My Plan, My Reality, and My Process

My husband Richard and I were married in Cancun, Mexico on April 15th 2006 and just 2 months into marriage found out I was pregnant with our 1st child. We thought getting pregnant would take at least a year but just one month off of birth control and 9 months later here she was, the most beautiful baby girl in the world. On March 16, 2007 Raigan Sophie was born via c-section after two inductions in a week. Richard and I had already been discussing a c-section and I was all for it because early in my pregnancy we learned that I had a dermoid cyst in my right ovary which would require surgery to remove. Within minutes of Raigan’s birth my dermoid cyst was removed and it was the size of a golf ball. The dermoid cyst would be the beginning of my female issues which I would say led to my fertility issues and what I would consider the start of my anatomy lesson.


When Raigan turned one year old Richard and I started talking about another beautiful baby, you see my sister and I are almost 8 years apart and I decided long before I was married that I wanted my children closer in age. My parents never planned for such a gap, they tried for more children it just didn’t happen the way they planned and neither would my plan.


It was between July 2008 when I lost my dream job and December 2008 when I lost my left fallopian tube to an ectopic pregnancy when I realized life wasn’t fair.

December 25, 2008 we woke up and I went in the kitchen to start breakfast. This was the first year we decided we would stay home on Christmas morning, start our own Christmas traditions. While taking the bacon, eggs, cheese, sausage and cinnamon rolls out of the refrigerator I got a sharp pain in my stomach. At first I thought I had to go to the bathroom but the pain got worse, more intense, it was like nothing I had ever felt. I called my mom she told me to sit on the toilet so I did and as I sat there my vision started to go, and I started to see rings of light. I started to get really dizzy and yelled at my husband to get me off the toilet all I could think was I didn’t want to die on the toilet. Once I got to the couch the pain hadn’t subsided so Richards called 9-1-1. I can’t remember clearly but I think there were at least 4 fire men standing in my living room on Christmas and all suspected different things that could be wrong, kidney stones, gall stones but none of them thought ectopic pregnancy until I got into the ambulance.


As I lay in a room in ER on Christmas waiting for Richard and Raigan I just wonder what was happening. I had a feeling it was an ectopic pregnancy because I had had 3 very heavy periods in a month’s time. I had in fact just called my doctors office a few days before Christmas because I had just started my period for the 3rd time and was a little concerned. The reason I was only mildly concerned is because I have a very unpredictable periods never the same cycle twice. The phone call to my doctor’s office was apparently too late because with the bad winter weather and the holiday week I was brushed off to make an appointment which was now scheduled for Jan 9th 2009.


This is about the time I started the “what if” game in your head. What if I had called sooner? What if I had paid closer attention to that slight feeling, that gut instinct that something wasn’t right? What if the 3 pregnancy tests I had taken had actually worked? What if I had better understood the Basel body temperature charts I had been taking?


Either way though I didn’t make it to January, I was in the ER on Christmas, the nurse was taking blood for some tests and the doctor told me that I would be going upstairs for a CAT scan and then they would better be able to tell me what was going on. As I lay very still waiting for the CAT scan the machine stopped circling the imager came in and said they called off the scan and I went back to emergency room. The doctor came back into the room where I was now laying chatting with my sister and mother and in a not so sympathetic tone he said did you know you were pregnant (in the past tense)? As I started to cry the loss of a baby I wanted so badly and had been working so hard for took over. All I could think about was how much I wanted that baby and had planned for that baby and now I had to tell Richard I had lost our baby. He came into the room and I broke down again and told him I lost our baby he just held me. Then the insensitive doctor proceeded to tell me that I needed to go into surgery immediately with a doctor that I did not care for one bit but she was the only doctor at the hospital. The ER doctor basically said in not so many words that if I didn’t have the surgery I would die. Fifteen minutes later I was taken to surgery to remove my left tube because the ectopic pregnancy has burst and I had been internally bleeding.


I made it through surgery, the doctor said everything looked good the other tube looked fine and the ovaries were great. My parents brought Raigan into the room Richard was there with me too but I was tired, hungry and desperately wanted a shower. My parents brought food but I couldn’t eat it because the doctors didn’t want me to get sick. I couldn’t sleep because the nurse came in every half hour to an hour to check my blood pressure I had lost so much blood I had to have a three transfusions. My blood pressure was so low I couldn’t even stand up on my own so taking a shower was out of the question.


