but that it would be harder for it to happen. So coming away from that meeting I am taking a few more natural pills that he said should help my egg quality and has been known to help others with this diagnosis. I will try those and possibly acupuncture to see if that will help wake up my ovaries to help them improve. Still not sure if we'll go through with IVF again or not. The doctor said there is a good possibility of getting to egg retrieval but there would still not be many eggs to pick from and he couldn't say what the chances of getting pregnant would be.  Not sure if I want to risk that much money on those kind of odds. But also not sure if I don't want to give up a chance to have one of our own. I guess you could say we're in a kind of hiatus, hopefully these new things I'm trying will just work and we won't have to make any of those tough decisions. That would truly be a miracle, keep praying.