OUR FERTILITY JOURNEY

June 8, 2019

Hi guys! If you’re reading this, it means we have announced we are pregnant. As I write this post, I am not pregnant. I was very open after we lost our first baby, but not so much after we lost our second. What helped me during my time of grief was hearing from other women who had experienced what I was going through. Women like Casey Wiegand, Shelly Mettling and Justine Campbell were helpful as they have shared their stories of loss pretty openly. I refuse to let our losses not help someone else. So here I am- going to detail a small bit of our story in the hopes that someone who goes through this in the future knows they have someone they can turn to.

This post is going to be long I’m sure! I apologize in advance. I’m going to start this by saying that I am not going to disclose the personal details of our losses. I want to be transparent in helping others, but there are things I’d like to keep private. Having said that, I am comfortable saying that due to the circumstances around our losses I have had two d&c’s. If you find yourself in this situation, please reach out to me. I am more than happy to share my experiences with you to help ease your mind as far as this actual procedure goes and the emotional and physical healing that comes with it.

Miscarriage is something that I never thought be would part of our story. After our first loss people said things like, “Well at least you can get pregnant or miscarriage is SO common, or so and so had a miscarriage and then they had babies just fine or how far along were you?"…. I know people mean well but the only thing that needs to be said to someone is, I’m sorry for your loss and I’m praying for you. That’s sufficient- I promise!

After our first loss I spent a countless amount of time questioning everything I did. Did I workout too hard? Did I eat something wrong? Was I too stressed? If you’ve experienced loss, you know the guilt can just overcome you. We were so fortunate to get pregnant again pretty quickly after our first loss. I was overcome with all sorts of emotions here. After you’ve lost a baby I don’t think you ever feel fully at peace when you become pregnant again. You’re absolutely elated but also terrified at the same time. I love this post from Her View From Home that talks about miscarriage.

I tried not to worry because part of me thought; okay there is NO way this will happen again…. and then it did. Now instead of being 1 in 4, I was 1 in 8 and I was absolutely derailed.

Y’all know I’m pretty crunchy and I have been for a few years now. You can read a post I wrote here on how I got into non-toxic living before I even started to try to get pregnant. I was already pretty toxin free but after our second loss I kicked it into high gear. I began doing more research on recurrent miscarriages and the more I read about mthfr mutation (which I have) and toxins, I knew that I wanted to get my body in the absolute best possible position because I was going to become a mom on earth. I was determined. Some of you might have noticed that it was around this time (Feb/March 2019) that I began sharing more on my Instagram (@thetoxinfreetexan) about toxins and Young Living. This is because I was making major changes in my own life and also felt so passionate about becoming a mother that I wanted to begin educating others more.

I am very thankful for the doctors that I have. My obgyn is the best. Sometimes doctors will wait until you have 3 losses before referring you to a fertility clinic- isn’t that insane?! Luckily my doctor went ahead and referred me and I’m so thankful for that. Corey and I went through all of the testing and even that was no joke. I went in for my blood work and in one day they took over 20 vials of blood. I’m not sure how I didn’t pass out! I also had to go through another procedure called a hysteroscopy. In order to do this procedure the doctor had to put me on birth control. There are a few reasons for this and even though I HATE birth control, I knew the reasoning behind it and it was a short-term thing just to have the surgery. About two days after I started taking the pill I began to get sick. It was a very rough month being on it, but I was able to get the procedure done. We met with the doctor after all of the testing and here’s the kicker, NOTHING SHOWED UP. Nothing at all. Both of us were completely and totally fine. This is weird to say, but in a way I was kind of upset about this. I like to fix problems, but if you can’t identify a problem, you can’t fix it.

We had options at that point. The doctor said it could have just been sh*tty luck two times in a row (his words, not mine. Excuse the language). And that I would go on to get pregnant again and be completely fine OR there could be something wrong that wasn’t identified in testing. We decided to try a treatment and this is where I want to focus. Looking back, this was a mistake. The treatment we decided on was for me to take a drug called Letrozole. I would take this for 5 days and it was supposed to stimulate my follicles to produce an egg or eggs. I wish I could accurately express how horrible this drug made me feel. I was miserable. I won’t get into all the side effects but man; it was a ROUGH 5 days. To make matters worse, my body didn’t respond to the drug at all. I went in to the doctor every other day for about two weeks for monitoring and we realized that specific drug doesn’t work for my body. During this time of sickness I had this feeling that we shouldn’t pursue any treatment, we should just wait and trust God’s timing. I don’t want to be TMI here, but our issue wasn’t getting pregnant so it didn’t make sense for me to take a drug and go through the stress of every other day appointments to get pregnant. That wasn’t our problem. I needed help staying pregnant. Getting pregnant and staying pregnant are two very different issues. I decided to finish this cycle out though because we were already in the middle and honestly we had already paid for it. They put me on another drug and this time it was in a shot form. Corey gave me a shot every day for about another week. Luckily my body responded to this.

Long story short, this cycle was unsuccessful. So for a month I had countless appointments, blood draws, drugs and shots all for nothing. If I’m being honest, I’m not surprised that it didn’t work. My body was in a good rhythm because I take care of myself, but to go from being put on birth control to literally being put on fertility drugs right after and then shots, it’s honestly no surprise to me that we weren’t successful. My body was like what the heck are you doing?! Looking back, we should have either never started treatment or we should have waited and let my body bounce back from the birth control before pursuing anything. Hindsight is 20/20!

My heart truly goes out to anybody who struggles with infertility. I cannot imagine having to go through this time after time after time. As I write this I don’t know if this will be our story in the future. I’m not sure how our story will go from here. Right now we’re choosing to trust the Lord with the timing of all of this. Corey is so good about reminding me that God hasn’t ever let us down or not fulfilled a promise to us. I’m clinging to that. Deep down in my heart I just have this gut feeling that it’s all going to be okay and we will get pregnant again on our own soon and have a successful pregnancy. That’s where I’m at for today! I don’t know if I will ever actually publish this post. It’s extremely scary to be so vulnerable! However, I have been able to get through all of this because of others being open so if I can help someone else then this is all worth it.

January 25, 2020

I wrote that post before we got pregnant again. Now that I am where I am I can share the rest of our story. I told my fertility doctor we wanted to stop any further treatment after our one round. We said we wanted to try on our own again and if/when I got pregnant again I would call them immediately and that’s what ended up happening. We are so thankful we were able to conceive again and we truly know how fortunate we are to have been able to do that. I found out very early and called the fertility clinic. From that point they saw me every week for ultrasounds and blood work through the first trimester before releasing me over to my midwife for the remainder of my pregnancy.

I’m not on “the other side” yet as they say. There is still a long way to go in this pregnancy but we trust the Lord and we are so incredibly grateful to everyone praying for our little boy. Through all of this I have felt loved by so many people & I’ve been able to connect with so many women going through this journey. I hope in a few short months I’ll be able to write a post introducing our little guy to the world!

Thank you to all of you who have prayed for us or reached out to me over the last two years. We appreciate all of the support!