Pregnancy Week 23: How Did We Get Here?

Not a whole lot has happened this week so I thought I’d take some time to give you all a little background on the family and how we got here.

The wife and I were married in October of 2001. We started trying to get pregnant late 2003 and Olivia wasn’t born until October 2005. If you do the math right, you’ll see that we were unsuccessful in getting pregnant for over a year.

I grew up, probably like a lot of you, thinking that it would always be soooooo easy to get pregnant. You have sex one time and the girl gets pregnant right? Umm…no. It does not work that way…at least for some of us.

For 12 months the wife would measure her basal body temperature every morning when she woke up. After months of graphing the ups and downs common sense told us that something wasn’t working. Was it her? Was it me?

We picked up the phone and made an appointment at a fertility clinic here in town. We weren’t too sure what to expect, but we had tried everything over the last 12 months and we needed some help. Maybe we should have put a Brazilian amulet next to the bed [see photo above].

We met with the doctor and he asked us many questions about our overall health and sex life. In order to rule me out as the culprit, he requested that I take a male fertility test. My test came back well within range and the doctor soon started to focus on Mandy.

He first wrote her a prescription for a drug called Clomid. Clomid, at least in our case, helped Mandy ovulate. No egg = no baby. The Clomid worked and Mandy got pregnant. The staff at the fertility clinic ran some tests on Mandy and determined that her body was not producing enough progesterone. And that is when we suffered a miscarriage.

When we started trying again, he put Mandy on a drug called Letrozole. And it worked! Now that the clinic had more information about Mandy, they gave her a prescription for a progesterone supplement that she took for about 10 weeks.

Nine months later, Olivia was born and our life has never been the same. For the next two years there was no birth control used [except the fact that we had a child] and nothing worked. When we wanted to have another baby…we started the whole process over again.

In July we will be welcoming a new addition to our family…Madeleine Kate. Lucky for us there was no need for any major surgery or other intervention. Many people out there don’t have it as easy…If you are having trouble getting pregnant; my heart goes out to you.

If you want to read more about a guy and his wife struggling with infertility then I suggest you check out Martin’s blog, XBoxForNappyRash. It’s well written and very funny.

Tagged as: Birth control, child, children, fertility, fertility drugs, Health, infertility, kids, pregnancy, pregnany, Reproductive health, wife