BABY HALES #2!!!!
So, it has been a long time since I have written on the blog. To be completely honest, I've been anxious to write this post since March when we found out we were finally expecting again, but the timing wasn't right to share such news at that point. But I'll share now!
We lost our precious Tace a year and a half ago in November of 2013. Ever since that time Brian and I have been longing for another baby. We knew that another baby would never replace our sweet Tace, and we would never want that, but our hearts and arms were so empty and broken after losing Tace that we longed for another baby to help fill some of those holes and ease the ache we were feeling.
So after waiting the allotted 3 months, we began trying again around the end of February (2014). Naively, I thought it would be just as easy to get pregnant the second time as it was the first time. With Tace we did have to use clomid (because I don't ovulate regularly on my own), but we got pregnant the first month we tried it and on the lowest dose. It was a piece of cake! So at the end of February I met with my OB/GYN and he again prescribed me the lowest dose of clomid to help me ovulate. I was hoping, and almost expecting, that everything would go as smoothly as it had before and I would have another baby in my arms before the end of the year. I have never been more wrong.
Throughout this first clomid cycle I took my temperature every morning to track for ovulation. I began to get a little bit concerned when my temperature never spiked....meaning it was likely I hadn't ovulated. However, I still went in for my day 21 progesterone test hoping I had ovulated and that I just hadn't been very accurate in taking my temperature. The nurse called me 2 days later with the news that my test results showed I had not ovulated. I was devastated. Not only was I NOT pregnant, but there was no way I even COULD have gotten pregnant that month. I realized this could be a much longer and more difficult road than I had imagined.
Needless to say, March was a rough month. If I had gotten pregnant by some miracle, we would have found out right before Tace's due date (March 30). I hoped for this because I felt like it would help soften the pain that came with Tace's due date if we already had another baby on the way. But instead, I didn't ovulate (which meant I most definitely wasn't pregnant) and we had to face Tace's due date with no baby. I should have been welcoming my little boy into my home that month, and instead I was designing his headstone and looking down a long road of infertility issues.
So in April I went up to two clomid a day. I did ovulate, but we did not conceive. That month was also hard, but at least I had ovulated. That was much better than the month before. So we tried the same dose again in May hoping that this time I would conceive (and we would find out right before Memorial Day and right after Mother's Day....I was so hoping...) Instead, the news we received was that I had not ovulated again. Again I was devastated. I knew that my body didn't ovulate well on its own, but now I was struggling to ovulate regularly with the help of fertility medication. I started to get concerned that something was really wrong and wondered if maybe the extremely high fever I had when we lost Tace damaged something permanently.
On top of not ovulating again that month, my cycle also failed to start on it's own so I had to take a progesterone supplement to start my cycle before we could start another round of clomid. This means between waiting for my cycle to start and going through the medication to make it start, we lost out on the whole month of June and part of July. Losing a month and a half of time doesn't seem like that long...but when you are hoping and praying for a baby every day, and missing the one you should already be holding, it seems like an eternity.
We were finally able to start another round of clomid about mid July. This time we were up to three pills a day (the highest dose our doctor will prescribe). I was really hopeful this month. If we got pregnant this month we would be on pretty much the same schedule we had been with Tace. This second baby would have been due within a day or two of Tace's due date at the end of March. We had been struggling for enough months now that we asked the family to join in with us on a family fast, we had made many trips to the temple, and done a few other fasts of our own. The day 21 progesterone test came back positive saying we did ovulate, so now we just had to wait one more week to see if we were pregnant or not. That week went by and we took a pregnancy test and.....and we couldn't quite tell. It was one of those tests that one pink like shows up if you aren't pregnant and two show up if you are......well, we could see the one test line for sure, but there seemed to be the faintest hint of a second line.....very very very faint. We decided to wait two days and take another test since your HcG levels are supposed to double approximately every 48 hours. Well, two days later we had the same situation. It looked like there was a very very very faint second line. We are talking so faint you had to hold it up to the light to see it....but still, we could both see something, and I was past the time when my cycle should have started. So we decided to test again in another couple days, but we were both starting to get hopeful and I FELT like I was pregnant (unfortunately a lot of early pregnancy symptoms and symptoms when you are about to start your cycle are the same so it is hard to tell the difference). Well in the next two days my cycle started. I was so mad, not sad, mad....which is weird for me. I wasn't mad at Heavenly Father, I was just mad that the faulty pregnancy tests had gotten our hopes up and I was tired of being jerked around emotionally.
Well, needless to say we called our doctor and got our next round of clomid (still at three a day) since my cycle had started. And guess what?...I didn't ovulate in September. I should have been able to predict that by now since I would always ovulate the first time on a higher dose, but not the second time. My cycle did not start on it's own again so we lost the rest of September and all of October waiting for my cycle to start and taking the medication to make it start.
Then November was here. I couldn't believe we were coming up on Tace's first birthday. I thought for sure we would be expecting by the time we reached our year mark of losing our precious angel. I never imagined it would take so long for us to have another baby on the way. Once my cycle finally started we called our doctor to see what was next. We had gone as far as we could with clomid and my body was no longer responding to the higher dose. Our doctor suggested we try one more fertility treatment with him, and then if that still didn't work he would refer us to a fertility specialist. So we tried one pill a day of femara in November (femara is similar to clomid, but some women have success on femara who haven't had success on clomid).
