How It All Started

A bit of our family background getting us to here.

Tom and I met in 2002. We were married in 2004. We bought our first home in 2005. And had our first son in 2006. Life was great.

Allan was a joy in our lives and we wanted another child as soon as possible. I had a c-section, so I was advised to wait a full year before trying. We started trying again when Allan was about nine months old (neither of us are very good with following orders!).

Finally in January 2008, the day after my brother’s wedding, we got a positive home pregnancy test! YAY!! Our family was growing and we were thrilled! Since we were in Washington visiting family, we shared the news with everyone. Yes it was early, but why wouldn’t we share the news?!
Four days later I started spotting. Little did I know at the time this was the beginning of a two year torturous emotional and hormonal roller coaster ride.

We suffered our first miscarriage in January 2008, at only 5 ½ weeks. My doctor explained miscarriages are actually quite common; that 20-25% of all pregnancies end in miscarriage. I shouldn’t worry, and should try again, and would most likely have no problems having another child.

We suffered our second miscarriage in June 2008, at only 5 weeks. I saw a new doctor in a new state, and he agreed with my other doc that these things unfortunately just happen sometimes. He said he’d give me a referral to a specialist or I could try again and most likely not have a problem. Banking on already having enough problems, we figured third times a charm and went for it.

We suffered our third miscarriage in November 2008, at just 4 weeks. A normal person probably wouldn’t have even known they were pregnant, but I did. I actually took a home pregnancy test the morning I started bleeding…because I just knew something was wrong. As much as I didn’t want to believe it, I had to know so it was documented and I could move to a specialist.

We had our first meeting with our Reproductive Endocrinologist (RE) in December 2008. I had tons of blood work done, as well as some x-rays and internal tests , to determine a cause. No cause was found. All of my tests came back within normal ranges, so nothing stood out as the leading cause of a problem. After discussing options with the RE in January 2009, we decided to try the least invasive methods first.
We got pregnant our very first try. We added progesterone to my daily routine and assumed all would be good to go. We were devastated by our fourth miscarriage in March 2009 at 5 ½ weeks.

We took a couple months “off” and waited until my emotions were under control again. We decided to try a bit more aggressively, and started taking injection fertility medications to increase the hormones in my system, produce more eggs, and time things right. Hoping the added hormones were the boost we’d need. We did not get pregnant the first cycle we tried.

However, we tried again the following month and got pregnant. I couldn’t believe it when I started spotting again, like all the others. This pregnancy was different, though. The pregnancy implanted in the fallopian tubes. I had surgery in September 2009 to remove the ectopic, and I lost my left tube in the process. There was also scar tissue on the fimbriae of the right tube, which the doctor was able to remove.
After this loss and surgery, we met with the RE again to decide our next steps. He said he believed we had a good shot of getting pregnant again, trying the same method we had just done. He also said that another option was IVF. We chose to try again, just with the injection meds. The less invasive (and less expensive) route.

We did not get pregnant when we tried on our next cycle. At that point we decided to go for the gusto. I was worried that if we did get pregnant while using the injection meds, then we could still miscarry. And if we did, then we would try IVF. We just decided to jump to the end now. IVF was going to be our final answer…we hoped!