Anniversary

Today is DH's and my 8th anniversary. We'll be going out for dinner tonight and I'm trying to shake myself out of the lousy mood I'm in. I wish I could celebrate holidays for what they actually are without having them overshadowed by thoughts of how it's yet another anniversary or birthday or New Year's without our having a child.

We've been dealing with IVF for well over half our marriage now. I think that, for the first 2 1/2 years of our marriage, we remained blissfully unaware that we had an infertility problem. DH didn't want to start trying until after around 2 years had passed. He was still trying to get established in a career and wasn't earning enough for me to stop working. He also wanted to have a large enough house for children and we were only living in a 2 bedroom condo. at the time. My job was very stressful and involved long hours and a 2 hour commute to Manhattan by train each day. Meanwhile, I was getting very nervous about my advancing age. I had never wanted to be an older parent and had always hoped to finish completing our family by the age of 35.

I finally managed to talk DH into my at least stopping bcp's (which were also making me miserable). At first, I wasn't charting ovulation or doing anything like that. I guess we just figured it would happen before too long without any planned efforts on our part. When nothing happened after a number of months, I suspected I might not be ovulating and went to see my Gyn. I can't even remember what she did.....I think she ran some blood tests (which were all normal) and basically said keep trying and come back to see her in 6 months. During that time frame, DH got a job in FL. I left my job and we moved. We decided that I wouldn't work and we'd focus on having children, after which the plan was that I'd be a stay at home mom.

We bought a 5 bedroom house in FL. We wanted to make sure we had plenty of room for the children (yes, those were the days of optimism). I then wasted some more time with an OB. She tested my FSH and LH levels which seemed perfect. Beyond that, she didn't do much for me other than admonish me to learn to relax. I had been using an electronic fertility monitor and, even though I had long cycles, I was ovulating. We made sure we timed things perfectly based on the monitor but still no luck. I made an appointment with a RE at a fertility clinic. There were really only 2 fertility clinics within easy driving distance of our house. I picked the one that had the most attractive advertisement in the phone book. At the time I made this appointment, I had no real idea what IVF was or involved and I certainly didn't think we would be told we needed it. Amazingly, neither of the OB's I had seen previously had ever thought to mention the possibility that my DH might have an issue preventing our success. As it turned out, his count, motility, morphology, etc. were all extremely low. My Dr. at the fertility clinic told us that we would need to head straight to IVF with ICSI. Anything less would be a complete waste of time and our chances of conceiving on our own were about 1 in a million.

That was a tough blow to take. I was scared to death by the whole IVF process and it took a lot for me to commit to that first attempt. The whole thing was as bad as I had feared. Looking back, I think a lot of it was the fact that we had moved fairly recently. I hadn't made any friends yet. I didn't have any awareness of the message boards online that later became my salvation. On top of that, DH was totally submerged at work and just didn't have anything left in him to deal with me and my emotions being all over the place. I think the only thing that got me through it was the hope of it working. Since all of the testing on me had come back clear, we had been told we'd have a great chance of success.

I don't think either DH or I really thought about it not working. We were that confident.
I'm sure my expectations would have been substantially lowered had I looked up that particular clinic's success rates which were far from impressive. I honestly didn't even know or think to do such a thing at the time though. After that first cycle failed, I was so crushed and I had found the whole process so miserable, that I swore I would never do it again if our frozen transfers from the cycle didn't work. Of course, there are days now where I wish I hadn't changed my mind. I just couldn't do it though. Both DH and I wanted children badly and I didn't want to go through life wondering "what if?" What if I had just tried one more cycle? What if the clinic was the problem? I did some research and switched clinics. At this point, I've been to 3 different clinics and still don't have the answer. Does the threat of having "what if's" ever end? I still don't feel at peace with giving up.

Well, this little walk down memory lane has definitely not helped put me in a better mood!!