Our Fertiltiy Story

           This story begins when I was a little girl. I would save my money to buy dolls and more dolls -dreaming of being a mother some day. When I was a teenager I would cut out pictures of people from magazines and glue them on construction paper and make large families. I would draw plans for houses big enough to hold large families. I dreamed about getting married and having a large family my whole life. Whenever anyone asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up I always said I wanted to be a mother—even in 6^th grade when that wasn't cute anymore. When I went to get my patriarchal blessing the biggest thing I was listening for was if I would have the opportunity to get married and have children. I didn't really hear anything else during the blessing—it said I would find a priesthood holder, marry in the temple, and we'd have children! (Luckily we get copies of our blessings, because there was MUCH more to it than that.)

When Timothy and I got married we decided to wait a few months before trying to have a baby so that I could graduate with my Associate degree first. We ended up only putting it off for a little over a month. Then, we decided to let the Lord decide when children would join our family. Little did we know that meant waiting 7 years before adopting, and 12 years before our first pregnancy. I studied as much as I could on my own about fertility, pregnancy, and child birth. I learned a lot, but it still didn't help that no baby seemed to be coming.

             First years-Endometriosis Those first years brought a disappointment with every passing month. The longer it took, the harder it became to accept that we still couldn't have children. But, I remember thinking after about a year-and-a-half, that if I could wait a year-and-a-half, I could wait that long again. After being married for about two years we decided to go to the doctor and see if there was anything wrong. Timothy’s screening (semen analysis) checked out fine. I was diagnosed with endometriosis through a laparoscopy surgery. The doctor removed the endometrial tissue that was in the wrong places, then prescribed me with Clomid and said we should be pregnant in the next few months, because everything else looked good. We even used ovulation predictor kits and basal temperature charting so that our timing was right. After three months of the Clomid treatment, however, we still had nothing. Around that time, we moved from Rexburg, Idaho to Greeley, Colorado. Our new health insurance had a very high deductible and didn't have fertility or maternity benefits, so we didn't pursue fertility treatments through the medical field. We did try doing acupuncture, but to no avail. We never stopped trying on our own, though.

           Adoption attempt After a while we decided to try to adopt through LDS Family Services. We had a home study done and waited and waited for a phone call for a baby. We advertized on adoptionprofiles.com and had a few birth mothers who talked to us, but none ever decided to place their baby with us. (I think it was because we weren't in an ideal situation: Timothy was in the middle of his masters degree, and I was working full-time from home. Most birth mothers want their baby to go to a family with a father who has a stable job and stay-at-home mom.)

           Adoption When we moved from Colorado to Eugene, Oregon, we transferred and updated our home study with LDS Family Services. Because we had been working with them for two years and had no luck we decided to look into adopting through the state foster care system. By February 2008 we had two open home studies in the hopes that we could get a baby or a young child. In January 2009 we got the news that we'd been selected to adopt Brigham (age 27 months) and Rebekah (age 16 months) and possibly their baby brother. We were so excited and felt so blessed to finally become parents. We got the older two children on January 26^th, 2009. On February 17^th, 2009, Hyrum (age 4 months) joined our family. This helped ease the pain of infertility. We were so grateful to be parents and have three beautiful young children to love and care for. But there was still a deep longing to experience pregnancy, child birth, and have a biological baby.

           Endo treatments While living in Eugene a friend mentioned that she had endometriosis and had been unable to get pregnant until she had been treated with Lupron for six months, which cleared up the endo, and she got pregnant right away after that. Lupron is a drug that essentially puts you into menopause. Resting from monthly cycles helps the body to heal the endometriosis. So, just before we adopted our children I had my doctor treat me with Lupron. I didn't have a cycle for about 9 months, which was a blessing because the first few months we had our children I didn't have to worry about the painful cramping I had been having every month. We fully expected that I would get pregnant after the Lupron treatment, we tracked my cycles again with basal temperatures and made sure our timing was right. We thought it would be nice to have a baby when Hyrum was 18-24 months old. But, that still didn't work.

           Chinese Medicine After a while I started looking into more traditional Chinese medicine. Eugene, Oregon is a perfect place to get into natural medicine techniques because there are so many naturopaths, acupuncturists, and herbal stores in the area. I tried many herbs on my own, and then after many months of no success I realized our insurance covered naturopath doctors at 90%! So I found a doctor and started treatments. We did a bunch of testing, acupuncture, and herbal remedies. The doctor helped me solve a lot of my other health problems, but couldn't come up with a solution to why we weren't getting pregnant. After about 6 months of this I stopped going because it seemed we were going no where.

