The Journey Here, Part I

I mentioned awhile back that I wanted to share a bit about our journey to pregnancy. Here it is, finally posting Part I.
 
Disclaimer: If you don't like hearing about intimate female stuff...skip this post. Also, it's long.
 
I really want to be pretty transparent on this blog, honest and real. The purpose of this blog from the beginning was to share our lives with our family. It's also to document our lives for our own sake so we can look back and reminisce and share details we would have otherwise forgotten. If that's the purpose of our blog then I'd hope we'd share the real us.

We all accept and acknowledge that no one has a perfect life, yet social media and the blog world allow us to present only the best side of us. Our perfectly edited photos and our life void of all the messy details. I'll admit, I often leave out some of the details of our life here in order to protect others and to focus on the good parts of life. But sometimes, I hate that. What we choose to share about the unsavory, unhappy, and even ugly parts of life is the real us, the interesting parts of who we are and how our past shaped us into the person you see today. So this post is a small effort to share some of my ugly - parts of my history that are personal but still valuable and those parts play a huge role in where Dan and I are today: facing parenthood and a whole new world ahead with a child.

Most people when they post about their pregnancy it's the gorgeous baby bumps and highlights of the nursery. I love those posts, and I plan to do those too. But I also find a lot value in the posts where women talk about their struggles to get pregnant or what to took to get where they are today. Most are vague and simply say things like "we struggled with infertility" or "intimacy was hard for us" but that's it. I get it, it's personal and sacred and if you aren't comfortable sharing, then don't. But for me, I craved to find some brave woman who was willing to share the difficult part of the process so at least I wouldn't feel so alone in mine.

So, I'm going to try and be at least one small brave woman. Share more than just "intimacy was hard" and be more vulnerable. Perhaps some other woman will stumble on this post while she searches the internet for answers to her own problems and concerns and she can take comfort in knowing she's not alone. My story is long and moderately crazy, so I'm going to split this post into two parts. Part I is my mysterious reproductive system before marriage and Part II will cover my wild history post-wedding.

To begin, ever since I was a little girl I wanted to be a mom. That has pretty much been my primary goal in life. Everything along the way was to hold me over until I could be a mom. As a kid, teenager, and even young adult it never occurred to me that being a mother might not be possible or that it could be difficult. I'm a firm believer that if God puts a strong desire in your heart it's not a cruel joke. It will all work out in time. That was my mindset as an adolescent, and this was how my journey began. 

I started menstruating at the age of 16. Late bloomer. By the age of 19 I had stopped menstruating, for over a year. It was unexplained besides stress related when I started college. The doctor I saw near campus tried to "reset" with hormones but that didn't work and eventually she put me on birth control for a few months. People have opinions about birth control but I'll just say one thing, they aren't used exclusively as contraception. I was on birth control for several months and then I stopped because I was lazy. Truly, that was the reason. And I didn't really care if I didn't get my period. At the time, it was just an inconvenience.

During the end of my freshman year of college through my junior year, I dealt with my anxiety and stress through systematic food restriction and over exercising. That's a whole other story for another day, but ultimately it wasn't about food or weight. It was about control. Anyways, eating disorders are known to cause reproductive issues and when you are severely underweight you don't menstruate. So there was another year, thereabout, with no period. When I started seeing a therapist to work through the food issues I went back on birth control (who knows how many different types) it took awhile to find the one that worked best for me. It was at this point in my life, as I was processing the eating issues, that I realized the choices I had made could likely have long term consequences, including my chances of being able to carry a child.

By the time I was a senior in college I was doing much better emotionally. I separated myself from the people who had triggered the eating issues, I was speaking regularly with a counselor, I was on  birth control and anti-anxiety medication. I was making plans and making progress. I felt good.

When I moved to New York in 2009 I was still taking birth control and I did so for a few years longer. One day I just decided to stop taking the pills and see if my body would regulate and menstruate normally. I was at a normal weight and I was living a much healthier lifestyle. The first time I menstruated naturally in over 5 years was huge. I was so happy, and so was my mom. Once I was menstruating normally again I figured everything was fine and babies were still possible. 

