The Long Road

The road that led us herestarted many years ago...

In 2004 Lynn graduated from BYU and we decided to begin trying to get pregnant and begin a family. When a year had passed and nothing had happened, we decided to start checking into the reasons why.

It was 2005. First, Lynn got tested. Everything was perfectly normal with him. He wasn't the reason we weren't getting pregnant. Having ruled that out, I started going through tests to see if the doctor could find something wrong with me.

One of the first tests I had done was actually a surgery called a laparoscopy. Laparoscopy is direct visualization of the peritoneal cavity, ovaries, outside of the tubes and uterus by using a laparoscopy. The laparoscopy is an instrument somewhat like a miniature telescope with a fiber optic system which brings light into the abdomen. The doctor did not find anything unusual during this procedure, except for some scar tissue on the ends of my fallopian tubes.

Another test I had done was called a hysterosalpingogram, or HSG. An HSG is a special kind of x-ray that involves giving an iodine dye via the cervix into the uterus and fallopian tubes and then taking x-ray pictures. The purpose of this test was to look at my fallopian tubes to see whether or not they were blocked or clogged. They can tell if this is the case by how much or how little dye runs out the ends of the tubes. In my case, my tubes were mostly blocked on the ends, near the ovaries.

This blockage of the tubes is what was seeming to cause our fertility problems. My uterus was normal, my cycle was normal, and my ovaries were normal. The egg, or ovum, that was released each month simply couldn't make its way to the uterus because the pathway was blocked from the very beginning.

At this point, we were getting ready to move into our new home, and we didn't begin looking into fertility treatment for a couple years. We still had hope that maybe we could get pregnant the old fashioned way. So we waited.

Once we decided that it was finally time to take serious action, it was 2007. We began seeing a fertility specialist during the middle of the year. By September we were undergoing the embryo transfer. It took some work to get to that point, though.

This was a very common thing to see me carry across the street everyday, where Erin, my good friend and neighbor, would give me a variety of shots, depending on the schedule from the doctor.
Sometimes they were subcutaneous, meaning short needles, and sometimes they were intramuscular, meaning long needles. Some stung, some didn't. I had at least one shot every day for several weeks, sometimes more than one shot. Plus I had to go in to the doctor to get blood draws regularly so that they could monitor my hormone levels. I had bruises on my arms from the blood draws and on my butt from the shots.

These were just some of the hormones that I was taking:
When the time came, I took one final shot that made my ovaries release the eggs that had been growing as a result of the hormones. Within twelve hours from then, the doctor retrieved those eggs from my body. At the same time, Lynn had to make a "donation" of his own. The doctors then took the eggs and the sperm and put them together to fertilize. The fertilized eggs, now called embryos were allowed to grow for 3-5 days. After 5 days, the doctor inserted two of the embryos into my uterus. The others (3 were left) were frozen. We were very excited and hopeful. We saw no reason why this wouldn't work.

For the next two weeks, I was supposed to wait and then take a pregnancy test. But I started bleeding before getting to that point. It was a terrible feeling. The doctors said that it might not mean anything, but I knew deep down what it meant. The embryos had not attached to my uterus, and my body was shedding the thick uterine lining that had built up over the last several weeks from the hormones I was taking. It meant that I wasn't pregnant.

After this huge let-down, we decided to wait before trying again. We looked into adoption. It didn't feel right. When we felt like the timing was right again, we decided to try fertility treatments again.

This time, the doctor had me take another HSG. He wanted to make sure the blockage hadn't progressed, which could potentially harm any implanted embryos. To our surprise, the blockage seemed to be gone. The test showed open tubes, as the dye poured right through. So, rather than spend thousands of dollars on in-vitro, we decided to try IUI, Intrauterine Insemination, better known as artificial insemination, which was considerably less money. We did this twice during the summer of 2008. Neither time was successful.

So once again we were left to struggle with our emotions and whether or not to keep trying and risk the continued ups and downs that come with the entire process. We decided again to take some time off.

Finally, in spring of 2009, we were ready to try one more time. This time we would be taking the frozen embryos that we had from the 2007 cycle, and implanting two of them into my uterus. Frozen cycles are never as successful as fresh cycles, and since we had failed so many times before, we were very cautious with getting our hopes up. In fact, we were so unsure of what would happen, that we planned a trip to Hawaii for a few weeks after the transfer, knowing that it would either be a celebratory trip, or a trip to drown our sorrows. We knew that if this cycle didn't work, we would be devastated and would need an outlet and some way of releasing some of the stress and tension that IVF causes. A vacation seemed like the best way to do this.

I had to take shots again, though not as many this time. In addition to shots, I had to take a few other medications as well. The transfer was on June 10. The two weeks that followed felt like the longest two weeks of my life. Finally, on June 24th, I got the news. I was pregnant! I couldn't believe it! I called Lynn right away and told him the news. While we were excited, we were still very cautious. I was obviously not very far along. Anything could happen still. We kept our excitement to a minimum. We decided to wait a while before we started telling people.

