Witch Doctoring

During this whole ordeal I have been doing endless research on how to give myself the best chance of getting pregnant. It seems that "western medicine" believes one thing and then there are the "witch doctors"! I have never been a big pill popper myself but it seems that I have suddenly turned into one. Since I am currently not injecting prescription drugs I might as well pop endless amounts of vitamins and supplements,right! I've been going to my favorite witch doctor once a week to get my uterus "adjusted". Sharon-the master herbalist provides an experience that is hard to describe. She has given me two tinctures to drink daily...women's formula and cayenne. I also am taking DHEA, L-Argenine, CoQ10, Vitamin E, Super B Complex, Prenatal Vitamins, Folic Acid, and Fish Oil. I have also switched to an all organic, dairy free diet. We should be getting back our test results to see if I have diminished ovarian reserve this week. We will see if this concoction helps my egg quality.

Old Lady Eggs

As you may have heard already, we are not pregnant:( It has taken me quite a while to say that without starting to cry and even now, 12 days after we found out I still get teary just thinking about it. I have read so many other people's stories about infertility and never really thought ours would be that complicated. Boy, was I wrong! I thought our only issue was getting the sperm to the eggs. Apparently there is more of an issue than that. I might just have old lady eggs at the ripe old age of 31. Who would have ever imagined that once you hit your 30's life is down hill from there! I had no idea, just a couple of months ago I was telling John 50 is the new 40:) So what's next...Of course I am constantly researching what I can do next. The day I got the not so good news I was on the phone with another clinic setting up a consultation appointment. Apparently my coping strategy is to make plans for the next step. I also started looking into in vitro with a partial money back guarantee. For these you have to qualify. The doctors look at your medical history and decide what they think your chances are of getting pregnant. They then put you in a tier if you qualify based on how easy they think it will be to "knock you up". The doctors haven't gotten back to me yet on what they have decided and we have a consultation appointment scheduled with a different doctor at the end of November. When I married an older man people were probably thinking that he was going to be the one whose body wasn't up for a little baby making. Much to my surprise as well, my body seems to be the one that is not performing "up to par". The beginning part of in vitro where you do all of the follicle stimulating hormone injections is called superovulation. My body didn't respond ideally in the first cycle that we canceled. It also didn't respond ideally in the second cycle with at least double the doses. This response to the meds indicates that there is probably either an egg quality issue or that there are just not many eggs left (diminished ovarian reserve). So yesterday we went in for a blood test that will tell us if we don't have many eggs left. Who knows why we didn't do this test before we did two in vitro cycles!!!??!!! This blood test is fairly new and is called anti-mullerian hormone. We won't find out what the results of the test are for a while....so I started doing more research! I thought I would be done with all the research when I got my master's degree. I know I said I didn't want to get my doctorate but I am starting to think I should get one in infertility as it seems to be the only thing I read about lately:) What I found out is this is a pretty amazing blood test to know about if you don't have kids, are thinking about postponing having kids for a few years, or want to know if you're still a "fertile myrtle:)" Because so many women are starting to have babies later in life this test could save them tons of heartache later on. If you want to know if you can wait and be fine you just go get this test done! It wouldn't have changed anything for me since I didn't have my wonderful husband when I was in my ideal child-bearing years:) which are apparently the younger the better, but it does make me think twice about how I might have lived my life differently if I would have known the info from this test.