Warning………this is a lengthy blog and may jump around a little. I wanted to write a little about the journey we took to get Kashe so that I wouldn’t forget. Read on if you would like but mostly it is just for my journal.
We had a hard time getting pregnant and we ended up having a lot of help to get Kashe. It isn’t something that we talked about a lot unless people had questions. Not because we were embarrassed or because it was too painful to talk about but more because we didn’t want the fact that we couldn’t have kids define who we were. We didn’t want to be the “poor sad couple who wanted babies and couldn’t have them.” Yes, we couldn’t have kids but we still had a lot of really great blessings in our lives and we wanted to focus on that. Tried to always focus on that.
It all started about six years ago when Ben and I decided that we wanted to start our family. It was our one year anniversary and we decided that we would start trying to have kids instead of preventing. It was going to work out perfect…….I had one more year of college. (Ben had promised my dad when he asked for my hand in marriage that I would get my degree and he wasn’t going to go back on that promise.) I would graduate in May and then we would have a baby that summer. We had it all worked out, or so we thought! So we got to work tryingJ and trying and trying! (This process wasn’t all bad I have to admit.) When we didn’t get pregnant the first couple months we thought that was kind of funny but didn’t think too much of it. After a year we started to worry a little bit. Then after a year and half we went to a doctor in Laramie. He ran a few tests but he didn’t think that anything was wrong. He wasn’t a specialist so he really didn’t know how to help us and frankly he didn’t really seem to care. We felt like we wasted time and money with this doctor. We decided to start seeing a specialist in Ft. Collins who we loved. He decided that I had endometriosis in a nutshell this meant that I had scarring in my ovaries and it caused really painful periods and could be the reason we could not get pregnant. He performed a surgery to clean up my ovaries and told us that we just needed to wait and see if that would work. At this point we had been trying for about three years. After this surgery some women get pregnant right away and some still don’t at all. We waited and continued to try and get pregnant but after another year nothing was happening.
At this point we also moved to Evanston so we had to get another doctor. We started seeing Dr. Blauer in Sandy Utah, we also loved this doctor and the clinic. We felt like these people cared about us and were really trying to help us get pregnant. We decided with Dr. Blauer that we needed to start being a little more proactive and we tried to do intrauterine insemination or IUI. For this process I started taking some pretty heavy duty hormones and then the doctors and nurses would do ultrasounds to try and predict when I was ovulating and then inject the sperm directly into me with the hope that the sperm would have a better chance of making it to the egg. We did this five times but we STILL were not having any luck. All of these procedures are pretty expensive and we finally decided that we needed to stop paying for this procedure and move on the next step…….basically the final step, IVF. If IVF didn’t work then nothing would. For this procedure I had to take a lot of hormones. Ben would inject them into my stomach and back depending on the medication. He became a great nurse. We did the shots and then the doctor takes the eggs from me. They inject the sperm directly into the egg and wait to see if they fertilize. If they fertilize they become embryos and the doctor will inject them directly into the patient. The first time we did IVF we had Fair to minus embryos which isn’t great. Dr. Blauer implanted two. We had to wait two weeks before we would know if I was pregnant. After two weeks the nurse called and said that my pregnancy test was negative!! This was definitely the hardest time in the whole process. Ben and I were sure that this would work and it was really hard when it didn’t. Especially because we knew that this was our last shot, there was nothing else to try.
I was pretty devastated when the first IFV didn’t work and I wasn’t really interested in trying again. The last thing I wanted was to go through all the medication and procedures and pain and then have a nurse call and tell me that it didn’t work! Luckily, Ben felt like we should do it again and so we did! We went through the entire process again. This time we implanted three embryos. This time when the nurse called the test was positive.
After all of this…….the entire six year journey. After all the doctors’ appointments, the shots, the pain, the money, the emotional rollercoaster I can honestly say………
It was
Totally.................................
Completely..........................
100%..................................