           Decisions In February of 2011 we found out about the adoption tax credit. It had become refundable and special needs children qualified for the maximum amount even if very little adoption expenses were paid. All three of our children qualified as a special needs adoption. So, our tax return that year was almost twice our yearly income. We weren't sure what we were supposed to do with all that money. We felt like the Lord had placed it in our path for a reason, but why? We prayed and prayed about what to do with money. Our first inclination was to pay off all our student loans and be debt free! We thought that would be what God wanted, too, because the prophets are always admonishing us to get out of debt. But, He had other things in mind. As we were praying, we got the distinct impression that we should use the money for fertility treatments, and pay off only our unsubsidized loans. Fertility treatments weren't even something we'd considered using the money for. I wasn't even sure if the new technologies for fertility treatments were pleasing to the Lord. We went into it a little skeptical. But, we paid off the unsubsidized loans and began looking into treatment options.

            Clomid cycles We found a full fertility clinic in Eugene only 5 miles from our home and scheduled a consultation. The doctor heard our history and decided to run his own screening tests to see what may be wrong. Timothy's second semen analysis came back perfect. The doctor did an ultrasound and found an ovarian cyst. He said it may be related to the endometriosis and wanted to remove it right away, because those kinds of cysts can burst and become dangerous. So, we scheduled a second laparoscopy. The surgery went well, the cyst was removed, but it was found to benign. The doctor found only one endo spot and removed it. He flushed dye through my fallopian tubes to make sure they were open—they were. He checked the health of all my reproductive organs—everything looked perfect. We had to wait a month to let my body recover from the surgery. Then we started in on the fertility treatments. The first treatment was three cycles of Clomid with IUI (intrauterine insemination.) That's where they take Timothy's semen and wash it to keep only the best of the sperm, and then use a catheter to place the sperm directly into my uterus. These cycles cost $800 per cycle—not bad for fertility treatments. But, those three cycles didn't work even though everything was timed and worked perfectly.

           Gonadotropin cycles The next step was to use a stronger fertility drug. We used gonadotropins that hyper-stimulate the ovaries. The drugs alone cost $300-500 per cycle plus the ultrasound monitoring and the IUI. The total cost of these cycles was about $2000 per cycle. For the first gonadotropin cycle, we were careful and only made one egg. That was unsuccessful, so the next cycle we used more drugs. I ended up with 5 eggs, and I was hoping all of them wouldn't fertilize. Although I wanted a baby and was willing to take twins, I didn't want more than two babies at once. But, the doctor said I only had a 10% chance of triplets with the five eggs, so we went ahead and did the IUI. The doctor was sure it would work, but it didn't.

            More decisions Up until now I had been avoiding IVF because I didn't like the idea of doctor's “playing God” and fertilizing eggs in a lab and selecting which ones to put back into the mother. But we prayed about it as this was the next step on the fertility ladder. The cost for IVF cycles at our clinic were about $11,000-$12,000, depending on how much medication was needed. When praying about it, we really felt like this is what we needed to do, and everything would work out the way it needed to. So, we decided to go ahead and do IVF (In Vetro Fertilization.)

            First IVF cycle The following is a journal entry from March 20, 2012 about our first IVF cycle. (in italics)

           Before we could do IVF we had to get blood work done, have a hysteroscopy, and do a trial transfer. Drugs for that started in February. First, we did about 2 weeks of birth control pills, then added lupron injections to the birth control. Then, I stopped the birth control and had a very light menstrual period. Then, they did a suppression check: blood test and ultrasound. Everything looked good—the cyst was gone and my hormones were suppressed, so we could proceed with the IVF treatment! We were excited, because we weren't sure if we'd be able to do it because of the cyst. So that next day, March 4^th, I started the stimulation injections. I had to do one injection each morning and two injections each evening. That was difficult, but went fine. I had a number of ultrasounds and blood tests over the next 10 days. Then, I was ready to do the trigger shot. I had about 18 follicles that Dr Austin could see on the ultrasound. So, he figured he'd be able to get about 15 mature eggs to fertilize. So, on Tuesday the 13^th I did the hCG trigger shot to make the follicles mature and prepare to be released. Then on Thursday, March 15^th, I went in to have the egg retrieval done. They had to put me under general anesthesia. During the process, they were able to retrieve 22 eggs. They put 11 of them with Timothy's sperm to fertilize on their own and they sent 11 to ICSI (Intracytoplasmic sperm injection). Basically, to have the sperm injected into the eggs. The ones that we meant to fertilize conventionally didn't end up fertilizing at all, and of the other 11 eggs, 3 were immature and couldn't have ICSI done. Of the other 8, only 6 progressed after fertilization. By day 2, 3 were progressing okay and 3 weren't developing quite as fast as they should have. So, on Sunday, March 18^th, the 3 better embryos were transferred to my uterus. Before the embryo transfer, I had an acupuncture session to increase blood flow to the uterus and afterwards I had another one. I had been doing acupuncture all through this process. Timothy had to start giving me progesterone injections the night before the transfer, and I also had to do progesterone vaginal suppositories three times a day. Then, I had to rest for 2 days. To make matters worse, I had gotten stick on Wednesday, the day before the egg retrieval, and I had an allergic reaction to the pain medication, Lortab. (I've decided I'm allergic to codeine like my mom.) I got so sick I began to wonder if I might die—my heart beat got very low and I was tingly all over and VERY lightheaded. I finally sent Timothy to the store to get me a caffeinated drink to help speed up my heart. That helped and I was able to pull out of it, but it took me two weeks. Well, after all that and an 11-day wait, I went in to take a blood pregnancy test. I was the most nervous about this part. Well, Sharon, the nurse coordinator, called around 10:00am on Thursday the 29^th and told me that the pregnancy test was negative. I was so disappointed. I was so sure this was going to work. I felt like if the Lord had led us to do these fertility treatments and provided the means to do so, then why wouldn't it work? But it didn't. Heavenly Father had something else in mind when he led us down this path. I must say that although the loss is great and I am grieving, I am grateful for the road we have traveled. We have learned a lot in many different ways. I have come to trust the Lord more fully and I have a greater understanding of the Atonement of my Savior. I know that I can put my burdens on Him and that He can strengthen me to withstand anything. “The Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord.” Job 1:21

