All the Gory Details

Today, children, we will be discussing how I got all these children...children who have left me with unsightly stretch marks, a permanent "is she pregnant or not?" belly, and who are leaching brain cells from me with every passing day. All this craziness might make you wonder if I regret all we've been through, and the answer is a resounding NO!!! I'd do it all again in a heartbeat!!! I'm posting all the gory details for those of you who visit this site hoping to find out more about what to expect on your own paths to infertility treatment, and have (up to this point at least) received a big, fat eyeful of nothing. Those of you who don't have infertility issues need not read beyond this point. O.k. and those of you still reading out of morbid curiosity...GOTCHA!

For those of you who don't know us personally, my #1 sweetie and I met in high school and married just after I turned 20. We had lots of stuff we wanted to accomplish together and individually, and really did not reach a place where we thought children would be welcome addition for about 7 years. I was still relatively young, and we didn't anticipate any problems. Do we ever? We began trying, and when it didn't happen in the first few months, I started taking my temperature and tracking my cycle. I could tell something wasn't quite right, as the signs for ovulation were murky, at best. We soldiered on, and just before the one-year mark, found out we were pregnant. We were elated! Unfortunately, four days later, we miscarried. Just saying, "it was a difficult time" is really insufficient to describe that kind of hurt and the fear it brings with it. This was the first time I thought, "This might not happen for us."

After that, I marched straight into my OB's office and demanded an infertility consult. There were a lot of empty words thrown at me "still young, only one year, relax and be patient." I rejected them all, waving my little cycle tracking cards wildly. Finally they conceded that I might know what I was talking about, and we began clomid.

For those of you unsure of what clomid is, I like to call it the P-pill. P stands for period, pregnant, and pre-menopausal because you get to experience all the symptoms of all three states AT THE EXACT SAME TIME!!! For those of you who have not experienced them, hot flashes are a real bitch. Anyway, clomid works on the part of your brain that affects hormone production. It's supposed to make your brain produce more of the hormones that make you ovulate. In order to regulate my cycles, they had to keep upping the doses higher and higher, until I was on just over 5 times the start dose. For those of you about to start clomid, this may not be the case for you. Most people just take a low dose and it works great. The symptoms are also GREATLY reduced at lower doses.

For a while, they just patted me on the back and told me how great things were going. I disagreed, mainly because I still wasn't PREGNANT, and insisted on additional testing. Lo and behold, the clomid was indeed not working, and we moved on to injectibles.

Injectibles are different from clomid in that they act directly on the ovaries. They're supposed to make you produce a lot of eggs so you increase your chances of getting pregnant. They don't have the side-effects that clomid does, but the fact that I was injecting myself in the stomach each night for almost two weeks sort of served as it's own special drawback. We also started intra-uterine insemination -- the reasoning being that the injectibles were really expensive and difficult, so let's give it the best chance possible by cutting out the middle man (sorry about that, honey).

It's too late to make a long story short, but our first round of injectibles didn't work. I then took some time off to just get back to feeling normal, then resumed the process with an exploratory laproscopic procedure just to make sure everything was hunky dory in there. After that, one more round of injectibles (at double the previous dose) resulted in the ever fabulous Jack.

When Jack was almost a year old, we decided to try again. We did one round of exactly the same meds as before, and BOOM this time we got triplets. Go figure.

So that's our experience in a nutshell. We didn't do IVF, although there is a link to an IVF website to the right of this post. It's there because that's where I found a great system of support while carrying multiples. It's pretty easy to find other mothers carrying twins, but once you up the ante by one measly baby it gets a little more difficult to find someone in your same situation. LOVE, love, love the internet.

Anyone about to enter this maelstrom, please feel free to contact me. Obviously, I'm a guarded and secretive person, but I'll make an exception and share even more details if you need them.