The First Visit

The first visit with the fertility doctor we talked about my husband and my medical history. The doctor went over everything and told us that we have unexplained infertility because he did not see any reason why we haven’t conceived.

The doctor recommends intrauterine insemination (IUI), which is artificial insemination (I will use the abbreviations IUI when I talk about this in the future). This procedure consists of collecting sperm from my husband and then the nurse placing the sperm into my uterus. This gives the sperm a head start but it still seeks out the egg on its own.
IUI is often selected for couples who have been trying to conceive for at least a year but have no reasons for their infertility. IUI is also a less expense way of trying to conceive.
I was to call the doctors office on the first day of my menstrual cycle. I called the office and an appointment was made to come into the office for a vaginal ultrasound. A cyst was found on one of my ovaries so I ended up having to take birth control for one month which cancelled starting the IUI process. I then will call the office next month on the first day of my cycle to see if the cyst had vanished.

White flour what is so bad about that??

When flour is bleached (which is a bleaching agent used to make it white)several nutrients are being removed from the grain. So you think that this wouldn't be that bad yes it is. After, the removal of the wheat germ and other nutrients of the grain all you have left are carbohydrate and then they will add back into the flour supplementary vitamins and minerals. Those items added back into the flour are most likely not in a digestible form. What to look for is nothing else but 100% whole wheat. You can find more information about white flour on Google search. Just go to the top right of my page and Google search for White Flour.

Did you know?

You can comment on each of my posts. Just go to the post you want to comment on and click on comments. I would be grateful for any comments you may have.

Ingredients in our food!

Another thing that my husband and I have been trying to do is to watch what we eat. It may be too late for eating right to help in the fertility department for us but it is never to late to start eating right to live a longer healthy life. I hope everyone will read this and maybe this will help in the health of your family.

We try to eat healthy without going too far out of our way. One way of doing this is staying away from High Fructose Corn Syrup. HFCS is found in many foods in most cupboards. Soda pop, ketchup, salad dressing, and white bread are just a few.
HFCS causes your body to crave more food and store more fat. Most people want to avoid both of these effects as much as possible. It has been proven to cause Type II diabetes in mice. It causes an insulin spike and leads to insulin resistance. This is a poison that has both short and long term effects.
It is not hard to find salad dressings and bread with no HFCS. You just have to read some labels. We have been so happy with the flavors of the higher quality and more healthy foods we have been finding at our regular grocery store. It’s a great, cheap, way to be healthier, lose weight, and avoid diabetes with no sacrifice.

McCormick's Creek State Park

Today we all packed up and drove to Spencer, Indiana, which is about an hour or so away from home. We wanted to do a trail to the caves unfortunately, the caves were closed. We were able to go into the creek at the falls. Here is a video of Sadie and Keena playing in the creek.
By the way, if you didn't notice on the video Sadie sometimes is in her own little world but we love her!

The Costs

Going through infertility can get very expensive. Many insurance companies do not cover this. My insurance does not. My recommendation is to talk to your insurance company and find out on each thing what is covered and what is not. For instance, I thought a semen analysis would be covered but it was not. There will be many other things throughout this journey that I could have done a better job into check costs and coverage. I am addressing this to those of you just starting out so you don't make the same mistakes as I have. I have paid too much for a prescription that I should have checked around to all my local pharmacies instead of just going to the one I always went to. I recommend that you research just how much each thing is going to cost and find out the best way to plan for this.
Infertility is very emotionally anyway and then facing the expense can be difficult. This can cause tremendous stress on a couple.

Semen analysis

Another step into infertility is for my husband to do a semen analysis. This tested his Sperm count (number of sperm), motility (percentage of living sperm), and morphology (normal shape of the sperm). The analysis showed everything was good. However, he was a little low on his FSH level in which he was prescribed Clomid to increase it.

Keena's Birthday

Yesterday was Keena's birthday. She is 3 years old. Here is a picture of the birthday girl! I also just had to show a picture of Keena sleeping. She is so funny!

The Girls!

You will soon see that I talk a lot about my 2 dogs. Keena and Sadie. So here is a clip of them. To set this up we decided to get the dogs a baby pool to play in, cool off and have fun! Unfortunately they just look at the pool and probably are wondering what is this? To help them out I put them in the pool thinking this will teach them what they should do and eventually they would gt in on their own. Of course, they were so not interested in that. So we decided to put some toys in the pool and see what would happen. This is a good video of what Sadie does in the pool.

There are many stories in the Bible about infertility here is one of them

~Abraham and Sarah had given up hope of ever having their own children when God gave Abraham the promise that he and Sarah would have a son whose offspring would be greater than the stars in the sky. Sarah laughed at the promise of God since she was well past the child-bearing years, but God fulfilled his promise with the birth of Isaac. (You can read more about the story in Genesis 16-21.)

