Parentood: Fertility Treatment

How many people out there are having fertility treatment? “About 6% of married women aged 15 to 44 years in the United States are unable to get pregnant after one year of trying. Also, about 12% of women aged 15 to 44 years in the United States have difficulty getting pregnant or carrying a pregnancy to term, regardless of marital status.” According to the Center for Disease Control. That’s a lot of people, walking around, working, acting normal but being poked, prodded, and needled, asked to leave samples left right and center all the while living with that sinking feeling that they had failed somehow. And yes, rationally of course, your brain tells you that it’s not your fault, there’s nothing you can change to make it better, but it’s hard to think straight sometimes.

My own journey is quite strange in that a first child was easy enough to conceive, I didn’t really give it a second thought. So I assumed that it would be oh so simple once again. Except that it wasn’t. It didn’t happen for years. I was so utterly disappointed every time I tested, spending so much! on pregnancy tests. I finally went to see the doctor who for some strange reason decided to do a painful fallopian tube test without testing for other things. Fun. They could find nothing with either myself or my partner, diagnosis: “unexplained infertility.” Off we were sent to an amazing fertility clinic, where the wonderful doctor who loved talking about Star Trek, recommended I have a thyroid test, bingo, hypothyroidism. Of course, I have no idea whether this condition was definitively causing fertility issues, but it was nice to know that I had been feeling lethargic and not like myself for a reason. After taking medication for this, I was able to conceive but miscarried at 6 weeks with “blighted ovum” which was a strange experience as there was no actual embryo there. Anyway, we eventually decided to start oral medication and IUI which eventually worked. Let’s see how this all goes, the journey is not over yet.