The next day I thought I would go home but the transfusions weren’t working which meant I was still internally bleeding so I was heading towards a second surgery. The only difference about this surgery was that my doctor would be assisting which made me feel better. Even still I was so mad cuss words were flying out of my mouth faster than I could think about it. I was so hungry, I wanted to be in my own bed and Raigan still hadn’t opened her gifts from us or Santa but I was headed back for my second surgery.

When I finally got home two days after Christmas and two surgeries later I had time to think about what just happened. I replayed the last two days people kept saying, “it will all work out and you will be back here delivering next Christmas.” Sometime you don’t need people to reassure you but to tell you the truth or just don’t say anything at all. I remember I kept asking can I still have babies; will I be able to conceive again? When you are down and out people tell you exactly what you want to hear. I didn’t understand why I had to have a second surgery; I would learn much later what good my left ovary was with no tube and that a second child would never be as easy to conceive as my first child.



When I was alone I had time to really think about my loss and what this did to my plan. My children would not be 2 years apart but closer to 3 years which was not ideal but would be fine. Richard and I didn’t really talk about what happened, he was worried about me and I was feeling sadness. Some people would say it wasn’t a baby but I would say it was very much a baby, a baby I wanted and a baby I planned for, a sibling and friend I truly wanted for Raigan. When I got home and looked at my temperature charts and calendar, I estimated that I had been about six weeks pregnant. I had never in all my years of thinking and planning about a family thought, “I want to have an only child; just one and then I will feel fulfilled.” I don’t think I had ever felt so lost and alone before not to mention confused. How did this happen? How could I go from conceiving Raigan with no problems to a burst ectopic pregnancy that stole my left tube?

Raigan had become my reason for getting up every day because I still didn’t have a job so I held tight to her and she may never understand what she did for me but in two words she was my rock. When I couldn’t talk to Richard and he couldn’t see just how much pain I was in I counted on her to make me smile. Had I not had her I don’t know what would have happened, what kind of shape I would have been in. After I got home I couldn’t think about doing much for myself but for her I would do everything and anything. My one precious gift that in some ways I felt I took for granted because I always thought there would be another. For her I wanted a sibling, a friend, someone she could play with, talk to, and grow up with.


I didn’t grieve for too long before I was in the doctor’s office figuring out our next move, what did this all mean in the bigger long term picture? Was one tube good enough? Was I going to be any good anymore?


We started a new year 2009, hopefully a fresh start and a baby in my near future. I was hopeful that it would all work out; I was a healthy 29 years old and no one said it would be a tough road ahead. I remembered what everyone kept saying to me in the hospital, “you still have one tube you will be in here delivering next December.”


Do you ever realize that when you want something so bad and think about something so much it’s everywhere but it’s not yours? All of a sudden everyone you see is pregnant and in fact I had 4 friends of mine that were to have babies around the same time my baby would have been born. All the commercials you see are about pregnancy and babies. All of a sudden all the e-mails in your inbox are about “what foods to eat while trying to conceive, or how to make sure your first born isn’t left out of your pregnancy.” All the clothes that didn’t fit Raigan and toys she stopped playing with I was keeping for another child. Should I start giving these things away? Was it time to start the process of letting go? Would it be that much easier later? It just never ends the list goes on and on.


February began what would become a long emotional journey. I would start on Clomidiphene a fertility drug because apparently I was no longer ovulating. I got the sense from my doctor this would all be great and with the fertility drugs I had a higher chance of multiples which run in both my husbands and my family. My new fertility regiment consisted of hormones that made me crazy and not such a nice person to be around. I could feel the effects of the fertility drugs from the inside out and it wasn’t right but I would walk through fire to have another baby so I would deal with it and everyone else would have to deal with it pleasant or not. I was so selfish I put my blinders on and kept my eye on the prize and if I could just get over the hump I could see the finish line, my final destination more clearly. February went by and my hopes got high and when March came around my hopes fell and disappointment set in.


March came and we added more hormones, shots mid month and pills that are suppose to make the uterus seem more inviting to an egg. Everything was so planned just the way I like it right? Not exactly, I was in the doctor’s office at least twice a month. We had to check my ovaries at the beginning of my cycle to make sure I was free of ovarian cysts. I had to pee on sticks to check for fertility and when that stick turned positive I called the doctor. My mid cycle visit to the doctor was to make sure the follicle was big enough before receiving two shot of hormones and then four days later I would lay out the welcome mat and take more pills for the next 14 nights. Once I received the shot Richard knew he was on the next day for baby making sex.