Explaining the BBT Chart

The idea behind taking your temperature is to find out when your temperature spikes. When it spikes that means you should be ovulating.
I have heard so many times that I need to count from the day I start 14 days and that is when I am ovulating. Well that is true for some people but not for all. This idea is possibly true if you have the "normal" 28 day cycle but it is not the rule for everyone.

If you look at the examples of my charts you see that I do not have a "normal" 28 day cycle.

So if you refer to my charts below (the 1st month)(double click the chart to get a better view) you will see that my temperature spikes at day 19 and another spike at day 25. So ovulation most likely occurred around one of those days.

Taking your BBT is not a simple thing. You need to buy a BBT Thermometer (which are not expense) they just have the .10 degrees registered on the display and you need that to really understand and see the small changes but mean a lot when charting. You also need to take your temperature every morning at the same time. You need to have the thermometer right next to you. You do not want to get up or get a drink or anything like that or your charting will be off. You also need to get at least 6 hours of undisturbed sleep right before you take your temperature to accurately chart. This was very difficult for me. I wake up several times through the night and had a hard time getting that perfect reading. All I know is that I would try whatever I needed to, to accomplish my goal. In the end the goal of conception didn't work but I did learn so much about my BBT and I know that it did help me in other ways learn about how my body works.

What do we do now. I have tried the fertility pills and taking my temperature and the results did not achieve pregnancy.The next step would be to go see a specialists.

BBT (Basal Body Temperature)

I did the Basal Body Temperature Chart (BBTC) to see when I was ovulating. I used the chart for 6 month prior to the Clomid.

For the next 5 months while on Clomid I also used the BBTC. You can see what my chart looked like for 4 months of being on the Clomid.

Kudos!

I want to say thanks to a few people.

First thing I needed to do to create this blog was to come up with a name and logo you might say. I wrote down a list of words that pertain to what I wanted to talk about. For example, infertility, sperm, eggs, Petri dish, fertility treatments etc. I looked at my list for weeks and really couldn't decide what it would be. I ask some of my friends to see what ideas they could come up with. So I want to thank Jayne for coming up with Why can't we be friends.

I also need to thank my husband for drawing the picture for me. I searched for just the right picture of a sperm and egg and could not find one. So Aaron was able to draw the picture and color it for me.

Last but certainly not least I need to thank Wendy! Where do I start, She has done so much to help me get started. There were a lot of computer lingo I just am not familiar with and she set things up for me. If you seen my blog a few days ago and now you see that it has changes it is due to the gracious help of her.

Thank you all for taking your time to help me. I appreciate it so much!!

Other things

As you can see am not just talking about infertility. I do enjoy other things and my life doesn't revolve around it. Of course a lot of days it does, just because you can't just forget about it. It is always there. I will continue my journey through all the fertility treatments and throw in a few other things.

The Things we find in the yard!

I have been wanting to send this video out because I think it is funny. A while back when there was a lot of rain and flooding in our city my husband caught a fish in our backyard. Here is the video of the fish.

My pipes are clear but no baby

Tried to conceive thinking that the surgery might help but that didn't help conception but it was a start to finding out why we can't get pregnant.

The doctor suggested I start taking Clomid. This is an oral tablet to help ovulation. I started at a low dosage for 5 days.

If I started my menstrual cycle then I would call the doctor and I would go see him and he would increased the dosage each month that I didn't conceive. I took Clomid for 5 months. Which means that form of fertility treatment didn't work for me.

Has anyone else had a Laparoscopy or used Clomid and was able to conceive?

My EYE My EYE

This morning I woke up and my eye felt like I had been hit. I looked in the mirror and my eye was very bloodshot. It looks like I had a rough night. So I went home early from work to get some eye drops since everyone at work was afraid to be around me thinking I might have pink eye. So I came home and cleaned my house.

I Wonder if She Remembers?

A friend of mine when we were in our 20's worked together. Sometimes babies would be in the office. I would be the one to hold the babies because my friend was afraid of them. She thought she might break them. Today she has 1+++ kids and is a great person and mom and I hope one day I can follow in her footsteps.

It is really strange how life works out. I never thought I would be writing about infertility. I just thought when I was ready for kids it would happen. I know that God will guide me through my struggles in his own way.

My friend do you know who you are??

Surgery

After talking to my Physician and doing an exam there were findings of endometriosis. So my physician wanted to do a laparoscopy (visual examination of the inside of the abdomen ) and electrocautery (burn off) of endometriosis. So breaking this down basically it means. He went in to make sure my tubes were clear (which they were) and examined the extent of endometrosis. I had a very mild case of it. This procedure sometimes helps in conception.

It's not as easy as everyone said it would be!

Today I will be posting my first message.

I am wanting to talk about infertility. This is the first part of my journey and will post what steps I have taken in the past to conceive. So far nothing has worked. I realize that I have waited longer than most to start trying so I knew age would become a factor. When you are my age and have never conceived you would speak to a doctor about infertility after trying for 6 months. So I went to the Dr. to discuss steps to becoming pregnant.