We tried to have our first child for a year before seeking out medical help. I was diagnosed with mild PCOS along with my hypothyroidism that was at that point under control with medication. Then we looked into my husband before attempting to use Clomid. It was then that our MFI was discovered with a strict morph of 1 and 3% (normal is over 5%). We were advised to go directly to IVF w/ ICSI at the cost of ~$9k per attempt. To say we were heartbroken is putting it mildly. We had money put aside for a baby, but not enough to attempt just to have a baby even once. We ended up getting a loan for $35k. That $35k represented our only chance to try and have a biological child. Even if we exhausted that $35k, coming up with another $20k after that to attempt to adopt a baby would take years, if we were ever able to do it.
On our first attempt with IVF, we put two perfect blasts back and froze another almost perfect one. At 6dp5dt, I got my first faint positive on a HPT. We were so excited, we told everyone. We were convinced we had overcome the low morph and my PCOS. We had our first ultrasound and saw two yolk sacs. We were going to have twins! Nothing could compare to those two weeks that I was pregnant. We prayed for the babies every night, I told them I loved them every day, almost every hour. Then, I went in for my 6w1d ultrasound to see the heartbeats...and that's when it started falling apart.
They found a slow heartbeat on one of the babies. The other had no heartbeat and no clear fetal pole. Our doctor tried to be optimistic, so we came back two days later. I just knew something was wrong. I felt something was wrong. Deep down, I knew we wouldn't see another heartbeat. The one heartbeat that we had seen was now gone. The second sac was now getting smaller, most likely it had stopped developing and was going to become a vanishing twin. My beta had also plateaued and wasn't rising like it should anymore. Just like that, it was over. I wouldn't be a mom. The matching onsies I had bought the week before would be tossed in a bag with every other baby related thing in the house by my husband an hour later and thrown in the bottom of a rarely used closet in his quest to try and protect me from having a panic attack. I started crying in the office and I think I cried on and off for the next 10 days until I elected to have a D&C. Exactly one month after my beta day.
We both sought out therapy while we tried to find answers. They would do genetic testing on the baby and we would learn it was a normal male - a little boy - the day after my husband's grandmother passed away. We mourned them both, both of us crying, curled up together in bed. We mourned our lost first son and the great grandmother he would never know. We sought out therapy to try and understand our anger and despair. We asked question after question of our doctor, trying to find a reason. We needed to know why it had happened, why we were given this perfect little boy, only to lose him.
Two and a half months after my D&C I was diagnosed with Compound Heterozygous MTHFR. Treated with high amounts of folic acid, it can cause blood to clot and cut off blood and nutrients to a fetus. Usually losses happen in the second trimester, but given that everything else was normal, this has to be our answer. A gene mutation that happened before I was even born and lived with for 27 years.
We hold on to this answer because we don't have any others. The emotional burden for this is too high for us to not have something to try and fix for this next time. My stims were changed (because my RE likes to change at least one thing between cycles, hoping it will help, in this case our fert rate) and we hope that this second time we have the issues figured out. We hope that just as easily as I got pregnant the first time, with both blasts we put back implanting, that it'll happen again. That this time, my body with work correctly and we'll be able to bring home a baby.
I will have many more appointments this time. I'll have to see specialists before I even get pregnant and have a plan for what other medicines I'll be taking when I get pregnant this time. I'll be high risk no matter how many I have, whether we're lucky enough to have twins again, or if it's just one we're able to have. Pregnancy this time isn't the happy, uplifting thing it was the first time. We're scared. Terrified might be a better word. We're not telling anyone we're in the middle of our second IVF or pregnant until I'm 13 weeks pregnant. My husband will be keeping me planted on the couch probably my whole pregnancy if he can. But I would do all of that if it meant finally bringing home our living child.
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