Around the same time I started having random pain in my pelvic area. Most of the time I passed it off as constipation and used heating pads and muscle pain patches to get through the worst days. I vaguely recall having a similar pain in high school, but not as severe or as frequent. I tried tracking my food to see if it was maybe an allergy, I saw a GI doctor who said it was just irritable bowel, and I kept a log of how frequently it happened. In the spring of 2014 it was getting really bad and some days it was excruciating to stand-up for long periods of time. Eventually my OBGYN did an ultrasound and told me I had a large, likely 3-4 inches in size (they said 8 cm), cyst on my right ovary. She also mentioned that I might not be fertile, and needed to have surgery immediately. Yeah, that was a heavy conversation. Then she sent me to get blood work and I sat there as the nurse, not so discretely, labeled my blood work for the CA-125 test, the test they do to check for ovarian cancer. That test came back negative, but it was still a traumatic experience.

At this time, Dan and I were planning our wedding. And I convinced myself we wouldn't be able to have children. It was a really emotional time for both of us. I felt like damaged goods and Dan was already stuck with me. But he was incredibly supportive and positive. I spoke to a woman at our church who had dealt with infertility and she was convinced her issues were caused by the birth control she used and all I could think about was how many years I had been on birth control and how many different types I had used. Was it the birth control? Was it my missed periods? Was it the eating disorder? So many questions and no answers. I found nothing comforting in my internet searches.

I kept going to the OBGYN and she kept sending me to get ultrasounds at different places. On the ultrasound you could see this massive black blob but no one told me what it was, the techs just took measurements. I was still a virgin at this time and I remember one of the techs refused to do the internal ultrasound (with a wand) because she "didn't want to be my first." What does that even mean!!!! I was so confused because I was like, lady do you know what sex is? But then I was like, wait, do I know what sex is? It was all very bizarre. Anyways, my doctor eventually sent me to a different doctor who had much more experience and I remember as he did the ultrasound he muttered something to the nurse about it might be a problem with the Fallopian tube. He too, couldn't figure it out so I was sent for an MRI. I got about 6 different ultrasounds in the matter of a month and, to me, no one seemed confident that the diagnosis was a massive cyst that needed to be removed immediately. I didn't want to undergo surgery on my ovary if people weren't certain.

I did a bunch of Google searches and decided I must have endometriosis since all the symptoms sounded like what I was experiencing. That condition is known to cause fertility issues. I decided to get a second opinion and find a specialist who might know more and tell me if surgery was really necessary. I got my MRI results sent to this new doctor and I went to meet with her for the first time. This doctor was a gift from God and truly the nicest most caring and sensitive doctor I have ever had. She made me feel like every question was important and that my fertility was not doomed. She looked at my MRI, did several ultrasounds on her own and agreed with me that it was likely endometriosis with at least one small cyst. The bigger issue was my right Fallopian tube appeared to be damaged and that surgery was necessary to remove it since it was likely the source of the pain I had been experiencing. I trusted her and I felt like she cared about me so I pursued the surgery with her as the surgeon.

Just shy of one month before our wedding, I had the surgery. My right tube was quadruple the normal size as it was filled with blood and other liquid. It was effectively dead and therefore removed. Normally you cannot see the tube on an ultrasound which is why my first doctor assumed it was a large cyst.  I had some endometriosis spots but not enough for that diagnosis. I also had a simple but small cyst on my right ovary which she did not remove because she didn't want to do anything to damage the ovary or the eggs. My doctor ran pathology on the tube which proved useless. To this day she has no idea what caused my tube to become so damaged. I was never sexually active nor abused (and believe me I racked my brain) and therefore had no STI. Her best guess is I had some other kind infection (like e.coli) that settled in my pelvic area and went untreated. We'll probably never know the cause.

So while the surgery was a success, I didn't really have any answers but my doctor assured me that she didn't see any reason why fertility would be an issue, I still had two fully functioning ovaries. Despite her reassurances, I had already conditioned my brain to expect that we would not be able to get pregnant naturally. Nevertheless, Dan and I waltzed into marital bliss. 

Part II, to be continued...