The Journey

I grew up pretty much the only child of a single mother. My siblings were all so much more older than me that they were all pretty much gone from home for most of the childhood that I remember. The experience made me shy of ever getting married, but one of the first things I ever wanted to be was a Mommy. I used to spend my hours as a small child pouring over baby name books and picking out my favorites. I remember one particular time, I had such a hard time narrowing down names, that I finally decided that I'd just have to have 18 children just so I could use all the names I liked best.

Not much of that perception changed as I grew older, and marriage still to me was just one obstacle in the way to having children. Of course, that would all change later, but I'm pretty sure my eagerness to be a Mommy was already apparent. I still remember one day when my sister took me aside to give me some particular advice. She'd been married a few years and had started her own family. I looked up to her as a mentor of sorts, and so I paid particular attention to all she told me. She said that when I got married, it would be better if I put off having children for a couple of years so that my future husband and I could spend a good amount of time just being married. The way she explained it made perfect sense to me, and I decided it was good advice to follow, and planned to do just that.

When the time came that I did finally fall in love and get married in April of 2001, it was easy to stick to the plan. Matt and I very much enjoyed that time together with just us, and while I was still excited about the prospect of having children, I very gladly took my birth control pills faithfully from the beginning.

After being married for a year and a half, I felt a renewed sense of desire to start a family which was strong enough that Matt and I had a discussion about going off of birth control. It was a little earlier than the two years we had planned, but we figured if we did get pregnant right away, we'd have been married more than two years by the time the baby came, and so we decided to stop the pills.

I still remember that first cycle well. I was three days late in getting my period. I felt for certain we had done it on the first try, as being at all late was an unheard of occurrence for me, even before I ever took the pills. We had the option of getting a blood test done at our University's health clinic for the same price as buying an HPT, and so we went the surer route. It was late on a Friday when we went in. Unfortunately, the clinic closed before we were able to get the results. No worries, however, as the results showed up the very next morning as a new day of a new cycle. I was definitely not pregnant. We called anyway to get the results the following Monday as I was curious if I had miscarried. But alas, the results showed I had never been pregnant to begin with. It was the first failed cycle in what would become a seemingly endless stream of failures in our whole Trying To Conceive (TTC) journey.

March 2003 ~ Okay, we were just kidding before. Now we're actually trying.

Alright, so we'd been through a few cycles now, and still no luck getting pregnant. But, it takes some people some time, right? And if I were really being honest, we probably hadn't really been trying (or at least, that's what I told myself to justify our failure). And then we got the call. Matt's brother and his wife were pregnant. They were expecting their first baby and were due near the end of the year. We were happy for them, of course, but it still struck a little pang in my heart... Why not us? It was obviously time to try harder. One day, as we were driving down the road, I turned to Matt and said, "I want your mom to have two first grandbabies for Christmas this year." There was still time, I figured, to get pregnant and have a baby by then. Matt just very calmly said, "Ok", and that was that. Time to get down to serious business.

Well, obviously we failed. No baby for Christmas this year. Month after month of hoping and feeling disappointment. And this was only the beginning. When we hit the TTC One Year mark, that magic number that finally qualifies as "Infertile", in October, I mostly chose to ignore it. After all, I convinced myself that we hadn't really been trying those first few months I was off the pill, and I was still convinced we could do it. And it all seemed like I was right in December when my period was late again. Day after day passed, and the cycle dragged on. Five days late. Nine days late. I was convinced this was it. So what if all the HPT's I peed on came up negative. I had NEVER been this late in a cycle before. Ever. More days passed. Still no period, and still no positive test. I firmly believed I was pregnant, despite the negative tests. I even planned out my speech for "breaking the news" to the family at Christmas. I believe I came very close to having a nervous breakdown from dealing with the emotional roller coaster of it all. But finally... on the 49th day, a full 15 days late from my average cycle length, my roller coaster came crashing down... and a new cycle finally started. I was heartbroken. How in the world could my period have been so late? I figured I had done it to myself by stressing about the next cycle starting. However, the experience was something of a last straw for me. It was finally time to face the inevitable. It was time to ask for help. If nothing else, I hoped to start a simple fertility medication like Clomid to "help" things along.