Baby making sex is much different from love making it is calculated definitely not a romantic intercourse and the main purpose in fact is to get pregnant. Love making is not so planned, perhaps romantic and relaxing. Baby making is much more stressful because you have such a small window for all the stars to align. It becomes a chore instead of enjoyable extracurricular activity.


Just as February began with hope and ended in disappointment March was much the same more drugs and more calculations on the calendar. By April, May and June I was still hopeful at the beginning of every month and perhaps as the months went on just a little bit less hopeful than the month before but still remained somewhat positive. I was going through pregnancy test right and left with hope that I would see two lines and I could stop everything and enjoy our hard work. I began to get higher doses of hormones as the months went by but the regiment was still the same and months were scheduled from start to finish.


My family was supportive but they also had their own ideas of what I should be doing. Some people just didn’t seem to understand why I didn’t just stop taking all the drugs and try to have a baby “naturally” and told me that I needed to relax and stop putting so much pressure on it. This is not something one wants to hear when you are on a mission and have been told you don’t ovulate and know that the only way to make it all function is the drugs. Again I had my blinders on and didn’t want to hear what people were saying unless they were telling me what I wanted to hear. This is about the point when I stopped telling those people much about what I was doing. With the drugs I was much more irritable and couldn’t handle much of what I saw as pessimism.


I know looking at it that they were only trying to help and that some of my critics had experienced something similar to this before but times have changes since 30 years ago. The medical profession has grown and changed by leaps and bounds and now had remedies for conceiving and options. All I could think about was if there are options why wouldn’t I try everything I could. By not trying everything I could I felt that I was giving up, my parents always said if you want something bad enough you have to work for it and that exactly what I was doing. When my parents were teaching me that hard work pays off they didn’t specify what kind of work, they didn’t say in a career specifically but rather anything I wanted in life. Well at the moment I could only think of one thing I wanted more than anything else…a baby.


By July my doctor decided it was time to check my right tube, the only tube I had left. Checking my tube consisted of an x-ray; basically you put your legs in the stirrups while they shoot ink into your uterus that shows up on an x-ray screen. The dye will be seen as it moves through the uterus and through the tube(s) but in my case it stopped in the uterus and apparently if the dye doesn’t flow into your tubes it is painful, very similar to really bad cramps. The x-ray showed that my tube was closed. With what, they didn’t know; it could be mucus could be scar tissue they really couldn’t say or even speculate what blocking it or why it was blocked.


At this point my frustration kicked into high gear. I had been on fertility drugs that made me feel nothing like me for months and now they find out that no matter how many months I take these crazy pills nothing would have helped in getting me pregnant. Why did no one think of this x-ray sooner perhaps before months of fertility drugs or shortly after the surgery just to make sure things were working as they should? At this point it just seemed like we were always running into the shit storm instead of being one step ahead of it.


After the result came back my doctor wanted to have an exploratory surgery to investigate the tube and see what was causing the blockage. Richard however would not have it, he hadn’t said much in this process but when the doctor mentioned another microscopic surgery he put his foot down and would not even consider it. He thought a third surgery in less than a year was too much and seemed to still be mad that I had to have a second surgery back in December.


I felt like we were running out of options and I was not about to give up, I knew I could make it through another surgery, no problem, but the problem didn’t lie with me being able to get through a surgery but rather that our insurance would not cover this surgery. Our insurance would cover tubal removal but it would not cover for the doctor to fix the tube laproscopically. Basically I had to decide what I wanted to do and everything would be final once I decided. Not really great options at this point because Richard was 110% against the surgery and I wasn’t completely sold on losing my only tube for nothing. My doctor was prepared to take my tube out and “prepare me for IVF.” We didn’t understand why my doctor would even put me through another surgery just to take my tube out to prepare me for another procedure in which my tube would matter either way. IVF is not an affordable option for everyone, the doctors definitely don’t make it an easy option to put on the table and our insurance company won’t even think to help a family struggling with fertility with the cost of IVF.


