How We Got Here (Infertility Edition)

I think to a certain extent my guilt in going back to work early is normal. I wonder at times if it is compounded by our history. You see, I am infertile.

I guess that considering I am writing about my baby, that seems like a bit of a misnomer, but for all intents and purposes I am infertile...or sub-fertile if you will. My beautiful baby girl is the product of many years of scientific research and technology, a fact that I am thankful for daily. My beautiful baby girl was conceived using In Vitro Fertilization (IVF).

Cue Octomom jokes now....cuz I haven't heard those before.

Let's go back to the beginning shall we.

When I was 19 and in a fairly serious relationship, I got pregnant by accident (truly, because all methods of birth control being used FAILED...it was the perfect storm). In a fortunate turn of fate, I miscarried. As devastating as it was, it was truly a fortunate turn as I was neither capable or prepared to raise a baby at that point and a few years later that relationship turned quite sour. In the process of miscarrying, I developed a bit of an infection which was treated and then life went on.

What I didn't know was that in the interim the infection, which had not been caught quick enough, had made its way through my uterus to my fallopian tubes. More on that later.

While in the middle of this failing relationship, I met my husband through a mutual friend at said friend's dinner party. We got along great and there started a friendship. A few years later, both of us fairly freshly single, we met up again at another party being hosted by our mutual friend and pretty much haven't been apart since (except for the odd business trip).

That was thirteen years ago.

We got married a year and a half after our first real date, with thoughts of a large family (he is Italian after all). A year after we got married, we sat down and had the discussion about how we wanted to proceed. We determined that we didn't want to proceed at all for at least another couple of years. I was just 24 at the time and our first year of marriage, with all of its ups and downs, had been great. We just weren't ready to start a family.

Every year until I was 30, we had the same discussion and every year we decided to put the discussion off for another year. The way we figured it, we had plenty of time. As the years went on, our desire for a large family also changed as we witnessed the chaos surrounding the large families we were related too. Being an only child myself, I was perfectly content with only one child and being the middle of three, the idea of having only one appealed to my husband as well. Good thing we decided that early!

The year I turned 30 my biological clock started ticking. Audibly! So we decided that despite the fact that I was in university finishing my bachelor's degree, we would throw away the birth control and start trying. Being the organized gal that I am, we even bought furniture and a stroller when a fantastic sale came up, thinking that like so many of our friends, we'd be pregnant within months. I mean how couldn't I? I had gotten pregnant through two methods of birth control so this was sure to be a breeze.

There was no pregnancy that year. Or the next. Or the next. Or the next. By the time I was getting ready to turn 34 we realized that we really needed to involve a doctor in our process. With me being in school we hadn't pursued why we weren't getting pregnant, chalking it up to stress, school and whatever other theory of the moment came up. I was getting ready to graduate from university so it was really time to graduate to the specialists to see what was the matter.

The pulled blood, they did tests - some of which were quite uncomfortable - and eventually they had a diagnosis for me. I had bilateral hydrosalpinges. What this meant was that my fallopian tubes were wrecked. The infection I had suffered after my miscarriage had decimated my tubes and now they were scarred and filled with fluid.

The day I received that diagnosis has got to be one of the lowest points in my life. Our specialist advised me that we had one option and only one option to get pregnant. IVF. And if we wanted to ensure that the IVF had its' best chance of working, they were going to have to remove my fallopian tubes as well.

In October of 2008, I had my fallopian tubes removed. In February of 2009, after handing over a huge chunk of my life savings to a fertility clinic, I went through IVF. It was a brutal month and a half long process that involved hormones, shots, many dates with a vaginal ultrasound wand, lots of blood tests and a brutal egg retrieval process. Five days after retrieving 8 eggs from my ovaries the doctors transferred two embryos back into my uterus. By some miracle, two weeks later my blood test advised me that I was pregnant. Nine months later, in the early morning hours of Boxing Day, my daughter was born.

And that is how we got here. Five months later, with a gorgeous child filling our lives in a way we didn't ever imagine. So I wonder if I would have felt this guilty had she been easier to conceive or if my struggle to conceive her is making it harder to step away from her, knowing that I only really have this one chance to watch a child of mine grow and develop.

45 days to go.