It was with a heavy heart that I told Matt I thought it was time to seek medical advice. He readily agreed, however, and so we made our first appointment. It was apparently nearly impossible to get in to see an OB/GYN for an infertility appointment, and so we had to wait weeks before going to our first visit.

Our first doctor seemed rather nice. He was sympathetic and all that you might expect, and ordered the first round of tests. Mostly for me. I had blood drawn to check for hormone levels and such. The doctor had me go in for an HSG to see if my tubes were clear. (Which was, by the way, a very painful and uncomfortable procedure, and gave me my first taste of what a contraction feels like. Thanks to this experience, I considered drugs during delivery seriously for the first time, whereas before, I was firmly against it.) Then, near the end of my cycle, I was to get more blood drawn for a progesterone test. That was supposed to be about a week before the end of my cycle, and I dutifully went in for the test. Surprisingly, though, my period started the very next day. It was a 26 day cycle. It had me all manner of confused. First a 49 day cycle, now a 26 day cycle? It was insanity! Nevertheless, all my tests came back clear.

Matt, on the other hand, had only one test to take. And unlike me, his results were not so great. The doctor called us back into his office for another visit in April to go over all our results. He then explained to us that he believed our infertility was entirely a male factor issue. Matt's sperm count, actually, was insanely high. Off the charts high. But his morphology (shape of the sperm) and motility were extremely low. With so very little of his sperm being viable, the doctor pronounced that the chances of us ever conceiving naturally were slim to none, Clomid or no. It was a bitter blow to find out there was something wrong after all. But, there was a silver lining here, the doctor told us... Most sperm problems of this nature, he explained, were caused by varicoceles... which you could think of as blocked veins. Blood doesn't flow properly to the area that's needed, and as a result, the sperm forms wrong. A simple surgery, however, was proven to be highly effective, raising our chances of conceiving naturally to about 30%. It was a cheaper option with better chances than IVF, especially where repeated pregnancies were concerned. So we were pretty much down to two expensive options... the surgery, or adoption. After much discussion, we decided we were just not ready to give up conceiving a child of our own at that time, and so we opted for the surgery.

Since my doctor could only treat women, Matt had to make an appointment to visit a Urologist to get the process underway. After being examined, the urologist said he did in fact feel a varicocele under the skin, and felt that a surgery would be highly successful. And so, we scheduled it for the middle of August, and counted down the days.

The surgery, itself, was fairly quick and easy. The doctor said he had found and successfully removed two varicoceles, and the prognosis was good. Matt spent a week on the couch taking it easy, with some great pain meds and a doting wife to take care of his every need. He actually recovered fairly quickly, and the whole thing just seemed simple and easy. It was explained to us that we could not expect to see results for at least three months, as that was how long it would take for new sperm to grow. And so we waited. Again.

The three months before Matt was re-tested seemed to pass by ever so slowly. However, as time does, it did pass, and we were excited and optimistic about the results. It was short lived, though, when we got the results back. The sperm count was still amazingly high, but the morphology and motility had only improved very little. It seemed it has all been for naught. It was a heavy disappointment, and we just didn't know what to do next. It was suggested to us that our best hope was to begin trying cycles of IUI (Intra-Uterine Insemination). However, my OB/GYN didn't seem to think it was hopeful, and each IUI cycle (not covered by insurance, of course) promised to be more than we could afford, especially after the surgery which we had already had to seek family support for.

We spent the next couple of months just sort of drifting, trying to decide what to do. Matt's mom decided we needed a second opinion, and got us in to see supposedly one of the best urologists in the state. However, his fame made him almost impossible to see, and the first available appointment was a couple of months away. And so we waited. Again.

