Tuesday, April 24, 2018

Baby Hayward Journey


So in the spirit of #NIAW (national infertility awareness week) I thought it would be appropriate to tell our story so far….

My husband and I will have been together for 7 years this year… and basically we have never not tried to get pregnant… although we weren’t trying we weren’t trying to prevent it either…. Well after about 3 years of trying naturally we finally went to my obgyn and asked why aren’t we getting pregnant…. So we did some blood work and I was diagnosed with PCOS. So she put me on metformin… which helps regulate your cycles etc. and some women can get pregnant just with the help of this medication… so we were super hopeful and happy we finally knew what the deal was… little did we know this was only the beginning of our journey.



We tried for about a year… with no results, so my dr said ok lets try some fertility medication… I read so much about clomid and all the success stories and we figured we would be pregnant in no time… well our first round our dr started us on 50mg with lab work the 1st and 20th day. No pregnancy… 2nd round… she upd our meds to 100mg with lab work… still no pregnancy.. so my dr has us do an HSG to make sure we didn’t have any blockages. This was a great day… we had no blockages! We both were crying with tears of joy.




We also tested my husband’s  sperm count and he was good! So the 3rd round she upd our dosage to 150mg with lab work… still no pregnancy … This was beginning to take a toll on our relationship, our hope, and our happiness and not to mention the side affects from not only the metformin, but the side effects of clomid are horrible…. Mood swings stomach aches, nausea, hot flashes… So the next round my dr told us this is the last round she can do for us and if this doesn’t work she is going to need to refer us to a specialist. 4th round she kept our meds at 150mg. with lab work and no changes….. no pregnancy, we felt defeated…




so then my dr referred us to PNWF in seattle, and we had our over the phone consult which is where we learned and talked about iui… and possible injections if it came to that… after learning all of this we knew that we needed to take some time. I was planning a wedding and didn’t need anymore stress and we needed time to focus on us. So we took just shy of a year break from infertility treatments. When we finally decided to start trying again I began to do research on IUI and found out we had a dr locally that did IUI!!! So I called my OBGYN and had her send a referral! We were so excited to learn that we could do this in town. We were in such a better place and mind frame, we were ready to start again… so we had our consult with Dr Johns and made a plan… but since we had already done 4 rounds with fertility meds he wanted to max me out on the meds and if no changes he knew I was going to probably need the help with stronger meds and injections. So our 5th round first round with him he did 150 mgs and ultrasound on day 12 to see where my follicles were at… no luck that first month no follicles at all…. So the next round our 6th round dr Johns maxed us out on Clomid at 200mg… day 12 Ultrasound and we had one mature follicle… we both instantly started crying we were both so excited. We had him print out 2 ultrasound pictures I took one to work told all the girls cried happy tears and tj took his to work so happy put it on his tool box and told all the guys at work… so we got our trigger shot and the next morning went in for our 1st IUI… 








Then the TWW (two week wait) sooo hard to wait to take a test with your mind playing games on you… the side effects to the trigger shot is false pregnancy symptoms… and no matter how many times you tell yourself you are not pregnant your mind is still playing tricks on you… like ive never felt like this before… and then it’s the night before we take the test and I start my cycle… I sat on the toilet and cried…… it was the closest we had ever been… and it was over…. I had cried many times in my husbands arms… a lot of tears a lot of sleepless nights… a lot of doubting  your self worth and feeling worthless…. Feeling as though god put women on this earth to make babies and I cant even do that… wondering if I will ever be a mother… if I will ever know what it feels like to be pregnant  or to give birth…. I cant explain the feelings or thoughts…. Keeping our hope and faith is always a struggle at times… praying and just trying to stay positive.



So Dr Johns referred us back to PNWF… and we went and met with dr Swelstad we both really liked him!! And we made a new plan with him…. He switched us to the  dosage of 7.5 of femara and started us on follistim.. our injections.. so round 7… femara days 3-7 and follistim 1.0 units days 8-10… then Ultrasound on day 12….. We had follicles but none were mature so the dr had us take another shot of follistim (what we had left which was about half a dose) and go in 2 days later for another ultrasound with the hope that the extra meds and days our follicles would grow… but they barely grew .2… we were so let down… even though we try not to be we were just really hoping all these new meds were going to give us better results…. Round 8… Dr upd our follistim  to 1.8 units and kept us on the femara  so again days 3-7 femara and 8-10 injections… went to our day 12 ultrasound and again we had follicles but none of them were mature follicles biggest ones measuring under 10,  so the dr had us do shots for the next 2 days (gave us another 300 units) and wanted us back for another ultrasound in 2 days with the hopes that the medicine and days will help out follicles grow. We went in for our ultrasound…. And they had barely grown… The biggest one was just over 10 at this point, as soon as the ultrasound tech left the room she said she was going to get the pa to come talk to us… I started balling in the room… it just sucks…  to just feel so helpless with something you both want so bad and for things to not work for us over and over again… so the PA came in and wanted to do some lab work and test my estrogen and she said it my numbers were high we would continue our round… if they were low we would cancel this cycle. So we did our lab work and my estrogen level was at 34 VERY LOW…. It was a long drive home I cried for most of it… and my sweet husband he stays so strong for us when I know his heart is hurting so bad for him, us, me…




He is my best friend my partner my shoulder my support… He is the other half of my life. I don’t know what I would do without him.



So we have worked with out dr and made our plan for our 9th round… We will be switching back to clomid because we had better results with that and uping our dosage of the follistim again to 2.8 units days 8,9,10… with blood work on day 3, ultrasounds on day 3 and day 12 and hopefully we will have some mature follicles to be able to trigger and do IUI…. So for now we have eachother we have our faith, our hopes, and some very supportive people in our lives….  Here’s to our 9th round and hoping we will get some results! Baby dust!  And a big thank you to everyone who has bought and wears there infertility awareness bracelets that we made and our selling! It means the world to us.

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