Our Story: Experiencing Infertility
If you’ve read Our Story page, you’ll have a general idea of our (my husband and my) life. We started trying, but not trying - you know if it happens it happens - to have a baby in August 2020. After a couple of months with no luck, I figured it might be a good time to get a women’s wellness exam to make sure everything was okay. Every lab and test I took came back normal and my doctor reassured me that many healthy couples take 6 months to a year to get pregnant, so to keep trying and have fun with it. At that point, we’d only been trying for three months, so I breathed a sigh of relief.
Six months and one super weird menstrual cycle later, I felt like I needed to see my doc again. In all honesty, I hoped I was pregnant but my body was just reacting weirdly (spoiler alert, I wasn’t). She ran some other labs and did some other tests, but again, everything came back fine. “Don’t stress out too much about having a baby, that may have been the cause for your menses to go haywire.” Back to the drawing board, I guess.
Month after month, I got my period. And it was devastating each and every time.
And when 12 months of trying came and went and we still had nothing to show for it, I began to fear that my body couldn’t do what it was meant to do - produce children.
One-third of the time, my doctor had told me, fault doesn’t lie with the woman, it’s in the man’s sperm. So, after one official year of trying, in August 2021, our doctor referred my husband (Kai) to a fertility clinic in Honolulu for a semen analysis. We anxiously waited a week for his results to come in. Normal low. Meaning that his numbers in motility, morphology, concentration, and volume (across the board, basically) were just slightly lower than normal. Theoretically, if I (Jillian) was totally healthy with zero reproductive issues, we could conceive on our own. But, his numbers mixed with any female issues could mean we’d have a difficult time getting pregnant.
We tried for a couple more months after getting his semen analysis back to see if we could get that bun going, but still, we had no luck. So, finally, in November 2021 we made the move to get the help of a fertility clinic.
The decision to involve a fertility doctor was so exciting. It brought about a renewed sense of hope that admittedly, was fading for us.
As luck would have it, I was on my menses when we got ahold of our clinic. Within a week of contacting them, I was in their office getting blood work and a salpingogram. On the spot, I learned that I had uterine polyps and would need to undergo surgery to have them removed. I remember asking what causes uterine polyps and how could I prevent them. “Honestly,” they replied, “It’s just like getting pimples on your face. They’re typically always benign and will come and go. Some women are just more prone to them than others.” Great.
I underwent a horror story of an HSG and had a hysteroscopy throughout the remainder of 2021. In January 2022, we were ready to start trying for baby! We were so ecstatic about our upcoming IUI and were under the impression that by the end of 2022 we’d have a baby in tow. I mean, with the polyps gone, there had to be nothing else stopping us from pregnancy, right? Wrong.
Our first IUI failed, and a little part of me died.
I have always been (for the most part) a very confident woman. I have always been strong-minded and not easily broken. But the day Aunt Flo came after that TWW, I felt like my heart shattered into a million tiny pieces I would never be able to find. I felt so broken, defeated, useless, and like a total disappointment to my husband. I cried like I did when I lost my grandpa and grandma (the most I’d ever cried in my life), it was that bad.
For the first time in a long time, I felt lost and had no idea where to turn. My girlfriend suggested I join a Facebook group, so I did. Banding with a group of girls just like me was what my soul needed at the time. It helped tremendously to hear from girls who were experiencing the same heartaches that I was because it’s a heartache no one truly understands unless you’re going through (or have gone through) it. After a few days of feeling my feelings, I pepped up and started looking forward to IUI #2.
IUI#2 ended up turning into unofficial IUI #2, as we had to try naturally and were unable to go into the Clinic. AF came again and we were on to the next.
Every time Aunt Flo came, she brought more heartache than the last. Each time, I was heartbroken, defeated, and devastated. And each time my husband had to pick me up off the floor. With each failed IUI, though, I began to learn more and more. I began looking into things like IUI success rates - which were never shared with me before, what women did in the transition between IUI and IVF, and even alternative medicine.
We’re currently gearing up for IUI #3, and I’m hopeful!
While I’m hoping we don’t have much more of a fertility journey ahead (and that you don’t either), I’m excited to share each step of the way.