This fancy urologist that we saw lived in a city quite a ways from us, but we were happy to take the special trip to hear what he had to say. He ordered a new sperm analysis for Matt so he could see for himself the results. They were pretty much the same. However, this doctor had a very different outlook on the situation. He said that yes, the percentages of sperm that were correctly formed and functional was very low. However, because Matt's sperm count was so insanely high, that small percentage actually represented a rather high number of viable sperm. While he felt there was nothing new he could do for us, he said that he thought our chances of success with IUI would actually be very good. In fact, he didn't see any reason at all why we couldn't conceive naturally. Well! Wasn't that news to us! For the first time, we actually felt like there was hope for us. And with more generous support from family, we took the plunge to begin TTC through IUI.

~ Interlude: Why? ~

It was during this summer that I became far more obsessed with researching infertility online than I already had been. Eventually, I began seeking out online support groups. I was drawn to stories of women who were experiencing similar struggles, and I took a lot of comfort from those who had managed to win the fight against infertility. Seeking these stories out led me to a particular online message board community that covered all aspects of fertility, from those just starting TTC to those who were already Mommys and everything in between. On this forum, I found under the heading of "Support and Coping" a thread with one word as the title: Why?

I was a moth to the flame. Of all the emotions and thoughts that I had about our infertility struggle, this one word resonated above all others. Why? Why us? Why is it so easy for some women and unfortunate teenage girls to get pregnant, but not us? I would hear tragic stories in the news of neglected or harmed babies and think, why were there women in the world who didn't seem to care about the blessing they'd been given, but my husband and I, who wanted it so badly, were continually denied?

And there were the other inevitable thoughts... Why has God given this trial to us? Have we done something wrong? Was there something we weren't doing right? I firmly believed that I was not undeserving of the blessing of being a Mother, so why wasn't it happening? Why were we being punished in this way?

The question became one of my constant companions, and led my mind in endless frantic circles. It was, above all else, hard not to lose hope. I'm not entirely sure it was good for me at the time to have found that thread on that message board asking all the same questions and giving no real answers. I was obsessed with it for several months, following the stories of the women who posted to it. Looking back now, it's easy to see that it only helped me focus on all the negative aspects of our struggle, and fall even further into depression.

More waiting for more appointments to schedule things to get underway. My OB/GYN certainly wasn't very helpful, and I was beginning to have doubts as to whether or not I really liked him. He took the decision to switch out of my hands, though, by up and leaving the clinic in August with no word of any kind. That meant we had to visit a new OB/GYN to get all the paperwork required to coordinate the IUI's through my clinic and Matt's urologist. (My clinic would have nothing to do with collecting and preparing the sperm.) It was finally a go to make our first attempt for my September cycle, and so we counted down the days. Again.

I kept myself busy though. Oh yes. It was during these last summer months that I read online about a book called Taking Charge of your Fertility, by Toni Weschler. I found the book at our library, and gave the entire thing a serious read. I knew about charting cycles, of course, and even how to do it. But I'd always lacked the motivation, I suppose, to actually do it, thinking that I knew my cycle perfectly well. That all changed with this book. It seemed like it would be a good idea to try it, especially considering we had to time the IUI so precisely. And so, with my August/September cycle, I made the commitment. We bought the best basal body thermometer we could find, and I began dutifully waking up at 7:30am every morning, including weekends (the torture!), to take my temperature.

Finally the day arrived. My temperatures took a nosedive and my OPK (Ovulation Predictor Kit) finally gave a positive. It was about day 19 in my cycle and I for certain would be ovulating within the next 24 hours. It was time. Matt and I coordinated our schedules with work and called both clinics to give them a heads up. We visited Matt's clinic first for the semen collection and preparation. They handed us a white styrofoam box to take with us, and you'd think they'd handed us a baby itself with how carefully we were holding and treating the thing. We rushed to my clinic, they led us into the room, and a doctor I hadn't yet met did the IUI. It was all quick and painless, and there was nothing left to do now but take our empty styrofoam box home and wait.

I suppose it wasn't too surprising, two weeks later, when my cycle showed up as usual. We'd been told that IUI's often fail on the first try, but we had really hoped to defy the odds and have success on the first try, and so it was still bitterly disappointing to us. But one thing you learn when you spend years TTC is that there's always the next month to try again.

