Where to begin?

image from CBS news web article on teen pregnancy rates in 2011

I'm sitting in a hotel room by myself, relaxing after a long day at an academic conference.  We don't have cable at home so I'm indulging in a little TV time.  As I was flipping through the channels, I stopped on MTV's Teen Mom 2.  As it turns out, they are playing a marathon of Teen Mom 2 episodes.


I've never seen this show before.  My only exposure to it was a couple years ago in another hotel room with a group of girlfriends in our college town.  They were watching the original Teen Mom, or maybe it was Sixteen and Pregnant, I don't know.  But anyway, I was in the bathroom area getting ready to go out for the evening and wasn't really paying attention.  Suddenly, one of my girlfriends who had been trying for a couple of years to get pregnant, ran out of the hotel room crying.


I went after her, and found her in a stairway sobbing.  I tried to console her, to assure her it would happen for her someday, and even said that I understood what she was going through because my husband and I had stopped using protection two years earlier and though we were not "actively" trying for a baby, we were beginning to wonder if we too might have a problem.


Even though I told her I understood, I didn't.  I didn't get why watching a TV show about teenagers who have no business having babies would be hard for her to watch (especially because two of our girlfriends back in the hotel room were pregnant for the first time too).  I didn't get it then, but I get it now.


That was nearly two years ago now, and since then, my husband and I have been through all kinds of intrusive, embarrassing, nerve-racking, and often inconclusive tests.  We have tracked dates on the calendar, charted my temperature, checked the "stretchiness" and clarity of my bodily fluids.  I have peed on dozens of ovulation kit sticks and countless pregnancy test sticks.  Doctors have told us to have more sex, while others tell us to have less sex.  We have gone down the road of assisted reproductive technology (ART) with intrauterine insemination (IUI) and even to the brink of in vitro fertilization (IVF) and back again.  And I swear, if one more person tells me that "maybe it will happen if you just relax"...


So yes, things have changed a lot for me.  If I could go back in time and tell the old me what I know now,  I think I would have been more empathetic with my friend in that hotel stairway.  I don't know what more I could have said or done for her, but I know I would have better understood the pain she was going through.


Fortunately, my friend was able to get better medical advice after changing doctors and was able to start taking a fertility drug to help her ovulate regularly (Clomid).  After only a few cycles of taking Clomid, she became pregnant and in July 2011, gave birth to her son.


My story  does not have a similar happy ending...yet.  So far the doctors cannot definitively tell us why we are unable to conceive.  Part of me wishes that there was something that could be diagnosed and fixed so we could move forward.  I wish our problem were as simple as discovering that there was some pill one of us needs to take, and then we could enjoy our journey to parenthood the same as everyone else.  But as of now, that is not the case.  We fall into the 33% of infertile couples who are diagnosed with "unexplained" infertility.


This new blog will be a place for me to record our experiences as my husband and I navigate the sea of infertility.  It has already been a stormy ride, with many high & low waves, but so far we've been able to hold on tight to each other and together let the winds keep blowing us toward our destination, which hopefully, will be in the land of parenthood :)