             A few weeks after the devastating news, we went to meet with the doctor. He said that there had possibly been a problem in the lab because both another couple's and our sperm had done something unusual, so they thought it was a problem with the supplies used. When the eggs and sperm were put together, the sperm from both couples (us and another) did the same thing. They started out looking great, but only an hour later most of the sperm were lethargic and by 4 hours after putting the sperm with the eggs all the sperm were lethargic or dead. (Sperm normally last 48-72 hours.) Because this strange occurrence—one that the doctor had never seen before—happened in the same IVF cycle, to 2 out of about 12 couples, he thought there may have been a problem with the uterine-like dish they used. They had ordered it from a different company than they had in the past. Because of this problem the doctor offered to us and the other couple a free IVF cycle. We had to pay for the medication, but there would be no doctor bills. Since we were planning on moving to Utah in June, we decided to hurry and get in on the May IVF cycle.

           IVF try #2- In May 2012 we did the second cycle. This one ended up costing us about $2000 for medication, but we were so grateful for the free medical treatments. This cycle went similarly to the last one, only they sent all of the 20 eggs retrieved to ICSI. About twelve of them fertilized well and began to grow. By 5 days later there were only 6 that were still growing and healthy, but they were doing very well. They transferred two of the embryos and froze 4 of them. Then we had the 11-day wait until the pregnancy test. It didn't work again. I was upset, but I didn't feel quite as devastated, because I knew I still had two more chances with 4 frozen embryos. About this time we were moving to Utah and I didn't have time to worry about not getting pregnant, because I was so busy with packing and getting ready for the move.

           Frozen Embryo Transfer #1 In November 2012 we decided to try a frozen embryo transfer. I had a doctor here in Utah monitor everything via ultrasound and fax the results to my doctor in Oregon. Then, the day before the transfer I flew out to Eugene. I had two good quality embryos transferred. I really thought it would work, because I wasn't as stressed about the fertility treatment and my life in general was less stressful than in Oregon. But, we were again disappointed. At this point I had had 7 embryos transferred, and none of them worked. My doctor said that the chances of us ever having a baby with my eggs and Timothy's sperm were slim to none, but we did have one more chance with 2 embryos still frozen. Our doctor recommended using donor sperm if the last frozen transfer didn't work. I told him that was not an option for us. If we were going to have a baby it was going to be my eggs and Timothy's sperm only.

            Allergy treatments Meanwhile I learned about an allergy treatment that my chiropractor does. I was very interested because I have so many food- and air-borne allergies. I started doing the allergy treatments and told the chiropractor our fertility story. He tested me, I was allergic to Timothy, testosterone, semen, and embryos. So he treated me for those each in turn. He thinks the reason seven embryos haven't implanted is because my body was rejecting them as a foreign substance (allergen). These treatments are called NAET, for anyone interested. They really work too—I can eat all sorts of foods that I had to avoid for years.

            Frozen Embryo Transfer #2 Then, in July we took a family trip out to Eugene, Oregon to visit friends and have the last 2 embryos transferred. This time the doctor added a few extra medications hoping they would help. On top of the daily progesterone injections, and the twice weekly estrogen injections I had to do a twice daily anti-coagulant injection and an oral allergy medication. This time it worked, which is nothing short of a miracle! We became pregnant with twins, but one of them died when I was about 6 weeks along. We were sad to loose one of our twins, but we are so grateful that one is growing and developing normally! As you can see from the ultrasound pictures, it is growing perfectly. We are so grateful that the Lord has seen fit to bless us with this little one. It truly is a miracle!