It didn't take long, especially after that first failed cycle, to become fully obsessed with charting. I went all out. I joined an online charting community. I'd spend hours reading about charting, analyzing my own chart and looking at other women's charts as well to learn all I could about patterns and anomalies. I was already used to living my life in two week increments (the hopeful half of the month, and the disappointed half of the month), and charting just reinforced that division. From this point on, it would become dangerous to hold a conversation with me, as it was all I could talk about to pretty much anyone. At any point, I could (and probably would) tell you what cycle day I was on, how many days before or past ovulation I was at that point, what my temperature had been that morning and how that related to the previous days, the state of my cervical mucus, how long my last luteal phase had been, how long my last cycle had been and how many days above or below average that had been, how many days the actual last period had lasted and how many of those days had been heavy, whether or not my OPK had been promising that morning, and any other number of "TMI" details that no one but myself probably ever wanted to know. I got caught up in words like "triphasic" and "implantation dip". I was well and truly obsessed.

By the time it came time to attempt IUI #2 in the middle of October, I felt much more prepared and sure of the whole process. It was again about day 20 in my cycle. Right on schedule. Since we'd been through the procedure before, there was nothing new to expect, other than the fact that we again had a completely new doctor perform the actual IUI. We went home to wait with our again-empty styrofoam box, hopeful and sure that this time it would work.

The one thing that Time does for you when you're depressed is march on anyway. As hard as it was to put every failure behind us and press on, time passed anyway. I focused on my charting, waiting and watching for the day to attempt IUI #3. It finally came about day 22 that cycle. Not too terribly off for me. We went through the motions of semen collection, transporting our white styrofoam box, and preparing for the IUI. We again had a different person to perform the procedure this time. The difference with her, though, was that she was not actually a gynecologist, but rather a Certified Nurse Practitioner (CNP). I really had no idea what that meant at the time, but it didn't really concern me at that moment. The IUI was a simple procedure after all. Her name was Jennifer as well, and she was cheerful and sympathetic to us. It's hard for me to even think about her now without tears coming to my eyes. I didn't know it at the time, but our entire TTC Journey was about to change the moment she asked me one simple question. "What day of your cycle are you on?" I beamed proudly as any charter would, and answered with total confidence. It was, after all, an extremely easy question. What I wasn't prepared for was her reaction. "Day 22?" She looked at me sharply and I was confused. One thing I knew was my cycle. Granted, I'd only been charting for a couple of months, but was already well on my way to being an expert on it. And one thing I knew was that it was typical for me to ovulate around day 20. But apparently, it wasn't good enough for her. "Is this normal?" was her next question. I told her that yes, it pretty much was. About 20 days to ovulate, a luteal phase of another 14-15 days, making an average total cycle length about 34-35 days. She then proceeded to express much concern that it was taking me so long to ovulate. She talked about the "textbook" perfect cycle, where ovulation occurs on day 14 and the total cycle length was 28 days. Sure, I knew that, but not everyone is textbook perfect, right? The problem, she said, is that the egg is designed to be released around day 14. The longer it takes for it to be released, the "older" it gets, and the chances of successfully getting pregnant go significantly down. She then proceeded to tell us that she had never seen a successful IUI happen past day 18.

It still amazes me to this day that it took a "simple" CNP to figure out something that none of the "real" gynecologists ever took notice of. To say I was angry would be a major understatement. I was livid. To think of all the time that had passed, of all the numerous doctors we had seen, and not a single one of them had ever expressed concern that it might be taking me an overly long time to ovulate. I even told her that the last two times we had been in for an IUI, we had told them what cycle day I was on, and no one had even batted an eye. She was astounded, but then began talking about how doctors can become focused on the answer they think they have found and ignore all else. After all, my initial testing had all turned out normal. And Matt's hadn't. She figured they had decided they'd found the problem and never looked at me again.