One option that would be covered by insurance was a consultation and a second opinion. In late July we decided we would go to one of the local fertility clinics for a second opinion and have another x-ray done to be 100% certain nothing else could be done. All the research I had done about the x-rays says that sometimes if there is a blockage the pressure from the dye can break whatever is blocking it open. Once again I was hopeful, I mean something has got to give but the tube was blocked and they couldn’t say for sure what the cause was or why it happened. When we went for our consultation with the fertility doctor we went over the x-ray and she told us about our option. Our option consisted of IVF and only IVF or forever be without child. As I sat crying in the doctor’s office feeling very hopeless and discouraged I still felt there had to be a way around a procedure that once again our insurance would not cover. This procedure would cost a minimum of $12,000 but could be much higher and has no guarantees. If IVF doesn’t work we are up a creek without a paddle, SOL and back at square one. Could our marriage handle another upset and one with such a large financial consequence attached to it?


Once I regrouped I reevaluated the situation and I still only saw a bump in the road. “Where there’s a will there’s a way.”


In September my doctor found a way around IVF called a fallopian tube recanalization, in other words they would go through my uterus with a tiny microscopic tube and try and break through the blockage. There were no guarantees that this procedure would work but it was covered by insurance and didn’t require any anesthesia.


On October 15, 2009, on my 30th birthday I had the procedure to open my tube and hopefully get the gift of fertility. Sure enough the procedure worked and I now had an open tube to work with. With an optimistic attitude about the outcome of this procedure I had planned on a happy ending with my tube so I was off to the pharmacist to get more clomid only to find out that my insurance would no longer cover the drug which meant the cost would go from $20 to $100. With tears in my eyes I started to make phone calls to various pharmacies to see if they all charged the same. Sure enough I found a pharmacy that charged only $25 for the prescription. How is this possible, how can one pharmacy get away with charging upward of $100 for the same prescription that another pharmacy would only charge $25 for? However the system works I had the prescription I needed without breaking the bank and now had a renewed sense of possibility, we were back on the fertility horse and for the next few months continued with my monthly drug cocktail of hormones.


December 2009 came around and all I could think about was how perfect it would be if I were to find out I was pregnant on Christmas, exactly one year from our loss. All day on Christmas I thought about the fact that if I not had an ectopic pregnancy this would have been our babies first Christmas. I was hoping that finding out we were pregnant could maybe replace a bad memory with a good one and all the work we had done in the last year would have paid off. The bad memory of Christmas 2008 however was more than a memory to me because this was something I thought about every day since it happened. There wasn’t a day that went by since Christmas 2008 that I didn’t think about that day. When would these memories fade? When would I no longer think about it? The pain was still fresh if I allowed myself to take it that far but it kept me motivated. I didn’t want the ectopic pregnancy to be a bitter lasting memory of my child bearing years. Giving up meant that everything I did in the last year was all for nothing. It meant that for the first time in my life hard work would not pay off.


While December proved to be another disappointing month and one of the most difficult of them all, January was even more unsatisfactory. Here we were in a new year and in a couple months Raigan would be turning 3 years old which meant if we got pregnant now our children would be about 4 years apart in age. In the month of February 2010 we changed the fertility drug from Clomid to Letrozal and my doctor started talking about changing our methods. Letrozal is actually a drug used for women who have gone through breast cancer surgery but have the side effect of heightened fertility. This drug, Letrozal was particularly tough on my psyche and tough on Richard and my relationship. I would say this drug put me as close to depression as I have ever been. It made my mind very negative and made me want distance with everyone. It made it harder to deal with family and their opinions, it made it harder to enjoy conversations and there wasn’t really anything to get me out of the slump I was in. The only thing that was for certain was that this was not me; I didn’t even recognize who I was anymore. I used to enjoy life and people and I saw myself slipping away with every month of hormones. Perhaps it was the disappointment; the let down every month for over a year was changing me in ways I didn’t recognize.


There was one night that Richard and I were able to talk openly about our situation and where we were mentally and emotionally. This wasn’t the first time we had talked openly but it was a hard conversation to have and the last time we had talked we had been out and Richard had had a couple drinks. That night he had said he would be fine with just having Raigan and he likes to focus on what we have, not what we don’t and may never have. He also said that night that he didn’t want me to feel bad about not being able to have any more babies. The truth of the matter was I am much harder on myself than anyone could be, and I have always been this way. The fact that we would end our journey to have children was more to me than being happy with the one beautiful child that I had it was a lifelong dream coming to an end. It was a long time of planning and thinking about a family and the kind of family I wanted. I am also more selfish in this way, I never thought about just having one baby there was always more than one in my mind and heart.


