Gabby Writes

I’ve always been someone who wanted kids. I can’t think of a time where I didn’t.

Of course, I fully support people who don’t want children. I understand every reason for not wanting them. I think I just have that urge, or whatever in me.

Anyway, I wasn’t going to have a kid unless I was in a committed relationship. When we started dating, my husband and I talked about having kids. After several months into our relationship, we just stopped trying to prevent pregnancy. That was almost three years ago.

I started to get a little more serious about it after we got married. I tried to keep track of my cycles to figure out when I was ovulating and all that jazz. The problem was, however, that over the last few years my period started getting more infrequent. It could skip 1-4 months. That means I wasn’t ovulating those months. Even with ovulation tests it was hard to gauge all that.

Last year, I finally made an appointment with a fertility doctor — I go to the Reproductive Associates of Delaware (RAD). I think I only had my first virtual consultation by the time my mom was diagnosed with brain cancer. Suddenly, having a child became so much more important because I knew my mom wanted to be a grandmother badly. I wanted to give that to her before she died (which never happened, unfortunately). My sister and her husband weren’t talking about having kids anytime soon, so it was up to me.

I think I’ll break my fertility adventures into a few shorter blogs so that this doesn’t go on forever.

I’ll begin with my first appointment. I went in and got an intrauterine ultrasound. First thing I found out was that my uterus is tilted. It points towards my spine rather than my bladder. I was told it’s comparable to being left-handed instead of right-handed. So, not a big deal. Then they looked at my ovaries and counted my follicles — follicles are where the eggs grow and eventually pop out from, for those who don’t know. Apparently, I have a lot of them. That, combined with me not always ovulating, is a sign of PCOS (polycystic ovary syndrome). Now, although that was explained to me, I wasn’t officially diagnosed.

After that, I had to go get bloodwork done. The phlebotomist walked in with what looked like a shit ton of vials for my blood. I counted when he put them down, and there were 12. I have never had that much blood sucked out of me. But I guess they had to look at a lot in my blood.

I did find some things out from the blood results. I finally learned my blood type. I was super close to having pre-diabetes. My cholesterol was a little high. I also had a vitamin D deficiency, which I never knew could play a role in getting pregnant. I now take a daily supplement, so that has been taken care of. I think I also found out about my high prolactin levels then too. Prolactin has to do with producing breast milk, but high levels can make it difficult to get pregnant. My prolactin levels were about to become a pain in my ass.

All my husband had to do was provide his specimen, something less difficult than I had to go through. Turns out all of his levels are average, so all the problems start with me.

I was scheduled for a procedure to look at my fallopian tubes to make sure there weren’t any blockages in them. That adventure I will go into in my next post.