She then proceeded to stun us again, as she looked at that day's semen analysis and said that actually, Matt's sperm had been perfectly normal. We weren't aware that they actually analyzed the semen that was collected before "washing" it for the IUI. We were told that for guys with real semen problems, having around 8 million sperm to perform an IUI with would be fantastic for them, and here was Matt with over 50 million perfectly formed and moving little guys ready to attempt the job. We told her all about the varicocelectomy and how he hadn't improved after that initial 3 months, and she then told us that improvements can continue to happen for up to two years after the surgery. We were blown away. No doctor had ever given us hope that the surgery could still have been successful after that initial 3 month check had failed.

Well, she said, since we were already there and the semen was already prepared, we went ahead and did the IUI anyway, though she had given us pretty much no hope that it would be successful. She completely expected it to fail, and if it did, she said, she wanted me to call her the very first day of the next period. It was past time to do something about my cycle. Jennifer was far more than a glorified nurse. As a Certified Nurse Practitioner, she could and did have her own patients, and it was clear she intended to adopt me from that moment on. And I will forever be grateful that she did.

~ Interlude: Empty Arms ~

It's hard to describe the magnitude of depression that infertility can cause. Matt and I had long both been fighting it, and we drew nearer to each other for comfort. But the tears still came often for both of us. We had long since stopped attempting to attend all of our religous services, as I would usually be quietly sobbing before the end of the first hour. We just happened to live in demographic of young married couples just like us, and it seemed the majority of our congregation was made up of annoyingly fertile women, and the weekly reminder was torture. But it wasn't just church... the daily reminders of our failure to conceive were everywhere. When we would go shopping at places like Wal-Mart, we would deliberatly take the long way around the store solely to avoid walking by the baby section. We'd change the TV station if a baby-related commercial came on. We avoided movies about parenthood. We went to great lengths to avoid all those little reminders, but we were still deeply affected. Ironically, it still seemed to take up the majority of our waking conciousness, and it didn't seem like there was anyone who really understood what we were going through besides us.

It was about this time that one of Matt's university courses assigned a project to educate the community on a little-known issue. It might seem masichist that Matt would have deliberatly chosen to focus on infertility, but if you knew how thoughts of it pervaded our lives, you would see it was the only natural choice. With his group, he began researching online for infertility related articles and websites, and among his searching, he happened upon a video made by a couple similarly affected as we were. In an attempt to explain to people how infertility really affected them, they gathered pictures, added captions to them, and set it all out in a slide show to beautiful music. They called the video "Empty Arms, Broken Hearts."

The first time I watched the video, I cried. And then I began to send it to everyone I knew. Finally, there seemed to be a way to explain to my family what we were going through in a far better way than I had been able to do myself. Up until this point, I really hadn't even shared with my family what we had been going through besides my mother and sister. Infertility is so tricky. It's so hard to explain to people what it's like, and to hear the generic responses of unhelpful advice like, "You just need to relax and it will happen." Relaxing wasn't going to magically cure our medical issues. But after sharing this video, the responses I got were really encouraging. I think the video helped both Matt and I reach out to the rest of our family and friends, who seemed better able to understand what we were experiencing, and helped them better sympathize.

If you'd like to watch the video, please visit Tears and Hope: the Infertility Awareness Project.

True to the CNP's expectations, IUI #3 did indeed fail. I went in to see her at the very start of of that next cycle. She decided that the first thing we should try in shortening my cycle was to begin taking Clomid. Clomid can be a tricky drug. It has the unfortunate side effect (one of many) of thinning the lining of the uterus if the dosage is too high, making implantation of a fertilized egg fairly impossible. A sort of shooting yourself in the foot, if you will. Therefore, we started off with the very lowest dose of 50 mg after doing a quick ultrasound to make sure I had no large cysts on my ovaries. It wasn't enough. I still ovulated that cycle about day 21. So the next month we bumped up the dose to 100 mg. It still had no effect whatsoever on my cycle.

It was hard to pass the time those couple of months. It would have been folly for us to attempt any more IUI's until conditions for success were better. It's amazing how much time during TTC you spend just waiting. And there was nothing we could to to help time pass along more quickly, and so every day was a new struggle with patience.