I continued to take my temperature every morning to check myself for ovulation. Day 14 came and went (you are typically supposed to ovulate around day 14). I went to my day 21 progesterone test knowing it would come back negative. It did. So I continued to wait for my cycle to start. While we were in that waiting period Tace's first birthday came and went. I sure missed that sweet boy. I tried to imagine what he would look like as a one-year-old and what he would be doing. I can't wait to have all those experiences with him some day.
Throughout the Thanksgiving holiday and Tace's birthday I had missed a few days of taking my temperature. After the holidays were over (and I was still waiting for my cycle) I started taking my temperature again. I noticed that it had spiked sometime in those few days that I had missed (somewhere between day 21 and day 26). That was really late for ovulation, but my temperature chart had always been accurate in the past....so I called the nurse and asked for another progesterone test to see if I had ovulated. It came back negative, but I still wondered if I had ovulated and we just tested me at the wrong time because I didn't know the exact day of my temperature spike. So I continued to wait throughout most of December to see if we were expecting. The tests came back negative and my cycle eventually started on its own around the end of December (so with femara one cycle took about two months for me instead of the normal one month because the possible ovulation came so late).
When my cycle started I called the doctor again and we decided to try one more round of femara on two pills a day since it looked like there had been a chance that I had ovulated. This time I knew to watch for ovulation closer to day 21 than to day 14. My temperature eventually went up mid January around day 21. I went in for my progesterone test and the test levels still came back low enough that they didn't think I had ovulated for sure. I waited out the time until I could take a pregnancy test and sure enough it was negative.
By this time I was feeling pretty discouraged. There were several other couples we knew who had gone through the same trial as us with having a stillborn baby and they were either expecting again or already had a second baby here. These couples were able to get pregnant within 1-3 months of when they started trying again. I was so excited for each of them, but wishing more than anything we could join them. It felt unfair that we had to go through the trial of losing Tace, and the trial of infertility at the same time. But, I knew that Heavenly Father was aware of us and the trials we were facing and that He would help us through them. So I did my best to continue to press forward with faith and hope for the future.
After the last negative test from our second dose of femara, our doctor gave us the number for a fertility specialist. He had done all that he could up to that point and since we had been on fertility medication for a year now (it was now February) he felt that we needed to see a specialist to continue to move forward. So we called the Utah Fertility Center and set up a consultation with Dr. Foulk. However, he was so booked out that we couldn't get in to see him until April 15th. So we had about a month and a half to two months to wait until that time.
At this point Brian and I, and our families, thought that it would probably be best to give my body a break for those two months before we met with Dr. Foulk. My body had been through a lot with the infection when we lost Tace and then high doses of fertility medications for almost a year now. We were ready to move forward with this plan, but then when my cycle started later that week Brian and I both started feeling like maybe we should try the clomid one more time. We had gotten pregnant with Tace on clomid, and we had at least ovulated on clomid a few times throughout the past year, which we never did for sure on femara. Since we both felt like we should try it one more time I called my doctor and asked him if we could do clomid one more time in this waiting period before we could meet with the fertility specialist. He agreed that we could try it again and prescribed me three pills a day since this was the last dose I had ovulated on. So we started the clomid cycle again.
As we went through the clomid cycle in March, we still went forward with our plans to see the fertility specialist in April. We came up with questions we wanted to ask and attended a free information seminar that the Utah Fertility Center puts on once a month. That was really helpful to go to because it helped answer a lot of our questions about what our path might be from here. We knew there was eventually In-Vetro Fertilization, but we didn't know what steps came before that. We came away from that meeting anxious for April 15th to get here so that we could get in and get our consultation done so we could start moving forward again.
I went in for my day 21 test as usual (my temperature showed I had ovulated so I was expecting a positive test result) and it did come back positive. However when the nurse called to tell me this she was like, "Your levels are really high! You could be pregnant!" Oh I wanted to believe her so badly!! However, my levels were also super high last April and August (even higher than they were now) and I wasn't pregnant then. However, the nurse had never said those words any time she had called before, even when my levels were high those other months. So....my hopes were starting to go up. I tried not to be too hopeful, without losing faith of course, because I knew it was not super likely that I was pregnant based on the past year. However, that next week could not pass fast enough so I could do a pregnancy test!
The day finally came to do a test and I decided to do two at once since we had had issues with faulty tests in the past. I did the tests, set the timer on my phone for five minutes, and then Brian and I sat down in the hall to wait. When the timer went off we both took a deep breath and headed back into the bathroom (this had become a ritual any month we got to the point of taking a test). There were two lines.....on both tests! I couldn't believe my eyes! The second line was light on both tests, but most definitely visible. I still wasn't 100% convinced, so I decided to do a third test. It also came back positive. We were both so excited, yet trying not to be too hopeful at the same time since we had seen tests we thought were positive before. However, these three definitely looked positive. It was hard to have to go to work that day and try to concentrate on teaching a bunch of rowdy 13- and 14-year-olds when all I could think about was stopping by Walgreens after school to pick up a digital test that would clearly say YES or NO. School eventually got out and I did just that on the way home. My plan was to do the more expensive test the next morning because the best time to do tests is first thing in the morning. But, I decided I could do another cheap test that afternoon. If it still came back looking positive in the afternoon then I would start believing it more. It came back positive again! I decided I couldn't wait on the digital test so I did that one as well. And....POSITIVE!!!
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