At this point though Richard and I both agreed we couldn’t do this for another year and the fact that Raigan’s third birthday was right around the corner helped us make up our minds. In the last year we hadn’t been truly living we had been getting by. We were living according to a fertility calendar full of doctor’s visits, drugs, and scheduled baby making.


Our final scene would consist of a procedure called IUI, intrauterine insemination, simply said they take his sperm concentrate it and then insert it into my uterus with a catheter; this couldn’t get any more romantic. We would have to set it up as perfect as we could which meant we would wait to do the IUI until I was ovulating on the right side. Through this whole process I have learned a lot about the female body and learned that just because I only have a fallopian tube on the right side doesn’t mean I couldn’t conceive a baby from the left ovary. Apparently fallopian tubes can move from one ovary to the other, the doctors are not sure how often this happens they just know that it’s not out of the question. I didn’t want to take any chances though and wanted to get the most probability that I could because we were only doing the IUI once. Insurance did not cover this procedure but for $350.00 we would try it once our last hope for a baby.


Since my disappointment in December 2009 I had already been thinking about the end of all this planning and drugs. How much more disappointment could I take? The roller coaster ride for the last year was too much I wanted off. It was hard for me to say it out loud because in my mind it meant I was giving up. After everything I had been through how could I give up? I wanted my dream of having more children to come true I didn’t want to believe that this could possibly be it. Ending this journey wasn’t going to be easy but I wanted to live again, I wanted to be happy again, be satisfied with what I have and most importantly I wanted to be me. I haven’t been the same since 2008 when I had surgery. Since I had been thinking of ending this fertility journey it had really made me think about how events in one’s life change them not just for awhile but forever. I was going to have to teach myself how to be happy with what I had and stop living in what would be a fantasy world to me. I had to come to terms with my future and the future of my family, just the 3 of us but would I ever truly be the same?


As I went to yet another doctor’s appointment at the beginning of March I was very open with my doctor and let him know that Richard and I had been doing a lot of talking and after the IUI we were done with everything. We would go until the IUI had the best chance of working (when I ovulate on the right side) which could be many months but that after the IUI we would no longer be continuing with the fertility treatments. My doctor gave me more hope and proceeded to say, “Well you never know what can happen, I have had people stop all the fertility treatments to come back to me pregnant.” After the doctor’s appointment we were on track for an IUI and I would be back in his office in a week for my first shot (follistem) that would prepare me for the IUI. I went to the pharmacist to pick up the follistem and learned that my insurance would not cover it and it would cost us over $400 every month for one dose. Thank goodness I had a coupon for a free one time trial for the drug because it would not even be an option otherwise.


My appointment came as it always does and this month would not be our month, the start would not align in our favor. I was now a medical mystery; I was on day 9 of my cycle and already had a full grown follicle (a typical cycle would not see a full grown follicle until between days 12 and 15). In fact in the previous month I didn’t even ovulate until day 18 or so the doctor thought. My doctor could not make sense of it, first, why I would have a full grown follicle and second was this follicle going to amount to anything or would it go away on its own? The other factor we looked at was the entire cycle around my temperature charts which showed that my temperature went up after I started prometruim which meant that we assumed my temperature went up because I was ovulating but in fact the raise in my temperature could be due to the hormones not that I was actually ovulating at all. I had my doctor stumped on what to do next. What we did know for sure is that because the full grown follicle was on the left side we would not do the follistem shot this month. This meant we had another month to get it right and another doctor’s appointment scheduled for next week to check on the full grown follicle and try and figure out what was going on with my lady bits.

 

April fool’s day came and to be able to say I was pregnant and mean it on April Fools would have been fun unfortunately being pregnant is no joke. The next day my new cycle started and I was back to doctor with what appeared to be a cyst, oh for the love of all things sane could just one thing go my way in this process? Now what? This month is now out and I am running out of patients.


During this visit to the doctor’s office my doctor had started pushing me towards IVF treatment which is not even in the budget no matter which way he tried to paint it. This is when it hit me, my time was up and the last year and a half was all for nothing. Perhaps now is the right time to go through the grieving process...