For the February cycle, we again bumped up the dose of Clomid to 150 mg, which is just about the max. Anything higher than that would be pushing it. Finally, we had a hint of success. I ovulated on day 18. Eager and anxious, we went ahead and performed IUI #4. Jennifer the CNP was still concerned, however, that the Clomid had had such little effect on my cycle. She decided to send me in for more blood work to check various hormone levels that my original gynecologist had not checked.

I showed up to the lab ready to take on my first ever glucose challenge test. First, though, the nurses drew blood to test for a fasting insulin level. Then I got my sickening sweet drink, waited for an hour, and then they drew my 1 hour glucose and 1 hour insulin levels. They also drew more blood to check other hormones which I can't remember. Five vials in total. It didn't take long to get the results back. Jennifer called me that very afternoon.

Most of the hormone levels came back normal. Except the insulin. A normal person will have a glucose (blood sugar) level of about 80 to 120. A normal insulin level will be about 10 percent of the glucose level, so a normal insulin level would be about 8 to 12. She told me that anything above an insulin level of 15 would be considered exceptionally high. My fasting insulin level had been in the 90's, and the 1 hour insulin level was just over 110. I was dumbstruck, and I remember my very first thought was how in the world had I not dropped dead yet of such an insanely high level of insulin? Jennifer said that I for certain had problems with insulin resistance, and it was causing Polycystic Ovarian Syndrome (PCOS). Even though I didn't manifest to the full degree all of the typical symptoms of PCOS, there was enough there to mess up everything else. She explained that it only took one hormone to be a little off to cause the whole rest of the system to fall out of whack. The insulin level being off was indirectly the cause of me ovulating late. Unfortunately, she didn't have the credentials to deal with the problem, and so she referred me to an Endocrinologist.

The next week, I was in the office of yet another new doctor. The Endocrinologist was in complete agreement with the CNP, although she wanted to get a few more blood tests done. For one, the CNP had only had the original lab draw a fasting insulin count, and not a fasting glucose count to go with it, and therefore she wanted me to repeat the entire glucose challenge. Additionally she wanted to check my thyroid level. The results of the second labs were much the same as the first. Glucose was fine, insulin was off-the-charts high, and all else was in normal limits. The Endocrinologist decided to start me on two medications. The first was Metformin, an insulin regulator drug that's usually the first choice to treat PCOS. The second was a very low dose of Synthroid. While my thyroid level was within normal limits, she said that lowering it often helped women get pregnant. The catch was we couldn't start either until we knew whether or not IUI attempt #4 had succeeded or failed.

I returned to the Endocrinologist to get the prescriptions to begin my shiny new medications. The Synthroid was a piece of cake. I was on pretty much the lowest dose possible. In fact, I had to cut my pills up into fourths to get a small enough dose. The Metformin, on the other hand, was not a fun drug. Lots of women lose weight as soon as they start Metformin, and I'll tell you why... Because it makes you sicker than a dog. Especially at the beginning when you're body is learning to adjust. Therefore, most women (myself included), don't start on a full dosage, but rather spend a couple of weeks working up to their prescribed dose. I wasn't on a full dose until the start of my April cycle. We were too busy to really pay much attention to it, though, as we spent the month of April packing our apartment and preparing for a big move. I would not see my kind Endocrinologist nor Jennifer, the genius CNP, again.

You know, after three and a half years of waiting and trying different things, it sure is amazing when something happens that gives you "immediate" results. What a novel concept for us! Nevertheless, it was with utter amazement that my very very first Metformin cycle was almost textbook perfect. I ovulated on day 15 and had a 14 day luteal phase, bringing the total cycle length to 29 days. I was almost euphoric over the success, as if I had had any control over it. I finally felt real hope, like all the pieces of the puzzle were finally coming together. Even though we had just settled into our new place and hadn't yet contacted new doctors, we were optimistic for our future, and hoped that that elusive Big Fat Positive (BFP) would finally come to us.

