Blog 2 of 6: "You Want To Put That Where?"
/Once upon a time, transvaginal ultrasounds didn’t exist in my world. Now, I’d say I have a pretty intimate knowledge of this type of ultrasound. If you are lucky enough not to know what a transvaginal ultrasound is, allow me to explain. It’s where an ultrasound probe is lubed up and inserted into the vagina. It rests against the back of the vagina, where they capture images of the internal lady bits.
The first time I felt a little mortified. Luckily, the nurse was very kind and explained what she was doing every step of the way. Now, I have very little shame and don’t think twice about that probing ultrasound wand. It’s a good thing I got over it because the reproductive doctors aren’t gentle when they’re jamming that wand into your ovary trying to measure each follicle. But I’m getting ahead of myself. Let’s back up.
Kids have always been something I wanted eventually. For a while, after I found out how babies were born, I thought adopting sounded like a good option. When my sister had her first baby, I was only 19, and babies still seemed scary, but by her second child, two years later, I was engaged, and my little niece felt like the most precious thing in the world. In that moment, I wanted one. By age 25, I was married and finishing nursing school, and I had full-on baby fever, but my husband wasn’t there yet, and student loans were crippling.
The birth of my first niece in 2007.
The moment I knew I wanted to be a mom.
A few years later, in 2014, we decided to try for a baby. A year into trying to conceive naturally, I was diagnosed with endometriosis. I had the surgery to remove it performed by a reproductive specialist in an attempt to save my ovaries. I wanted to give myself the best chance at having children in the future. Surgery went well, and I won’t get into all the ugly details of post-op.
I walked away knowing that my uterus was in great shape and my ovaries were scarred but still worked just fine. In the six weeks after surgery, I sent my husband to have his sperm checked, and his number of swimmers and their motility came back great. I was sure we’d be pregnant in no time.
In the months that followed my surgery, I had a fresh fear in my mind from all the pain I’d just endured, and I was terrified the endometriosis would come back and spread, causing me to become completely infertile. They were reasonable fears, and the people telling me to “just relax” had clearly never been in my situation. I began doing ovulation predictor tests, changed my diet, got rid of chemical-based cleaners, and scheduled our sex life down to the minute. Basically, I was doing everything I could to get knocked up and nothing was working.
A rocky five months after surgery, my sister came to me with great news and a broken heart. She knew how hard we were trying to get pregnant, and she got a “free sex baby” on her honeymoon. A free sex baby is what us infertile women who’ve spent thousands trying to get pregnant call getting knocked up the old-fashioned way.
I was excited for my sister. She deserved all the good news, and I hated that she was nervous to tell me. And I hated that I was sad for myself when all I wanted was to be happy for her.
I’m also going to mention that I worked as a pediatric nurse at this time in my life. I loved working with the kids, but years into our fertility struggle, it became an uncomfortable reminder of what we couldn’t have. It hurt to see all the happy couples with their brand-new babies because I wanted it so much. It made me furious to see the negligent parents and the parents who hurt their children. It killed me to see the mother of five (custody of none) give birth to another drug-addicted baby who would be taken away like the rest. It became a habit to give myself pep talks in the bathroom mirror.
That summer, I started on my first fertility medication—a nightmare pill called Clomid. Clomid made me a crazy woman. I have been on several fertility medications since, and nothing compared to how crazy it made me. I couldn’t trust myself, and I was already stressed. It was awful, and we still weren’t conceiving. Two months and ten appointments later, we went in for our first Intrauterine Insemination or IUI. I did a trigger shot the night before, which tells my ovaries to release the mature eggs. The following day my husband gave a sample of his sperm for the facility to wash and concentrate before they inserted it into my uterus around the time my ovaries release. So romantic. OR not.
I married a very thoughtful, caring, sensitive man. I thought we were going through this together, but while we waited for the doctor to come into the room, my partner—my other half—casually said, “I think we might be jumping the gun.”
When he said this, I was already a ball of anxiety, sitting on the exam table with a thin paper drape covering my naked lower half and staring at the syringe of sperm on the counter. At that moment, I realized my husband and I were not on the same page. We weren’t even in the same book.
I had kept him away from my many doctor’s appointments because there was really nothing he could’ve done. The trade off was he hadn’t realized what shape all those appointments left me in. He hadn’t gotten prodded by four different people in the last 8 days. He hadn’t been taking the medication that gave hot flashes and emotional mood swings. He hadn’t had to ask the nurse he worked with to give him a shot in the buttocks. I was beyond pep talks in the bathroom at work. I was hiding tears regularly, but my husband didn’t know. He hadn’t felt every symptom for the last year and wonder… could that be a baby? Only to re-live the loss over and over again, then wonder if something was wrong. We were living in different worlds where I hid my anxiety. Not just from him. I hid it from most.
Of course, I dealt with this like a mature adult and sat down and had a conversation. Just kidding! Fertility meds made me feel crazy, so I just tried to ignore my feelings until things got better. This resulted in emotions boiling over, which led to a fight at eleven o’clock one random night. I went to bed crying, and unbeknownst to me, my husband thought for the whole next day that I would leave him, which wasn’t even a thought in my mind.
Eventually, we had that mature conversation.
Our first treatment didn’t take. Neither did our second, and by the third, we had moved back to the reproductive endocrinologist better known as the fertility specialist. We thought the two treatments we had with my OBGYN were expensive out of pocket at around $300 a pop. Oh, how we were wrong! With the specialist, the medications and treatments cost about $2500 a cycle(month).
Over the next year, I had dozens of blood draws and ultrasounds, hundreds of hormone shots, and thousands of dollars worth of unsuccessful treatments. I never would’ve started that last IUI if I didn’t think we had the money. But I thought we were prepared. However, our debt was becoming a heaping mountain that threatened to crush us. Insurance didn’t cover a thing, so we paid in full for each treatment. We were midway through our last IUI when suddenly there were surprise charges, and we didn’t have any more money. NONE! Our credit cards were all maxed out—our checking account down to the bare minimum. I understand why these clinics operate the way they do, but it sucks to pay thousands of dollars a month only to be treated as an inconvenience when you don’t have an extra $1000 lying around. I spent hours in that damn waiting room, only for the doctor to spend a monthly total of roughly 20 minutes with me. All the failed treatments had left me a sobbing mess, and now I had to fight to find a way to continue the torture by begging them to let me fall further into debt.
I knew it would be our last treatment for a very long time, and if that treatment didn’t take, our next step was IVF which would be roughly about $15,000-$20,000.
The clock was ticking away my fertility despite everyone telling me I was “So Young.” My husband and I rearranged our lives to figure out how to pay for each treatment. I left my pediatric nursing job and found a new job that had nothing to do with children or families. Then we took several months off treatments and started plotting a way to pay for In Vitro Fertilization (IVF). The big one! The one I knew would get me pregnant.