June 30, the day before we left for Hawaii, I started getting morning sickness. I was sick the whole time we were there. Everything smelled like garbage. I threw up many times. Six days after we got there I started having severe cramping near one of my ovaries. I called the doctor and he wanted me to go in to an emergency room to have an ultrasound just to rule out an ectopic pregnancy. They found nothing wrong, except that I was dehydrated. This is probably what caused the cramping. The good thing that came out of this was that we got to see the heartbeat for the first time! At 6 weeks and 6 days, all that showed up on the ultrasound was a little blob, with a beating heart in the middle of it. Amazing.

We returned home from Hawaii, not a moment too soon for me, since I had been so sick, and I was still taking progesterone and estrogen shots and supplements, as per the regimen that the doctor had me on.

On July 24, around 11:30pm, I suddenly started having severe pain in my chest when I took a deep breath. I went to the emergency room and the doctor found that I had multiple blood clots in both sides of my lungs. I was in the hospital for a couple days to get the pain under control. We don't know for sure what cause the clots, but there are a number of factors that could have played a part: I had recently traveled and sat for several hours on a plane, I had been lying in bed for days doing absolutely nothing because I was puking so much that I was too sick to get up and do anything, I was taking extra amounts of estrogen which can be a factor in increasing the risk of clots, and I was pregnant which also increases the risk for clots.

Whatever the cause, once I got home, if I hadn't been in bed before from vomiting all day, I was in bed now because I simply didn't have the energy to do anything else. I could barely brush my teeth without getting out of breath. I couldn't take a shower because it took too much energy. I had to force myself to get up and walk around for five minutes every hour, even though I was out of breath by the end of those five minutes.

As a result of the blood clots, and so that I didn't get any more, I had to start taking blood thinners. The only blood thinner that was safe to take while pregnant was a shot, and I had to take it twice a day.
Lynn had been giving me my fertility shots since we went to Hawaii. Now he had two more each day to give me. Just when I thought I would be done with my shots (the hormone shots only had another couple of weeks to go), I now had to start taking new ones, and would have to continue them until 4 weeks after the birth of the baby.
We filled up four or five of these gallon water jugs just from the blood thinning shots, plus some sharps containers before we started using the water jugs.
Now, as for the nausea, I tried just about everything to get rid of it so that I could eat something. These didn't work:
Out of the two nausea medications I tried, phenergan and zofran, only the zofran worked. Unfortunately, I had to battle with my insurance company to get them to pay for it on a regular basis, since I needed to take it every single day at a high dose. I was able to get it paid for, but it was a pain. I took one zofran every single day for the entire pregnancy.

I was still pretty sick and lost weight in the beginning of the pregnancy. All I could keep down at times was Ensure. My puke bucket became my best friend. Every morning I would sit up and the very first thing my body did was throw up. This lasted for about half of the pregnancy. The last half of my pregnancy I threw up much less often, but I was still nauseated most of the time, and just about anything could make me vomit.

Still, I began feeling better for a few weeks at the beginning of my third trimester. My lungs were beginning to heal so I could breathe again, I was puking less frequently, and I could eat more normal foods again. Of course, just as soon as I started feeling better, I started feeling the discomforts of pregnancy: heartburn, swelling, painful joints, difficulty sleeping, itching...

Here are all of the various remedies I took throughout my pregnancy, from gummy vitamins and folic acid to tums and benadryl for itching.
The visits to the OB got closer and closer, from every 4 weeks to every 2 weeks, and then came my first weekly visit. I had been itching badly for a week or two, and I had become quite swollen with water retention. The girl at the office took my blood pressure as usual - it was extremely high. My urine had protein in it. My OB came in and looked at me and said that he wanted me to go to the hospital. He said he could buy me a day or two, but that I was going to have this baby soon. I was 36 weeks and 5 days.

I went to the hospital and got sicker, my kidneys started shutting down, my urine was brown, I had a massive headache, and I was puking every ten minutes from the magnesium sulfate they put me on during the night to help my blood pressure.
The doctor started the process of inducing me, being careful about the timing because I had to be off of the blood thinners for 24 hours before delivering. By morning, when I wasn't progressing very quickly toward a natural delivery, but I was progressing further in the pre-eclampsia, I asked the doctor to please take out the baby. He agreed readily and scheduled the c-section.

James was born at 1:46pm on February 4, 2010. I was 36 weeks and 6 days.

Now I am on a different blood thinner, a blood pressure medication, and have just had the last day of blood thinner shots.
Of course, the struggle was worth it. Look at that face.
The road is not over yet. James faces multiple surgeries throughout the next 18 years, which will start as early as when he is three months old and go as late as his teenage or adult years. I never thought I would be able to say it, but now that I have held my sweet little boy in my arms, and stared at his precious little face and hands and feet for hours, and have come to learn what it means to love a child, I will say that he is worth all of what we went through to get him here, and whatever challenges lie in the road ahead.