It was Sunday, June 25th, when I ovulated next. Again, day 15 of the second Metformin cycle. We were eating dinner at my sister's house, celebrating some family birthdays, when I felt the usual accompanying ovulation pains, and whispered as much to Matt at the table. I was elated that the Metformin seemed to be working yet again, shortening my cycle to a more normal and ideal length. I fully expected another 14 day luteal phase and 29 day cycle.

~ Interlude: It Doesn't Matter Anymore ~

One thing I will forever be grateful for is a certain epiphany of sorts that I had shortly after our big move. I was sitting in church one Sunday mulling over that old familiar question: Why? I still hadn't managed to let go of the resentment I had been building up against God for inflicting us with this trial. Matt had sometimes spoke of his theory that perhaps a baby had been withheld from us because we weren't doing enough spiritually to be worthy a child. The idea made me angry, and often felt like God was trying to force my hand or my behavior, and if you knew me and my particular quirk of demand-resistance, you'd understand how the idea of demanding that I be a certain way before being blessed with a child made me furious. It just didn't seem right. Especially when there were certainly plenty of other girls and women out there who seemed to do little to deserve their miracles.

The more I sat and brooded over the whole thing that particular day, the angrier I got. It just didn't seem fitting with the image of loving Heavenly Father that I had grown to belive God to be. After all, we were placed on this earth to make our own choices and our own mistakes. The idea of Heavenly Father trying to force us to be a certain way just went against everything I believed. It seemed to go against Free Will itself.

And then it hit me. God wasn't about to go against Free Will. It was one of his most cherished beliefs. It was what His Son had fought so hard for. For us. And in that moment I seemed to know that our infertility was not becuase Heavenly Father was trying to coerce us to behave a certain way. It was as though I could literally feel all the anger and resentment I had hoarded washing out of my body. I sent a huge silent apology to Heavenly Father for ever thinking such a thing in the first place and allowing myself to build up so much anger against Him for it.

I still didn't know why we couldn't concieve, and still had no notion of how much longer we would be fighting infertility, but I wasn't angry about it anymore. In the end, it really didn't matter why. The only thing that mattered was how we dealt with it, and what we learned from it. Looking back now, it's easy to see that the entire experience not only brought Matt and I closer together than perhaps would have been possible without it, but it had also taught us both an incredible amount of compassion for anyone else going through any sort of monumental trial, infertility or otherwise. And maybe that was the reason, or maybe not. It just really didn't matter anymore. It was time to stop focusing on the Why. For the very first time in our entire TTC jorney, I felt at peace. And I'm forever grateful I managed to find that peace before what happened next, or I'm afraid I would have held on to that anger forever.

Well, day 29 of that cycle came, and passed. I had my typical pre-period cramps, and so fully expected to start a new cycle within another day, and didn't think too much of it. Another failure, another cycle. And so day 30 passed, and day 31, and day 32, and so on, and I was too wrapped up in other things to really pay attention to it. It was disappointing to think that the Metformin might have failed, but after all, I'd had many thirty-something day long cycles. Friday morning, day 34 of that cycle, it suddenly hit me. Ok, so my period was 5 days late. That was nothing new. What finally struck me was that the difference this time was that I was a whole nineteen days past ovulation. And that was something that had never happened before. Like lightning, it occurred to me that there might be a reason I'd had a couple days of sore breasts, and my breath stopped as suddenly, somehow, I knew.

I fabricated a reason for my mother to take me shopping that day, as I was without a car. I snuck into the dollar store and picked up two HPT's... one for now and one for morning, which is typically the best time to test. And then I waited a couple of hours for Matt to get home from work as I wanted him to be there. At about 3:00 in the afternoon, I took the test. The box says to wait 3 minutes before reading results, but it only took a few seconds for the positive line to show up. I always imagined I'd break down crying the day I finally saw a positive pregnancy test, but instead I could barely breathe from the excitement of it. For Matt, it was almost too much to hope for that it would actually be true. After all the years and months of failure after failure, after surgeries and procedures and numerous doctors, of being poked and prodded and tested in the most intimate ways, it was finally, gloriously over. We had conceived. Naturally.